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CHAPTER ONE

ISOLDE

The moon hangs full and high in the night sky. It’s the only reason I know it’s night. It disappears during the daytime hours, but the dark sky is perpetual. Day after day, night after night, I stare out of the iron-barred windows of this fortress where I’ve been locked away for the last twenty-one years.

To keep me safe.

Safe.

From what?

Everyone and everything, apparently.

For twenty-one years, I've been the Morvoren family secret—the female twin vampire no one could know existed. Too rare. Too valuable. Too vulnerable.

The only one of my kind in this generation, the mystery surrounding my birth is… well, a mystery. Th ey know things they won’t tell me, and so I sit here, alone, shielded, lonely.

Sighing, I look around this room, which is the classroom behind these enchanted walls. I sit at my solitary ebony desk, back straight as the iron bars that cross the windows. The stone arches curve overhead like massive ribs, meeting at a keystone bearing a crest I’ve memorised but never fully understood. The candles in the iron chandeliers barely push back the gloom, and the shadows are my only companions.

The stone beneath my feet holds centuries of cold and untold tales. Sometimes I speak aloud just to hear a human voice, even if it’s only mine, bouncing hollowly off walls that have witnessed centuries of secrets.

The fireplace crackles, and I watch the flames dance, knowing they’re my only allies here.

Bookshelves tower to heights that require the wooden ladder to reach, their contents bound in cracked leather. This room, with its perpetual chill and persistent shadows, is my sanctuary and my cage. Sighing, I go back to my maths. Boring as all fuck, but something I have an aptitude for, it seems.

The partial differential equation sits innocently on the page, and I glare at it with sudden loathing.

?2ψ + (2m/?2)(E-V)ψ = 0

“Ugh!” I spit out as a red shadow creeps over the page.

Startled, I look up and blink.

The moon is turning red—a deep crimson that, despite its beauty, sends a chill down my bones.

“What the hell?” I mutter, standing up and moving closer to the narrow window to peer out.

I jump when there is a crash out in the hallway, and loud voices, urgent and chilling, echo through the stone fortress.

“Isolde!” my dad calls out as he bursts into the room. “Go to your room immediately.”

“Why?” I ask. I’ve barely started tonight’s lessons. In my sad, pathetic secret life, my studies are something I look forward to.

“Just go,” he snaps, pulling me away from the window and drawing the heavy, black velvet curtains across the windows.

“What is happening? Why has the moon gone red?” I ask as he literally pushes me from the room.

“Go upstairs now,” he says in that tone that puts an end to any other questions I might have, of which there are many.

Leaving my books on the table, I climb the uneven spiral staircase mere feet from the classroom doorway to my tower bedroom, counting the steps as I always do. Seventy-three in total. I push open the heavy oak door and enter my circular prison .

The four-poster mahogany bed sits in the corner, covered with a flowery print duvet cover.

I cross the stone floor to the barred window and stare up at the red moon. “What is it about you that has everyone freaking out?” I mutter and pick up the scrying mirror.

I tap it once. “Isaac.”

It remains blank, with just my reflection staring back at me.

Tap. Tap. “Isaac.”

Nothing.

Tap. Tap. Tap. “Isaac!”

Still no answer.

With a low, irritated growl, I tap the mirror again.

Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. “Isaac, answer me, for fuck’s sake!”

Eventually, my twin swims into view, reflecting a male version of me with his dark hair and bright blue eyes. He is the yin to my yang. He has offensive magic, I have defensive. We are opposites, but in the best way. Music is thumping loudly in the background, a dark death metal tune, which he turns down when he sees me.

“Issy! What’s up?”

“Why is the moon red?”

“Huh?” He scrunches up his nose, and then my heart does a rapid flutter.

His best friend at SilverGate Academy appears behind him, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. He bends down for a closer look, and those brown eyes with amber flecks go a shade darker when he sees me. I lick my lips, wishing I could run my tongue over the tattoos that cover most of his body—that I can tell anyway from only ever seeing him in the mirror—up his neck, down his chest, over his arms and hands.

“Issy,” he purrs in that accent that is like pouring honey over chocolate. It’s indistinct to most people, but when you listen hard, hear him groaning your name in your dreams, you hear the slight Italian inflexion. He drags deep on the cigarette and then pulls it out of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. “What’s got your knickers in a twist?” he asks with a smirk that nearly sets my twisted knickers on fire.

“Uhm,” I mutter, thoroughly embarrassed, feeling my cheeks heat up. My sheltered life has prevented me from engaging with boys, men, so whenever I see my crush, I get all flustered and wish the earth would open up and swallow me whole, delivering me onto the next world.

“Issy?” Isaac snaps, getting annoyed with my stammering.

“Uhm, the moon,” I murmur, picking up the mirror and turning it around to show them. “It’s red. Why?”

“Red?” I hear Isaac’s voice. “It’s not here.”

I spin the mirror around to see CJ staring at me intently. I force my gaze away from his, even though I could stare into his eyes forever.

“What do you mean?” I ask, trying to focus.

“Look.” Isaac turns the mirror around to show me a pale white moon hanging in the sky.

“Okay, that’s weird,” I mutter. “Why is it red here?”

“I’ve never heard of a red moon,” he says with a frown, turning the mirror back around.

“Issy!” my dad’s voice shouts, echoing up the stairs. “Pack a bag.”

Alarmed, I glance at Isaac, who shrugs.

“I’ll call you back in a minute.”

He nods, his face concerned. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you back, okay?”

I cut off the connection as my dad storms into the bedroom, carrying a large empty suitcase, which he swings onto the bed and flips it open. “Start packing.”

“Why?”

“Just do it,” he says.

“Where are we going?” I ask, already moving to my wardrobe on the far side of the windows.

“Just you. You need to get out of here.”

“Why?”

“Just pack.”

“No!” I say, throwing the clothes into the suitcase and then standing back with my arms folded. “Where am I going? I have a right to know.”

“To SilverGate with your brother,” he grits out, clearly not happy about it in the least. “You leave in five minutes and counting, so pack or you will go as you are.”

That gets me into motion. I’ve lived my whole life here. I have things I want to take, things I want to sort through to know if I can live without them or not.

I try not to think too hard about the fact that I’m suddenly being shipped off to SilverGate Academy like my twin brother did three years ago. If I do and it turns out to be a joke, or only for a night, it will crush me. I’ve longed to attend a proper university, be surrounded by students, make friends, and be around CJ to drool over him in person.

My hands shake as I throw clothes into the suitcase, my mind racing and thinking of the one thing I didn’t want to.

SilverGate.

I’m actually going to SilverGate. The place I’ve only seen through Isaac’s side of the mirror calls with its dark foreboding hallways and crowded lecture halls suddenly within reach.

“You have three minutes,” Dad barks. His eyes keep darting to the window, to that blood-red moon that hangs like an omen.

“Why now?” I demand, grabbing my sketchbooks from under the bed. “Twenty-one years of isolation, and suddenly I’m being shipped off? What’s happening? ”

Dad’s jaw tightens. “The Crimson Moon changes everything. They can find you now.”

“Who can?” I shove my clothes and toiletries into the case, not even seeing what I’m packing.

“All of them.” His voice drops, and for the first time in my life, I see fear in my father’s eyes.

I snatch my scrying mirror, wrapping it carefully in a cashmere scarf before burying it deep in my suitcase to keep it safe. It’s been my one link to the outside world. The one thing that has given me a glimpse into the normal life of a twenty-one-year-old vampire who doesn’t have to fear the world.

Yanking open my desk drawer to grab my journal—the one where I’ve documented every lonely day, every whispered conversation with Isaac, every glimpse of CJ that made my heart race.

“Time’s up,” Dad says as there is a loud, ominously slow thumping on the heavy oak front doors.

My heart stops for a second, and genuine fear overrides the confusion, irritation and growing excitement.

Dad zips up the suitcase and grabs it, hauling it off the bed. He hands it off to my mother, who bursts into the room, a frantic look on her face.

“We have to go,” she says urgently.

Without waiting for me, she turns and hurries down the stone steps.

“Go!” Dad roars as I just stand there like a deer in headlights when the banging becomes louder, more insistent.

It gets me into motion, and I follow my mum down the steps and through the winding hallways of the castle. I run behind her, trying to keep up, my footsteps muffled by the crimson runner that stretches down the hall. The suits of armour track my movement, metal groaning as I pass. I’ve always suspected they’re more than decorative, and now I see they are.

The wall sconces cast my shadow in multiple directions, making it seem like I’m being pursued by darker versions of myself. I count the doors, the alcoves, and the silent iron maidens that flank the enormous tapestry Mum is headed towards. The woven hunting scene of a woman fleeing from shadowy pursuers has always felt like a warning rather than decoration.

Mum shoves it aside to reveal the stone wall behind it.

Thunder crashes above us, making me jump, followed up by a crash that indicates the doors have been breached. “Quickly,” Mum says.

To where?

I watch, frozen, as she places her palm against the stone. The wall shimmers, revealing a dark passage that shouldn’t exist.

“Through here,” she whispers, grabbing my hand and dragging me into the darkness .

My vampire night sight kicks in to reveal a narrow passageway that opens up into a small, circular, windowless room.

“When you get there, you and Isaac aren’t twins, okay?” she says frantically. “You are his younger sister. Remember that, Issy. It’s important.”

Before I can respond, she shoves me into the middle of the room and flings my suitcase at my feet.

A blinding flash of light burns my retinas, and I slam my eyes closed, feeling a gale-force wind rush over my skin, tearing at my hair and clothes… and then everything goes still.