Excerpt: Azure City

Dangerous Spirits spin-off book!

Serializing over on the Patreon is a book slated for next year, Azure City. As you might guess from the title, it’s in the Dangerous Spirits world, catching up with Athos and Meg a decade or so after the original trilogy ended. An old friend of Athos’s comes to town with a weird book he wants to show them…

Allan took the letter back and held out a small book, three by four inches, bound in what looked like blue leather with silver trim. “The letter was tucked inside the front cover.”

Athos took the book. The leather was worn in many places, smoothed by (he assumed) the touch of many, many fingers. Not a single word adorned the cover, but in the silver filigree, there was a pattern, a collection of circles like bubbles at the top of a drink, and in the center, a tall steeple rose to a point from which twenty or so lines radiated out. Curious, he opened the cover, but the page inside was blank. He turned it, and so was the next one, and the one after that.

“They’re all blank,” Allan said.

“It’s reindeer ink.” Athos looked around, but no reindeer happened to be at the bar.

Meg frowned. “Like invisible ink, where you have to heat it up?”

“It’s not reindeer ink,” Allan said, and then, to Meg, “We had a reindeer in our class. They can see farther into the ultraviolet than we can, and they have this UV ink that only they can read. His mom used to write notes that looked blank to us. But it’s not. I checked with a UV light.”

“If it’s blank, then why didn’t he write that note in the blank book?” Meg wondered.

“I wondered that too. But I think…the book is a puzzle,” Allan said. “Athos and I used to do puzzles in high school, but I don’t know how this Alex person knew that. I can’t remember the ghost thing though.” The hyena leaned over to Athos. “I was hoping you would.”

“Yeah, I…” Athos scratched under his ear. “It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. Something from one of the One Small Candle books, maybe?”

“The what?” Allan tilted his head and then his eyes widened. “Oh, right! The Spirits of Glockenbee, all those books. I found them while packing, hadn’t really looked at them in a while. Creatures of the Night, that was the one you loved, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Athos nodded.

“But you’re not wearing your vampire cape anymore.”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s been years and years. You know, I just…”

“Grew out of it?” The hyena grinned and tapped the book. “I hope not.”

“Why, are there vampires in the book?” Meg asked.

“No, it’s just a spooky mystery. Like vampires, but real.”

Athos didn’t feel like re-litigating the ‘vampires are real’ argument, especially in front of Meg, who, despite having met a spirit that could see through time, did not think that meant there was any more chance that vampires were real. He returned to the letter. “So what does this all mean?”

Allan followed him willingly, clearly having already thought about it. “The numbers might be wavelengths of visible light, you know? That goes from like 380 to 700 nanometers. But I haven’t been able to get a light source at just that exact frequency.”

“I guess it’s been hectic lately,” Meg said.

“Oh, I got this six months ago.” Allan took the book back. “I haven’t told you the strangest part about it.”

Athos glanced at Meg, his fur prickling, and saw that she’d assumed the very neutral expression she got when she was worried about something. “Stranger than a blank book from someone who knows you but you don’t remember at all?”

“I threw it out. I tried the light thing and then I figured it was just a practical joke. It didn’t quite track as a scam, but it has almost that shape, right? Someone scraped some info about me off the Internet and then found a blank journal in a craft shop and decided to play a joke. Or there’s secret writing that gives me a phone number to call, or they just wanted to make me feel creepy. There’d just been a profile of me in TechTalk and I’d gotten a couple weird emails already. So anyway, I messed around with light, tried to write in it, and then threw it away.”

“What happens when you try to write in it?” Athos asked.

“Don’t,” Meg said.

Allan gave Meg a curious look but held the book out. “Go ahead. Nothing happens. Pen or pencil or marker, nothing takes.”

“I’m serious,” Meg said as Athos lifted his paw. “Don’t write in it.”

Allan’s ears twitched as he looked from Meg to Athos. He set the book back on the table. “What’s going on here?”

Athos waited, and when Meg didn’t say anything, said, “I think we should tell him.”

“You know about the book?” Allan leaned forward toward Meg. “You’ve seen it before?”

“No,” Meg said. “But…without going into too much detail, a thing happened to me like ten years ago, and it’s the kind of thing that most people don’t believe, but this book feels like a thing like that, if that makes sense.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t know that, but…” Meg chewed her lip, a thing Athos rarely saw her do. “What I know is that if you do shit like write in a weird book, you’re putting something of yourself into it, even if you just write a nonsense rhyme or ‘George the Fox had a marvelous Box,’ any shit like that even, you’re giving it some part of you and then you’re committed to it whether you like it or not. So you really got to know what you’re doing.”

Allan listened to this but didn’t seem to take it in. “What happened to you?”

“That’s a long story,” Meg said with practiced ease, “and no offense but I don’t know you well enough to tell it yet.”