Taltos

Taltos is a novel by the American writer Anne Rice, published in 1994. It belongs to the sequence of books about the Mayfair family, the New Orleans dynasty of witches who are beset by ghosts, spirits and their own inherited powers.

Mr Ash is a quiet-spoken and unfailingly kind man, and he is also the sole survivor of an ancient species. He has lived among human beings as long as he can remember and is now the head of a large corporate empire, and he believes that he is the last of his kind.

Then a mysterious old friend tells him that another Taltos has been seen in the same Scottish glen where he ruled his clan centuries before the Romans came. That news takes him into the world of Rowan Mayfair and into the Mayfair family's entanglements with his own species, and the novel moves between contemporary New Orleans, the Scottish past and the long history of a people who have been hidden inside human society. Mr Ash's own memories provide one half of the story, and the Mayfair family's present troubles the other.