“But m’lady, if there are, you’ll be very prepared,” Verbena told her, a sparkle in her blue eyes. “I’ve slipped one o’ your littler stakes here in the back of your hair.” She poked at the heavy mass near the back of Victoria’s crown. “Just in case.”

“If I pull it out, likely it will all come falling down,” Victoria replied, gingerly feeling for the stake. “But in a pinch, I suppose it shall do. I only hope I’ll not have need of it. I have been looking forward to one night where I don’t have to make some excuse to sneak out and stake a vampire.”

Verbena handed her mistress a small reticule. “Holy water, an’ a cross in here, my lady,” she told her. “An’ you look lovely.”

Victoria might look like any normal young woman, just debuting into Society, but beneath her gown—whether it be a fashionable high-waisted one, or the retrospective costume she currently wore—she harbored a secret that made her very different from any other girl.

She wore the vis bulla, a tiny silver cross amulet that gave her superhuman strength, speed, and healing capability. Victoria Gardella Grantworth was a Venator, a vampire hunter descended from a long line of slayers in the Gardella family. Her duty, beyond that of her unsuspecting mother’s expectation that she marry well, was to hunt the undead who lurked in the shadows of London Society. And everywhere else in the world.

Victoria wasn’t the only Venator in the world. Her great-aunt Eustacia had been a powerful Venator before she became too old to hunt, and then there was Max Pesaro, another Venator who spent more time disparaging Victoria’s hunting skills than anything else. He, too, was a vampire hunter, though not descended from the Gardella line.

Victoria was rather glad that she would be attending the masquerade ball at Lady Petronilla’s tonight, for Max disdained social functions and would not be there to glower at her and make snide comments about how many men had signed her dance card.