Seventeen-year-old Mina is always focused on what comes next: exams, school dances, opportunities for a picnic by the lake. Filling up the future keeps her from lingering over how little she knows about her history or where she comes from. Anytime she asks her father questions about Egypt--or about her mother's mysterious death--he struggles to open up.

When Mina receives an invitation from an aunt she's never met to visit the Haikal mansion, her mother's childhood home in El Agamy, Mina accepts. She can't resist the chance to learn more about her roots or what happened to her mother, even if it means lying to her loves ones for the first time in her life.

But when Mina returns from El Agamy, she doesn't come back alone.

A sinister entity follows Mina from the Haikal mansion to her tiny California town. Mina is forced to abandon her friends, her father, and everything she loves in order to prevent the entity from violently possessing them. Isolated and fighting for her life, Mina must seek help from an unlikely ally: Jesse Talbot, the mortician's hostile son and the only person who proves immune to possession. Jesse would rather floss with barbed wire than team up with social butterfly Mina, but he doesn't exactly have a choice--after all, he's running from family secrets of his own.

As Mina and Jesse dig deeper into Mina's family lore, they uncover a bloody debt that must be satisfied if Mina wants to finish senior year alive.