Zmyeevich is dead. History records that the great voordalak - ruler of all the vampires of Europe for four centuries - perished in 1897 beneath the ramparts of his own castle, deep in Wallachia. The Romanov family is free of its curse.

But twenty tears later, the tsar faces a new threat - threat from his own people. War has brought Russia to her knees, and the people are hungry for change.

On the Eastern Front, two soldiers, an uncle and his nephew, both bearing the name of Danilov, prepare for the encounter that has been inevitable since each was, in his own way, born.

But one of them carries in his blood an ancient curse, and may be means by which a monster that the nineteenth century had thought dead and buried might be resurrected in the twentieth.