Diarmuid Ryan was worried. For some reason, teenage runaways were disappearing from the various homeless camps around Toronto. He worried about that kind of thing because he was a private investigator who sought the runaways out on behalf of their families. Sometimes, all these kids wanted was to know that their families cared enough about them to look for them. Sometimes, that was all it took.

Gerald Hewitt was a man who'd made a deal with the devil. Quite literally, he had come to an agreement with a race of beings who thought nothing of slicing and dicing human beings for experimentation. He fervently wished Diarmuid Ryan would stop looking for the missing teens. If he kept it up, something was going to have to be done about him. The last shred of his remaining humanity hoped it would be him who taught him that lesson and not the Dryac; the albino aliens he worked for.