CHAPTER 1
ADRIAN
I WON’T LIE. Walking into a room and seeing your girlfriend reading a baby-name book can kind of make your heart stop.
“I’m no expert,” I began, choosing my words carefully. “Well—actually, I am. And I’m pretty sure there are certain things we have to do before you need to be reading that.”
Sydney Sage, the aforementioned girlfriend and light of my life, didn’t even look up, though a hint of a smile played at her lips. “It’s for the initiation,” she said matter-of-factly, as though she were talking about getting her nails done or picking up groceries instead of joining a coven of witches. “I have to have a ‘magical’ name they use during their gatherings.”
“Right. Magical name, initiation. Just another day in the life, huh?” Not that I was one to talk, seeing as I was a vampire with the fantastic yet complicated abilities to heal and compel people.
This time, I got a full smile, and she lifted her gaze. Afternoon sunlight filtering through my bedroom window caught her eyes and brought out the amber glints within them. They widened in surprise when she noticed the three stacked boxes I was carrying. “What are those?”
“A revolution in music,” I declared, reverently setting them on the floor. I opened the top one and unveiled a record player. “I saw a sign that some guy was selling them on campus.” I opened a box full of records and lifted out Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. “Now I can listen to music in its purest form.”
She didn’t look impressed; surprising for someone who thought my 1967 Mustang—which she’d named the Ivashkinator—was some sort of holy shrine. “I’m pretty sure digital music is as pure as it gets. That was a waste of money, Adrian. I can fit all the songs in those boxes on my phone.”
“Can you fit the other six boxes that are in my car on your phone?”
She blinked in astonishment and then turned wary. “Adrian, how much did you pay for all that?”
I waved off the question. “Hey, I can still make the car payment. Barely.” I at least didn’t have to pay rent, since the place was prepaid, but I had plenty of other bills. “Besides, I’ve got a bigger budget for this kind of stuff now that someone made me quit smoking and cut back on happy hour.”
“More like happy day,” she said archly. “I’m looking out for your health.”
I sat down beside her on the bed. “Just like I’m looking out for you and your caffeine addiction.” It was a deal we’d made, forming our own sort of support group. I’d quit smoking and cut back to one drink a day. She’d ousted her obsessive dieting for a healthy number of calories and was down to only one cup of coffee a day. Surprisingly, she’d had a harder time with that than I’d had with alcohol. In those first few days, I thought I’d have to check her into caffeine rehab.
“It wasn’t an addiction,” she grumbled, still bitter. “More of a . . . lifestyle choice.”
I laughed and drew her face to mine in a kiss, and just like that, the rest of the world vanished. There were no name books, no records, no habits. There was just her and the feel of her lips, the exquisite way they managed to be soft and fierce at the same time. The rest of the world thought she was stiff and cold. Only I knew the truth about the passion and hunger that was locked up within her—well, me and Jill, the girl who could see inside my mind because of a psychic bond we shared.
As I laid Sydney back on the bed, I had that faint, fleeting thought I always had, of how taboo what we were doing was. Humans and Moroi vampires had stopped intermingling when my race hid from the world in the Dark Ages. We’d done it for safety, deciding it was best if humans didn’t know of our existence. Now, my people and hers (the ones who knew about Moroi) considered relationships like this wrong and, among some circles, dark and twisted. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except her and the way touching her drove me wild, even as her calm and steady presence soothed the storms that raged within me.