Page 3

About twenty feet away, half-hidden behind a cluster of cypress knees, Chewy, Arthur, Otis, and Mona were sitting in a neat little semicircle around a very familiar paper bag, and Barney — Barney, who not thirty seconds ago had been lecturing me about the gravity of our situation — was frozen mid-reach with a taco wrapper in one hand and the journal in the other.

"Barney."

"What?" He answered me entirely too quickly. With entirely too much guilt.

"Are those tacos?"

"No."

Chewy, mouth already stuffed full, did not even have the decency to swallow before he answered. "Yes."

"TRAITOR." I pointed one accusing, mud-streaked finger at all four of them at once. "I told you to stop feeding them tacos, Barney!"

"They were hungry."

"They eat better than I do! Do you have any idea how much special, super-dee-dooper, fresh-made dog food costs these days?”

I didn’t wait for an answer. "Too damn much! Especially when you’re always feeding them tacos.” Taking a step forward, I added between gritted teeth, “Again, I say, Those. Dogs. Eat. Better. Than. I. Do.”

"That's because we don't complain," Chewy said, with the serene, infuriating confidence of a dog who has never once faced consequences for anything in his entire life.

"You farted so much last night that Kai shifted in his sleep because the Fairy King with whom he shares his soul, Roy, thought we were under attack," I informed him, in case he'd forgotten, which he had absolutely not, because his tail was already wagging like this was a compliment.

"Yeah, Roy still maintains it was a reasonable response," Kai said from beside me, his tone entirely earnest, like that wasn't the most ridiculous sentence a grown man had ever said out loud.

“It was extremely reasonable,” Roy added, sounding deeply wounded on principle as I heard him through our well-established Mating Bond. “A responsible Fairy King does not ignore a chemical attack.”

“It was a taco fart, Roy,” I grumbled in return.

“Precisely my point,” the ancient Fairy King sniffed.

I would've kept arguing — genuinely, I had a whole speech loaded up about cheese quantities and canine digestive responsibility — except I noticed, somewhere in the middle of it, that Barney had gone quiet.

Not sulking-quiet. Not caught-red-handed quiet.

Quiet-quiet.

Kai noticed half a second after I did. "Barney?"

Nothing.

Barney was staring down at the journal, and even from where I stood I could see it — a page that had been blank every single day for four solid months was no longer blank.

Words. Actual, honest-to-Great-Goddess words, crawling across the paper like they were being written by a hand nobody could see.

Which would've been bad enough on its own, except Zelda's whole entire concealment Spell was supposed to be the reason nothing could reach us inside Dragoon Bootay and the surrounding area. Nothing could find me. Nothing could write in a book she'd wrapped in three separate layers of Magic so thick I sometimes felt it pressing against my skin like humidity.

So if the journal was suddenly writing itself...

I crossed the distance in three muddy strides and stood behind Barney.

"Well," I said, reading over his shoulder, "that's cryptic as shit."

THE SPELL NO LONGER HIDES THE QUEEN.

Barney's face went the color of old dishwater. "We need Zelda."

Before any of us could so much as reach for a phone, another line crawled across the page, slower this time, like whoever was writing it wanted to make sure we read every letter.