"Throughout American history, every major conflict has been due to either a misunderstanding between parties or a failure to live up to a promise - and needless bloodshed was always the result." And bloodshed was something with which Janiss Connelly was all too familiar, either by her own or someone else's hand. Friends. Lovers. Enemies. But as the administrator of Cedarcrest Sanctum, it was a necessary evil: keeping the facility's residents safe - and, thanks to infusions of her vampiric blood, alive - was both her responsibility and mission. It is a mission that is jeopardized by a very old - and private - vampire living and working as a college professor in Charleston, West Virginia. Janiss visits to determine her undead "neighbor's" true intentions, only to find that she and Cedarcrest are on the professor's "syllabus." Left with no choice, the administrator must become the student and ask her own hated teacher for the deadly tutelage she needs to rescue the Sanctum. In "The Matriarch: Changeling," Janiss will learn that friends and enemies are never who they seem to be - a lesson that must be paid in blood.