In Thrall, a young woman looking for a transformative college experience is bitten by a vampire and must team up with his other living victims to hunt him down.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Thrall by Rebecca Mahoney, which releases on April 21st 2026. PLUS you can check out a video below from Rebecca too!
SYNOPSIS
Lucy Easting has at last broken free from her grim home life and is ready to truly live. But her long-awaited new beginning at Rollins University isn’t what she expected. After attending the first campus party of the year, Lucy awakens the next day with a memory block…and two puncture marks on her neck.
She tries to piece together what happened that night, but every lead brings her to another dead end. Until she receives a handwritten note from the campus radio station, inviting her to call. When she does, the host’s soothing voice over the line confirms her worst fear, and the simplest explanation of what’s happening to her: she’s turning into a vampire.
Lucy teams up with the show’s host, who narrowly escaped an attack her sophomore year, and a beautiful archery champion who, while exactly Lucy’s type, is as likely to shoot her as kiss her. They believe their “friend with the cold hands” is responsible for the disappearance of several women in town, and they’ve been tracking him via the airwaves since long before Lucy arrived.
As the vampire’s sway over Lucy grows and his plans become clear, she realizes she must fight for a future of her own, or she may not have any future at all.
EXCERPT
Lucy woke like she was surfacing from water.
The air was thick and damp when she gasped it in. But there was a breeze moving on her skin, lukewarm as breath. There was a chorus of frog song overhead. And a few feet away, the tree line sat patiently.
She was standing outside, in the field across from her dorm. In her pajamas, without shoes. And the low afternoon light she had fallen asleep to was long, long gone. The night was deep around her. So deep that the pond in the center of the field looked like a hole in the earth. The sidewalk lights whirled as she spun around. There was no one with her in the quad that she could see—and she could see surprisingly well, despite the dark. Most of the lights in the windows were off.
And yet something about the dark felt very . . . full. As she stood, scrambling for her bearings, she found her eyes drawn once, then twice, to the same corner of the woods. I don’t want to be here. It was a hilariously inadequate thought. But her whole body screamed it.
Between the low light and the surge of adrenaline, all four buildings looked the same. She darted to the wrong dorm first. And once she correctly located Quincey’s front entrance, she realized, with a jolt, that she didn’t have her ID for the card swipe. She knocked softly, at first.
Then, when she remembered that the RA’s dorm was a ways down the hall, she pounded with both fists.
She forgot, until she saw the rumpled figure emerge, exactly who the building’s RA was. But making a better second impression wasn’t her first priority at the moment.
Lucy? Mila mouthed, her brown eyes narrowed in sleepy confusion. She padded across the hall and, with a click, pulled open the heavy outer door. “What’s wrong?” she rasped. “Are you okay?”
“Sorry.” Lucy’s own voice startled her: it was a cracked whisper even rougher than Mila’s. Her throat felt sore. “I think I was sleepwalking.”
Mila’s brow smoothed out, softening the rest of her face. “You’re certainly having a day, aren’t you,” she muttered. “Is your room unlocked, you think? Or is your roommate there to let us in?”
“I . . .” Lucy blinked, hard. Had Whitney come home? She was usually a light sleeper, so she didn’t think she’d missed it. Though she usually wouldn’t sleep through climbing out of bed, descending a flight of stairs, and walking outside, either. “I’m not sure.”
“I’ll get my keys and walk you up,” Mila said. “Wait here a second?”
Lucy watched Mila disappear around the corner toward her room, then slumped back against the textured cool of the concrete of the wall.
She could feel one last bead of sweat slipping down her neck—a slow, lukewarm slide. Absently, she reached up to swipe it away with two fingers.
They came away red.
And for the second time that day, she smelled it. That bright metallic tang.
It was standing there, with blood on her fingers and that smell coating the back of her throat, that the word finally swam through her mind. It was such a full, immediate understanding that it must have crossed her mind, if only subconsciously, before that moment. Maybe in the health center. Or maybe the moment she’d spotted the bruise on her neck.
“Mila?” Her voice sounded so quiet next to the blare of her thoughts. The useless cries of a door alarm for an intruder who was long gone. “I’m just gonna use the bathroom for a second.”
“Huh?” came Mila’s faint voice in reply. “Sure. Take your time.”
Lucy slipped through the nearby door and flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights. She didn’t run. It didn’t seem like there was much point anymore.
Her perpetually pink complexion was a sallow gray in the bathroom light. Her pale blond hair was a ghostly cloud from the humidity. When she swept it back from her neck, it felt damp under her fingertips.
She didn’t have to look. She could have left her hair right where it was, followed Mila back to her dorm. She could probably still pretend, if she tried hard enough, that none of this was really happening. But it would still be right there against her skin.
So she moved her hair clear. And she could see now exactly what was bleeding. Mixed among the mottled blue and purple in the center of the bruise, there were two deliberate punctures along the curve of her neck.
There was no such thing as vampires.
But if there weren’t—then what was this?
