King of Lost Dreams

Book : King of Dead Things Duology

by Nevin Holness

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

Eli and his found family must go back to the time when magic first arrived in London to uncover his lost past in this scintillating sequel to King of Dead Things, a young adult urban fantasy steeped in Afro-Caribbean folklore—perfect for fans of Legendborn and Leigh Bardugo.

Gods and secrets don’t stay buried forever.

The magical underbelly of London is no longer under threat from the malevolent daughter of Death after she was vanquished during an epic nine-night. But in her wake, certain truths have been unearthed that have left Malcolm, Eli, Sunny, and their friends fractured and desperate to lay the past to rest.

For Malcolm—a boy grappling with his inherited death magic—confronting his past means facing heartbreak, realities he isn’t yet ready to acknowledge, and perhaps even first love. On the other hand, Eli, a silver-tongued thief with no memories of his past, is more determined than ever to uncover his lost identity and find out once and for all where he came from, unless his past catches up with him first…

Something is lurking in Eli’s dreams, giving teeth to his nightmares. And when Malcolm finds a mysterious letter in the ruins of a former magical sanctuary full of its own secret histories, he and their friends set out to find a hidden key that may just be the answer to all their problems. If they want a chance against the shadow that’s been hunting Eli, they’ll need to learn the magic of their ancestors and go back to the very beginning: when magic first arrived in London.

Release date: July 7, 2026

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter One: Eli CHAPTER ONE ELI
Eli pulled a clump of bloody flowers from behind his molar with a wince.

The petals might have been white once, but now they were stained wine red. As soon as Eli opened his palm, the buds curled up and shriveled. Eli had always had an affinity for the earth. Usually he could touch a wilted plant and turn it from limp and brown to lush green; he could stick his finger in the earth, and roots would unravel from the ground. But lately he seemed unable to control the magic. It didn’t help that these outbursts of wild magic always seemed to occur at the most inopportune moments; last week he’d fumbled a job when he’d stopped to unpick jagged wooden thorns from his palms and lost his mark’s trail. The week prior, he’d gotten caught mid-getaway when a tangle of roots had inexplicably entwined his calf and sent him sprawling to the ground. Then there was the flood. Eli had let his mind wander for all of five minutes, and the next thing he knew, he’d accidentally caused enough muddy torrents of water to swamp their whole flat.

Really, today’s job should have been simple. Eli, Max, and Malcolm were often tasked with retrieving all kinds of peculiarities: ancient knives, cursed artifacts, haunted bones. A book, in the grand scheme of things, was not a difficult ask. Technically, they wouldn’t even be stealing; they’d noticed the book was missing from their archive list, and they were simply returning it to where it should be. Finding the library had barely taken any time, and sneaking inside after hours, even less so. They should have been in and out with no problem, and they would have—if it weren’t for Eli’s magic.

The issue was that Eli’s mind was not on the job. It turned out that college, which had been an intimidating enough venture anyway, was proving even more difficult alongside balancing multiple jobs, piecing together a forgotten identity, and grieving the absence of a sister that he hadn’t even known he had until recently. His thoughts kept drifting back home to the mountainous stack of academic reading that he was already behind on, and every time his mind drifted away, his magic went with it. Each time it happened, he’d end up much as he was now, in a darkened aisle of a library, bent over at the waist, coughing up a piece of earth, and feeling like something was trying to climb out of him from the inside.

He was so distracted that he barely registered movement behind him. Luckily, the only thing that stepped out of the darkness was Max. She was wearing bright pink dungarees and had a pencil haphazardly sticking out of her curls. Soft, blue magic glowed from under the beds of her fingernails, lighting her way, and she had a few books that she hadn’t arrived with under one arm.

Eli quickly pulled himself upright and wiped his mouth. He shoved the fistful of petals he’d just coughed up behind his back and tried to seem nonchalant.

“What?” Max said, clutching the books a little tighter. She must have misread the guardedness in Eli’s expression because she immediately looked sheepish. “It’s not stealing if I intend to bring them back.”

This, at least, was familiar. He’d never seen Max enter a room with books in it and leave empty-handed. Not for the first time, he wished Sunny were there because he knew she would have been as amused by Max’s expression as Eli was. Of course, none of them had seen Sunny for months, not since that last day at the canal when Eli had asked for answers about his past that Sunny had refused to give. He was beginning to wonder if he was ever going to see her again.

“Find anything?” Eli asked.

Max took one of the books out from under her arm and held it up, and it seemed to be at least two inches thick.

“I picked up this really cool biography about the first woman in space and this poetry collection, which is translated from French, about this king—”

Eli smothered a smile. “I meant about the book we’re looking for.”

“Oh. Well, no. Not yet.” She moved her light closer and squinted at Eli. “Are you bleeding?”

Eli wiped at his mouth. His lips tasted coppery, and he realized with a jolt that he’d smeared some blood on his chin. “No.” It technically wasn’t a lie; he wasn’t bleeding anymore. “It’s, uh. Dye. From the books.” Max’s eyes narrowed like she could see straight through him, so Eli swiftly changed the subject. “Where’s Malcolm?”

“Over here,” a voice called from a few aisles over. Eli and Max followed the sound to where Malcolm was crouched by the bottom row of the history section. Eli had already checked this area, but he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Of course, most of his attention had been on not splitting apart at the seams, so it was highly possible he’d missed something.

Malcolm stared at the row of seemingly innocuous books like they held the secret to the universe. His hood was up, concealing his expression, and hunched in the corner as he was, it was easy to forget that, standing, he towered over six feet.

“Something’s here that shouldn’t be,” Malcolm said. Eli and Max glanced at each other, and Malcolm cleared his throat awkwardly. “I mean, I um… think.”

Since joining Pam’s, Malcolm was full of these vaguely ominous non sequiturs. Ever since the day Malcolm had taken Osebo’s fang and killed the daughter of Death, one of the last surviving gods to have made it to their gray and dreary island, something had changed in him. More than once Eli had wandered outside to find Malcolm standing in a downpour of rain or lying on his back in the pitch blackness before making some bizarrely astute observation like We should check on Mr. Palmer from down the road; his heart’s been troubling him, or Let’s stock up on batteries. I think we’re going to have a power cut soon. If Eli’s magic was a burst artery, Malcolm’s was a slow, leaking puncture.

He always seemed to be right, too.

Eli took a deep breath and made himself be still. He couldn’t sense the book, but he did feel an unsettling twitch at the back of his neck like he was being watched. Eli turned to squint into the darkness. There was nothing there but shadows.

“Oh,” Max said. She seemed just as intrigued by the bookshelf as Malcolm was. “I feel that. It’s hidden. Like a puzzle. I love this kind of magic.”

She leant between the two of them to squint at the row of books, her eyes wide behind her glasses, then began pulling out and pushing in books in some kind of synchronized pattern. The sequence made zero sense to Eli but must have been accurate, because a few minutes later there was a clicking sound like clockwork, and a long, thin, hardback picture book slid out from one of the shelves.

Eli reached forward and ran his fingers over the cool, hard edges of the cover. The title read The Fable of Fifi the Fool, and the cover depicted an elderly, solemn-looking man staring up at the stars. What Eli gathered from flicking through the pages was that it told the story of a village idiot who had angered the wrong god and had his magic stripped from him. It didn’t seem like a particularly morally complex story. Eli didn’t understand why it was important, but then again, he never understood half the jobs they took. He was just there to retrieve it because Max had said they should.

“Okay,” Eli said, snapping the pages shut. “Let’s get out of here.”

The others went ahead, but Eli took two steps and stopped. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.

“Eli,” Malcolm said. “You coming?”

“Yeah.” Eli passed him the book and put on what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I just… forgot something. I’ll catch up.”

“You sure?” There was concern on Max’s face again. He knew he only had so long before he cracked and confessed.

“I’m fine, promise. I’ll be right out.”

Eli followed the itch at the back of his neck. He could have sworn there had been something there just on the edge of his periphery, but the library was silent and unmoving. He snapped his fingers to make a small green flame appear at their tips, the same way their mentor, Pam, would when lighting a stove, but there was nothing there apart from his own shadow, which jittered and danced under the moving light. He was about to admit defeat and call it a night when he turned around.

Inches away from him stood a fox.

Well, not a fox exactly. It was a man wearing a mask carved into the shape of one. The mask was wooden and was hand-painted in smears of orange, with a short, pointed snout. Eli was just near enough to see the individual brushstrokes against the wood. In fact, this close he could see that they weren’t painted in a solid color but rather dozens of intricate, intersecting lines so that whenever the mask moved, it looked like it was dancing. Something about the mask was familiar, but Eli couldn’t place what. The fox’s head was angled to one side like it was assessing him. Even though Eli couldn’t see his face, he got the distinct feeling he was being hunted.

“It’s you,” the fox said. The voice beneath the mask wasn’t familiar. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Who are you?” Eli asked.

The fox cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”

Eli stared at the masked figure. His heart raced as it always did when he felt like he was getting close to answers about his past. Before he could interrogate any further, a few things happened in rapid succession. First, Eli went to take a step forward, but the fox was quicker; he reached into a pocket and pulled out a handful of golden dust. Eli almost mistook the powder for sand, but then the fox’s hand caught the light. The dust had a slight metallic shimmer to it, like he was holding hundreds of thousands of faraway stars. Eli caught on to what was happening a beat too late. He opened his mouth to protest, or maybe to alert the others, but this was a miscalculation. The fox lifted the bottom of his mask just enough to reveal his mouth, raised his open palm, and blew. The dust from his hand swirled and puffed into a cloud of dancing smoke.

Eli knew the second the smoke hit the back of his throat because it felt like he’d inhaled thousands of needles. If he’d been able to talk, he might have screamed, but all he could do was choke and claw at his throat while his eyes and nose burned. His vision blurred, and when he looked back at the fox, it was like gazing through a kaleidoscope; he saw two, three, four hazy versions of the mask peering down at him. Everything felt heavy and distant. Clumsy and uncoordinated, Eli stretched out a hand as the fox moved deftly to one side. And then he was turning away; all three, four blurry versions of him stepped back into the shadows and disappeared like he’d never been there.

“Eli?” Max’s voice called out. Eli wasn’t sure why she sounded so frightened until he registered his surroundings. Books were scattered across the floor, and somehow Eli had ended up curled up on the carpet. He couldn’t remember why. How had he gotten there? Why was he on the floor?

“What happened?” said Max as she rounded the corner. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I was just…” What had Eli been doing? The memory slipped from his mind like something cold and wet. He’d been… looking for something? No, that wasn’t right. Something had been looking for him, maybe, but that didn’t feel right either. “I don’t… remember.”

“It’s okay.” Max put a hand on his arm to steady him. “Are you hurt?”

Eli looked down at himself. He didn’t seem to have any injuries, though he never had those for long. His magic tended to wash away cuts and bruises like a tide to sand. He felt a little dizzy, and his throat hurt. Maybe he was just coming down with something. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Okay. Well, maybe you just need to sleep it off.”

“Right, yeah,” Eli said, rubbing at his head. There wasn’t much that good sleep couldn’t solve. “Let’s go home.”

Home, of course, was Pam’s West Indian Takeaway, the sticky-floored restaurant that Eli worked in and lived above. By the time they got back, it was late enough that the shutters had been pulled over the front windows. The lights were still on, and the TV in the corner was set to a spaghetti Western while a somber Michael Bolton ballad blared from the radio. Eli paused in the doorway and braced himself. All of this meant only one thing: Pam was home.

Right on cue, a small, hunched, and scowling white-haired woman hobbled out from the back, muttering and cussing under her breath. This was enough to stop Eli in his tracks—not the cussing or the hobbling, which was customary—but her presence alone. Pam was often gone for days at a time with no explanation of where she’d been, but in the past month or so he’d barely even caught a glimpse of her. She was either out of the country, off on a job, or she’d be heading out just as he arrived home or vice versa. If Eli didn’t know any better, he might have thought she was avoiding him.

Pam’s eye skirted over them as they returned, and Eli knew she was doing the thing she always did: scanning them over for any anomalies or injuries, trying to infer their day through their posture and expressions before she read them the riot act.

“You dead anyone?” she asked, which was the closest she ever got to asking if they were okay.

“No bodies today,” Max replied without missing a beat.

“Night’s still young, though,” Eli added, just to make Pam kiss her teeth, which she did, loudly and wholeheartedly. Eli moved to where Ox, in the form of a cat, was curled by the window and offered a hand for a chin scratch. The fact that Ox had not yet been chased outside by Pam with a broom was an indication of their begrudging friendship, which had been growing ever since Eli and his friends had first met the shape-shifting lagahoo last summer. Pam still referred to Ox solely as the vermin, but she also left out an extra bowl of chicken on the days Ox was around. Everyone had been surprised by this, but not Eli. Pam had always had a thing for strays.

“You find what you was after?” Pam asked.

“Here,” Eli replied. He pulled out the book they’d taken and flipped through the pages once again. He kept waiting for the illustrations to reveal some uncanniness, but it just looked like a normal children’s picture book. “Gonna return it to the House of Spiders tomorrow.”

At the mention of the House of Spiders, Pam’s spine stiffened. She’d never been quiet about her distrust of the abandoned magical sanctuary they’d discovered earlier that year. Death trap were the actual words she used to describe it. Mad house. A blight on their community’s history. Since she also had similar sentiments toward their local post office, Eli opted to take her criticisms with a grain of salt. “You spend too much time at that place,” Pam said. “You should be careful, or it will get its rot in you. Like a cavity.”

“It’s just an old house,” Eli said.

“If that is what you think, then you’re more of a fool than I suspected.”

The others slipped off to their various corners, but Pam snagged Eli by the sleeve before he could escape. “Something hurt you,” she said, not quite a question.

Eli looked down at himself. Nothing was amiss. He had a headache, and there was a weird, crackling, jittery feeling under his skin that reminded him of Pop Rocks, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad feeling. He didn’t mention what had happened at the library, or how erratically his magic had been behaving recently. He knew Pam would just make a big deal out of it. “I’m all good,” he said, and this time it didn’t even feel like a lie.

Pam’s eye narrowed. She only had one working eye, the other marred with a deep scar, though that didn’t lessen the weight of her gaze. “What did I teach you?”

Eli sighed. By his feet, Ox meowed—kind of judgmentally—and Eli wondered when they’d mastered this Abbott and Costello act.

“Say it,” Pam said. “Open wounds…”

“Only fester. I know. I’m not hurt, I promise.”

“So everything went as expected.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Pam’s gaze was heavy on him. “I meant what I said about the House of Spiders. You should be careful with that place,” she warned. “With anything that comes from it. There is a lot of history in those walls, and there is nothing more dangerous than history.”

Eli wasn’t concerned. It’s not like the past had ever hurt him.

Precisely two nights later, Eli went to bed and opened his eyes to find that he wasn’t sure whether or not he was awake. The first sign that things were not as they should be was that he could see. Usually, without his glasses, the world was a disorienting blur. Now his glasses were on his bedside table, where he had left them, but he could see his room with perfect clarity. He was still under his sheets, the same worn blanket spread over him, the same precariously balanced plant pots lining every shelf of his bedroom, but something had shifted. There was a chill in the air that hadn’t been there before. He felt motion sick, like the ground beneath him was moving; only, everything around him was eerily still. All the familiar sounds of home had vanished. He couldn’t hear the ancient boiler that usually hummed through the walls all night. There was no rush of passing cars outside. None of Malcolm’s snoring from down the hall. All he heard was a muffled thud, thud, thud, so low and steady that at first he mistook it for a pulsing heartbeat.

Drums. He could hear drums.

The shadows shifted, and Eli became aware that he wasn’t alone. Whatever was in the room with him wasn’t human. It had long crooked horns, blazing eyes, and hooves that sparked embers with every step. Even from across the room, Eli could hear its heavy breaths. Some deep, visceral instinct told him not to look directly at the creature. If he did, he wasn’t sure he would ever look away.

Eli scrambled backward, his heart pounding, but his body felt sluggish and uncoordinated. He couldn’t catch his thoughts quickly enough to form a reasonable plan. He reached for his magic, but it was like calling it from the next room. Everything felt hazy and too far away. The creature edged closer, so slowly that at first Eli wasn’t sure if it was moving at all. It seemed to move imperceptibly, within the space of his blinks, until the jagged tips of its horns were close enough to touch. Eli could feel the heavy heat of its breath on his face. The beast growled a deep, guttural noise that caused embers to sputter from its mouth. Hot, molten flecks landed on Eli’s skin, but he couldn’t move. It was like there was an invisible hand grasping his throat, keeping him still.

Eli! he heard, muffled and distant, like he was underwater. It was a familiar voice but one he couldn’t quite place. Lij! Wake up!

Wake up? Eli thought. But this wasn’t a dream, was it?

Except—yes. His eyes were closed, and when he finally opened them, he found himself squinting in the early-morning sunlight. Eli jumped out of bed and bent over to catch his breath. He scrambled to put on his glasses, relieved that he needed them again. His heart thundered in his chest. He had a distinct feeling that something had been here in the room with him, but when he tried to summon the memory of what, it felt blurred and just out of reach.

A dream, that was all it was. He was fine. Dreams couldn’t hurt him.

But once he was on his feet, he looked down and saw that the dream had left a mark on him. Red, swollen burns littered his arms. Eli tried not to dwell on it. It was nearly impossible not to be on the receiving end of an odd scrape in their line of work. Besides, magic caused inexplicable things to happen all the time; that was what made it magic.

He went about his day and resolutely didn’t think about it. He had enough to worry about with studying and work; he didn’t have time to fret about what happened while he slept.

Except the next morning, he woke to find scratches up and down his legs. The day after that, it was bruising around the bones of his wrists. The final straw was the morning Eli found gouges curved like bite marks, deep enough across the length of his forearms that his bedsheets were crisp with blood.

Dreams weren’t supposed to have teeth.

“Do you think they’re memories?” Eli asked Max after that particular incident. They were in the back room of the diner while Max doused his skin with saline water. The sun had barely risen, and Eli was once again bleeding.

Over the top of her glasses, Max gave him a curious look, which from anyone else might have been dubious, but that wasn’t Max’s way. She’d only ever been intrigued by the unknown. “Memories don’t have claws,” she said, which Eli supposed was fair. Dreams didn’t have teeth, and memories didn’t have claws. But something had torn into him, and whatever it was, it was hungry.

“And yet,” Eli said, “you’re covered in my blood.”

“Yeah,” Max agreed. “You notice that’s been happening a lot recently?”

It was something of an understatement. He’d never needed to be careful with his own safety before, a consequence of being able to touch a wound and heal it into a scar within moments. But the wounds that came from his dreams were different. He couldn’t use his magic on them. Whenever he’d try, the bones in his hands would lock up and harden, and the magic in his blood sharpened until it felt like dozens of little pinpricks under his skin. It was like the magic was fighting him somehow. Eli couldn’t tell if it was just him being unable to control his magic due to his own lack of discipline, or if the dreams themselves were blocking the healing. He wasn’t sure which answer would have scared him more.

“Talk me through it,” Max said, as pragmatic as always, but this was the part that bothered him most of all. After he woke, the face of whatever was hunting him in his dreams would be blurred and distorted in his memory, like someone had taken a finger and smeared the picture in his mind. Sometimes it felt like a creature; other times he got the vague feeling, a deep, sickly fear in his chest, that it was something more.

There was one thing that stuck with him—one thing he seemed incapable of forgetting.

Drums. No matter the dream, no matter what was after him, there was always the sound of drums.

“Huh,” Max said when Eli was done explaining. Her nose crinkled the way it always did when she was thinking. Eli was the only one of them who could mend a wound magically, but he’d always thought of Max as the real healer of their group. She couldn’t help but fix things. “That’s creepy.”

Eli forced himself to breathe as Max, careful and methodical, wrapped his arms in bandages. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. Not every dream is like that.” Sometimes he dreamt of snow and would wake to find frost on his eyelashes. Another time he’d dreamt of the sea and later coughed up salt water. “Anyway, it’s not so scary once Sunny gets there.”

He hadn’t been sure it was her at first. Her voice had sounded familiar but so muffled and distant that he could barely discern who was speaking. It was only after the second or third time, when the voice became impatient and notably unempathetic despite the horrifying circumstances, that Eli concluded there was only one person it could be.

Max, to her credit, hadn’t hesitated to come over when Eli had called her in the middle of the night to explain that his arms were dripping red. She’d barely blinked as he relayed the insanity that was his dreams becoming reality. Only now, at the mention of his missing sister, did Eli clock concern on her face before she was able to mask it.

“Sunny?” Max repeated.

“Yeah,” Eli said, and he flexed his fingers under the weight of the new dressings. “I’m pretty sure she’s been saving me. In my dreams.”

They didn’t talk about Sunny much. If Eli was being honest, that was largely his doing. It had been months since Sunny had left their group, and Eli had yet to learn how to broach the subject of her absence without fracturing the careful facade of calm they’d somehow managed to cultivate. He was fine, he’d tell anyone who asked. Sure, the last time he’d seen his sister had been after they’d both narrowly avoided demise at the hands of the daughter of Death. Yes, he hadn’t known that Sunny was his sister at the time, though she had apparently known the truth despite watching him agonize over not knowing his identity for years. No, Sunny had made clear, she did not have any intention of giving him the answers he was desperately searching for. (And these were perfectly valid answers to want, like for instance: who he was, where he came from, why he didn’t remember anything prior to his first arrival at Pam’s, or most importantly, why she had been lying to his face about who she was since the day they had supposedly first met.)

Eli hadn’t seen Sunny since that last day at Camden Lock, where they’d gone their separate ways, yet her presence was now often in his dreams.

“You mean nightmares,” Max said, which brought Eli up short.

“What?” he asked.

“They’re not dreams. They’re nightmares. Dreams don’t leave you with these kinds of scars.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t thought of them that way. Did it count as a nightmare, Eli wondered, if it haunted you during the day, too? “I guess.”

“But you’re sure it’s her?” Max asked.

“It’s her.”

“And you’re sure…” Max seemed uncertain how to word this part. “You’re sure it’s real?”

It was the same thing he’d been asking himself over and over.

After the nine night when they’d killed the daughter of Death, Eli’s body no longer felt like his own. There had been days on end when he’d felt shaky and nauseous. He desperately craved the feeling of a magic that wasn’t his. Even after, once the sickness subsided and he was finally able to use his own magic again, it hadn’t been the same. It was like his magic was using him instead of the other way around.

“Do you think, maybe…” He felt stupid saying the words out loud, but the sunrise had cast the room in a soft, orangey light. Here with his friend in the safety of his home, the nightmares felt light-years away. “Do you think it means Sunny’s coming back?”

Max looked pained. “I would like that,” Max said. “I really would. I miss her just as much as you do. But… I just don’t know.”

“It has to mean something, right?” Even to his own ears, he sounded desperate. “She has to know what’s happening to me. It has to be—I don’t know—connected to my past somehow. This can’t just be… my mind.”

“Eli.” Max’s voice was gentle. She seemed to be choosing her words very carefully. “Malcolm told me about the nine night. He said there was a moment when you—you lost control. It’s understandable considering what went down. Plus, things are different for you now. You’ve just started college, so you’re probably overwhelmed, but if you need some help—”

“Stop patronizing me.” The words slammed out of Eli before he could stop them. He caught himself with a wince. Immediately, he wanted to tak