Amanda and her twin sister Tabitha don’t often see eye to eye. Tabitha fights demons and vampires, and Amanda just wants to deny her passive magical powers of empathy and premonition and live a normal life. At the beginning of the book, Amanda’s just broken up with her boring fiance for bad-mouthing her strange family because only she’s allowed to do that. Kyrian of Thraice is a vampire adjacent creature who is closed off to love because a thousand years ago in Rome, we learn (through dreams and exposition) that he fell in love with a gold digger who betrayed him, and gave up his immortality for revenge on her he did not exact.

These two characters end up handcuffed together in the early chapters by the Big Bad, Desiderius. Tabitha is the real target it turns out; but it’s no matter that Dark Hunters and Witches are natural enemies, Kyrian’s boner is so pronounced that he graciously and in the most horny way possible, sets about getting them both free. They both ~haven’t felt this way in ages~, for Kyrian that’s literal, despite being surrounded by other sexy people. These two are instant soul mates, evident to no one but the reader.

They are uncuffed, there is so much exposition about the gods, particularly Aphrodite and Artemis, about the order of dark hunter Kyrian is a part of, the types of vampires and what they subsist on respectively, Kyrian’s past with his ancient nemesis and his wife, how near indestructible a dark hunter is, the nature and duties of squiring, how Artemis loves tall blondes/ short kings literally need not apply, blah blah blah. In all this, Amanda lets (?) Kyrian show-up her ex in his lavish car, later learns her house was burned down, then she bangs the dark hunter and comes to terms with the fact that she’s some sort of empath (since she can feel... everything that’s going on, during). Kyrian reveals he’s scared of himself and how blind he can become to people he’s loyal to, and he feels he’s on the precipice of something big with Amanda.

The smut is alright but I’m not a big fan of insta-love, even when the protagonists fight half-heartedly against it for the duration of the novel. Amanda knows nothing about him, but when she pokes him awake and this over 6’2” man springs onto her defensively, she’s thinking about his meaty thighs and his hot breath. Like. girl, you were kidnapped? He’s a ye olde sap who hasn’t felt or sought out the touch of a woman since the duplicitous prostitute he took for a wife in ancient Rome, but he’s ready to go for this woman with latent witchy powers within 48 hours of meeting her bc she affords him human kindness every time he gets his ass kicked. All it took was a plain-ish jane with a southern drawl (I actually get it, I love accents; I was reading her with a Sookie Stackhouse voice). They have this whole Beauty and the Beast thing, with a little everlasting servitude to a goddess on the side. They cannot be together, but the magnetism is becoming a character on its own, ykwim?

So they have a manufactured falling out; he’s a soulless immortal adjacent pseudo-vampire and she’s an accountant. What kind of life could they have together? Honestly, this book reminds me of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemesin, but Jemesin really dug her heels into the whole thing. This book has Demigods, monsters, and a wide world between, built on the structure of a fantasy romance with a leading man who’s a good guy robin hood billionaire who’s obsessed with you. The final smackdown ends with her saving Kyrian by returning his mortality (vis a vis the true love test from Sabrina the Teenage Witch), the daemon unlocking her powers, and the two of them using teamwork to outsmart their foe. The previously star-crossed and infertile main couple are un-crossed and fertile. Artemis departs with ambiguity that nearly constitutes a cliffhanger, and Mandy and Kyrian bang it out to celebrate their pregnancy announcement. The End.

I’m going to rate this my default fantasymance rating of three stars because, although I could see where it was headed the whole time, there was too much telling and barely any showing, and I found all the “I claim you/ you belong to me” stuff passé, I did **finish** the book, and it was cute in places. Kenyon has a really nice literary voice when she’s not using it to exposit all over the place. A friend recommended this series to me and said it gets really good in the later books (this warning sucks, like no I’m not going to slog thru the first 300 pages of Homestuck or the first 100 episodes of One Piece to get to the so-called good part; but) I’ll probably pick up the next one. Mad respect to the author for making vampires a little cooler and also for writing over two hundred books?! I think Kenyon is my new role model.