Dark Road to Paradise: Tales of the Night Kind

"Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?" They are lines from the poet Walt Whitman, but for Cassie Edwards, they become something different entirely. Spoken to her by the man she loves, Martin Cabot-who is also one of the Night-Kind-what humanity calls vampires-the words frame a choice between certain death and eternal life. The year is 1991. Cassie Edwards has lived most of her life under a shadow-she has been HIV positive since a car accident when she was ten. At nineteen, she's finally getting out into the world, leaving her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee behind to start college at Auburn University. There are no guarantees for the future, she knows, but she's determined things are going to get better. Meeting Cassie by chance, Martin thinks that he may have found a way to escape the hold his own past has on him, and the horrors he left behind on the West Coast, where he first left behind the daylight life to claim a dark immortality. When Cassie's illness takes hold at last, Martin must decide whether to tell her the truth about himself-a truth that will leave him exposed-and leave Cassie with a fateful choice. As if this weren't enough, the shadows of Martin's past aren't content to remain buried, and they are coming for him, and for Cassie. Enter a new world of supernatural horror and romance from Clay Gilbert, the author of the "Children of Evohe" science fiction series.