If you'd asked me a week ago, I would have told you that the best cupcakes were dark chocolate with chocolate cream cheese icing, that dancing in a crowd of magic wielders - the Adept - was better than sex, and that my life was peaceful and uneventful. Just the way I liked it. That's what 23 years in the magical backwater of Vancouver will get you - a completely skewed sense of reality.

Three months ago, I lost my foster sister, Sienna, to the darkness. As in blood magic and chaos and general mayhem. No one saw it until it was too late, but I should have. Now I have a wounded heart and soul that I can't even reveal to anyone around me, because I'm supposed to hate Sienna with the fiery passion of the justified - and I do.

I hadn't set foot in the human world for more than a few hours in over three and a half months. Sure, I was stronger and faster than I'd ever been before, and I had a shiny new sword, but I was seriously chocolate deprived. I don't recommend quitting cold turkey. And the new sword was a problem - to my mind, anyway. It represented all the expectations of a powerful father and a new otherworldly life. A life that wasn't the one I'd worked so hard to build.

I had new cupcakes to bake, a new treasure to hunt, and a new dragon in town - literally. Who wouldn't be ecstatic filling their days with chocolate, trinket collecting, and martial arts training? Yeah...me. Because no matter how much chocolate I ate, I couldn't fill the dark pit in my soul. A darkness born from blood alchemy. A darkness that reeked of the black magic I now knew I was capable of creating. Maybe it was time to walk away. But what if there were important things left to do?

Three months ago I nearly lost my best friend while retrieving the first instrument of assassination. I also inadvertently released a rival who was definitely unhinged, way more powerful than me, and obsessed with harnessing the deadly power of the artifacts I'd been tasked by the guardian dragons to collect. Add a sexy sentinel and a nearly immortal vampire to the mix, and what could possibly go wrong? Knowing my luck, I was about to find out.

I wasn't even remotely interested in collecting the third instrument of assassination. It was far better for everyone involved - and Warner, specifically - if I just let it be. And since I was the only one who could retrieve the artifacts, I figured it was my call to make. I was wrong. And while that wasn't unusual, I was just so wrong about everything. I was wrong about whom I was protecting and why. I was wrong about whom and what I could control. And I was wrong about whom I was becoming.