Venessa Giunta

Jivaja Venessa Giunta

Mecca is a murderer.

At least, that's what she thinks when she accidentally kills a man who attacks her in the parking lot of her favorite coffee shop. Self defense, right? Except how is she to explain that she killed him with only a hand on his wrist?

Vampires don't exist. At least, not in the "traditional" sense. The Visci, a species that subsists on human blood, are not undead. They're not human. And they never were.

Close kin to humans, the Visci pass within our society easily, and over millennia, have wedged their way into positions of power. Long-lived, they are also very difficult to kill. However, they have an evolutionary flaw. While they do not die easily, they also do not reproduce easily.

But they can mate with humans -- and have, giving rise to a population of human-Visci hybrids, called half-bloods by those of pure Visci lineage. For centuries, they lived and worked together, these half-bloods and pure bloods. But tensions have risen and civil war is now raging on the doorstep.

But Mecca Trenow knows none of this when she flees to her father, panicked over her unintended use of the family Gift: the one that allows her to manipulate human energy. She's always hated her gift and refused to learn anything about it beyond how to control it so she would do no harm. That is, until a rogue pure blood attacks her and she reacts instinctively, draining his life -- the life he's stolen from another -- out of him in moments.

And now she's a murderer.

When word gets back to the Visci of someone who can kill one of their kind with just a touch, the race is on to acquire Mecca as a weapon in the coming battle. As she learns about this shadowy underground group, she also discovers her father's dark past and the secret he has kept from her all of her life. Reeling from this discovery and unable to trust the one person she has always counted on, Mecca is isolated from everything she once knew, all the while being hunted by dangerous creatures bent on using her Gift for their own bloody purposes.