picture on it.
A picture so perfect as to fool the eye.
Zachary turns back to the ghost of his younger self but the figure is gone. The snow is gone. He is alone in an alleyway standing in front of a painted door.
The light has changed. A predawn glow chases away the stars.
Zachary reaches for the painted doorknob and his hand closes over cold metal, round and three-dimensional.
He opens the door and steps through it.
And so the son of the fortune-teller finds his way to the Starless Sea.
DORIAN NAVIGATES THE DEPTHS with Fate’s heart in its box carefully wrapped and contained in a pack strapped to his back and a sword that is much more ancient than him but not nearly as ancient as the things staring at him from the shadows and all of them are still sharp.
A sword does not forget how to find its mark when it is held by a hand that knows how to use it.
Its blade and the sleeves of Dorian’s star-buttoned coat are covered in blood.
There are…things that have followed him since he left the inn and more that have joined them as he walks on.
Things that want his life and his flesh and his dreams.
Things that would crawl under his skin and wear him like a coat.
They have not had a mortal come so close to tempt them in countless years.
They change their shapes around him. They use his own stories against him.
It is not what Dorian had expected, even with the moon’s warnings.
It all feels too real.
One moment he is in a cavern, his gaze trained on a distant light, and the next he is walking on a city street. He can feel the sunlight on his skin and smell the exhaust from the passing cars.
He trusts nothing that he sees.
Dorian continues down a crowded city sidewalk in what would pass for midtown Manhattan if it were not looked at too closely. He dodges pedestrians with practiced skill.
Businessmen and tourists and small children turn and stare as he passes.
Dorian avoids making eye contact with anyone or anything but then he reaches a familiar landmark flanked by two large cats.
He never realized before just how big Patience and Fortitude are. The two larger-than-life-size lions track him with glossy black eyes that do not belong to them.
Dorian pauses in front of the library stairs, tightening his grip on his sword, wondering if stone lions will bleed the way everything else this place puts in his way has bled.
He braces himself, waiting for the lions to pounce, but instead something grabs him from behind, wrapping around his neck and pulling him into the street.
It slams Dorian into the side of a taxi, the screeching of horns throwing off his equilibrium, but he maintains his grip on his sword and when he recovers his balance he swings and the sword meets its target, swift and certain.
The thing that he cuts down looks first like a briefcase-wielding businessman and then like an amorphous, many limbed shadow, and then a small child, screaming, and then nothing.
The street and the taxis and the library and the lions fade along with it, leaving Dorian alone in an expansive cavern.
Above him the starless darkness is so vast that he could almost believe it is sky.
There is a castle in the distance. A light glows in the window of its highest tower. Dorian can see it and the softly glowing shore it rests above. He keeps his sights set on it, as the castle does not shift and change the way the rest of the world down here does and he uses it like a lighthouse to guide his way.
Blood that is not his own pools in his boots, seeping in through each footstep.
Beneath his feet the ground changes, shifting from stone to wood. Then it begins to tilt, swaying over waves that are not really there.
He is on a ship. Sailing over open ocean beneath a bright night sky.
Standing on the deck in front of him there is a figure in a fur coat that appears to be Allegra but he knows it is not Allegra.
They are trying to disarm him.
Dorian tightens his grip on the sword.
excerpt from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins
They’re watching me now. Literally right now as I’m writing this.
I’m at the Noodle Bar and while I was in line to order my ramen this random guy behind me starts chatting me up, like, asked about my “a well-read woman is a dangerous