Cait MaCready wrote a book, a book that the powerful Queen of No Tomorrows knew about before it was even started and wanted to take for herself. The struggle between them destroyed the Queen and it very nearly destroyed Cait.
Six months after, she's sleepwalking through life, trying to convince herself that she's recovered, that she's still alive. But she's hearing voices, not the Queen or the god she tried to call down. Something from the water, something that haunts the edge of sleep. Instead of giving in, Cait fights it but her strength can't hold out forever.
When Cait crosses paths with an Appalachian witch in search of her lost brother and a local developer ends up dead with water in his lungs from Cretaceous seas and guts filled with fish that went extinct millions of years ago, Cait finds that denial and running away from what happened will only work for so long. Then the LAPD come calling and worse than that, something out of time is testing the boundaries of the shoreline and wondering if it is safe to come forth now. Waiting to see if it can stop being the Thing That Wants and instead become Thing That Takes.
But how can Cait hold on when the Thing in the waters knows what she's afraid of? How can she resist the call of the drowned chorus? How can she fight when the thing can call anything that's touched the water, when the waters themselves remember all that has happened within them? And those waters are only rising.