Luce Price has always felt different. Shadows seem to haunt her every move. For years she’s felt completely alone in her own nightmare of darkness and now the shadows have emerged into a truly formidable force. After a tragic incident concerning Luce and the shadows takes place, Luce is sent to Sword and Cross, a reform school. Without her best friends and her family, Luce has never felt more isolated. Yet, a ray of light still remains. She meets two enigmatic boys, and feels an uncanny connection to one of them: Daniel Griggori. Unfortunately, he seems to go out of his way to avoid her.
To the people of Salann, the sea is everything. It is a cruel master, harsh and unforgiving, and it is both life and death. Annaleigh Thaumas has sent four of her eleven sisters back to the sea — and each went more horribly than the last. Now, there are whispers that the sisters are cursed, and loneliness has joined the heavy swaths of grief and mourning that encase the family like a black veil.
The world is broken. The “Phenomenon” has fractured Verity into the North and the South, led by two leaders who have drastically different ideologies of how to rule. In the chaos, acts of violence and sin are physically manifested in monsters — Corsai, who feed off of fear, Malchai, who feed on blood, and the rare Sunai, who survive on the souls of sinners.
