What exactly possessed primitive humans to inflict marks on their skin is
hard to fathom. Perhaps one of the tribesmen had inadvertently gotten some
dirt or ashes in a wound and once it healed, it remained discolored. While sitting
around the fire swapping tales, his buddies might have made note of this
new thing. With a little experimentation, they realized that if they opened a
fresh wound, charred a stick, and buried the black residue inside the slice, the
result was a tattoo. Proof that humans are endlessly inventive when they’re
bored.


Thousands of years later we have a story about a high school girl who is
having a rough day: while Zoey Montgomery is trying to cough her lungs out,
her best friend is prattling on about Z’s drunken “almost” boyfriend and a
football game. That all becomes irrelevant when Zoey spies the undead guy
standing next to her locker. Don’t know about you, but I didn’t have dead guys
waiting for me in high school. (Not many of the live ones, either.) There’s no
way Zoey can ignore the newcomer’s vivid Mark, the sapphire blue crescent moon tattoo on his forehead, and “the entwining knotwork that framed his
equally blue eyes” (Marked).


This dude is a Vampyre Tracker, and he’s not there to compare notes on
Zoey’s upcoming geometry test. Instead, he comes  …