Chapter One

Mia Cordova is a nurse's aide at Los Arcos Care Center, a large skilled nursing facility caring for the profoundly disabled. Abby Tate, Mia's twenty-one-year-old patient, has been in a coma for almost two years, kept alive on a ventilator. When Abby unexpectedly wakes up to find herself a quadriplegic, she withdraws into her own inexpressible feelings of grief, loss, and fear. As her memories return, it seems Abby is somehow unconsciously channeling some dark and vengeful power, a malevolent force that threatens to destroy everyone and everything around her.