Gina Starkweather lives in Hemming, a rural Tennessee town where thirteen children die each year from snakebite. It has been an expected phenomenon for nearly twenty years, and only the victims' mothers suspect why. They wouldn't have had children at all, had a stranger not appeared and promised them the gift of life.

These desperate mothers finally bore children without knowing their offspring would never reach adulthood.

It has been written off as myth, a local legend that speaks of one called the Keeper of Serpents who comes in the night with his army of snakes to claim those born under the stranger's contract before their eighteenth birthday. When Gina learns of her own mother's deal with Death, she and her brother set out to find the Keeper before her time runs out.