The gods were not pleased. They demanded the king slaughter all the creatures he’d made. How dare he, a mere mortal, be contentious enough to thwart their will.

But the king refused. “I will not allow my children to suffer for your vanity! You can all die for what I care.”

So while his children were spared their Apollite curse, the gods gave them a new one. None of their species would ever be able to choose a mate of their own free will, only the Fates could assign them that. And there would never be peace between the animal Katagaria and the human Arcadians that the king had created.

Eternal enemies, the two races would become known as Were-Hunters because each would hunt the other. Throughout all time, they would battle and slaughter their own kind-forever suspicious. Forever angry. More than that, they would become the chosen food source of their own cousins, the vampiric Daimons who needed souls to live past their twenty-seventh birthday.

No peace. No succor. Their fate to suffer and to exist in spite of the gods.

Until the day the last two survivors kill each other. That was their prophecy.

And none were to suffer more than those who bore the name of the king’s direct descendants. Those who bore the surname Kattalakis…

CHAPTER ONE

January 2003

Sanctuary, New Orleans

“So that’s the infamous Sanctuary…”

Fang Kattalakis looked up from where he was locking down his sleek Kawasaki Ninja to see Keegan eyeing the triple-story redbrick building across the street.

The pup was just hitting puberty-about thirty years old in human time, but true to their species and his Were-Hunter age, Keegan appeared around the human age of sixteen-which meant he was as excitable as an adolescent. Dressed in black leather to protect him while he rode his motorcycle, Keegan almost dropped his bike in his eagerness to visit the famed sanctuary that was owned by a family of bearweres.