The eternal awakening of my power had transformed me into something far beyond the human girl who first arrived in Evergreen, a being whose every sense was heightened to an almost unbearable degree, where the raindrops falling like individual crystals that I could count as they hit the window, the heartbeats of a distant deer in the forest calling to me like a siren's song, and the scents — Lucian's cold metallic allure and Kai's warm earthy wildness — mingling in the air to create a torment that left me torn between the cold promise of Lucian's immortality and the hot, defiant passion of Kai's mortal world.
Lucian was my guide in this new existence, his presence a constant in the mansion's shadowed halls, where he taught me to harness the shadow power that now lived in my veins, his cold
