Imagine, for a second, that you are of the air, ethereal, a cool brush against a willing arm. You remember what it is to live, to have color and substance. You remember what it is to matter. Now you can fly, hunt for some shredded vestige of your former life, through candelabra corridors and stands of tall trees at night, from wooden cotton-candy roller coasters to office buildings holding the shadows of the work that was formerly done. You are no longer bound by life, but in death you visit what you have lost. You see it over and over again, and you hurt, and because there is no physical outlet for the pain, your longing becomes all you are, all you ever were. It becomes your reason for existence. And then it turns to anger and a hatred beyond anything possible. And you realize that you don't need to be alive to harm those who still are.... The book was strange enough with its appearing and disappearing writing, but what was even stranger to Blythe Armstrong was how she had found the book in her attic in the first place: the ghost of her mother had told her in a dream where to find it. Still reeling from her mother's death of years before and a recent move from San Francisco to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio with her father, a rare book dealer, fourteen year-old Blythe is unprepared for what she discovers. She is the Guardian, the next in a lineage of women who, for the past thousand years, have been granted the power to prevent evil spirits from harming those who are alive. All she needs to use her power is the book, a pen and the courage to be who she is destined to be. The book and the pen were easy to come by but the courage is not. And in the course of discovering her new role and adapting to her new school and home she finds her first love - sunny yet tortured Skylar, and her second love - mysterious Henry, who is somehow old beyond his years. There is also the matter of a spirit who is more dangerous than the rest - one who has had an eternity to build upon all the hatred and anger the world could possibly possess. One who wants to rid the world of the latest Guardian and all who would follow her...