Shaken by her grandfather's death, Chance Matthews isn't in the mood to deal with a strange girl with alabaster skin who knows things about Chance that she can't possibly know. The girl speaks of being charged by an angel to battle monsters and claims she cannot do it alone. She says she needs Chance's help. Chance doesn't believe in angels - or monsters. But among the artefacts left by her geologist grandparents there lies a fossil of a creature that couldn't possibly have ever existed.

The men on board Her Britannic Majesty's ships 'Terror' and 'Erebus had every expectation of triumph. They were part of Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition - as scientifically advanced an enterprise as had ever set forth - and theirs were the first steam driven vessels to go in search of the fabled North-West Passage. but the ships have now been trapped in the Arctic ice for nearly two years. Coal and provisions are running low. Yet the real threat isn't the constantly shifting landscape of white or the flesh-numbing temperatures, the dwindling supplies or the vessels being slowly crushed by the unyielding grip of the frozen ocean. No, the real threat is far more terrifying. There is something out there that haunts the frigid darkness, which stalks the ships, snatching one man at a time, mutilating, devouring....