Synopsis
A peculiar incident in a graveyard in 1817 changes the course of a 15-year-old boy's life. He cannot remove the knowledge that immortals walk among us, that monsters are real and that a very interesting older woman kissed him before he saw her killed. So he decides to roam the earth, looking for the woman and others like her, trying to find out what it all means.
p.s. ~ they're really hard to find!
Excerpt
What to do? He asked himself for the thousandth time. He stood there for five minutes, arms crossed. He wanted to run. He wanted so desperately to retreat to the happily delusional woman's bed across the street. Or to find an open bar and get sh*t-faced without the aid of an iron bar knocking his noggin. Instead, he just stood there. Frowning at the door.
The sounds of London crawled up to his ears. There were families trying to ignore him in the apartments above, forks and knives clanking on their dinner plates. Pedestrians, on either side of the alley, speeding through the streets. Someone in the block behind him must have been sick, for he heard sounds of someone retching. The sights and smells of the Spitalfields returned to him and – not that he needed it from a physiological standpoint – sobered him up. Old men, dying. Young women and men, ill and desperate for any reason why their lives were being stolen from them. Desperate for a way out of the squalor and illness surrounding them. He recalled the sight of a young mother carrying her baby with her, cooing at it, playing with its fingers. But the baby's fingers were soft grey-blue. It had been dead for hours, perhaps days. He thought of stopping, of telling the woman and offering help. He had broken down in tears, then and there. Unable to offer her the comfort she needed. He was a foreigner with a strange accent and an even stranger agenda in her country. What could he offer her?
