When Ruth Ellen Abbot, a young woman running away from a failed love affair, finds employment on a wagon train heading west to Santa Fe, she could never imagine she’d soon be embroiled in a horrific web of disappeared children, witchcraft, and satanic rites—nothing a simple girl from Chicago could possibly have any connection to.

Or does she?

The old Mexican curandero she visits in an effort to rid herself of terrible nightmares advises her to flee and hints that, like others on the wagon train, Ruth harbors dark secrets that attract evil.

“But what would a witch want with me?” she asks.

“Now that,” the curandero says, “is the question.”