Allie Beckstrom knows better than most that there's a price to pay for using magic; she's suffered her fair share of migraines and gaps in her memory during her time working as a Hound, tracing spells back to their casters. But now Allie's been visibly marked by it with a mysterious iridescent tattoo. She's not only lost all memory of how she got it, but also of the man that she's supposedly fallen in love with. Oh, and as usual, she's completely broke.

So when the criminal magic enforcement division of the police asks her to consult on a missing persons case, things start to look up. At first, it seems to be a fairly straightforward way of earning some money but like most things in Allie's life it soon turns into a dangerous mix of underworld criminals, ghosts and blood magic. This time Allie is going to discover it takes more than magic to survive . . .