More than anything, Abbey Howard wants to be an ordinary seventeen-year-old girl-hang out with her girlfriends, gossip about boys, stay ahead in school, and keep on the right side of her mom. But there's one thing that makes her different: a ghostly shape she calls the Shadow that's haunted her since she was a little girl. Her life gets even more strange when the new dreamy guy in school, Caleb Powell, claims he can also see the Shadow. He tells her that he and his family are guardians who protect ordinary people from the very real and very dangerous things that go bump in the night. He wants to know what the Shadow is and if it's dangerous, and destroy it if he has to. But is he interested in her, or just the thing that haunts her? They discover that the Shadow is more than a simple ghost. It's part of an ancient plan to thwart an immortal empress who desires to conquer Earth. The empress was separated from this world untold ages ago by a Veil of power that bars her and her kind entry to our dimension. But over the millennia she's worked tirelessly to tear down the Veil, and her work is nearing its completion. When the Veil falls, nothing will be able to stop her from reclaiming what was once hers. Abbey has within her a secret power that can bring true death to the immortals-a fact that has come to the empress's attention. She knows Abbey's name, and the dire threat she poses to the empress's everlasting rule. Abbey and Caleb must fight for their lives against demons and undead soldiers sent by the empress to destroy them. Their only hope for survival lies in the hands of a shady spiritualist, and a mysterious occult artifact known as the Sapphire Eye.