Since they began getting each other into and out of trouble at age six, Mike Zimmer and Alex Jackson have been best friends. Now 20-year-old college roommates, they have distinctly different outlooks and personalities, but the friendship remains rock solid. That is, until Alex notices behavior changes in Mike - restlessness, eating pounds of food without gaining weight, and a sex drive bordering on insane, even for Mike, the campus stud.When a spring break camping trip takes a bizarre and violent turn, Alex realizes his lifelong friend is a Lesser-Bred - a human carrying genes of the Kin...the dragons that inhabit the world in human-shaped bodies right alongside humans. And Mike is starting to Shift, taking on Kin behavior, instincts, and bloodlust. Alex finds himself torn between loyalty and self-preservation, and Mike is torn between dreading life and fearing death. Mike's metamorphosis puts them on separate paths, but leaves them connected in ways they can't fully understand.