Dark Road to Paradise — Clay Gilbert

“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. 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 Grove University, in the small town of Grove, Alabama. There are no guarantees for the future, she knows, but she's determined to move forward, determined that things will change. Martin Cabot came to Grove, Alabama, under a shadow -- the shadow of his own destiny. He may appear to be only a young man of twenty-six, merely another professor at the University, but he has looked that way for fifty years. Time stopped for Martin decades before, but the world has moved on. 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. The true test for Martin and Cassie will come when her illness takes hold at last, and 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. The ultimate answers lie on the Dark Road to Paradise.