The house always keeps its secrets. Some of them have fangs. One month after nearly dying to save Las Vegas from a threat she still isn't fully recovered from, Kayla Diaz just wants a quiet stretch of small jobs - wards, curse removal, anything that doesn't leave her hand shaking for a week. Instead, Metro PD calls her out to a body dumped in plain view outside The Night Star, one of the Strip's glossiest resorts, during peak crowd hours. Hundreds of witnesses. None of them useful. And a crime scene that doesn't match anything in her playbook - no binding-ward, no ritual residue, nothing that reads as wizard work at all. Scouting the casino for answers, Kayla stumbles onto a truth that upends everything she thought she understood about her own city: vampires are real, hiding in plain sight behind the Strip's glittering facade, protected by the same tricks that keep every gambler losing track of time. The dead man belonged to Thomas Paget, the Night Star's owner and the head of Vegas's dominant vampire faction - and he's certain a rival faction declared war on him by leaving the body at his door. As more bodies surface and both sides drag Kayla deeper into a conflict decades in the making, she starts to realize the whole war might be built on a lie neither side has bothered to question. With her exiled mentor reaching her through dreams to warn her the world is bigger and stranger than she was ever taught, Kayla has to find the truth buried under two centuries of vampire pride before the bodies stop being containable - and before whatever's really behind it all decides she's seen too much. The gripping second novel in the Kayla Diaz urban fantasy series - for readers who like their magic costly, their mysteries layered, and their cities full of things that don't show up in mirrors.
