Raven's Blood

It's Matti Raven's eighteenth birthday.  She's bright.  She's athletic.  And she's bi-racial growing up in what has always seemed a racially tolerant, small town near the northern California coast. 

During the first minutes of a fiery invasion of Earth by the Kryl, the brutal rulers of a vast, stellar empire, she is both orphaned and revealed to be a telepath.  Alone among the survivors in the apocalyptic world that follows, she is given a choice by a gang of cutthroats to become their communal sex toy or to be skinned alive.  When she opts to go down fighting, she discovers that she is not alone and that it's a toss-up which of her allies is most lethal.

Conversing with animals was just the beginning.