It is 1985 and the United States is reeling from a disease that has taken huge, bloody bites out of the country as people are changed into vampires. The survivors have grouped together in remote outposts and the National Guard is the lifeline that runs between the outposts, bringing news and supplies.In Wereburg, New York, a young woman named Destiny Riser has lost her parents in the plague but saved her little brother, Chance. But the outpost she brings him to is still young and learning and in an accident of fate, it is ravaged by vampires. Destiny sees her brother bit and changed and from that moment on, rechristens herself ‘Promise’ and vows to release Chance from his nightmare, nighttime existence.With the assistance of her black horse, Ash, she combs the barren forests surrounding Wereburg and even her old development, Willow’s End, searching for Chance; desperate to end his misery. But then the National Guard brings a stranger to Wereburg, a man who is purportedly a fabled ‘half and half’–someone who has been bit but who has at least a partial immunity to the disease. That man will change everything that Promise believes.