The Werewolf Who Waited 1,200 Years and Started Terribly

A 1,200-year-old werewolf, a baby vampire in a cardigan, and the worst first date in history

Here is the setup, and it is a good one. Lachlain MacRieve is the king of the Lykae, the werewolf clan, and he has spent roughly twelve centuries chained in the catacombs under Paris, burning alive, healing, burning again, on a loop, because that is what the vampire Horde does to their enemies. Twelve hundred years. Then, through his cage, he catches a scent. His mate. The one being his kind gets exactly one of, ever.

And he tears himself apart to get to her.

The catch, and this is where Cole is being clever whether or not it lands for you, is that his fated mate turns out to be Emmaline Troy. A vampire. A shy, sweet, half-Valkyrie, half-vampire girl who wears cardigans and apologizes to furniture and has never fed from a living person in her life. His mortal enemy, in the softest possible packaging. He has spent 1,200 years wanting to burn the entire vampire race off the earth, and the universe hands him this trembling, kind-eyed girl and says, that one, she is yours.

I love that engine. A hatred that old crashing into a bond that absolute. That is the whole book, structurally, and it is a great idea.

What works, what genuinely does not, and the scene I still argue about

So let me be honest about the elephant, because dodging it would be dishonest and also every real review of this book has to reckon with it. Lachlain, when he finally gets to Emma, does not behave like a romance hero. He behaves like a feral animal who has been tortured for a millennium and has lost the plot, and the early scenes between them include coercion and at least one moment that is, flatly, an assault. It is not framed as sexy. It is framed as him being genuinely broken. But it is there, and if that is a line for you, it is a real line and you should trust it.

I read this the first time on a long flight, of all places, wedged into a middle seat, and I remember getting to that early section and physically angling my screen away from the stranger next to me, less because of spice and more because I did not want a witness to how uncomfortable I was. And here is the thing I keep circling: I kept reading anyway, and by the back third I was completely in the tank for these two. So what does that say about me? I genuinely do not fully know. I think the book earns its turn, but I understand people who feel it never should have started where it started.

Because it does turn. That is the craft here. Lachlain does not get a pass, he gets a reckoning. He figures out what he has done, and the second half of the book is him grovelling, protecting, and slowly, clumsily learning to be gentle with a person he was built to hate. Emma is not a doormat in it, either. She starts the book flinching at everything and ends it feeding, fighting, and deciding on her own terms, and watching her spine arrive is honestly more satisfying than any of the sex scenes.

And the sex scenes are not shy. This is a spicy book, unapologetically. Cole writes heat like she means it.

The other thing nobody prepares you for is that this book is funny. Emma’s Valkyrie aunts are a riot, a whole coven of ancient warrior women who electrocute the lights when they get excited and hoard shiny objects like magpies, and every scene they are in crackles. Nix, the scattered, prophetic one, basically walks in from a better sitcom. That comic energy is the secret sauce of the entire Immortals After Dark series, and it is already fully alive here.

The tangent I cannot resist: the worldbuilding is doing a slightly insane amount of work in the background. There is an entire supernatural society called the Lore, with a running mythology tournament called the Accession, plus Valkyries and demons and Fae and witches all with their own rules, and Cole just tosses you in and trusts you to swim. Sometimes you are drowning. Sometimes a paragraph reads like a fantasy wiki someone force-fed into a romance. But mostly I found the overstuffed sprawl charming, because it is clearly a woman building a sandbox she intends to play in for fifteen more books, and she was right.

Where it genuinely creaks: the prose is very 2006. There are turns of phrase and a few emotional beats that feel dated now, some of the internal monologue goes in circles, and the pacing sags in the middle stretch through France before the Valkyrie coven shows up and reanimates everything. It is not a flawless book. It is a foundational one, which is different.

A fated-mate romance lives or dies on one question: does the bond excuse his behavior, or does he have to earn her anyway? This book, to its credit, makes him earn it.

About Kresley Cole

Kresley Cole is a former competitive athlete turned romance juggernaut, which honestly tracks, because her books have the stamina of someone who trains. Before she went full paranormal she wrote historical romance, and you can feel that pedigree in how she structures a slow burn and a grovel. Immortals After Dark became her flagship, a sprawling interconnected series where side characters keep getting promoted to leads, and she also writes the wildly popular Arcana Chronicles in YA. She is one of those authors whose backlist is a genuine rabbit hole. You go in for one werewolf and emerge four months later knowing the entire family tree of a fictional demon dynasty. I speak from experience.

If this one got its hooks in you, read these next

• No Rest for the Wicked by Kresley Cole, because the very next full IAD book (a Valkyrie assassin and a burnt-out vampire on a competition) is where a lot of readers think the series truly hits its stride.
• Bitten by Kelley Armstrong, if you want your werewolf romance with a sharper, more grounded, less operatic edge.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, if the fated-mate, morally-gray-immortal, high-heat pipeline is exactly your drug and you want the modern romantasy juggernaut version.
• Fever series (Darkfever) by Karen Marie Moning, for that same intense fae-soaked, dangerous-hero, slow-burning-obsession territory, set in a wonderfully menacing Dublin.

You can grab a copy of A Hunger Like No Other on Amazon if you want to start the series at the beginning like most of us did.

For your book club

1. The opening scenes are the most debated part of this book. Does the story earn Lachlain’s redemption, or does starting there poison the whole romance for you?
2. Emma begins timid and ends fierce. Did her transformation feel earned and self-driven, or did it hinge too much on Lachlain?
3. Fated-mates as a trope removes some of the choice from love. Do you find that romantic, unsettling, or both, and why?
4. The Valkyrie aunts inject comedy into a dark premise. Did that tonal mix work for you, or did it undercut the stakes?
5. This came out in 2006. Which parts feel dated to you now, and which parts hold up better than newer books in the genre?

Anyway. I gave it a 3.75, and I stand by both halves of that number, the point-seven-five it earns and the full point it loses. It is not the best-written romance I have ever read. It might be one of the most important ones to the genre, though, and it is still, twenty years on, the werewolf everyone else is quietly copying…