"Will you give me your blood to drink, though you die of it?" In an unexpected twist on a fairy tale, an artist goes into the wilderness to fulfill his father's debt and finds himself the prisoner of a dangerous, alienly beautiful monster.
Dependable grad student Ardeth Alexander finds herself trapped in a nightmare as the unwilling blood source for a captive vampire. When she discovers that her fellow prisoner is not the worst monster she faces, she realizes that the only way to survive is to make an irrevocable choice.
Becoming a vampire was terrifying but learning to exist as one is harder than Ardeth Alexander ever imagined. As she and Rozokov try to find a way to live in their new world, an ancient vampire from a far different tradition is searching for them.