When Ted Hall's birthday dinner in San Francisco's famous Chinatown ends with an explosion, the fire department blames a gas leak, but when Ted finds strange, personalised messages from the restaurant's fortune cookies scattered around his apartment, his suspicions are aroused, particularly as his somnambulant travels appear to coincide with murders by the notorious Hang Wire Killer.

Meanwhile, the circus has come to town, but the Celtic dancers are taking their pagan act a little too seriously and the manager of the Olde Worlde Funfair has started talking to his vintage machines. And while the new acrobat is wowing the crowds, his frequent absences are causing tension among the performers.

Out in the city there are other new arrivals, immortals searching for an ancient power which has been unleashed, awakening something awful buried deep beneath the San Andreas fault... a primal evil which, if not stopped, will destroy the entire world.