They were the beautiful dreamers. From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder – and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world.
When Ann LeSage was a little girl, she had an invisible friend—a poltergeist that spoke to her with flying knives and howling winds. She called it the Insect. Eventually, with some professional help, Ann learned to contain it. But the nightmare never truly ended.
The year is 1911.
At the dawn of the twentieth century in the Idaho logging town of Eliada, orphaned farm boy Jason Thistledown and black physician Andrew Waggoner came face to face with monsters: the human sort, in the form of American eugenicists seeking to perfect the human race through breeding and culls; and the inhuman, a parasitic species named Juke, that lived off the hopes, dreams, and faith of humanity, even as it consumed it from within.