It was the answer to a question she thought would never be spoken: "Ask the rose why it is red and it would give you the same answer I would: because God made it that way."
Sharon Peters, a young woman who has left her promiscuous, drug-fueled adolescence behind her after reuniting with her on again-off again beau, Bernie, sees only smooth water and clear sailing ahead.
But Sharon has been singled out -she knows not why- as a player in a battle between ancient forces of good and evil as old as the cosmos itself.
Drawn into a cat and mouse game of seduction and betrayal between her newly returned lost love and the dark demimondaine, her friend, Katerina Cheplik, she finally realizes the game is not for Bernie, but for her. There is another, more sinister, more powerful, who will never let her claim the second chair.
Implicated in a series of gruesome murders, Sharon is spirited away and imprisoned in an insane asylum where she meets the two hundred year old man, William Davis, a man with his own, dark secrets and firsthand knowledge of the evil Cheplik legacy.
As the terrifying darkness ever more tightly enfolds the little college town of Red River, drawing more and more of her despairing inhabitants into the hopeless web of the Evil One, Sharon and Davis must find the courage to risk their lives -and be willing to give them- to face down the literal and figurative storm bearing down on the besieged city.
The fate of the eternal souls of thousands hinges on them as they battle the raw, unearthly power of the bete noire, the dark-eyed enchantress, Katerina Cheplik.