When seventeen-year-old Valerie Russell runs away to New York City, she’s trying to escape a life that has absolutely betrayed her. Sporting a new identification, she takes up having a gang of squatters who live in the city’s labyrinthine subway system.

But there’s something eerily beguiling about Val’s new close friends. Impulsive Lolli talks of monsters in the subway tunnels they contact home and shoots up a shimmery amber-colored natural powder that makes the shadows around her dance. Severe Luis claims he could make about Valiant: TODAY’S Tale of Faerie deals with creatures that no one else can easily see. And there’s Luis’s sibling, timid and delicate Dave, who makes the mistake of allowing Val label along as he makes a delivery to a female who works out to have goat hooves instead of feet.

When a bewildered Val allows Lolli to chat her into searching for the concealed lair from the creature for whom Luis and Dave have been dealing, Val finds herself bound into service by a troll named Ravus. He is as hideous as he’s honorable. And as Val increases to learn him, she finds herself torn between her affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her fresh friends are becoming.