She can nearly smell the bookstore from here. It’s maybe another fifty steps away. She’s got everything she needs.
The money to buy the book? Check.
The blaringly loud whistle her mother gave her before she left for school this morning, just in case she needed a way to alert others that she was in danger on the walk home? Check.
Her favorite Never After bookmark, just waiting to be placed in the new book she’s about to buy? Check.
A huge grin on her face that she’s trying to stifle but unfortunately cannot, because she’s too excited for words? CHECK.
After the day she’s had, this book is pretty much her prize simply for surviving the last eight hours.
Because her luck is about to change. She is only five steps away from the bookstore—two if she leaps—and her heart starts pounding louder the closer she gets to the door.
She’s almost there. And soon she will be reading the climax, the ending, the finale of the series of books that defined—nay, divined—her childhood.
She can hardly wait to find out what happens next!
CHAPTER TWO
THE BOOK
Alas, what happens next is not what anyone expected. Sad trombone.
Filomena reaches for the door handle like she’s reaching for her dreams and accidentally whips it open a little too excitedly.
She feels a familiar blush warm her cheeks and she shrugs, apologizing as she walks in. “Whoopsie,” she says, and offers a nervous laugh. “Sorry about that. I think the wind took it and—”
“It’s quite all right, dear,” the bookseller at the desk says with an understanding smile that is also full of pity—a reaction Filomena’s not unused to.
Filomena smiles back and fidgets with her hands as her eyes scan the bookstore for what she’s expecting to find: a huge, freshly filled stand full of copies of the new Never After book. A ladder of books. A tower of books. A ziggurat! A pyramid! An explosion! Just like there was for all twelve books before this one.
The Never After series is one of the most popular book series of all time. In the twelve preceding volumes, readers followed the adventures of Jack the Giant Stalker and his lovable, loyal crew of ragtag friends as they met heroes and heroines of popular fairy tales and battled to keep the land of Never After safe from a slew of evil witches, villains, and ogres. In the twelfth volume, Jack and his company were running for their lives, hounded to the edge of a cliff and certain to fall to their deaths. Would he find yet another ingenious way to escape and defeat his enemies once and for all? She certainly hopes so. The book ended on a literal cliffhanger.
Filomena is itching to read the thirteenth book. She has waited so long. A whole year!
But instead of the books, she finds a group of fellow die-hard Never After fans—better known as Nevies—standing around grumbling, seeming as disappointed and let-down as she’s starting to feel. They look like they’re about to take out pitchforks and riot. Then she hears someone say, “Ugh! No way! It can’t be true! No book?!”
Filomena’s heart starts to sink. Another feeling she’s grown used to.
Since she’s there alone and isn’t the most, er, socially outgoing individual, she approaches the familiar and friendly face at the counter instead of the crowd. Mrs. Stewart is not just a bookseller but also a former novelist who opened a bookstore after she’d sold gazillions of copies of her one book and decided she wanted to devote her life to reading instead of writing. Mrs. Stewart is also not just a bookseller but one of Filomena’s few friends.
“Excuse me? Mrs. S?” Filomena asks. “Do you have the new Never After novel in stock? It was supposed to come out today, and I figured—”
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. Stewart says, her sympathetic smile growing more sympathetic. “We figured, too. We were all ready with our fairy-dust cookies and our Stalker hats.” Indeed, many of the Nevies gathered at the store are eating crumbly sugar cookies and wearing the pointy green hats that Jack famously sports in the books.
Filomena’s heart sinks past her stomach to the floor.
“Except apparently it isn’t being published after all. Not this season. Not ever. The author’s long gone, and there’s no book.”
“The author—you mean—Cassiopeia Valle Croix? She’s dead?” gasps Filomena.
“Dead or disappeared—they won’t say.”
Filomena’s mouth drops open. “So … wh-what do you mean? The book won’t be published? But it’s been advertised all year. And the cover’s on the website. How can that be?”
“It just is.” Another sad headshake.
“It won’t be published? At all? Never?”
“Never ever, that’s what they say,” says Mrs. Stewart, frowning. “Apparently, Cassiopeia wrote all twelve books at once, years and years ago, and her estate has been publishing them all this time. But she never wrote the thirteenth one. Her estate thought they would find it in her files, and promised the publisher they would send it when they did. The publisher kept saying it was coming, hoping the estate would find it. But at last they all had to come clean. There is no thirteenth book. Not anywhere. Either it wasn’t written, or it’s lost, but in any case, it’s not being published. I’m sorry, honey.”
Filomena is so devastated she cannot speak. Her mind reels from disappointment. She wants to shake a fist at the sky and scream Noooooo! But instead she just turns pale.
“What can I tell you?” Mrs. Stewart sighs. “Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. This is one of those times. We definitely don’t have the book in the store. But I don’t know, maybe try online?”
(They don’t have it online. They don’t have it anywhere. The book does not exist. This is something Filomena confirms later that evening after much online searching.)
Filomena opens her mouth to protest—to protest what, she isn’t even sure—but stops herself. “Never?” is all she asks.
“Never,” Mrs. Stewart echoes sadly.
Feeling just incredibly, ridiculously, completely bummed and discouraged, Filomena takes one last look at the dejected crowd of Nevies and heads back toward the door. Maybe we should riot, she thinks. Maybe we should throw some books around, kick a few journals. Something. This will just not do!
She leaves the bookstore in a huff. All she has left is a long walk home after a terrible day.
She’s too busy feeling sorry for herself to notice that someone started following her about thirty paces ago.
But when she does finally sense a presence behind her—a very unwanted presence—she feels an uncomfortable paranoia start to wiggle its way into her bones. She tries to shake it off, convincing herself it’s only her parents’ neuroses playing tricks on her.
But when she turns and spots the person behind her, a tall figure draped in black, her eyes widen. She spins back around, pretending she hasn’t noticed him.
Oh no, she thinks. Is he a kidnapper? Just like they always warned?
She reminds herself that her emergency whistle is tucked inside her backpack. She tugs the bag closer to her in preparation, hoping she’ll be fast enough to get away if this person really is a Filomena-snatcher.
Her parents have made her suspicious of everyone. She tries to shake off the fear again, convincing herself she’s just overthinking things.