After exposing his order's role in the slave trade, Pel is a priest without a parish, seeking refuge in the rain-soaked port city of Geth Rell and the bottom of a teacup. He wants to be left alone with his failures.

Then Dzokaya sits down next to him. She is a paradox and a pariah: a horned vedzryyf'len, highborn and free, her parents murdered by a killer that leaves no wounds, only hollowed-out corpses still warm with life. She is not looking for a savior; she is looking for the truth.

Out of habit, if not faith, Pel agrees to help. What they find is not just a killer, but an ancient, otherworldly evil that wears the storm like a cloak and has the city's elite in its thrall. As the bodies pile up, Pel and Dzokaya are the only ones who see the pattern, the only ones who feel the unnatural chill in the air.

To stop it, the defrocked priest must claim a power he never wanted, and the proud outcast must wield a magic her people are forbidden to use. They are not heroes. They are the only ones who know the world is not as it seems, uncovering it one hollow corpse at a time.

For readers who prefer their dark fantasy atmospheric, their horror psychological, and their protagonists far from being legends.