Danni Telfer, abandoned as a toddler, has no idea what the fading tattoo of a white rose on her left shoulder means. Not does she want to remember the peculiar perceptions that disturbed her childhood. A talented historian, Danni's focus is on the Louisiana research project she hopes will land her a job that doesn't involve teaching bored college freshmen. But she's walking into a confluence of events that will change her life forever. His story preserved only in a threadbare quilt fashioned by a slave during the Civil War, the Vampire Grimaud has slept for a century and a half beneath the soil of a Louisiana plantation called Angola. The place is now a prison hiding over six thousand men in sweltering isolation. One of these, Antoine Dupre, is innocent of the decade-old murder for which he is imprisoned. Yet now he must kill or be killed, unless, impossibly, he can prove his innocence. When a prisoner crew back hoeing the warden's latest project, a golf course, unearths the vampire's grave, Stéphane Grimaud wakes to a future beyond his imagination. Without help he will be vulnerable. How fortunate that an adept, a mortal gifted with the ability to see beings who exist in shadows, is nearby. Yet how strange that she fears him! These three - historian, prisoner and vampire - have only a moment in time in which to alter a future already written. And the cost to each will be immeasurable.