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were on me like rats, ready to hack me to death. I tried to stay on my feet, but they were coming at me from all directions and I was knocked to the ground. I had all but accepted death when, out of nowhere, Gilbert came charging in on his monster of a white horse, toppling the Marmlucks like skittles.”
    Adam McLeod was sat on a bus, drifting in and out of sleep. It was the middle of the morning and he was fighting to stay awake, but his body was still on Eastern Standard Time and all it wanted to do was sleep. His thoughts had turned to Henry Warwick and the story of how he had become a vampire. He had heard it so many times that he felt he could do a better job of telling it than Henry himself.
    Henry was like a father to Adam. Without him, Adam would have pressed the self-destruct button years ago. It was Henry who had helped him out of some very dark places and it was Henry who had convinced him that becoming a vampire was all part of God's plan for him. It was also Henry who had mentored Adam in the ways of the warrior and given his life as a vampire a real purpose. God had led him to Henry and to the Knights Perennius just as God had led Henry to Gilbert.

“Melrose Abbey!”
    Adam was quickly brought out of his slumber by news that he had arrived at his destination. He grabbed his holdall, thanked the driver, and got off the bus at the stop on Buccleuch Street.
    Anna was standing there, waiting for him. Despite all the years apart, he recognised her instantly, just as he knew he would. She was wearing a knee length unbuttoned fawn raincoat over a perfectly fitting black dress and she looked even more beautiful than he remembered.
    “Hello, stranger,” she said, holding out her arms to embrace him.
    Adam dropped his bag and walked straight into them. He held her tightly, his head nestling on her shoulder and her head on his. It was all he could do not to burst into tears. After a few moments, he loosened his grip so that they were still in each others arms, but standing face to face. “Long time no see,” he said, taking the time to look deep into her green eyes.
    Adam and Anna had first met aboard a ship, The Hector, while it was sailing from Scotland to Nova Scotia. Adam was then a headstrong eighteen year old in search of adventure and had been all too willingly duped by the offer of free passage to the New World and the wild promises of bountiful farmland that awaited him. What he hadn't been told was that there was thick forest down to the shoreline that would have to be cleared before anyone could actually work the land. There was also the added complication of the native Indian population not taking too kindly to white men cutting down their trees. That little nugget of information had been left out of the sales spiel too.
    The Hector had left from Greenock on the 14th of July, 1773, and Anna was among the 170 or so other passengers aboard. The fiery redhead with the impish smile had stolen Adam's heart the moment he set eyes on her and they became inseparable within days of setting sail. It was all the more surprising because when they first met they shared little in the way of a common language. Adam spoke Gaelic, as did the vast majority of The Hector's passengers, and knew only a few words of English. Anna was fluent in English, and several other languages, but spoke not a word of Gaelic. Despite her Celtic good looks, she was in fact from Rottweill, a town that today is found in the south west of Germany, but at the time of Anna's birth in 1420, was a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire. Words mattered not because laughter became their language of love.
    The three-masted fluyt had been built to carry cargo, not passengers, and so conditions on board the creaking vessel were spartan to say the least. With a rotting hull and its general poor state of repair, the Hector should never have been sailing three thousand miles across the Atlantic, whatever its payload. How it made land was down to