This is not my week. Or month. Or year. My now-ex-boyfriend cheating on me with my best friend? I'd get over it eventually. Finding out my sister has Lycan wolf DNA and I have hours to get her out of the city before she's locked away in a government research facility? I definitely didn't see that one coming. To save my sister's life, we take off in the middle of the night following cryptic instructions from our late father to what was supposed to be the toxic wastelands. Imagine my surprise when we stumble into a fairy tale civilization of wolf shifters where magic is real.

I refuse to spend the rest of my life with my childhood bully for a mate. I may be a cursed shifter, incapable of shifting—but I wasn't desperate. Not till the Alpha Supreme cast me out of the House of Fire and Fluorite for rejecting his son. Now I'm packless. Homeless. No longer under the protection of a House. Until the dark vampire king of Blood and Beryl turns his sights on me. In return for protection from my former House, I have to become his fake mate. I'll be a queen and a fraud. It's a treacherous lie to live—and I find myself forgetting what's real and what's not.

The brutal alpha of our rival Shadow Pack has a reputation for serving up malice and pain. Where he comes from, wolves roam free and lawless. A treaty forged over a hundred years ago is the only thing standing between all-out war between our packs.

When my family left our small, ultra-conservative pack back in Utah to join a giant pack in Northwest Louisiana, I thought I'd be able to coast through my last year of high school in semi-anonymity, then get the f--k away from wolf pack politics and just live my life for awhile. But the Moon decided to prolong my torture by placing my fated mate in front of my face on my first day at Blackstone Academy. He's the Alpha's son and king of a school crawling with shifters, and it turns out he doesn't care to be saddled with a Moon-chosen mate who he thinks is a nobody omega wolf.

I'm the lowest-ranking wolf from a pack that only exists to guard the shifter prison in our territory, but I've been planning my escape for years. I just have to make it through one more heat, then I'm done with this pack and the alpha-holes that run it. Everything changes when my pack gets an invitation to Mating Season, the reality show where Alphas and Lunas from around the country meet to pick their chosen mates. And my Alpha is sending me.

Four years ago, Ryan Shaw broke my heart, tore it into little pieces and then stomped on it. Ryan is my fated mate, but when I saw him with another woman, I’d had enough. I finally told him what he meant to me, and he rejected me in front of everyone. Heartbroken, I ran, trying to get as far away from him as possible. Except I’m on a roll with picking jerks. So now I’m on the run again and heading back to the one place I know I’ll be safe to lie low for a few days. But Ryan knows I’m here now, and he has very different ideas.

Elyseans are so wise… Elyseans are so beautiful…. Elyseans are divine… Elyseans are power-hungry assholes with a god complex. Yes, I said it. Sue me and bring out your pitchforks. Unfortunately for me, the deadly Elysean Trials are right around the corner. Despite my unpopular opinion of them and anything Olympian-gods related, when they unleash their strange blue birds to select mortals around the country as candidates, one of them chooses me.

I cannot believe my bad luck when an embossed envelope arrives at my door just one week before my twenty-fifth birthday. Which just happens to be the cut-off date for being called up for the testing of the blood. I thought I was in the clear, turns out that I was wrong. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the whole dragon tribute selection process, only that it has something to do with a person’s DNA.

Lorelei Clay isn’t like other people. She isn’t even like other supernaturals. Her specialties are the nightmares of the living, communication with the dead, and cooking bacon until it’s golden brown and perfectly crispy—no magic required.

As a reporter, I’ve seen firsthand what the Awaken virus does to people you love, turning them into mindless beasts intent on violence. That’s why I’m staying safe inside my apartment. Women are getting kidnapped right off the streets in broad daylight. Rumors say there’s a group of Awakened living under New York, and they’re responsible for the disappearances. The old me would have sniffed out that story, but post-apocalypse Mal is too scared to go digging for clues.