New Orleans doesn’t forgive, but it hides things well, and I’d learned to hide with it.

Then a black cat led me down the wrong alley, a seer forced open something I couldn‘t close, and I woke up with fire in my hands, and my parents‘ faces burned into my memory. The vampires who killed them. A name I wasn’t supposed to know yet.

Now there’s a man made of ice and old magic bound to me in a way neither of us chose, a city full of things that want us both dead, and a monster who’s been waiting five hundred years for exactly this.

I spent my whole life surviving.

Turns out, that was just practice.