People pity me, but mostly they feel envy. I have all the luxury and freedom a girl my age could want.

Something is happening to Charlotte Emerson. Like the fires that are ravaging the hills of Los Angeles, it consumes her from the inside out. But whether it is her eternal loneliness, the memory of her brother, the return of her first love, or the brooding, magnetic Jared-she cannot say. What if it''s something more . . .

Something to do with the sudden tear in her perfect nails. The heat she feels when she''s with Jared. The blood rushing once again to her cheeks and throughout her veins.

For Charlotte is a vampire, witness to almost a century''s worth of death and destruction. But not since she was a human girl has mortality touched her.

In what way will you be transformed?

Until now.