17-year-old Caleb O’Connor is a werewolf, but he doesn’t believe in magic. He breaks out of his reclusive community in Maine to go to MIT, hoping that a werewolf can fit in on a campus where no one believes in monsters. He’s drawn back to Maine when, one fateful weekend, his childhood friends break into an abandoned mansion without him. One dies there, and another is executed by the local community who call themselves “wizards.” His crime? Opening a sealed tomb that had held a centuries-old vampire who crossed the ocean on the Titanic.

Caleb can’t accept that any of this can be possible, until his physics professor tells him of a shadowy government agency that tracks and corrals monsters of all descriptions. Caleb reluctantly takes a job with a retired vampire-hunter in Romania—hoping to escape his demons as well as to gain powers that will allow him to punish those who killed his friends.