It's another blustery summer in Windermere.

Remote, fanatical, and superstitious, the holy city is held tight in the vice-like grip of a centuries-long vampire panic. The local Archbishop, Cyril, has devoted his life to snuffing out this sacrilegious source of Windermere's woes.

Not content with spitting in the face of death, the vampires too bewitch the living. Blood that is euphoric and addictive in equal measure flows like liquor down the throats of the bold and the foolish. With every addict, the vampires' hold over the city tightens. Sinners will always return to their ways, a priest knows this best of all, and so Cyril knows this threat must be extinguished at the source.

But for all his conviction, there is one vampire Cyril knows he cannot unmake - not with faith, nor fire, nor fury: a novice of his own order named Brontë. A mistake, an anomaly, she shouldn't have been born at all. And though Cyril had scoured and searched the scriptures he had found no answer. It's all he can do to keep this hypocritical, heretical secret at all costs.

Beset by doubt from both within and without the cathedral walls, Cyril must struggle to retain his political influence over a fractured city, religious control over his suspicious faithful, and spiritual control over his own - supposedly unbending - faith. And as well-kept secrets threaten to crawl into the light, Cyril must either find answers, or write them himself.