“Ouch! What the fuck, you psy—”

She didn't finish that sentence, because the assailant was dragging her backward with one hand while pulling her hair and wrapping a piece of fabric around her mouth with the other. Oh, shit. Someone was trying to abduct her. Her. Chloe Miller, twenty-five, seven hundred dollars in her checking account and under two thousand in her savings. It didn't make any fucking sense. Unless they wanted to sell her. Shit. Chloe lifted her hands, struggling against the muscular arms of the dude tying her mouth. At least she thought it was a dude. He smelled like one. Thinking fast, she threw her foot back as hard as she could.

"Ow!" Bingo. She'd hit his crotch. "You bitch!"

He loosened his grip, and she yelled as loud as she could, "Help! Somebody he—"

She wasn't even done pronouncing the last syllable when a shadow appeared, flying past her and launching itself at her aggressor.

Chloe didn’t have time to see it. She couldn’t tell who—or what—it was at all.

The next moment, Charles was walking up to her, flanked by Quincy, one of his security guys, and Victor, another bartender. He pushed the guy with so much strength his body crashed against the wall. Quincy's hand wrapped tight around the guy's throat, and he held him up effortlessly.

She'd never been so grateful for her coworkers’ inhuman speed.

"Are you all right?" Charles asked, holding her up by the forearm.

She was a little shaky.

"Yeah, I… He grabbed me. He just grabbed me, right here, from the back, and tried to gag me. There was someone—something—who pushed him away. I don't…"

"Do you know this man?"

She got a good look at the would-be kidnapper. She saw hundreds, if not thousands of people every day in this line of work, but she was certain she'd never seen him. He was the kind of man people remembered. Incredibly tall, muscular, and very handsome.

"No, I…"

"Victor, contact the Wolf's people. Tell them I need a track. Quincy, call everyone. I want all hands on deck. Your phone."

Charles didn't formulate any of his orders like a question. Quincy handed him his mobile phone without protest.

"Call with updates. Come on," he said to her now. "I'll take you home."

They walked in silence, Charles still holding her, half-carrying her. It took a while for her to regain her senses.

"What the hell? What did he want with me?"

"We'll find out."

Charles's lips were thin.

Seven Names

After a month, they still hadn’t found out. They didn’t know why that guy, or the others who’d attacked her since, had been after her. That they were hired hands was obvious. But who was pulling the strings? None of her father’s victims came from a family powerful or rich enough to have dozens of bounty hunters under their thumbs. It made no sense at all.

And now, she told herself, it didn’t matter. She was going to be grateful for the opportunities her misfortune had brought and look to the future. She was at the Institute. Her acceptance wasn’t conditional; even if—when—Charles dealt with her attackers, she’d still be an Institute student. It was a blessing.

And she had nothing to lose anyway.

"Common room." Blair gestured to the cozy open space in front of them, stating the obvious. The room contained warm sofas, dark wooden coffee tables, thick carpets over the marble, a large TV screen, and two open fireplaces.

A small group was watching a movie she recognized.

"People!" Blair yelled over the surround sound. "Meet Chloe."

Some waved their hands, others turned and smiled, and two or three, engrossed by the movie or working on their laptop, ignored her entirely.

They walked to the end of the common room, and Blair pointed to a curved staircase carved behind one fireplace. "Up to the bedrooms, down to the study and the gym." There was one door in front of them and a second farther along the wall, closer to the windows. Gesturing to the first, Blair said, "This leads to the back garden and out to the forest. Don't go alone, ever." She led them through the second door and into a large beige and blue kitchen.

"The kitchen is filled with the basics, purchased as part of the meal package, but if you see anything labeled in the fridge or cupboards, it means it belongs to someone. It's not worth getting your paws on it, regardless of how delicious it sounds. Trust me when I say that they'll find out you took it. Locator spells are taught freshman year."

As she spoke, Blair filled a screaming kettle and put it on the hob before opening cupboards and drawers until she'd assembled all the necessities for making a decadent hot chocolate, mini marshmallows and all.

Chloe moaned as she wrapped her frozen fingers around the mug.

Blair said, "So, the hill. It's called Night Hill, and its history goes back two thousand years. Are you taking Paranormal Intro?"

"Definitely," Chloe replied. She'd just started realizing how ignorant she was about this world.

"Good. It should help overall, but you won't hear the deets about this area in that class. It’s only covered in Advanced Immortal History. Basically, over two thousand years ago, a higher being went crazy and started murdering everything in its path. That wasn't unusual in that period, because many immortals were killed or banished from this world."

Chloe nodded like she had totally known that. She definitely hadn't. Shit, where was her notepad?

Blair carried on. "But that one’s antics were particularly gruesome. We're talking dismembered bodies and blood—a lot of blood."

"Charming."

Chloe grimaced. Then she took a sip of the heavenly concoction and found that she didn't mind hearing about dismemberment and blood after all.

"Well, she wasn't."

"She?" Chloe repeated.

Blair rolled her eyes. "No interruptions. Questions after, if you please."

Her voice had changed, adopting a layer of authority. Chloe remembered that Blair wanted to be a teacher. It might actually suit her.

"Sorry." She pinched her fingers together and moved them in front of her mouth in a shushing motion. "Not a word."

"Why thank you. Anyway, as regulars do, they sent a bunch of soldiers, knights, and heroes to take her out. Which was super stupid, because the bitch was badass. But something happened the day they cornered her. One of the soldiers bit her hard enough to draw blood."

Chloe was dying to fill the dramatic pause with a thousand questions, but she prevented herself.

"The soldier was seriously wounded and should have died."

"But he didn't."

"He did, for a time," Blair corrected. "The next night, he rose again as something different. Now, there are a lot of theories as to what vampires actually are, but we do know they were made by this immortal creature, Ariadne. Legend says she was Dionysus's wife, and it's hard to say where mythology ends and history starts in paranormal studies. What we do know is that she calmed down after making the first vampire. No more massacres are attributed to her. She realized she was capable of creating companions for herself, and she did so, exactly seven times. Drakes, Helsings, Beauforts, De Villiers, Rosedeans, and Stormhales. Those are the families who own the houses on the hill—the heirs of the first vampires, made by a goddess. They're paranormal royalty. Literally. The Drakes are kings of the American vampires. The Beauforts and De Villiers rule most of Europe…"

"Wait," Chloe interrupted her, going back on her word. "You said Ariadne made seven families. That's six names."

Blair's furtive glance went to the open door behind them. The common room was oddly silent.

"Yeah…I don't like to talk about the seventh here. It gives me nightmares."

A flash of annoyance needled Chloe. She felt like she was missing something big—something she should know.

That said, Blair had been nothing but charming to her, and the subject obviously made her uncomfortable. She wasn't going to push the boundaries of her first acquaintance in a new place just because curiosity was her fatal flaw.

"Right. So, where's my room?"

Perspective

Whatever she imagined college dorm rooms to be, this wasn't it. The small, second-floor room at the end of the right wing was charming and comfortable but stripped of bedding and decoration. The bare walls were painted purple and had wooden beams, and a four-poster single bed in the corner matched the furnishings.

"That's amazing. Everyone has a room like that?"

"Not quite. Undergrads have to share rooms on the first floor, and we PhD folks have bigger quarters upstairs. Still, the master’s students have it good. You have an en-suite," she said, pointing to a door tucked on the opposite side of the bed, "and a small fridge, but if you want to cook something, that's downstairs. We try to avoid setting the place on fire more than a couple of times per year.”

Somehow, Chloe doubted Blair was joking.

“The walls can be painted, and you're free to hang whatever you want. There's a service room on the first floor with a bunch of stuff you might need—carpets, lights, that kind of stuff. You should have bedding in the wardrobe."

Chloe looked around. Her place in NOLA had been slightly more spacious, but definitely not nicer.

"That's amazing, thank you."

Blair grinned. "You want amazing? Watch this."

She sat down on the floor in the middle of the room, hands on her lap, eyes closed, and seemed to concentrate. Her pale skin emitted a warm glow. Chloe gasped as her hair moved with a wind she couldn't feel.

"Well? What do you think?"

Chloe was concentrating so hard on the witch that she hadn’t noticed anything at all. But when she looked around, her jaw dropped. The walls weren't purple anymore; they were now beige, with blood-red flowers running through them.

"A little too emo for you?" Blair guessed. "I bet you're a blue person."