It begins with a boy searching for his father-vanished these last two and a half years. It continues with a man moving through life one day at a time, ready to marry his best friend and the love of his life. And then-somewhere between fate and chance-the boy and the man meet. What they uncover about each other, and about who they truly are, will shatter everything they thought they knew. But in the shadows of modern-day New York, something darker stirs. Agents slip through the streets, hunting the last heirs of a royal bloodline banished four centuries ago-determined to erase them forever. With the line extinguished, nothing will stand in the way of their true design: the obliteration of a nation thought lost these last 350 years. Ominous signs flare in the night sky. In Rome, the Royal Bay sheds its leaves out of season, foretelling the death of a king and the coming of doom. A comet cuts the night sky. Now, the world's final hope rests in the most unlikely of hands: a fallen angel, a thirteen-year-old caught between boyhood and manhood, and an exiled king who remembers nothing of his throne. True darkness is coming, the hour is late, and time is running out.
