they are something else now. They will tailor themselves to suit you so they might pull you from your path.”
“To suit me?”
“To frighten or confuse or seduce. They will use your thoughts to ensnare you. We exist at the edges here, of what you might call story or myth. It can be difficult to navigate. Hold tightly to what you believe.”
“What if I don’t know what I believe?” Dorian asks.
The moon looks at him with night-dark eyes and for a moment it seems as though she might give him something, perhaps a warning or a wish, but instead she takes Dorian’s hand in hers and lifts it to her lips and then she lets him go. The gesture is simple and profound and within it he finds the answer to his question.
The innkeeper returns with Dorian’s bag. It is heavier now, Dorian can feel the weight of the heart-filled box that has been placed inside. He should probably return the heart to Fate but he decides to concern himself with finishing one story at time.
Dorian opens the door of the inn, revealing the same dark vista as before. It looks more like a castle than a mountain now. There might even be a light in one of the windows, but it is too far away to be certain.
“May the gods bless and keep you,” the innkeeper says. He places the lightest of kisses on Dorian’s lips.
Armed with a sword and a heart, Dorian steps into the unknown and leaves the inn behind.
The wind howls after him as he leaves in fear of what is to come, but a mortal cannot understand the wishes of the wind no matter how loud it cries and so these final warnings go unheeded.
excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
I feel like I’ve heard of the Owl King before but I don’t know where.
* * *
—
I asked Elena what she’d wanted to talk to Z about after class that night and she said he’d been in the library checking out some weird book that wasn’t in the system and then he came back after to track down other books from the same donation, total library-detective mode (her words) but she didn’t know why and he hadn’t said. She did mention a couple of the books (including the first one) were still missing, so maybe he has them.
She gave me the name she gave him from the book donation. J. S. Keating, so I did some digging. A lot of digging.
* * *
—
Jocelyn Simone Keating, born 1812. Not a lot on her, no marriage records or subsequent kids or anything. Sounds like she was disowned. Other Keatings: brother, married, no kids, just a “ward” without a name recorded dead as a teen. Brother’s wife died, he remarried, wife number two died and later the brother died ancient and alone I guess. There were two other Keating cousins who didn’t make it out of their twenties. Then that’s, like, the end of the Keatings, or at least that branch since it’s a common enough name.
No death record for Jocelyn. Not that I can find.
But the books were donated in her name, like, less than thirty years ago? Elena let me dig through the library files when her supervisor was on his lunch break and I found the full record, though it wasn’t digital at the time because they were still transferring and it’s a low-res scan of a handwritten paper and half of it is illegible.
But there’s something about a foundation and instructions for donations and how does a lady leave her library to a bunch of different universities in different countries when some of them didn’t even exist when she died? I mean, seriously, even if she lived to be a hundred this school was founded, like…longhand math, boo…something like forty or fifty years after that?
Elena helped me find some of the other donated books and some of them are, like, way too modern to belong to a lady in 18whatever. There’s Jazz Age stuff in there. Maybe it wasn’t *her* library, maybe it was a library named after her? Or it’s just the foundation and the name is a carry-over from something earlier. I can’t find info about the Keating Foundation anywhere, it’s like it’s not a thing.
One of those books had that bee drawing in it again. Bee-key-sword in faded ink along the back cover underneath the barcode sticker.
This is all so weird. And not, like, good weird. I love a good