THE CRESCENT MOON gleamed bright in the star-studded sky, a beacon of light in the darkness. Not chasing it away. No, darkness was fine. Darkness was our domain, the time when we roamed and played and hunted. We slept the days and roamed the evening twilight. And when the sun fell over the edge of the Earth, that was when we rose. The lunar rays didn’t chase darkness away, so much as crown it. Make it glisten and glow with shadows and light.

We weren’t vampires. We were something older, much older than those legends. We were what begat those first whispers that eventually wound their way into folklore: The Monère, children of the moon, a people who had fled their dying planet over four million years ago. Supernatural creatures faster, stronger, more beautiful than mere humans.

I was the exception to that. The beauty part, that is. I was the pigeon among all the peacocks. Plain, with straight dark hair and shadow-danced eyes. The exotic almond tilt of my eyes was my only attractive feature. At five feet eight, I stood as tall as the shortest of my men, and was built more like a long-distance runner—lean, pared down like an athlete, with a light, modest bosom. I hadn’t inherited my mother’s lushness, which was fine by me. It was a body I was comfortable with. And my simple looks…well, the plainness was not so surprising. Not in a Mixed Blood, which is what I am. A quarter of me is human, the other three-quarters of me is Monère, a people I’d only just come to know existed. And the reason for that? My mother, Mona Sera, a Full Blood Monère Queen, had tossed my mongrel self away at birth, like garbage. I’d been raised among the humans. Grew up thinking of myself as such until puberty hit and the moon’s gifts of greater strength and sharper senses, far more acute than any human’s could ever be, made it clear that I was more.