Carrion comfort - Dan Simmons

They are 'mind vampires' - creatures with the psychic ability to 'use' humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, feed off their emotions, force them to acts of unspeakable violence.

Each year three of them, Melanie, Willi, and Nina, meet to discuss their on-going competition of vampirism and slaughter. But this year something goes wrong and they, and their innocent victims, are plunged into a struggle that will determine the future of the world itself.

Ranged against them are a handful of normals: Saul Laski, psychologist and concentration camp survivor, who has devoted his life to tracking down the Nazi vampire von Borchert; Natalie Preston, whose father inadvertently and fatally crossed the path of the ancient and deadly Melanie; Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry, dragged in while investigating a series of bizarre murders.

Together they create a strange and vulnerable alliance against evil