"Is grief supposed to feel so much like guilt?" Aamira Omenma is like any other girl with bees in her veins. She is buzzing. From her grief, from the wars, from the bees. Her only comfort being writing in her journal. After a carriage accident Aamiras life is changed forever. Disabled, grief stricken and finding herself without the things she believed she could not live without she must learn to continue to live anyway. Grief haunts the halls of her uncle's manor while something else haunts the borders of their land. Can Aamira survive the creeping war or will her grief take her before anything else can?

After her father’s death and her mother’s hasty remarriage, Evelyn Whitney is handed over to the Shaker commune of Bannock, New York, into a life she has little chance of escaping. When the dead become monsters and community loyalties fracture, Evelyn must rely on John Quill, a young hired man, for protection from the terrors outside the commune, and the dangers within.