Prologue Wherein Our Heroine Has a Rude Awakening Victoria opened her eyes. A ring of faces looked down at her: Max, his face shadowed but sharp-eyed; Sebastian, golden-haired and tense; Wayren, near the foot of the bed, her pale oval face tight. Ylito and Hannever stood above Victoria’s head, frozen and watchful. She knew from the pattern on the stone walls behind them that she was in the Consilium, the secret, subterranean space belonging to the Venators. The vampire hunters—of which she was the leader. “What—” Her head felt soupy and her eyelids heavy, and suddenly she remembered. “Beauregard!” As memory sliced through the fuzziness, she tried to pull up, but her ankles and one of her wrists were caught fast. Someone’s—Max’s—fingers tightened around her left arm, keeping it pinned onto the bed beneath her, and before she could react with the anger and confusion erupting inside her, a splash of water caught her over the face. The cold seeped down into her hair and over the warm skin of her neck, and she jerked beneath her restraints. “Why did you do that?” she said, glaring up at Ylito, who’d tipped the vial over her face. She raised her free arm, near Sebastian, to brush some of the water from her eye. No one answered . . . yet, something in the room had changed. Eased. Sebastian