Van Helsing: Blood Moon Over Whitechapel

(Book Four of the Van Helsing Chronicles)

A blood moon rises over London, and the children begin to walk.

When the ship Demeter runs aground at Whitby with its captain clawed open from the inside, Dr. John Seward sends an urgent summons to the one man who will understand: Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Livestock lie drained in the fields. Three women in the asylum dream the same dream every night — a lady in a wedding dress standing in the sea, calling children home. And in the churchyard of St Mary’s, a Roman grave older than the town itself has been opened from within.

The name on the stone is FILIA LILITH.

Daughter of Lilith.

Van Helsing has spent thirty years hunting the bloodline of Dracula. He did not know he was also hunting his own. The Van Crowe crest he buried when he came to England was never merely a family secret — it was a summons. Lilith, the first mother, the White Bride, the one even Dracula fled in the Carpathians, has followed the blood west. She does not want another thrall. She wants a son of Van Crowe, born under the blood moon, willing and perfect.

In London the moon turns red. Eighty children walk in trance toward St Pancras Old Church, the oldest sacred ground in the city, built on the same Roman soil where Lilith was first buried. Beneath the streets, bone dolls hang from sewer pipes. Women in white with sewn-shut eyes hum a lullaby no living mother taught them. And at the centre of it all stands the Mother herself — beautiful as a storm, dressed in the wedding veils of women who died in childbirth, smiling at the hunter she calls little son.

Armed with a fragment of the Spear of Longinus and allies who will be changed by the night — Lady Eleanor Ashford, the blind seer Agatha, and Seward himself — Van Helsing must descend into the dark and decide what mercy looks like when the enemy is also an ancestor.

Blood Moon Over Whitechapel is a story of inherited curses, mothers who refuse to rest, and a hunter who learns that some lines can only be broken by the one thing he has always feared using:

Love.