Children are disappearing from Philadelphia. There are no witnesses. No ransom demands. No bodies. Only terrified families, unexplained patches of unnatural cold, and traces of charcoal left behind. Detective Evelyn Callahan has spent months chasing the cases through the Missing and Exploited Children Unit, but every lead ends the same way: nowhere. Then Christopher North appears. North is a stranger with piercing blue eyes, an impossible knowledge of the disappearances, and a past that seems to stretch much further than it should. He insists he wants nothing except to help bring the children home. Eve isn't convinced. The more she investigates him, the less sense he makes. But when the evidence begins pointing toward something that cannot be explained by police reports, forensic science, or anything Eve has been trained to believe, she is forced to confront a terrifying possibility: Christopher North may be telling the truth. Something ancient has returned. Something that has hunted children for centuries. And it has unfinished business with North. As Christmas approaches and the temperature continues to fall, Eve is pulled from the streets of Philadelphia into a hidden world of old legends, forgotten rules, and creatures that were never supposed to be real. To save the missing children, she will have to trust a man who refuses to tell her exactly who he is, and Christopher will have to confront an enemy he once believed was gone forever. Because some legends were never meant to be stories. And some monsters have been waiting a very long time to come back.
