Major Story Arcs
Four Devils, One Hell
Gloria DeVere is a 32-year-old Grendel who has never seen battle. She has spent her short career as an art curator, amassing art for the glory of Grendel. She lives with Alexander, a more experienced retired warrior Grendel, on the shore in England, and wishes she had a more exciting life. One day she receives a call, telling her that “the treasure,” a mysterious lost artwork of great renown, has been found and is being sent to the Americas.
She is attacked by some rapists while traveling to Milwaukee, and kills them. It is her first fight, and she is elated. However, as she sees the Grendels in the Americas, she becomes less enamored of the organization. She thinks they are boorish and do not live up to the Grendel code.
She tracks the Treasure to New Orleans, killing more men as she hunts down the secret information. She finds Radley Benton, the New Orleans Grendel art curator. He is pathologically shy, but she seduces him in order to find out more. She starts to wonder whether she is as corrupt as the other Grendels she disdained just a short time ago. She observes the wild voodoo culture in New Orleans, and is simultaneously repulsed and enthralled.
Trying to work her way into the local Grendel krewe, led by a man named Renute, she helps his men capture Josef Mantovani and a young boy, not knowing why Renute wanted them. However, she sees Mantovani’s honest eyes, and begins to think she made a mistake.
She goes to Renute’s headquarters and observes from a high window. He has captured Mantovani and several other trouble-makers, and tells them that he is actually a vampire–as are all of his men– and hates everything about Grendel. He has amasses an enormous amount of Grendel-related art, including the Mona Lisa, the “treasure” Gloria has been seeking. He plans to destroy it all with an atom bomb.
Gloria sees the Mona Lisa and is enraptured by its beauty. Her doubt gone, she joins Mantovani and the others in fighting Renute and his men. After dispatching several vampires, Radley approaches her. He is now a vampire, but no less pathetic than before, and asks her to join him. She kills him without a second thought, but is then killed by one of Renute’s men, Dulac.
Eventually the heroes win and the bomb is deactivated. Mantovani takes the Mona Lisa home with him and hangs it in his private detective office.