Nalini Singh steps back into the shadows of her heartbreakingly original world where angels rule, vampires serve, and the innocent can pay the greatest price of all . . . Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux and her lover, the lethally beautiful archangel Raphael, have returned home to New York only to face an uncompromising new evil. A vampire has attacked a girls' school - the assault one of sheer, vicious madness - and it is only the first act.

The Archangel of Death and the Archangel of Disease may be gone but their legacy of evil lives on - especially in Africa, where the shambling, rotting creatures called the reborn have gained a glimmer of vicious intelligence. It is up to Titus, archangel of this vast continent, to stop the reborn from spreading across the world. Titus can't do it alone, but of the surviving powerful angels and archangels, large numbers are wounded, while the rest are fighting a surge of murderous vampires. There is no one left...but the Hummingbird. Old, powerful, her mind long a broken kaleidoscope. 

Naasir is the most feral of the powerful group of vampires and angels known as the Seven, his loyalty pledged to the Archangel Raphael. When rumours surface of a plot to murder the former Archangel of Persia, now lost in the Sleep of the Ancients, Naasir is dispatched to find him. For only he possesses the tracking skills required - those more common to predatory animals than to man. Enlisted to accompany Naasir, Andromeda, a young angelic scholar with dangerous secrets, is fascinated by his nature....

In the wake of a brutal war, the archangel Raphael and his hunter consort, Elena, are dealing with the treacherously shifting tides of archangelic politics and the people of a battered but not broken city. The last thing their city needs is more death, especially not a death that bears the eerie signature of an insane enemy archangel who cannot - should not - be walking the streets. This hunt must be undertaken with stealth and without alerting their people.

The stakes are even higher as the struggle for power among the angels threatens to tear the world apart.