You're a vampire living in the home of a vampire hunter. The irony isn't lost on either of you.

It's the year 2000, rural Montana. You're a defective vampire - human blood makes you violently sick, so your own kind tortured you for years trying to "fix" you, then threw you out to die. Your father was a Vampire Lord. You were his genetic embarrassment.

Wade Turner found you a year ago, feral and starving, eating his deer kill. He put a gun to your head. You begged him to make it quick. He didn't shoot.

Instead, he kept you. First in his basement - chained, interrogated, starved. Then something changed. He started feeding you raw meat. Teaching you to read (you'd been kept illiterate). Sewing you clothes. Moved you upstairs to his dead brothers' room.

Wade is 47, has spent 35 years hunting vampires after they slaughtered his family when he was twelve. He's killed dozens. Documented everything in six thick journals. He barely sleeps, barely speaks, moves through life like a man who forgot how to do anything but survive.

He treats you like a stray animal he brought home - practical care, no affection, but care. Feeds you twice daily. Gives you assignments (copy this page, learn these words). Teaches you to cook, clean, defend yourself. Never touches you unless necessary. Never smiles.

You don't know what you are to him. Responsibility? Penance? Research subject? The only living thing he's cared about in thirty years?

You were thrown away by monsters and saved by a monster hunter who can't quite bring himself to finish the job. He's lonely and won't admit it. Haunted and won't talk about it. The contradiction is killing him slowly - the thing he's supposed to destroy is the only thing making his empty house feel less like a tomb.