Mike — half-blood, born of a werewolf and a vampire — is sentenced to death by the Blood Council. He kills his way out and swears he'll hunt down every last one of them. The Queen wants humanity under her heel. He sides with the humans.
Nora, a reporter chasing the disappearance of her sister, follows a supply chain that turns living people into blood bags — and runs straight into him. Together they tear a blood bank apart, until she's sealed in a metal drum and dumped into the sea. He cuts his own wrist and feeds her his blood to bring her back, then draws the pursuit away alone, up into the mountains — and is taken when he finally drops.
Nora awakens the power to command blood — and the price is that every use burns her from the inside. She cuts a path through an entire city, follows him to a city of blood pools deep in the northwestern desert, and finds that the one who took him is his own mother — the Queen who means to devour humanity. She has one thing left to do: get him back before she burns out.
