"December's thorn, cruelest in the wood, Will give no rose, but still draw blood" —Traditional
Life in Blue Mountain, a small town in the heart of Georgia’s Appalachian region, is rarely normal. Nothing is ever quite what it seems, and the past...well, the past is always complicated. Fever Devilin is a folklorist and recovering academic who was raised among those contradictions and later returned to his family home. While on the mend from a near-fatal experience, Fever is visited by a woman who claims to be his wife, and she is there to deliver the shocking news that Fever has a son.
His friends don't really believe she exists—they think she's another hallucination of a mind still slowly recovering from a long-term coma. Fever's fiancée is torn between outrage and concern for his mental health. And the fact that Fever, even in the best of times, has a tendency to see things that may not, strictly speaking, exist isn’t helping one bit. But when someone starts shooting at Fever using very real bullets from a very real rifle, everyone can agree upon is that there's something deadly going on. All Fever has to do is sort out who’s real, who’s not, and who is trying to kill him before they actually succeed.