Chapter 1

I couldn’t remember my parents. Not really.

I remember my mothers honey-blonde hair and tinkling laugh, and my fathers great hairy arms.

I knew more memories must exist somewhere deep inside me, as I had surely been old enough to make them, but they were well-hidden. I couldn’t even remember their faces. Or their names.

For as long as I can remember, it has always just been Azriel.

I knew he wasn’t my real family - he wasn’t anything like me. He was calm where I was wild, patient where I was impatient, and strong where I was not.

He was a vampire and I was a human, and that made us too different.

But he loved me anyway. At least, I supposed he did. I told myself that he wouldn’t have saved me if he didn’t love me. I certainly loved him.

Of course, that didn’t make any sense.

The reality is that I don’t know why he stopped the vampires from killing me after they killed my parents, and I don’t know why he chose to raise me after their deaths. But it felt nice to imagine, and I had a very nice imagination.

And it may seem odd, a human girl being raised by a vampire in a world where vampires kill human girls, but it was all I knew.

Next to him, in a life perfectly strange and dangerous, I learned to walk at a vampire’s side.

And I found it glorious.