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PROLOGUE

RHENN

I’ve known of the mortal realm. People who look like us, talk like us, but are in no way anything like us. I didn’t know that’s where Sumner was from, not until I smelled her, tasted her blood. I’d only met one human before her, and I was too young to understand that’s what she was.

It isn’t the softness of her flesh that bothers me, her inability to obey a simple command, or even the way I hate her with every last fiber inside me. Her kind doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t belong here. But she does belong with me.

She is the sweetest poison. My living hell. I crave her tears, hunger for her pain, so long as I’m the one giving it to her.

And I will do everything in my power to make her pay for what she’s done.

I will torture her, torment her, protect her.

The human is mine.

What she doesn’t know is that our history goes back further than she thinks.

Sumner will wish she never met me. I’ll make sure of that.

Welcome to my world, little Vixen.

CHAPTER ONE

SUMNER

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to die. Would it hurt? Do all the bad things go with you? Or are you finally free?

My mother used to say I was a dreamer. A girl with an imagination so wide I could change any outcome. All I needed to do was visualize it, trust it, and make it so. I believed her enough to think I’d actually seen it happen. I don’t know now if it was true.

When you’re young, you believe the world is good. It’s easy to be happy because that’s all you know. The monsters under your bed aren’t real and the sun always rises to shine down on a more beautiful day. Life is simple. It’s perfect.

How easily that can all be stripped away.

I’d spent years trying to hide from the darkness, never realizing it was living inside me all along. Hidden. Stowed away like a secret too shameful to tell.

They say people change. If my mother had to do it over again, I wonder if she would have stayed. After all, it isn’t normal to wander off in the middle of the night, never to return. Any rational person would know not to leave a four-year-old child alone, telling no one she was still in the house. Perhaps there was a darkness in her too.

If only she knew that would be the easiest part.

There was a time I imagined she was out there somewhere, trying to find her way back to me. Mothers love their children, don’t they?

I tried so hard to fight, to keep my head held high, because if I could just make it to the next day, I knew there was a possibility it would be better than the last. I had made a pact with myself, a promise that I would forever wear my resilience like a tattoo on my sleeve. It’s embroidered, scarred deep into my bones, because that’s what I am. A survivor.

But if I am to die, swallowed by a nightmare is always how it was going to be.

This one is different from my normal nightly visions, the kind that pull me out of sleep with a cool chill down my spine and a nauseous pit at the center of my stomach.

This time, I’m awake.

Heavy footsteps echo through the trees around me. Air burns in my lungs, my sides ache.

The woods are never-ending, with twisted branches and tangled underbrush that snag at my feet with every step. It hurts to breathe. Even my racing heart is begging me to stop.

I keep running.

Not seeing it, having no idea what’s pursuing me, isn’t the worst part. It’s the bone-chilling growl it releases as it gets closer. I sense it everywhere, a growing presence looming all around me.

Exhaustion grips my legs as I fall to the ground, landing roughly on my hands and knees, and I bow my head in defeat.