"All I did was set the Members of the Gathering up so that they would burn to a crisp when the sun arose. You would think that vampyres as old as they are would be able to appreciate a good joke..." What starts off as a desperate attempt to save herself from a hoard of ancient vampyres, turns into an adventure that takes the vampyress Celeste past the boundaries of the Roman Empire and into worlds beyond her insane imagination. Anxious to find out what happened to her werecat lover Vanity, she travels between this plane of existence and others, along the way encountering the macabre court of the Unseelie, a pack of angry Highland werecats, the Loch Ness Monster, and-atop his fiery throne-Lucifer himself. Through nights of torture, tests of fortitude, a couple of massacres, and a fallen Empire, Celeste finds out a lot more than she ever wanted to know about Vanity, and discovers a few things about herself as well.