New Cover Kinda Dead Inside (signed copy)

Turning someone into a vampire was supposed to be straightforward.

At least, that's what Calder assumed. He'd had centuries to absorb the general theory, even if he'd never had to test it personally. The mechanics seemed logical enough. Bite. Share blood. Wait. 

He was wrong. As it turns out, he was horribly wrong, and now he's standing in his own bedroom watching the person he inexplicably decided to keep actively rejecting every step of a process that has worked reliably for vampires since before written history.

Aiden's body has opinions about the vampirism virus, and those opinions are no. His heart keeps trying to restart. Stuttering back toward life with stubborn, irregular attempts that make Calder's chest seize every single time. Only for it to fail again before it finds a proper rhythm.

He can't keep blood down. The transition that should have been underway by now is stuck somewhere between here and there, and Aiden is caught in the middle of it. Calder does the thing he is least naturally equipped to do in any situation.

He panics. Quietly, thoroughly, and without letting it show, because Aiden is already the world's least cooperative patient, and the last thing this situation needs is for Calder to visibly fall apart.

Aiden was buried alive on Halloween night. He woke up in a stranger's bed wearing pajamas that don't belong to him, with two neat puncture marks on his neck and a vampire wearing an expression that oscillates between adoration and barely-contained terror. His body feels like it can't decide what it wants to be, and the man responsible for all of this is relentlessly, aggressively kind about it, which Aiden finds significantly more irritating than if he were just terrible.

Being buried alive was, in retrospect, possibly the universe's way of warming him up for what came next. He should have taken it as a sign. He should have gone home, eaten his M&Ms, watched his horror movies, and let Halloween be a normal, terrible evening instead of the beginning of whatever this is.

He's sick. He's uncomfortable. He's confused about approximately everything, and if anyone expects him to be gracious about it, they are going to be deeply disappointed, because Aiden, in his best health, has a limited tolerance for nonsense. 

Aiden, at death's door or hovering just outside of it, apparently unable to commit either way, is operating on no such limitation whatsoever. He is, by any reasonable measure, the most spectacular brat in recorded history. Calder is discovering this in real time.

They bicker. Constantly. About everything. About whether Aiden is allowed to have opinions about his own supernatural transition, and about the fact that Calder hovers, and about the fact that Aiden refuses to be hovered over. Underneath the bickering is something else. 

Something that started in a graveyard when a vampire looked down into an open coffin and found the most extraordinary person he'd ever seen. Something that neither of them is quite ready to name yet.

But they're getting there.

One argument at a time.

Being buried alive was just the beginning. Turns out the afterlife is even more complicated.