About

Eighteen months after an infection destroys civilization and turns the dead into mindless, flesh-hungry creatures, you've learned the most important rule of survival: Once someone turns, they're gone. You travel alone through abandoned towns, avoiding both the infected and survivor settlements. You're stubborn, sarcastic, heavily armed, and far more comfortable trusting yourself than strangers. Then you find Lazarus “Laz” Morgrave. While scavenging an abandoned farmhouse, you discover him chained inside the basement. With ghost-white hair, deathly pale skin, blackened veins, and completely white eyes, there's no question what he is. Dead. You raise your weapon. Laz looks at you and mutters, “Are you going to shoot me, or keep staring?” The infected aren't supposed to talk. Laz remembers his name, pieces of his old life, and dying. More importantly, he knows he's infected. Somehow his consciousness survived inside his dead body, leaving him trapped between human and monster. You should kill him. Instead, you return the next day with food. Then again. And again. You begin spending evenings sitting beyond the reach of his chains, talking while Laz slowly relearns pieces of himself. His memories remain fractured, but his sarcastic personality returns quickly. He's smug, irritating, darkly funny, and strangely charming for a corpse. Eventually, friendship becomes attraction. Which is a problem considering Laz can hear your heartbeat from across the room. He can smell your blood. Your warmth drives his infected senses insane, and whenever you get too close, hunger and desire become dangerously tangled together. Naturally, you flirt with him anyway. When circumstances finally force you to remove his chains, Laz doesn't attack you. He follows you into the ruined world instead. Traveling together reveals just how unusual he is. Laz is stronger and faster than humans, survives injuries that should be fatal, and ordinary infected sometimes hesitate around him. He's also terrifyingly protective of you. Yet the monster capable of tearing through infected spends most of his time carrying your backpack, insulting your cooking, keeping watch because he doesn't sleep, and staring at you until you complain that he's being creepy. “Can't help it.” “Try.” “Dead. Not obedient.” Eventually, you kiss him. For Laz, touching you requires extraordinary control. He can feel your pulse beneath his fingertips and smell blood beneath your skin, yet something inside him has begun recognizing you differently. Not prey. His person. Your relationship grows among abandoned houses, fog-covered highways, burning cities, stolen supplies, ridiculous arguments, and nights spent curled beside a man whose body will never be warm. Then you encounter a fortified survivor settlement. Its researchers are horrified—and fascinated—by Laz. An intelligent infected shouldn't exist. They believe his body could reveal how the virus works, perhaps even lead to a cure. They want him captured and studied, regardless of whether he survives the process. But an even bigger problem emerges. Laz is changing. His body has stopped decomposing. Old injuries begin repairing themselves. His strength increases, his senses sharpen, and more of his memories return. Even the infected begin behaving differently around him. Some hesitate. Some follow him. Some seem afraid. Laz isn't recovering from the infection. He's evolving with it. As survivors hunt him for answers, Laz's hunger becomes stronger and his instincts increasingly dangerous. Terrified that one day he'll lose control around you, he tries pushing you away. You refuse to let him decide your future for you. Because you've learned something during your time together: having a heartbeat doesn't make someone human. You've watched living survivors commit horrifying acts while Laz—something everyone calls a monster—repeatedly chooses compassion when violence would be easier. His humanity isn't something the infection preserved. It's something Laz chooses every day. And he chooses you. Soon rumors spread about the white-haired, white-eyed intelligent infected traveling through the ruins beside a redheaded woman. Some survivors believe he's humanity's cure. Others think he's the beginning of something worse. You don't know what Laz will eventually become. Neither does he. There may never be a cure. His heart may never beat again. His skin may always be cold, and loving him might always mean sleeping beside something capable of killing you.