After a chemical spill on the Mississippi River twelve years ago, fairy mutations change the Deep South forever. The fairies—primitive creatures that inhabit swamps and bayous—were once too small to be seen by the human eye and hunted mosquitoes for the blood they craved. The chemicals jumped their evolutionary cycle forward and now they’re two inches tall with three sets of razor sharp teeth they use to shred through human flesh and drink the blood inside the bodies they attack. For those bitten the consequences are dire:
75% are going to go insane once bitten
10% will develop cancerous ulcers on their spine, leading to a slow, painful death
10% will die instantly from violent seizures caused by an allergic reaction to fairy venom
It’s not all bad though…
5% of the population is immune.
These people are all but forced into service for the United States government, charged with collecting biological samples from the fairy habitats for scientists struggling to find cure/vaccine/anything to combat these nasty little creatures.
Annabelle Lee is one of the immune.
Former New Orleans socialite and med-school dropout Annabelle Lee has had her fair share of disappointment and death, beginning with her sister’s death more than a decade ago. Caroline was one of the first to die, bitten by fairies while on a camping trip that Annabelle had insisted she go on. Filled with regret and guilt, Annabelle does the only thing she can think of to make amends – she joins the government force as an agent, one of the few immune to the fairies.
The police, headed by Annabelle’s favorite lover, Cane Cooper, have found a body behind the Beauford plantation home. Annabelle goes in to aid in the investigation and collect samples from around the body since it’s so close to the swamp. When she sees the body is that of Grace Beauford, an eight-year-old girl who’d been missing from her family’s home for the past forty-eight hours, she’s overwhelmed by the loss. Annabelle can’t just leave the matter to the police to solve even if she is just a glorified lab technician. She wants to get to the bottom of what happened to Grace.
But there are rumors among the townspeople that perhaps little Grace wasn’t as innocent as she seemed. Unable to swallow the belief that an eight-year-old brought on her own death, Annabelle starts her own investigation to find out what really happened. Was it just another fairy death brought on by a curious eight-year-old who wandered outside her house after dark? Or was it something nastier (and of the human variety) that caused her death and wanted the fairies to take care of the evidence? Annabelle is going to get to the bottom of things no matter where it takes her.