The Cloud

by Lee Payne

When an ancient vampire starts hunting and collecting young women in Pine View County, Texas for his cloud, Sheriff Garrett Lambert must end the destruction. This task becomes even more urgent when the vampire’s purpose for being there becomes clear—to make the silver-haired werewolf his familiar. If Sheriff Lambert cannot find and kill the vampire, someone very dear to him will be lost forever.

With the help of his teenage daughter, Paige, best friend, Deputy Ty Jackson, an English professor who specializes in the occult and folklore, a Native American of the indigenous Cato tribe, and an elemental witch with the gift of sight who is a descendant of Marie Laveau, Garrett becomes the hunter.

698 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 8, 2025

About the author

I have written articles on the missions of California, lost cities of the Maya and ghost towns of the West for a bunch of magazines. I was especially fascinated by Virginia City, Nevada, once the richest cubic mile in all the world, and by San Francisco where the West's gold and silver was ultimately bought and sold. It was a tiny village beside an improbable bay when it suddenly exploded with Mexicans, Chileans, Kanakas, Malays, Chinese, Yankees, Southern gentlemen, Bowery toughs brought West by the U.S. Army and even tougher escaped convicts from Australia--a thousand men for every woman, all busily creating the kind of society only 30,000 unsupervised men can imagine.
But I had no interest in writing about men--even with all their lynchings, arsons and murders--without women. So what about the 6,000 teenage Chinese girls imported into the city between 1852 and 1873 as sex slaves, not one of whom has left us an account of her sad life? But what about the first one? The one whose mastery of English at a mission school in Hong Kong allowed her to escape her fate? You can read her first three introductory chapters free at Amazon.com or Smashwords.
She is my fictional heroine plunked down in the middle of a totally real gold rush San Francisco, a city as foreign to her as it would be to us.
From the city's finest brothel to the mean cribs of Chinatown, it's all true and available for e-reader downloads or a print-on-demand paperback from Amazon, Smashwords or Barnes & Noble. Let me know what you think of it. I'll be here.

Reviews

[Spookygamma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good vampire horror. Can't wait for the next book