A mysterious, still not fully studied Voodoo religion; the spells of the Mayfair witches; a secret community of vampires… Three seemingly completely different worlds that have nothing to do with each other. But the Great Queen of Mysteries, with her characteristic skill, not only unites them into one whole—she also tightly weaves them together, forcing readers to travel from modern-day New Orleans into the jungles of Guatemala, from the twentieth century to the origins of world civilization. And the connecting thread is the heroine of the novel, Merrick—a descendant of the priests of candomblé, a member of one of the branches of the Mayfair family, raised by David Talbot, the former supreme head of Talamasca, who received the Dark Gift of immortality from the vampire Lestat himself.