Эйдан (главный герой) – вампир, которого в свое время не устроили правила мирового вампирского сообщества. Создал свой собственный уголок мира в заброшенном городе Пентон, штат Алабама, где теперь живут и люди, и вампиры. По миру пронеслась эпидемия, сократившая количество населения людей. Большинство оставшихся в живых выжили лишь благодаря вакцине. Вампиры умирают от голода, поскольку кровь тех, кто получил вакцину, теперь для них смертельный яд, а чистая кровь оказалась в дефиците. Чтобы питаться от человека, вампир должен связать себя с ним некими узами. Связанный узами человек – фамильяр. Крис (главная героиня), Люси, Мелисса, Эбби, Ханна - женщины, последняя девочка. Миррен, Марк, Оуэн - мужчины. Эйдан, Миррен, Оуэн, Люси и Ханна - вампиры.

Aidan had founded Penton on the idea that humans were the equals of vampires. Respect them for keeping you alive, he preached. Treat them as family. Don’t act like monsters. But vampires were growing desperate. Hungry predators suddenly considered his quiet Alabama community of vampires and bonded, unvaccinated humans to be the vampire equivalent of a midnight buffet in the Garden of Eden.
And he usually told them the same thing: Sorry, but foxhole converts never keep the faith. One of the SOBs hadn’t liked his answer tonight and took a plug out of his hand. Like that was going to convince him the guy would fit in.
Aidan!
At the shock of the voice echoing through his head, he jammed a foot on the brake, simultaneously trying to control the car and listen to the frantic mental SOS. His tires squealed when he jerked the steering wheel into the skid, sending the car spinning across both lanes of the deserted blacktop. It finally jolted to a stop in a shallow ditch, nose-first.
His forehead cracked against the driver’s-side window hard enough to spiderweb the glass and shoot stars across his vision, but the blood trickling its way down his temple barely registered.
Mark was in trouble.
Shit. What the hell had happened? The mental cry for help faded, taking the images with it: a blood-coated knife, a wet parking lot, a Dumpster, and his brother’s name: Owen. Now he was alone in his head again, alone in his car listening to the tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine, an owl hooting in the thick woods next to the road, and the rustle of pine needles as a cold wind blew away the last of the January rain clouds.
Owen had attacked again, and not just anybody. Mark was his business partner, his friend, and the husband of Aidan’s human familiar. They were his family, more than Owen had been in a long time. And he couldn’t lose another family member.
Unconscious doesn’t mean dead, idiot. Stop the pity party. Resting his head against the smooth leather seat, Aidan closed his eyes and unleashed his mind to search for Mark, sending psychic tendrils along the blood bonds that the humans and vampires of his scathe shared.
Finally, a spark. Mark’s mental signal was no more than a faint pulse, but Aidan was able to get a fix on a location: the abandoned Quikmart outside Penton.
God. Damned. Owen.

She’d been prepared to be bitchy and victimlike tonight, but one look at his face brought out the need to help him instead. “What’s wrong? I can tell you’re upset.”
He grunted, slouched down so that his head was even with the sofa back, and closed his eyes. “Just been a helluva night already.”
She wanted to soothe him, so she sat on her hands to keep them to herself. Touching him might be soothing for him but it would take her mind to places it didn’t need to go. “Talk to me about it. I mean, really, who am I going to tell?”
He swiveled his head to look at her. She could tell he wanted to talk, was measuring her ability to understand, maybe, or to empathize. At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“Mirren and I tried to follow another of my lieutenants tonight—you met Lucy, right?”
Krys nodded.
“She’s shacked up with my brother, Owen. They move every day, so we haven’t been able to find them. But she’s with him. She could’ve let us know where they are so we could put an end to this, but she hasn’t.”
Krys struggled to piece together the bits of information she knew or had overheard. “But Lucy was the mate of the doctor Owen killed. It doesn’t make sense that she’d join up with him.”
Aidan stared at the fire. “I don’t think she’s sold us out, or Owen would have made a move already. She’s just being stupid. But she went too far. She—” He stopped. Krys stared at his profile as he focused on the fire and wanted to smooth away the worry lines. She rested her hand on his arm without thinking, and he reached to twine his fingers through hers.
“What happened?”
His jaw muscles twitched. “She let Owen kill her familiar, a guy named Daniel. Helped him. He’d been fed on by two vampires. Mirren and I found his body in the woods behind the mill village.”
“It couldn’t have been somebody else? Maybe Lucy wasn’t involved.”
Aidan shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. He was bonded to Lucy, so the only way another vampire could feed from him is if she broke their bond. She lured him to her and then she and Owen bled him out.”

She’d been too overwhelmed by the night’s events to think much about this new house of hers, but now she sat on the floor and pulled a box open. Who had touched her things, meager though they were? From what she knew of Aidan’s power structure, she’d guess the job had fallen to Will or one of his fams. He seemed to be the all-around go-to guy in the organization, but Krys just couldn’t get a feel for him. He’d been downright calculating when he looked at Lucy last night, but maybe they didn’t like each other. He did seem devoted to Aidan.
Boy, he must think your life is pathetic. All she’d managed to accumulate since college was a little bit of cheap furniture, a few clothes, the Dinosaur, and a lot of debt. Now she had the clothes and the Dinosaur, and wasn’t too worried about the debt. She’d gone way off the student-loan collectors’ grid.
A knock at the front door jolted her out of her brain fog. She could see Melissa through the sidelight window, and smiled as she welcomed her neighbor. No, her friend. She liked the sound of that.
“Want to go for breakfast before we head to the clinic?” Melissa already wore her Auburn scrubs.
“Sure.” Krys grabbed her bag and followed Melissa to her car. “Like your scrubs—I went to school at Auburn. Did you? Or are you just a football fan?”
“I was in the nursing program there.” Melissa cranked the engine and pulled out of the driveway. “Well, at least I was until I got mixed up with an abusive guy. I’m not proud of this, but you might as well know. I struggled with depression and tried to kill myself before I met Aidan at the free clinic in Atlanta.”
Krys had trouble imagining Melissa in that life, but she herself was walking proof that grim things often hid behind smiling facades.