After a research facility is destroyed, the surrounding forest becomes a horrific war zone between intelligent winged mutants and mercenaries hired by the man that created them. When a mutant infects a local, Sarah's cancer is cured and both sides discover that she holds the key to their future.

Sarah Douglas is attacked and infected with the blood of a gargoyle-like creature. The cancer that riddled her body vanishes. The attack draws the attention of Doctor Scott, the scientist who inadvertently was responsible for infecting a colony of bats, changing them into intelligent creatures that could threaten mankind. As the infected blood slowly transforms Sarah's body, she is caught in the middle of a horrific war between an army of mercenaries and a colony of mutated winged creatures.

Watching the creatures gorge themselves on human flesh, she sees her future and fights to maintain her humanity. With Sarah's blood holding the key to his research, the doctor uses his vast resources to try to capture her, while keeping the outside world at bay. This becomes increasingly difficult as the colony expands its territory further away from the Devil's Claw, and members of the local population begin to disappear.

When David is old enough to realize that, while not visibly abnormal, mentally he - and others - are different, more than human, he is terrified of discovery. He lives in a land threatened by the twisted mutants of the cursed Fringes, a land where genetic conformity is the Will of God, and any deviation, from a minor quirk to a body-warping distortion, marks the sufferer as non-human, to be cruelly abused and ruthlessly cast out.

If their ability to communicate using thought alone is found out, David and his friends would be in terrible danger. They would have to run - but where to? And who is this new, distant thought-voice they can hear? Could it be from the impossible glittering cities that David has dreamt of, places from the past, from before God sent his terrible earth-scorching destruction to punish the wicked? And might it hold the key to their freedom...