A baby and the corpse of a transparent humanoid appear in the Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park, setting off a chain of events that lead, three years later, to the death of Keylor Moss, founder of an outlaw motorcycle club and a tree-worshiping cult doomsday called the Church of the Universal Branch.

Keylor’s estranged son Erlan returns to the high plains of Montana, intending to stay just long enough to pay his respects. But rival factions within his father’s organization have other plans. Some want him for a figurehead, the rest want him gone, permanently. To make things worse, Erlan is coming down with a strange illness that might be the vesiture – inheritance of his father’s so-called powers.

When Alli’s troubled fiancé leaves town in the middle of their wedding preparations, she is not fooled by his attempts to keep her in the dark. Because Alli has a troubled past of her own, and she has no intention of letting Erlan disappear into a cult.

As Alli infiltrates the church in search of him, Erlan’s symptoms morph into the ability to see in the dark and gain energy from the sun, forcing him to accept that his father’s stories might be true. Not good news, because that means the Groves and the Pax – a galaxy-spanning empire with a power that destroys advanced technological civilizations – are real as well, and headed for Earth.