Some little girls have imaginary friends; I had imaginary monsters. I’d try to conjure fluffy unicorns and happy, smiling faeries, but after a brush with Death as a kid, those figments of light seemed beyond my reach. When I say I had a brush with Death, I mean he held me in his arms in the pulsing darkness as doctors and nurses worked to revive my body in a sterile hospital room. And when that darkness began to flicker, life calling me back, he murmured something to me. Something important. Something I couldn’t quite hear over the roar of blood in my ears and the squawking of hospital machinery. Ever since that day, my daydreams and nightmares seemed to collide. Sometimes they seem more substantial than the world around me. But when the shadowy figments of my imagination break through the veil separating dream from reality on the darkest night of my life, I start to wonder if my brush with Death was much more than a hallucination. And maybe I brought more than a touch of darkness back from the brink with me.

Nothing in my life is as it seems. The four men who saved me have been keeping secrets—big ones—and their revelations shake my world to its foundation. They tell me I'm not who I think I am, I'm not what I think I am, but there's more to the story; I know there is. We're bound together in ways I don't fully understand, but it's becoming clear they're not only my future but my past, too. The unrest in the Shadow Realm is leaking into my world, and I seem to be at the center of it. Monsters lurk around every corner, and the people I love are in danger. The Horsemen will do whatever it takes to protect me and mine, but if I am what they say, I'm not as helpless as I'd once believed. My life has always been kissed by death—I no longer fear it. It's time to become something new, something more because the creatures of my nightmares have crossed the veil. Am I strong enough to stand beside the Horsemen and become something even monsters fear?