The last in a long line of women sworn to guard our world against evil, jeweller Garet James is struggling to come to terms with who - or what - she really is. Will Hughes, the alluring four-hundred-year-old vampire who tasted her blood and saved her life, could help, but he's disappeared. Garet believes he's in France, searching for the Summer Country, the legendary land of the Fey where he might be freed from his vampire curse.

Desperate to understand her legacy, Garet follows Will. In Paris, she encounters strange, mythic beings - an ancient botanist metamorphosed into the city's oldest tree, a gnome who lives beneath the Labyrinth at the Jardin des Plantes, a dryad in the Luxembourg Gardens - meetings that convince her she is on the right path. But Garet is not the only one trying to find the way in to the Summer Country - and the closer she gets, the more dangerous it becomes...