Nothing screamed badass vampire chick more than hiding behind a menu while your ex-fiancé and former best friend sucked each other’s faces three tables over and five booths down. I could hear their lips smacking and smell their horn-dog pheromones from my small table at the back of the restaurant. As if hiding wasn’t pathetic enough, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at them from over the top of the laminated cardboard in my hands, some sick part of me reveling in the painful twists of my heart and knots in my gut. That’s supposed to be me. My eyes squeezed shut to suppress the threatening tears as I slid further down in my seat.

Ugh. I’m such a freakin’ masochist.

“Kaela Peters, you are such a fucking masochist.”

My eyes popped open at the sound of my roommate’s raspy voice to find the redhead plopping down in the chair across from me, her green apron bunched up in one hand. One of her brows lifted as she stared at me with big, blue eyes, gnawing on her plump bottom lip, painted as scarlet as her hair. The color was all the more vibrant against her unnaturally porcelain-white skin. Sindi was also a vampire; in fact, in a much more traditional way than I was. Her coloring, for example—pale like vampires should be while my skin was still the olive tone it had always been. Her eyes had stayed the same, except when she fed from the vein, and then they sort of glowed, but mine made a permanent change from brown to a greenish-gray when I turned. We hadn’t figured that one out.

After enduring several long moments of her glare, I finally shrugged and widened my eyes with as much innocence as I could muster. “What? It’s not like I followed them here.”

“Not this time.”

My eyes began to drift over to the happy couple once more before I snapped them back to her. I didn’t fool her, though. She noticed, if rolling her eyes was any indication.

“I guess you’re at least taking my advice,” she muttered as she unfolded her long legs and stood to tie her apron around her small waist. “But when the hell were you going to tell me?”

My brows pinched together at the sudden change in her tone, from snarky to … pained. It took a lot to hurt Sindi’s feelings—her heart was possibly tougher than her indestructible body. Another of the differences between us. My body could heal itself in a short time; hers healed immediately. My skin burnt and blistered in the sun, but she’d burst into flames. I still needed oxygen (though not as much as a human), and she didn’t. My heart still beat, while hers was silent. But could it still be broken? What could I have done to do so?

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but tell you what?”

She blew out a quick breath. “It’s okay, Kaela, I get it. When you joked about moving far away from here and your past, I was serious when I said you should. I’ll miss you, but it’s what you need. But don’t lie to me about it.”

“I really have no idea what you’re talking about.” Actually, muttering about moving away hadn’t really been a joke, but not something I’d done anything about. Yet. My eyes stole another glimpse of the cuddling exes at the thought of leaving, and I sighed. I really was too much of a masochist.

Sindi’s hands landed at her waist, and her long fingers tapped against her hip bones as she let out another huff. “Whisper Falls Inn? Job offer? You left the email open on your laptop this morning. How could you not even tell me that you’d applied? And Colorado? Really, Kaela? Do you know how long that drive from Atlanta would be? I can only drive at night! You couldn’t find anything closer?”

I stared at her, confused. “Why wouldn’t you fly?”

She rolled her eyes. “You know why.”

I opened my mouth to ask because I had no idea why, but then shook my head. How she got to Colorado didn’t matter.

“Unbunch your panties,” I said instead. “I can’t have a job offer. I haven’t applied for anything new in ages. And definitely not in Colorado.”

She glared at me for another long moment, and she must have seen the truth in my eyes because her baby blues began to soften and she started fiddling with the contents of her apron pocket. “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t leave your shit out and open if you don’t want me to know. But if you care at all about my opinion, I think it’s pretty perfect for you. You should take it.” She broke our eye contact as she glanced around the restaurant. “My shift’s about to start. Where are you tonight?”

“Nowhere. I have the rare night off.”

“Then get your ass home, and if you don’t take that job, find another—a real one.”

“Hey! You bartend and wait, too. You can’t get any more real than those.”

“Those. Multiple. When was your last day off? Three weeks ago? You really want to hold down two jobs for the rest of your very long life? And at a 24-hour, hole-in-the-wall diner and meat-market nightclub? You’re too smart for this, Kae. Go use your degree, for Christ’s sake.” She turned and headed for the kitchen.

“Yeah, well, easier said than done. Not too many companies have night shifts for their PR teams.”

I stood up and threw some money on the table, although I hadn’t eaten anything. I could eat food. Blood sustained me, but I still loved food. Just not while watching the Ryan & Heather Sappy Love Show starring the two people who’d been my favorite souls in the world at one time. They still kind of were. Sindi had nudged them into second and third place, but I still loved them both. It wasn’t their fault they’d fallen for each other. That was all on me.

“Sindi,” I called out to her back as she retreated. She turned halfway and threw me an impatient look. It was all a cover, I knew. She’d never tell me I was one of her favorite people—she’d never open up enough to admit to that anyone—but she’d basically just shown it. “I’m not going anywhere. Relax.”

“Don’t worry about me, doll face. You do what you need to do. I will be fine. Always am.” Her mouth curved up in a smirk before she tossed her red ponytail over her shoulder and disappeared between the swinging doors to the kitchen.

I headed down the corridor toward the bathrooms—and the back door. Although I hadn’t permanently left the area in the two years since the night that changed my entire life, I’d been successful in avoiding running into them, and I didn’t want to change that now. I might have sometimes (frequently) watched (stalked) from a distance, but the thought of actually coming anywhere close to Ryan or Heather sent me into panic mode. Sindi had compelled them both to forget me and everything that had happened between us, but unfortunately her vampire power didn’t work on me, fellow vampire and all. I remembered it all—the good, the bad, and the very gruesome ugly.

The cool night air of winter in the South was a welcome relief as I slipped into the dark alley and headed home, thinking about how Sindi had been my saving grace when I’d been a newborn vampire. She’d found me in this very alley covered in blood. My fiancé’s blood. Hence, the “ex” part of our relationship. I’d nearly killed him when I ripped half his throat out. Hey, I didn’t know what I was doing. Seriously. We’d gone to sleep after making love, and I awoke a couple of hours later with a throat-searing thirst. Water just didn’t cut it. I’d been overcome with bloodlust, although I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time.

Yep. I’d nearly murdered my fiancé. The night he’d proposed.

After taking care of him with the healing qualities of her own blood, Sindi whisked me away from civilization before I could kill anyone and taught me how to control the thirst. It took a while—and a lot of fights with Sindi and many nights locked up in her storage room to keep me from becoming a murderer—but I eventually grew to the point where animal blood sustained my body and actual human food satisfied my hunger. Once I knew I’d be okay, I thought I’d give the Ryan and Kaela Show another chance. But I was too late. He’d already moved on, of course. He’d moved right on top of my best friend. I couldn’t blame either of them, though. After all, they didn’t even know I existed. How could they know the betrayal I felt?

Once inside the townhouse Sindi and I shared—well, she shared with me since it was hers long before she met me—I found my laptop open on the coffee table in the living room. A swipe of the trackpad proved the truth of her story: on the screen was an open email. Weird. I hadn’t seen it this morning. I dropped down onto the couch to read.

The rest of the email outlined a modest salary enhanced by free lodging and meals but failed to provide any other details, such as an address or even city.

“Spam is getting weirder by the day,” I muttered as I closed the email, cursing spammers and hackers. I wondered what this joker’s end-game was. What did they get out of a fake job offer?

Not two seconds later, another message popped up, opening itself.

A slideshow began to play at the bottom of the message, featuring gorgeous photos of a small town nestled in a cradle of purple mountains with snowcapped peaks.

“Awesome,” I muttered as my hand moved the cursor to X out of the window. “Virus must already be installed.”

My finger lowered over the trackpad and was about to press down when the slideshow displayed a photo that made my breath catch, and not because of its beauty. A large Victorian manor, complete with turrets and gingerbread trim, forced my pause. How do I know that place? The sense of familiarity poked angrily at the back of my mind. The photo changed, focused in on the plaque by the manor’s front door: Whisper Falls Inn, Est. 1854.

Home.

The word floated through my mind, not as a premonition or wishful thinking as the letter promised, but heavily laced with nostalgia. The townhome’s living room in front of me disappeared as other, seemingly random images hijacked my vision. Images of what could have been the rooms inside the inn, followed by portraits and snapshots of people. Faces that I felt deep down I should know. A close-up of a woman with long, dark hair like mine . . . gray-green eyes, the same shade and shape as mine.

Home.

“What the hell?” I slammed my finger down on the pad, closing out the message, and shut the laptop before jumping back in my seat, as though the message could hurt me. My heart raced, and I struggled to breathe. I curled into a ball on the couch and glared at the offensive machine on the coffee table. After several moments, my heart settled and everything returned to normal. Another few moments and I couldn’t remember what had caused such a visceral reaction. “I’m losing my damn mind.”

Sindi had warned me about vampires losing their sanity, but always in relation to being starved of blood. I was not starved of blood, nor of food. Well, I didn’t eat earlier. I unfolded myself from the sofa and headed for the kitchen to find something for . . . I glanced at the clock on the stove. 11:48 p.m. Something for brunch.

As I cooked and ate, my mind wandered back to Sindi’s orders and the fake job offer. Maybe it wasn’t real, but it got me to thinking. Hotel night manager wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind when I switched my major from pre-med to business after I’d turned and then continued with night classes to earn my event planning certification, thinking event planners worked at night. They did, but, turned out, not only at night. But maybe there was potential here. After all, hotels hosted events and many at night. I’d taken the bartending job to grow into a special events planner at the club, but it’d been more than a year and that had gone nowhere. And this was a full-time, salaried position with benefits in a place so far away, it didn’t get reception for the Ryan & Heather Super Sappy Love Show.

The small-town part, though . . . I’d come to Atlanta in the first place to escape the small-town life of my childhood. I’d done quite well in putting that misery behind me, never thinking about home and the family that had taken me in only because they had to, but didn’t really want me. I’d escaped that life once. Did I really want to go back? Of course, the pictures of the mountain village looked nothing like the dusty Texas town where I’d grown up. Maybe Colorado small towns were different.

“Yeah, right.” I dropped my plate in the dishwasher and cleaned up the rest of the kitchen before sitting down to clean up my computer.

After the virus scan came back clean, I went on an online hunt for a new job—hotel night manager. Every single listing I found on every single job site was the same one: Whisper Falls Inn.