Cahir Kolomire can end a man's life in four seconds flat. He's never once had a friend, been to a party, or figured out what to say when someone asks how his day was.
Raised in total isolation by a two-thousand-year-old vampire sorceress and a fifteen-hundred-year-old necromancer, Cahir was built for exactly one purpose: to survive. Every lesson came wrapped in violence. Every scar was a grade. He can read a killing intent from across a crowded room, and yet have no idea what it is like to have a friend.
Then his parents send him to Vharnoth Academy.
Within his first week, Cahir accidentally kills a student who never should have picked the fight. Within his first month, he's drawn a blade on a teacher out of pure reflex, humiliated a half-giant twice his size without breaking a sweat, and caught the obsessive attention of a girl who was never his to want. By the time the rest of the school works out exactly what he is, it's already too late to pretend he's normal, because he isn't, and neither is the family that made him this way.
The people around him keep trying to get close. He has no idea what to do with any of them. And somewhere in the Hollow Court, older and far more dangerous eyes have started paying attention to the boy who was never supposed to exist.
He can win a duel to the death with his eyes closed.
He has absolutely no idea how to be someone's friend.
