Lydia, who has now taken the name of Pandora to disguise her past and blend more with the Greeks, tells her dreams to the priestess and priest of Isis , who are both very interested in them and in the fact that Pandora can read and write ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, even though she has never studied them. So is a mysterious stranger whom they bring in as a consultant, because he has been helping them with various matters, including the corpses that keep turning up on the Temple doorsteps, drained of blood, left by a burned looking small man. Pandora also notices at this time a man lurking in the shadows around her, a man who eventually reveals himself as her supposedly dead brother Lucius and wants her out of Antioch or dead. She is amazed that they can converse without words. He in fact is now a vampire, but a good vampire who opposes the dark order who follow the old Goddess worship which involved blood sacrifice.
Good vampires execute justice and kill and drink the blood of evil mortals.
But Marius has a further secret. The theology and vampirology is complex and discussed at length. Suffice it here to say that Lucius gets what s coming to him, the dark killer vampire gets destroyed, Pandora becomes a vampire and she and Marius spend the next 200 years as a couple, but an often-fighting couple, he always seeing her as too sentimental, she seeing him as too rational. Eventually Pandora and Marius separate, still loving one another but driving each other crazy. Readers who are really interested in vampire lore.