Ashton Drake is a hardened, black market Mercenary, a violent, ruthless man without a moral compass who is nevertheless wracked with guilt for the one unforgivable act that haunts his dreams. Drake, a student of the dark arts, is the reluctant holder of a timeless cursed relic that may not only hold the secret to immortality, but may also be the key to the very gates of Hell itself.Sidney Taylor was a drifter, a loner, a brutal serial killer who finally met his excruciatingly painful demise at the hands of a pack of violent thugs after the bodies of eighteen of his victims were unearthed, rotting in the damp cellar of an abandoned barn on the outskirts of an impoverished, forgotten town. Charlie is a misfit, an outcast, a girl raised in the gutters of the broken British care system, working menial, poorly-paid jobs in seedy bars whilst drinking herself into an early grave. Charlie had felt a deep kinship to long-dead enigmatic serial killer Sidney Taylor since childhood, a man she only knew from the grainy pictures within pages of true crime books, a man who was a fellow orphan, a fellow black sheep. The obsession ran deep, so deep that it encompassed her entire life; no other man could ever live up to her expectations, no other man was Sidney Taylor.John McBride is the aged, foul-tempered kingpin of a vast criminal network. McBride, a wiry, wild and tough ex-biker, brutal, heartless and cruel, he is feared and respected throughout the underworld; however, his enemies are many in number and the old man has fears that a peaceful retirement may now be slipping beyond his reach as he senses young vultures slowly circling overhead. These four lost souls are destined to come together in a chaotic week of bloodshed, all of them pieces in a demonic game of chess, centred around the bloody site of Sidney Taylor's mass grave, the forgotten, rotting Barn whose very walls have soaked up untold amounts of blood. The four of them must now establish who, if any within this dark game are the players, and who are the pawns, before they are all violently removed screaming from the board.