ISSUE 001

Born as mortal sons to Napoleon Bonaparte's personal surgeon and forever altered by the sinister mentor who made them orphans, bloodsucking vampire brothers LUCIEN, THIBAULT and MARCEL are less Lugosi, more dashing serial killers, sour and snobbish, fond of fine things. Not unlike a competitive clan of creepy Kennedy cousins.

Fluent in many languages, including English and Smartass, these nearly immortal all-stars of mayhem and murder lack talons, retractable fangs and vulnerability to garlic or sunshine. They cast shadows. They make reflections in mirrors, and when buried, our boys enter a state of metabolic suspension, "sleeping" until it's safe to rise and return to their work, harvesting heads. Clever bickering fails to mask youngest brother Marcel's outright challenges to eldest boy Lucien's because-I-say-so leadership of the grown orphan gang.

1870 Our story opens in northern Nevada as a boomtown sheriff and his posse track the killers of a prostitute to an abandoned mine. Surrender negotiations only add to the body count, prompting the lawmen to entomb the killers with dynamite. Evil is nothing if not patient: for more than 150 years, the brothers lie beneath the surface of the earth, awaiting blood as seeds await rain.

2028 We catch up with the story's present-day action at a Jesuit seminary in Cuernavaca, Mexico, more than 2,500 miles south ... where HECTOR HORTON has assumed the identity of his slain identical triplet brother, ALEJANDRO HORTON - a former ruthless Oregon gang leader whose born-again heart and tearful mother's pleas prompted his break from the vice and violence of cooking and dealing methamphetamine. Alejandro paid bribes to redeem himself by reviving childhood altar-boy aspirations to enter the priesthood. Before he could relocate to Mexico, however, he and his mother were slain by members of a rival gang who mistook Alejandro for Hector.

This tragedy was made infinitely worse when guilt-ridden and grief-stricken Hector joined his only surviving triplet brother - the irrational and violently unpredictable CARLOS HORTON - in a botched bid for revenge: a firebombing that left Alejandro's killers unscathed, but claimed the lives of uninvolved women and innocent children.

Bitterly jealous that Hector was given leadership of their gang after Alejandro's death, Carlos hatched a scheme to simultaneously betray his brother and earn a pass from his deadly rivals by implicating Hector as the sole perpetrator of the firebombing and setting him up for ambush. But wily Hector managed to shoot his way out of the trap and flee to Mexico, where he entered the seminary in Alejandro's place, still unaware that Carlos set him up.

Hector's spirit is split and his sanity spread thin as he struggles to portray the persona of an eager and earnest student of peace and forgiveness, while weathering internal storms of guilt, anger and unrealized vengeance. When his academic adviser discovers Hector's true identity, however, the impostor is forced to leave. Hector returns home to Oregon, where he must choose and follow one of two paths: atonement and redemption, or vengeance.

Alejandro's death and Hector's disappearance created a leadership vacuum that sucked Carlos into power as head of the gang. His first order of business is another trademark ambush. This time, he plans to burn members of the notorious Yucatan Mafia for three industrial drums of Pakistani ephedrine. Carlos and his crew of whitebread tweaker henchmen lie in wait, completely unaware that three inhuman agents of evil are mere inches beneath them in the soft sand of an abandoned housing development. A few twitchy-fingered triggermen are about to open fire and loose a tide of blood that will revive the sleeping killers, unleashing a new season of destruction.