Fledgling

Shori wakes in a cave with no memory, badly hurt and starving. Her body looks like that of a child. When a man named Wright stops to give her a lift on the roadside, she feeds on him, and the first answers about what she is begin to surface.

She is a 53-year-old Ina, born into a long-lived species whose members survive by pairing with human companions they choose, each side depending on the other. Shori is also an experiment: her family blended Ina and human DNA so that she can stay awake and move in daylight.

Someone has murdered that family and the humans bound to them, in an attempt to wipe her out. Shori has to locate whoever survived and take human companions of her own. She must also deal with the Ina families, some of whom treat her as a danger and others as something to claim.

This is vampire fiction recast around symbiosis, consent, family and race, themes also found in the author's Xenogenesis books. Published in 2005, it was her last novel before she died in 2006. Shori reconstructs her own past while the people who destroyed it are still hunting her.