Ad Wilkie Book order

Emily Ashe grows up with an abusive alcoholic mother. She hides the truth of her life from everyone for fear of being taken away and put into an even worse situation. Together, she and her siblings lie, cheat, and steal to stay alive and to stay together. Her childhood isn't good, isn't safe and isn't filled with love. She endures the struggles and grows up to be a scrappy stubborn girl willing to fight her way free of her past and unwilling to do it in any way but her own. During a particularly bad week she escapes home and hides in a shed behind a big fancy house. She watches secretly as the older boys who live there spar with each other and with their big intimadating looking coach. She's caught and it turns out that the boys weren't boys at all, at least not human boys. They're something she thought only lived on the pages of the books she likes to read.

On his twentieth birthday Jory Trayner loses both of his jobs and finds out that his boyfriend is a cheating scumbag. But that's just the problems for that particular day. He has others. His best friend is a stuffed dragon that talks to him. He sees things that he calls Reapers, dark misty beings sent to collect the recently deceased. And he knows he's not human but he doesn't know what his father is because his dryad mother wouldn't tell him. She prefers her plants and abandoned him when he was barely eighteen. He does his best to carry on in the human world, a world that he doesn't fit into even though it's the world he was raised in. Athan Arctos is a vampire. He's wealthy, intelligent, handsome and is absolutely sure of his place at the top of the food chain, because duh, terrifying creature of the night. Jory asks him for a job and Athan decides to play with his dinner before consuming it.