Erica is being haunted by nightmares nearly every night. She dreams of ritual sacrifice, black magic and a mysterious red-headed woman. When the dreams start to invade her during the day she is persuaded to visit a hypnotherapist, Dr. Charles Bucher. Bucher's specialty is age regression and he soon discovers that Erica was a vampire in a past life and the red-headed woman is Selena the vampire's servant.

A historical epic, cast in the style of a realistic narrative with symbolic overtones, about runaway slaves and their hunters in the mid-nineteenth century, which weaves an analysis of the factional divisions between coffee and sugar interests, plantation owners and smallholders, around the drama of the Rancheador searching for the mythical rebel slave leader, Mother Manchora.