Once upon a time, there was a little boy. His belly full of laughter, his life full of joy. Until one day, something changed; stripped his innocence away. The hole inside making space for the devil to come and play.

The stories were all wrong—Hook was never the villain. For two centuries, all of the Darling women have disappeared on their 18th birthday. Sometimes they’re gone for only a day, some a week or a month. But they always return broken. Now, on the afternoon of my 18th birthday, my mother is running around the house making sure all the windows are barred and the doors locked. But it’s pointless. Because when night falls, he comes for me. And this time, the Never King and the Lost Boys aren’t willing to let me go.

Behind tinted windows a few yards from mourning family and friends, Jessica and Jude Day witness their parents’ funeral - and their own. Stripped of the only life they’ve ever known, the Days say goodbye to San Francisco forever. Six months and two new identities later, the 30-year-old misfits with elite self-defense skills and penchants for alcohol, sex, and trouble arrive like an earthquake to Peaceful Woods, a retirement community in Omaha, Nebraska, that thrives on rules and gossip. Welcome home, Jackson and Jillian Knight.

Barrington University is home of the Lords, a secret society that requires their blood in payment. They are above all—the most powerful men in the world. They devote their lives to violence in exchange for power. And during their senior year, they are offered a chosen one.

When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, the two find something elusive—the friendship of a like-minded, pitch-black soul. From small-town West Virginia to upscale California, from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country.