With Nazi bombs falling from the sky and fires consuming London, reluctant immortal Daniel Leland finds himself in an uncomfortable position. As a halfhearted employee of the British government, blackmailed into submission, he is forced to use his peculiar talent for murder in the service of the Crown. But as the assignments become impossibly challenging, the limits of that talent are tested. The Luftwaffe is not the most explosive thing to menace Great Britain, and even dead things can die again. There is more at stake than the questionable life of a lone agent, more at stake than Daniel Leland would care to admit.

In the twilight of the year 2003, a stranger arrives in the tiny town of Burns, Colorado. Whispers begin to fly as bodies appear, savagely mutilated, throughout the neighborhood, and the responsibility falls on two monstrously unprepared high school students to uncover the truth before the undead can destroy their hometown. Chris Doyle is a slacker and a sci-fi geek, barely eking through his senior year of high school; Aaron Margolis is a child prodigy who could have graduated at age twelve if his parents had let him. They have never had anything in common until a woman is murdered and Aaron comes asking for Chris’s help – he is seeing Texans who cannot be real. Then the high school’s English teacher disappears and is replaced by Daniel Leland, the sharp and reclusive newcomer, a man already convicted by public opinion. He says that he is a hunted man, and Aaron believes him, but Chris is not as sure. Doubts or no, Chris has no choice but to join up with the teacher when his best friend is kidnapped by superhuman forces, but this adventure is nothing like his comic books.

It begins with the breaking of a gentle monster. A medium cannot kill. A medium must not kill. And a medium should never become a vampire. Lenny played human, kept his head down, never took a life, until Sebastian came. Torn away from his comfortable life, he is plunged into an endless night of manipulation, death, and blood. The only light in the dark is Kim, a young wizard tasked with destroying Sebastian. She is determined to save Lenny from the monster controlling him, but the monster growing inside him will be harder to kill. Unknown to all, the existence of a vampire medium has sparked a war.

A murder. A betrayal. A war. Jadwiga Dąbrowska, dream-eater, wakes from her own murder in a bizarre mirror world, chained body and soul to a terrible being, the Shadow’s Face. With no choice but to obey the Shadow, she must contend with forces outside her understanding, fighting in a war that will never end. She can’t be sure that her freedom was a fair price for her life. Kim Reed has spent years searching for a lost friend, but her search is interrupted by war. An ancient wizards’ Circle is reaching for power, backed by black magic. With her own magic atrophied and her past making her an object of suspicion, she is not ready for politics, war, or spies manipulating her dreams. All she wants is her friend back, but there are Shadows standing in her way.

In the midst of a building magical war, Kim Reed thought she had found a bit of peace, a silver lining. Lenny, the friend she lost years ago, is safe, the monster who kidnapped him is dead, and this war cannot last long with so much raw power ranged against the enemy. But Lenny is not the man he was. There is something dark in him, something growing stronger by the day. Something that has caught the attention of the Shadows that live between the worlds. She knows she cannot fight her many battles alone, but allies are few and far between. Jadwiga, the mora, remains secretive and aloof, and Kim's old friend Daniel has a bloodier past than she had ever dreamed. And it is possible, just possible, that worse is coming than war. As Shadows close in, and the Veil between worlds grows tangled and thick, Death has gone missing, and soon, ghosts will crowd the living from the face of the earth.