Darkness, I — Tanith Lee

Tenebrae sum.
I am the darkness. Darkness, I…

Rachaela's daughter Ruth is dead â€" and now she has a new child with her Scarabae lover Althene. Anna is no ordinary girl. She matures with preternatural speed and Rachaela can't dispel the feeling that her daughter is Ruth reborn. But if Ruth wasn't evil, she was certainly dangerously unstable â€" a threat to all. It's difficult for a mother to connect with a child she feels isn't quite what she seems â€" or is far worse than she seems. But perhaps Anna doesn't have that streak of insanity, and it's only Rachaela's fevered imagination. Perhaps she's nothing more than a bright, new member of the mysterious Scarabae family, (themselves something greater than mere human), who is an asset not a potential disaster.

Anna's parents and the other Scarabae aren't aware that another member of the family has become aware of the girl â€" the father of them all, the almost mythical Cain, who lives apart from the world in a frozen wasteland, where's he's constructed a bizarre reproduction of Ancient Egypt within a pyramid of ice He wants not only Anna, but other children he believes are reincarnations of people from the past â€" the earliest times of the family. But what does he want them for? Soon, the kidnappings begin…

Meanwhile, Miranda Scarabae continues to grow younger, into a beautiful woman, bewitching the grizzled biker Connor. Uncle Camillo, himself no longer an aged man, has a new set of friends who live upon the streets of London. It's inevitable his eccentric presence will change them. And Malach, alone in the Netherlands, grieving the death of Ruth â€" despite her amoral wickedness â€" becomes aware his love might be reborn, and is pulled from his melancholy to find her: to save her.

As lives and stories twist and intertwine, the tale of the Scarabae draws to a vivid and powerful climax in the final volume of The Blood Opera Sequence.