Twenty-year-old werewolf, Talbot Osbourne, has a problem—pass his summer classes, find an apartment, and get a job—all before his mother decides to neuter him.  Luckily, his two best friends also failed last semester’s classes and have to spend the summer up in Woodstock at Hedgehill University to boost their GPAs.  Shapeshifter Brennan Pole finds a job posting for a magical education correspondence school, willing to pay in cash.  Meantime, wizard-in-training Fletcher Varley finds the boys an apartment for the summer and puts down a security deposit, sight unseen.


    Across town, Julian St. George receives a disturbing phone call from his mother, who is attending a vampiric clan gathering in Europe.  Upon arriving at their destination, Julian’s parents discovered a cross in their luggage.  Julian dismisses his mother’s concerns, both because luggage gets mixed up all the time at airports and also because his clan is Buddhist and thus crosses have no effect on them.  He promises his mother he will be careful and persuades her against returning home.  A second phone call goes much differently.  Nora Kavanaugh, the Irish exchange student Julian has had his undead eyes on all year, asks Julian’s help in planning a Take Back the Night rally.  As Julian cleans up the house to prepare for Nora’s arrival, he is assaulted by a cluster of garlic hanging in the hall closet.  Highly allergic to the bulb, he carefully removes it from his home, but the message it was meant to send comes across loud and clear—someone knows what Julian is, and has access to his home.  A hostile note accompanies the attacker’s calling card, warning Julian that his family has a week to leave Woodstock, or they’ll all be “dusted.”


    Talbot, Brennan, and Fletcher move into their new apartment, though they might have done better sleeping in the park.  The place is filthy, bug-ridden, and haunted by a ghost name Mary, a five-year-old specter with the mouth of a sailor, trapped in the closet on the hanger that caused her death.  Talbot makes a bargain with her—he’ll figure out a way to free her by the end of the summer if she stops trying to kill them.  Mary agrees. 


     The next morning, the boys attend their first summer session class—Deviance in Human Society.  The teacher informs them that the class will be divided into groups that will choose an element of human culture to examine through field studies.  Brennan is paired with Fletcher and Nora, the latter of whom the shapeshifter has a crush on.  Talbot is teamed with twin sirens and Julian.  Natural enemies, Talbot and Julian swear an uneasy truce for the length of the project because both need a good grade to graduate on time in May.  Talbot’s group decides to study the culture of human strip clubs to examine what type of people frequent such establishments.  They make plans to visit a club that evening to begin their project.


     After class, Talbot and friends go to their interviews at the Spells 4 U Correspondence School where they receive jobs as teachers via email for magically-inept students, with the condition that they have to build their client list or be fired.  Later that day, Talbot meets his study group at the Strip Mine, a half-dance, half-strip club that the Siren Sisters frequent.  They introduce Julian and Talbot to Christophe Du’Prae, the club’s owner and proprietor.  Christophe allows Julian’s group to use the club for their research project, with a few conditions—the names of all study participants in the final paper, no patrons or customers will be harassed during the course of the study, and finally, one member of the group will be required to perform at the club to dispel pre-conceived stereotypes and see “what it’s really like.”  Julian volunteers Talbot to perform, then excuses himself to use the restroom.


     While washing up, Julian is attacked for a second time—a stake shatters the bathroom mirror, leaving behind another note in the same handwriting as the one Julian found in his home.  Unable to go to the police about these threats for fear of exposing his vampiric nature, Julian collects evidence from the attack, determined to catch the stalker and prove his worth as a future law enforcement personnel.  He cleans himself up and decides not to tell his study partners about what happened.


     Brennan and company get their first student assignments from the Spells 4 U school, all of whom seem hopelessly inept when it comes to spell casting.  One, however, catches Talbot’s interest—a French girl named Cherie St. Proudhap.  While fantasizing about her, Talbot lets it slip that Nora is planning a rally for the end of the summer.  Brennan makes a plan to “help” Nora with her protest, hoping his efforts will make the banshee fall for him.