getting today. At least I’ll smell nice.
Wallace stops beside me, holds up the fourth Children of Hypnos book—the one with a battle axe on the cover—and says softly, “You are joking.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was a little worried about that. Okay, come on. . . .”
I bring him to my room. Inside, Davy sits up on the bed, tail thumping against the wall.
“You have a dog?” Wallace forgets the books and stands by the bed for Davy to sniff him. Half a second later they’re cuddling on the bed, and Davy is doing his best to climb into Wallace’s lap.
I glance around the room to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I have a lot of Monstrous Sea stuff lying around, but all of it could’ve been bought by a fan. I turn down the volume on the television but don’t turn it completely off—I can’t handle Wallace being in my room without Dog Days to back me up. “That’s Davy. If he gets annoying, shove him onto the floor.”
“Davy?” Wallace lets Davy lick his face. “Like Dallas’s sea monster Davy?”
Crap. “Hah, yes, like that. I got to name him.” Lies. I named the sea monster Davy after the dog Davy, not the other way around. The dog Davy is big and white and happy. The sea monster Davy could crush most cities, sheds clumps of fur that get mistaken for icebergs, and has a long neck and a tiny head with two little round eyes and a perpetual vacant smile. Sea monster Davy came to life when I was very little, and dog Davy dwarfed me.
Wallace looks around the room at the decorations on my walls. “What is that?”
He motions to Mr. Greatbody, who has made his rounds across the walls of my room and now sits above my computer. One of his paper eyes has fallen off, lost forever to the vent in the floor. “Something one of my online friends made for me. It’s her kind of joke.”
“I won’t ask, then.”
“So. Children of Hypnos. I’m guessing this means you finished?”
Wallace levels a stare at me the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Except in the mirror, every freaking time I read through Children of Hypnos. Here’s a big football-looking dude sitting on my bed with a very large, happy dog wiggling into his lap, getting angry about a series of novels.
“How is there no fifth book?” he asks. “How can it end there? How does no one know the real reason she quit writing?”
I settle in my desk chair. “Welcome to the pain of the Children of Hypnos fandom.”
“But what happens to all of them? Emery? Wes? Will Klaus and Marcia ever be together again? Does Trevor van der Gelt lose himself to his doppelg?nger? Does Ridley come back? Do they ever find Hypnos?”
I shrug.
“What about the author, though?” He opens up one of the books to the back flap, the picture of Olivia Kane. “Doesn’t she know? Even though she never wrote it, couldn’t she tell the fans what happened? She must have said something.”
“Trust me, I’ve loved these books since I was like twelve. I’ve looked. Olivia Kane is one hundred percent hermit, she doesn’t talk to anyone. She hasn’t made a public appearance in four years.”
“But—”
“You heard what Cole and Chandra said. Most people think she’s a lunatic. She might be, for all anyone knows. Stress does strange things to people.”
Wallace slumps against the wall in defeat. “This is the biggest disappointment I’ve suffered in my entire life as a fan. Can we, like . . . write her a letter, or something?”
“You’re really hung up on this, aren’t you?”
Wallace runs his hands over Davy’s fur. A deep furrow appears between his eyebrows. “I don’t know, I just . . . how can she leave it like that? The fifth book was supposed to explain so many things. Do they all die? Does Hypnos wake up and reset the world? Emery was dealing with all that guilt and her depression—what happens to her?”
I pull my knees up to my chest and watch him. He pets Davy, and Davy happily rolls over onto his back. Wallace glances at the stack of books, then focuses somewhere around my feet.
“There’s lots of fanfiction about it,” I say. “Or there used to be, before the fans scattered to the winds. People have written their own interpretations of the last book. Some of them are really good.”
He shakes his head. “It won’t be right. Why did she stop