The Sister I Never Met

Fay has hated her sister for as long as she can remember, and she cannot even tell you when it started. There was no first insult, no stolen boyfriend, no broken toy. She has gone looking for the beginning and found nothing there, no starting point at all — the hatred was just there, like weather. What she does know is this: when Ramona was sent to Arizona and Austin tagged along, Fay stayed behind, and she never forgave either of them for leaving.

Years later, on the morning of Fay's wedding, her mother lets a promise slip: Ramona is coming home, and there is something about her that nobody will say out loud. Fay digs in. Her sister is not welcome at the church, not in the photographs, not anywhere near the perfect day she has planned. When Ramona walks in anyway — loud, glittering, with a baby on her hip and a history she has crossed a desert to keep quiet — Fay says what the whole room is thinking: tramp.

The family sees a scandal: a wild single mother and a baby with no father anyone can name. The truth is stranger. Ramona is a witch, a bloodsinger, a woman whose songs are spells. Her son Denver is half vampire, the child of the vampire who used to hit her, the one Jeremy killed to stop it. And once, in an empty valley, when a pack of vampires came to take her boy away because they believed she had made an immortal child, Ramona opened her mouth and sang most of them to dust.

At the reception she meets Ethan — old, courteous, quietly starving, the kind of man who notices everything and touches nothing. He has spent lifetimes being careful around warm, human women. Near Ramona, for the first time, the thirst is simply gone, and what replaces it frightens him more: recognition. Vampires mate once, if they are lucky, and the song that seals it has to be sung from the heart. Their courtship is all restraint and almost — shared mornings, a child asleep between them, want held carefully at arm's length — until the night it finally gives way, and the door swings shut on the rest.

Fay, meanwhile, has the life Ramona never got: married to Edward, expecting, glowing, insufferable about it. Then the pregnancy no one thought to fear turns deadly, the birth goes catastrophically wrong, and the only person who understands what is happening to her body is the sister she has spent a lifetime despising. The venom that saves Fay changes her into something new, and the two sisters finally meet — really meet — over warmed blood, two nieces in a nest of blankets, and the slow, awkward work of unlearning a hatred neither of them chose.

But the old world keeps records. Hybrid children. A Cullen turned while gravid. A witch who can unmake a vampire with a note. On the morning of the first snow the Volturi come out of the winter trees, thirty guards deep, and the one weapon they truly fear is standing at the window with a cup of tea, saving one last note like a coin in a boot.

A vampire romance about the sister you were given, the sister you choose, and the voice that was yours all along.