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      For my family, who encourage me and support everything I do, but especially for Ryerson Louden, who always listened to a child’s wild stories and pretended he actually believed them.

      ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      Credit is due:

      As always, to my critique group, Mary, Marti, Cheryl, Chris and Michele, even though she swears she’ll never read another book by me ever again.

      To Sasha Bogin, an editor and a cheerleader, and Kelly Harms, my agent, who I imagine would make a wonderful pirate or hostage negotiator.

      To Joe, for listening to me rant about my characters the way some people rant about their co-workers: “Jen, are we talking about a real person now, or someone in your book?”

      And to Kevin Park, whom I forgot to mention in the last book, for literally saving my life and not holding the whole disgusting trip to the ER against me. Hopefully, subsequent birthdays have gone much better for you.

      Prologue

       Welcome Back

      He didn’t know how long he’d been dead. There was no time, no season, no change, only eternity.

      Shadows stumbled around him on the other side of the veil. Two in particular caught his attention. He knew what they were. He’d been one of them.

      The life he craved was accessible to them. Now, as in his living death, he wanted to leech it from the mortals who couldn’t protect themselves. If he could envy this undead pair, he would, but there was no time. They had no life, so they were none of his concern.

      On the other side, they couldn’t see him. When he was of the world but not alive, he couldn’t see the ones who’d gone before him, either. Despite their sightlessness, they appeared to follow him. He moved away. He wanted life.

      It was a fool’s errand, his never-ceasing search for that mortal energy. It throbbed in the people and animals he passed every day, but he could not touch it. Thin though the veil was, it separated him from what he craved. He could reach for it, hold it in his hands, but the film of the shadow curtain always kept him from it.

      Color, alien to this existence, would have shocked his senses, if he’d had any. The lifeless pair held something between them, shimmering and frightening like the fiery sword the angel held at the gates of Eden. It drew shadows to it like moths to the flame, though he hated such cliché description. He hated more that the thing drew him, as well. The shining rift split wider, and a hand, not full of life but real nonetheless, thrust through.

      The other shadows clamored for it, sliding over it. Like water on oil, they rolled off the corporeal skin. As if searching specifically for him, the intruder pushed the others aside and grasped him. He stuck.

      He hadn’t felt panic since he’d died. Hadn’t felt despair since her betrayal. He felt it now as the rough, real fingers pulled him through the rift.

      Thick and heavy, feelings he’d almost forgotten happened all at once. Slippery and hot, sensations he remembered being pleasant at one time engulfed him. His formless being squeezed and conformed into a shape at once familiar and horrifyingly foreign.

      Too bright. Too cold. Too real.

      Too loud.

      One of the pair laughed like jagged glass. “We fucking did it! I can’t believe we fucking did it!”

      The light stung his eyes. He blinked, but his vision didn’t clear. In his chest, he felt a thump that hadn’t been a part of him for centuries—the beating of a human heart.

      Alive. He was alive.

      He dropped to the floor, screaming and clawing at his mortal prison.

      The one who’d done it leaned over him and slapped him on the back. The connection of flesh against flesh drove needles of sensation to the bone.

      “Welcome back, Cyrus.”

      1

       Nightmare

      “You dreamed about him this morning, Carrie.”

      At the sound of Nathan’s voice, my hands froze on my keyboard. “You’re watching me sleep again?”

      This worried me. Besides being phenomenally creepy, my sire’s habit of spying on my nightmares usually flares up when there’s trouble on the horizon. Before our big fight with him two months ago, I’d often wake to find Nathan in bed beside me, staring at me as though I’d disappear if he looked away. Just three weeks after that, when our new blood donor had broken in with the intent to stake us in our beds, Nathan had been sitting in my desk chair, watching over me, waiting for something, anything to happen.

      Rather than looming in my doorway, he’d come in and sat down on my bed—there really was no place else to go, the room was so small—and settled in as though he’d been invited. Not that I’d been offended. It was his apartment, and Ziggy’s old room didn’t feel quite like home to me.

      I studied Nathan as he watched me. I assumed he tried to gauge my mood. He detests arguing with me, and he’d obviously had other hopes for how the conversation would go.

       Tough.

      “So, I’m worried.” At my arched brow, he acceded, “Fine, I’m irrationally angry with you.”

      Damn him for looking good. Time stops bothering with you when you become a vampire, and Nathan was frozen at thirty-two. Despite the pallor that comes with seventy years of avoiding sunlight, he remained just as young and handsome as he’d appeared in the photographs he’d saved from his prevampire life. More so, actually, because this Nathan was in my bedroom, in living color. Dark hair, gorgeous gray eyes, a body so toned and hard he looked like he’d been a statue of a Greek god in a past life. But it was his eyes that had made me fall for him. Even though he’d been acting tough, and threatening my life the first time we’d met, I’d seen the kindness and sorrow in them. His eyes weren’t just windows to his soul. They were doors that let out things he wouldn’t have been able to hide from me even without a blood tie between us.

      I’d turned back to my computer, where my latest dissertation on vampire physiology had waited with an impatiently flashing cursor. You can take the human out of the doctor, but you can’t take the doctor out of the vampire. Or something like that. I’d been working on A Case Study of Blood Type Compatibility for Metabolic Efficiency to kill time and distract me from the craziness of the past