While fifteen-year-old Ellie tries to find her missing eleven-year-old brother, Danny, in alternating chapters Danny dreams of a parallel quest in a fantasy world of dragons and shapeshifters that he and Ellie knew as children.
Eleven-year-old Robert is the only one who can help when a mysterious stranger arrives, performing tricks and promising to bring rain, at the same time children begin to disappear from a dust bowl farm town in Saskatchewan in the 1930s.
While making pumpkin soup, three friends discover they have no salt and go to the city to buy some, but while Cat and Squirrel head straight to the salt store, Duck pauses at a pepper shop, then fears he will never see his friends again.
When a little girl from the human world becomes lost in the magical Realm, Jessie's only hope of finding her is the wand of a brilliant but reclusive magician, and if she succeeds she must still face Mrs. Tweedie, who is up to no good.
Raj vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert with his parents, but when he returns he has been changed, and the fate of his family will echo the stories of those who have travelled before them.
Pia, the last person to see ten-year-old Katharina Linden before she vanished, is determined to find out what happened, but her quest becomes complicated when a second child disappears.
Thirteen-year-old Johnny searches the town after his twin sister Alyssa disappears on her way home from the library one day, and Detective Clyde Hunt, lead cop on the case, watches over Johnny and his mother to keep them safe while the boy and his friend continue their hunt.
