The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

Iris Scanlon runs a “daywalker service” for vampires in Half-Moon Hollow. While there are more all-night businesses that have opened up since the Great Coming Out, vampires still have trouble running errands and keeping their households running in a human, day-time oriented society. Also, some of them are just lazy.

When vampires have a need, they call Iris and she makes the daytime arrangements for them — from arranging for a plumber to snake a sink to grocery shopping for human guests to filing paperwork at government buildings that close at five. Iris doesn’t socialize with vampires. She’s not known in their community beyond her business card. And that’s the way she likes it. She’s pretty pragmatic about the undead and doesn’t want any part of the whole “capes and castles” fantasy.

Iris’ new service is booming and she’s successfully avoiding her clients, until she goes into her newest customer’s house one morning to find him poisoned on his kitchen floor. The vampire, Cal, offers her an obscene amount of money if Iris will get him out of his house and shelter him until he can heal up again.

Cal, a 500-year-old Greek vampire, is a recent appointee to the local Council. Unbeknownst to the other Council members, he has been brought to the Hollow to investigate a rash of unusual, violent vampire attacks. Cal believes his new position has made him a target and is afraid that whoever poisoned his blood supply could be planning to come back and finish him in his weakened state.

Iris needs the money, so she accepts Cal’s offer and takes him to her secluded house on the outskirts of Half-Moon Hollow. She lives there with her teenage sister, Gigi, and figures a weak, indebted vampire can’t pose much of a threat. As Iris and Cal grow closer, they begin to uncover suspicious ties from the attacks to the Council itself — and find themselves in even more danger. Can Iris go back to having a normal human life after having a romance with a vampire? And Michael settle for a domesticated life with a human? And will they survive long enough to find out?