Circus of the Damned

"You don"t volunteer for slugfests with vampires.

It shortens your life expectancy."

And you don"t fall in love with a werewolf. It interferes with your work. Especially when you"re a preternatural expert like me. My business brings me up close and personal with all shapes and sizes of monsters. And not all of them want to kill me.

Take, for instance, the local pack of lycanthropes – that"s werewolves to you. A number of them are missing, and they"ve come to me for help. I"ve survived a lot – from jealous vampires to killer zombies – but this love thing may kill me yet...

It was barely dark, and I was tired. Tired enough to go home and crawl into bed and hide. Instead, I was on my way to the Lunatic Cafe. I was going to try and convince Marcus to let me talk to the police. Eight missing, one dead human. It didn"t have to be connected. But if it was a werewolf, Then Marcus would know who did the killing, or not, but I had to ask. They"d come closer to telling me the truth than they would the police. Funny how all the monsters talked to me and not the police. You had to begin to wonder why the monsters were so damn comfortable around me.

I raised zombies and slew vampires. Who was I to throw stones?

"When the monsters are involved, it"s never just one dead body.

One way or another the dead multiply."

First ,there was the dead in the graveyard, two-hundred years dead. I"d been hired to raise them to settle a dispute over who owned the land they were buried in. Then there were the three dead teenagers in the woods, slaughtered in a way I had never seen before. And then they found the dead girl, drained of blood and left in her bed. I knew what that meant, all right. It didn"t take a degree in preternatural studies to figure out that something was very wrong in and around Branson, Missouri. And I was right in the middle of it. May name is Anita Blake. Welcome to my life...

We"d awakened something old and long dormant. It made me hesitate. Made me not want to finish the circle. Stubbornness, and fear. i didn"t completely understand what I was feeling. It was someone else"s magic, someone"s spell. We"d triggered it, but I didn"t know what it would do.

We could raise our dead but it would be like walking a tightrope between the other spell and ... something.

"These days my life is a cross between preternatural soap opera and an action-adventure movie. Sort of As The Casket Turns meets Rambo."

The first hit man came after me at home, which should be against the rules. Then there was a second, and a third. Eventually, I found out that the word on the street was that Anita Blake, preternatural expert and vampire killer extraordinaire, was worth half a million dollars. Dead, not alive. So what"s a girl to do but turn to the men in her life for help? Which in my case, means an alpha werewolf and a master vampire. With professional killers on your trail, it"s not a bad idea to have as much protection as possible, human or otherwise.

But, I"m beginning to wonder if two monsters are better than one...

"You can"t trust anyone who sleeps with monsters."

That"s what I"ve always said. That"s what I"ve always believed. But now I"m the one sharing a bed with the Master Vampire of the City.

Me, Anita Blake. The woman the vampires call the Executioner. From part of the solution, I"ve become part of the problem. So it hits close to home when an arsonist begins to target vampire-owned businesses all over town – and arsonist who seems to want to destroy more than just property. It"s the monsters who are in danger now.

And it"s up to the Executioner to save them from the inferno...

Pete, on the other end of the phone, sounded frantic. "The city is going nuts. So far we"ve managed to contain the fires to just a few buildings, but if the crazies keep it up, it"s going to get out of hand. There"s no telling how much of the city would go up.

"We need to know who"s behind this," I said.

"Yes, we do," Pete Said. "Get here as soon as you can." He sounded so sure I could help. I wished I was as certain. I sure I could do much in broad daylight. I"d been told once that the only reason I couldn"t raise the dead at high noon was that I thought I couldn"t. I was about to put it to the test.

Anita Blake, vampire hunter, has dealt with – and destroyed – a lot of monsters, but her old mentor, Edward, may be worse than any of them. Edward's got problems: a malevolent force is mutilating the citizens of Albuquerque. If he is to stop it he'll need all of Anita's firepower and cunning.

Author's Note

For those of you who have never read an Anita Blake novel before, let me tell you a bit about her world.

It's just like the world we all live in – except that the creatures of the night – vampires, werewolves, zombies and such – are not the stuff of fiction. They are here-and-now. We co-exist with them – not always happily, not always peacefully.

And sometimes we get to know them all too well ...

The only person capable of killing as well as Anita happens to be Edward, better known as Death.

He has saved her life on several occasions and she owes him for killing one of his cohorts. Edward calls in his marker, asking for her help with a preternatural creature like none he has ever encountered before. Anita comes to Santa Fe to meet an Edward totally different then Death. Edward is engaged to a woman with children and he seems to cherish all of them. As she works with Edward to defeat this seemingly invincible creature, Anita now knows she cannot hide from her own nature.

With the highly acclaimed Obsidian Butterfly, Laurell K. Hamilton's vampire hunter, Anita Blake, came into her own. She survived a supernatural onslaught unlike any she had ever faced before – and she did it without the two men in her life.

Now, six months have passed since Anita has seen either Jean-Claude or Richard. Six months of celibacy. Six months of indecision. Six months of danger. For her body carries the marks of both vampire and werewolf, and until the triumvirate is consummated, all three remain vulnerable.

But when a kidnapper targets innocents that Anita has sworn to protect, she needs all the help she can get. In an earth-shattering union, Anita, Jean-Claude, and Richard merge the marks – and melt into one another. Suddenly, Anita can harness both their powers. She can feel their hearts ... hear their thoughts ... know their hungers ....

Nothing can save Anita from a twist of fate that draws her ever closer to the brink of humanity – to finally surrender to the bloodlust, the beast, and the desire transforming her body and consuming her soul.