Night Life: A Vamps Novel by Nancy A. Collins

Cally Monture is half Vampire, half witch, and recently, her life has been turned upside down. First of all, she found out that she wasn't a new blood, but that her father was an Old Blood, making her one also. Her father had her transferred to Bathory Academy from her old school, Varney.

There, she encountered Lilith Todd, who hated Cally, blaming her for the death of Lilith's friend Tanith Graves. Now, Lilith encounters Cally when Cally and her friends go shopping for new dresses for the Vampire Coming Out party known as Rauhnacht. Cally and the others don't care to be dissed by Lilith, but she has better places to be... like at a launch for a new clothing line designed by the new designer Maison du Ombres. But when the model for the line attracts Lilith's ire, she decides to take her revenge on Gala, the model.

When she goes to her favorite vampire club, she realizes that the host, Sebastian, or Seb, treats Gala the same way he treats her, and that is an insult she can't ignore. Waiting until Gala has gone home, Lilith attacks her in vampire form, causing Gala to fall down the stairs and injure herself. Now, in the last book, Lilith got a card from the photographer doing the shoot for the new clothing line, and she calls him, finally interested in becoming a famous model.

He invites her over and takes pictures of her, and afterwards, recieves information about Gala's injuries. But he's so pleased with the pictures he's taken of Lilith, that he offers to make her the new model for the line, and she eagerly accepts. However, she runs into some problems when she goes for the shoot during the day, and ends up missing school, which really annoys her father. But he's livid when he gets the pictures of the new model for the clothing line he's backing and it turns out to be his own daughter- having a human take pictures of vampires is very much a crime in vampire society, and Lilith could be killed because of it.

Lilith doesn't really care about what her father wants, but when he threatens to restrict her to a single credit card, and that only a platinum card, she tries all her usual tricks to get her way. But when none of them work, she brings out her trump card, and threatens to tell her mother about Cally. Her mother has come home for Rauhnact, and while Lilith hates her mother, she'll have no problem throwing Cally's existence to her mother to get back at her father.

Her father steams, but holds his peace, for now. He's going to have to undo his daughter's foolish acts, destroying the pictures that were taken and wiping the memories of everyone at the shoot. But will he find a way to bring his own daughter to heel?

Cally, meanwhile, is suffering problems of her own. Her former schoolmates at Varney aren't happy about her change of schooling, but she's rescued by the brother of her friends Bella and Bette Maledetto. Unbeknownst to her, he's very much like a vampire mafioso, and when her mother sees him bringing Cally home in his limo, she freaks. Not only because of Maledetto's crime connections, but because he's an enemy of Victor Todd, Lilith's father. So Cally's mother calls her father...

And Cally finally gets introduced to her father, only to find out she's in danger from her father's vampire wife, who apparently makes ice look warm and friendly. Victor decides to move Cally and her mother to Europe to remove them from danger, and from the danger of Lilith outing Cally as her daughter. Cally is ecstatic to find out who her father is, but not happy when he makes her stop seeing Bella and Bette.

But when Cally is given an invitation for Rauhnacht, how can she be presented by her father without causing a storm of absolute crap for her entire family? And when Lilith's boyfriend, Jules DeLaval, agrees to be Cally's escort for the night, Lilith might just have a breakdown in front of the entire group of Debutantes. But little does Cally know that the Van Helsings are going to attack the vampires at Rauhnacht, helped along by Peter's hurt feelings when Cally broke it off to prevent him from being hurt. Will anyone survive the VanHelsings' attack on Rauhnacht?

Cally and Lilith's problems continue. I don't know if Cally is going to be able to survive the kind of backstabbing and general bastardy that passes for business as usual in vampire society. We already knew that Lilith was a bitch, but we find out that Lilith's "friend" Carmen is sleeping with Jules, and that Jules does this to keep Cally from losing interest in him and to keep himself in the superior position in the relationship. Every time she starts asserting herself, he sleeps with someone close to her to make her work to keep his attention to herself.

And Cally is just more of the same, but better, because Lilith *hates* Cally with a complete passion. About the only vampire who seems above these sorts of things is XO, or Xander Orlock, but even he blackmails Lilith into making him her escort at the Rauhnacht ball by making it a condition of helping her with her Alchemy homework. And since Jules uses XO to do his own homework so he can spend more time clubbing and screwing Lilith's friends, XO looks somewhat gullible and less bad than Jules and Lilith.

But this novel ends on a big cliffhanger. The attack on the Rauhnacht ball is about to begin. Who will survive the coming attack by the VanHelsings, and will Peter ever get Cally back after he betrayed her to his father and the other VanHelsings? We'll have to wait for the next novel, "After Dark" to see. And in the meantime, I highly recommend this book and this series. Don't miss it.