Nick Hayes sees how the dead died—and fights the supernatural forces that killed them.
When Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Nick Hayes touches the dead he relives how they died. It's a gift that comes with a price—the migraines, the nosebleeds, the pieces of other people's terror that lodge in his brain like shrapnel. Every time costs him. He does it anyway.
Three hundred people pack a San Diego nightclub. At 11:47 p.m., every one dies frozen in laughter. No toxin. No trauma. No cause of death that belongs in any textbook. The clocks stop. The disco ball keeps spinning. The room gets cold.
The city calls it a gas leak. Nick knows better. He touched one of them.
What he finds beneath the Laughing Room is older than the city—a wound buried under a century of concrete, a bound Entity feeding on the living, and a coalition called Dominion that wanted it unleashed.
Nick refuses to sign off on the lie. It costs him his job, his credibility, and nearly his mind. But it gains him allies: an assistant medical examiner with a dead brother and a secret, a homicide detective with no patience for lies, and a two hundred year old vampire who knows what's buried under the Gaslamp Quarter.
The dead want a witness. Nick is the only one listening.
