It’s not like she hasn’t had this dream before. Of being cold and wet, and of not being able to breathe. All the other dreams had been like this, except this one felt real. She was freezing, shivering, and as she opened her eyes to the murky darkness, she sensed another presence in the shadow. A hand, grasping her arm, lifting her up, up, up toward the light, and breaking the surface. Splash! Bliss took a ragged, coughing breath, and looked around wildly. It was no dream. This was real. She was submerged in the middle of a lake. “Hold still, you’re too weak. I’ll swim us to shore.” The low voice in her ear was soothing and calm. She tried to turn around to look at his face, but the voice interrupted. “Don’t move, don’t look back, just concentrate on the shore.” She nodded, rivulets of water dripping from her hair into her eyes. She was still coughing, and felt an enormous need to retch. Her arms and legs were weak, although there was no current. The lake was placid and still. It was hardly even a lake. When Bliss’s eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw that she was in Central Park, in the middle of the man-made lake where, last summer, before she’d enrolled at Duchesne, her parents had taken her and her sister to the boathouse restaurant for dinner.
The boats were nowhere to be found this time. It was almost the end of November, and the lake was deserted. There was frost on the ground, and for the first time that evening, Bliss felt a cold seeping into her veins. She started to shake.
“It’ll pass. Your blood will heat up, don’t worry. Vampires don’t get frostbite.” That voice again.
Bliss Llewellyn was from Texas. That was the first thing Bliss said to new acquaintances. “I’m from Texas,” as if identifying her home state went a long way to explaining everything about herself: the accent, the big curly hair, the five-carat diamond rocks on each ear. It was also a way for Bliss to hold on to her beloved hometown, and a life that seemed more and more remote from her current reality as just another pretty girl in New York.
In Texas, Bliss had stood out. She was five foot ten (with the hair height, she was easily six feet tall), fierce, and fearless—the only cheerleader who could execute a tumbling leap off the top of a fifty-person pyramid and safely land feet first on the soft grass of the football field. Before she discovered she was a vampire and capable of such physical dexterity, Bliss had chalked up her coordination to luck and practice.
She had lived with her family in a sprawling, gated mansion in an exclusive Houston suburb, and had driven to school in her grandfather’s vintage Cadillac convertible—the one with real buffalo horns on the hood. But her father had grown up in Manhattan, and after a fruitful run as Houston’s leading politician, had abruptly uprooted the family when he ran—and won—New York’s empty senate seat.
Adjusting to the frenzy of the Big Apple after life in Houston was difficult for Bliss. She felt uneasy in all the glamorous nightclubs and exclusive parties Mimi Force, her self-appointed new best friend, dragged her to. Give Bliss a jug of Boone’s, a few girlfriends, and a DVD of The Notebook, and she was happy. She didn’t like hanging out at clubs, feeling like a wallflower while watching Mimi have all the fun.
But her life had suddenly picked up when she’d met Dylan Ward, the sad-faced, black-eyed boy with the sexy smolder who had walked, cigarette-first, into Bliss’s life in a back alley on the Lower East Side just a few months ago. Dylan had been a misfit at Duchesne, too—a sullen, alienated rebel with a bunch of loser friends, including Oliver Hazard-Perry and Schuyler Van Alen, the two most unpopular kids in their year. Dylan had been more than a friend; he was an ally, not to mention a possible boyfriend. She blushed to remember his deep, penetrating kisses—oh, if only they had not been interrupted the night of the party. If only . . .
If only Dylan were still alive. But he had been taken by a Silver Blood, turned into one of them and then killed when he had come back to visit her—to warn her. . . . Bliss blinked back tears, remembering how she had found his jacket crumpled on her bathroom floor and covered in blood.