As a child, Diane Thiberge had been the victim of an assualt. Now aged 30, an ethnologist specialising in the study of predatory animals, and a woman adept in the martial arts, she believes she has at last found a meaning and purpose to her life when she decides to adopt a five-year-old Thai boy, Liu-San, whom she christens Lucien.
On her return to France, however, Lucien is involved in an accident and is declared to be brain-dead. A series of murders make Diane realise that her son is no ordinary child, but someone who, through no fault of his own, has fallen prey to sinister paranormal forces. In a denouement that takes her from Paris and Germany to the remote mountain fastnesses of Mongolia, she resolves to fight for her son's survival.