Balkan Prince

Every door in the old town wears a doll. Ask why, and no one will answer you.Come to the Albanian coast for the cheap wine and the gold evenings, and you'll never notice what the locals do: the little grey teddy bears hung by the neck over every doorway, the garlic braided beside them, the way no one who lives here will look up at the ruined house on the hill after dark.They've kept the same silence for a thousand years, and the same terrible bargain: feed the hill, and it leaves your children alone. The strangers who climb up there each summer are never really missed. The town looks away. The town has always looked away. It is the price of a paradise, and until now the price has always been someone else's.Nada is a stranger too, a woman the world has spent her whole life learning to look past, who sees what no one else can: the lightless thing wearing a beautiful man's face, the ancient Prince who has fed on this coast since before it had a name, and who has just looked at her and decided she is his.But the season is dying. The house on the hill is starving. And a bargain a thousand years old is about to break because when the winter closes in and the strangers stop coming, something has to be fed, and the cold is turning, at last, toward the town's own.A gothic vampire novel of dread, desire, and a debt paid in blood.Hope is the last to die.