The Book of Living Secrets

by Madeleine Roux

Genres: YA Paranormal; YA Romance; Horror

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of The Hazel Wood, this genre-bending page-turner from New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Roux follows two girls who transport themselves into the world of their favorite book only to encounter the sinister alternate reality that awaits them. 

No matter how different best friends Adelle and Connie are, one thing they’ve always had in common is their love of a little-known gothic romance novel called Moira. So when the girls are tempted by a mysterious man to enter the world of the book, they hardly suspect it will work. But suddenly they are in the world of Moira, living among characters they’ve obsessed about for years. 

Except…all is not how they remembered it. The world has been turned upside down: The lavish balls and star-crossed love affairs are now interlaced with unspeakable horrors. The girls realize that something dark is lurking behind their foray into fiction—and they will have to rewrite their own arcs if they hope to escape this nightmare with their lives.

Release date: March 8, 2022

Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

 

1

Moira Byrne did not believe in destiny, yet destiny found her in the public gardens, standing under a leafless tree, regarding an easel and a blank canvas. He was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen: trim and tall, with a wild mop of ebony hair and painterly fingers.

Destiny had brought them together.

How romantic, she thought. And how tragic. How could such a beautiful thing be all alone?

“Who is that boy?” she asked nobody. The others in her party at the picnic did not hear, but Moira asked the question again and again in her heart. Who was he? She had to have him.

Beside her on the picnic blanket, her fiancé, Kincaid Vaughn, remained buried in a book. He always had time for his books and science and experiments but never time for her. Moira stared at the boy painting, wondering what it would be like to hold his hand and kiss him. She held these two truths in her heart: that she could never marry her betrothed, and that she would do absolutely anything to have the handsome painter in the park.

Moira dispatched her maid, Greta, to approach him discreetly later, and Greta returned with a name and a token, for the boy had seen Moira, too. He had offered Greta a handkerchief to take back to the beautiful girl with the flaming red hair and green eyes: a square of cotton smudged with black paint.

“He’s French,” Greta had also said. “He has a funny accent.”

Severin Sylvain, Moira said silently, in her heart, repeating the name she had learned. I will have him one day. I would give up anything to be his—my fortune, my family, my breath.

Moira Byrne did not believe in destiny, but she believed in true love, in a bond of souls. Souls not just married together but irrevocably intertwined, sewn together with the thread of Fate. Tear them apart and they would bleed. For love was pain, that could not be denied—her heart ached for the thing she wanted, the thing she would stop at nothing to have.

—Moira, chapter 2

Connie stood outside her date’s house, swathed in orange tulle. Beside her, her best friend, Adelle, squeaked out a low “Eeeeee!” of anticipation. In all that puffy neon fabric, she felt like a sunset on an alien planet. She felt alien, too. Connie took a deep breath and raised her hand to knock on Julio’s door.

Sadie Hawkins. She had asked him.

“I can’t do this, Delly,” she wheezed. It came out like a deflating balloon.

Adelle gasped and took a step toward her, practically glowing in the light of the glass sconces hanging outside Julio’s front door. She had rented a Victorian-era ball gown from a theatrical supply store in Brookline. Sumptuous green velvet with black lace and a real bustle, chosen to match her favorite literary heroine’s style.

Don’t I look just like her? Just like Moira?

Adelle, blond and heavily freckled, didn’t much resemble the scarlet-haired, porcelain-doll perfection of Moira, but she had looked so happy in the costume-supply dressing room, beaming with excitement, that Connie had told her yes, she looked just like Moira. It had made Adelle’s day, and so it had made Connie’s, too. Until Adelle reminded her that they needed dates, and didn’t Julio always stare at Connie in class? And even Connie’s strict Catholic parents liked Julio, which really was something.

“What’s wrong?” Adelle asked, taking Connie by the wrist and dragging her away from Julio’s front door. “It’s okay to be nervous. Boys are terrifying.”

“It’s not that,” Connie mumbled.

It was and it wasn’t. She didn’t feel afraid of Julio; she just didn’t want to go with him to the dance. Take him on, 1v1 on the soccer pitch? Sure. Slow dance with him in a gymnasium under the flash of strobes and cheap purple gobos? No thanks. At night in bed, she lay beneath a ceiling plastered with posters of Megan Rapinoe, Layshia Clarendon, Serena, and Abby Wambach, and wondered if she could get up the courage to ask Gigi from the comic-book store on Commonwealth to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Gigi was a year older and went to private school, but she might say yes.

She might have, if only Connie had asked her.

“Can we go somewhere else?” Connie asked, putting her back to Julio’s door. Adelle’s stepdad, Greg, had dropped them off there, with the understanding that Julio’s parents would drive them all to the school for the dance. Both girls had turned sixteen in September, but neither had made much progress toward a license, preferring their bikes and the T over summer driver’s ed classes. “Typical Virgos,” Adelle liked to say.

“Like where?” Adelle asked. Her lower lip wobbled, and Connie winced.

“Like anywhere else. Burger Buddies for a Pigmalion, or even the Emporium. I just . . . I don’t think I can do this.”

To her credit, Adelle did not cry. That didn’t make the lance through Connie’s heart land any softer. The disappointment was written all over her face—Adelle had been talking up the dance for weeks, obsessed with her dress, the way she would curl her hair, and the secret date she would only reveal the night of.

“S-sure,” Adelle said. Her long green train dragged down the sidewalk, collecting leaves. “I knew this would happen. I pulled a tarot spread before getting dressed tonight, and right away the Five of Cups came up. Figures.”

Connie nodded as if she knew what the Five of Cups signified. She didn’t. Lately, Adelle had been submerged up to her eyeballs in the esoteric and the occult. She couldn’t make a single decision without consulting a star chart or whipping out one of her growing collection of tarot decks.

“Delly? I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. If you don’t want to do it . . .”

Connie adjusted the backpack on her shoulder. Her normal, comfortable clothes were inside. She realized now that they had told on her the whole time—she’d had no intention of going through with Julio, with the dance, with Adelle’s romantic notion of the perfect fairy-tale evening. The perfect ball. Connie knew that that was what Adelle wanted: to re-create the big dance from their favorite book, Moira. Everything was about Moira, if it wasn’t about astrology, tarot, wizards, vampires, werewolves, or aliens. Adelle’s imagination was as big as her heart, a heart that Connie could now see was clearly breaking.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. At the end of the drive, she turned toward Adelle’s house. It wasn’t a far walk, but Greg had insisted on driving them, insisted on the formality. That was a point in his favor, at least in Connie’s eyes: he knew how important the night was for Adelle. But Greg never really won points with Adelle no matter what he did; they were oil and water. Connie could already see rips forming in the tulle at the hem of her dress.

“I mean, I pulled the Three of Swords, too, so I should’ve known, but I’m curious . . . what made you change your mind?” Adelle asked, as they walked side by side under the occasional flash of streetlamps. Orange and yellow trees drooped over the lane; tumbleweeds of crunchy leaves were blown by a wind that they walked directly against.

I like girls, Connie didn’t say. “Julio just gives me bad vibes.”

They were quiet for a while. Connie took out her phone from her backpack and texted Julio an excuse and an apology. Then she sighed. It would be all over school on Monday; he would tell his friends and they would tell everyone on the baseball team and then the baseball-team girlfriends would whisper about her. That wasn’t really anything new; even Connie’s own teammates had cornered her before, Caroline and Tonya in particular. Both girls were proudly out, and they were convinced Connie was gay too. “Look at you,” Caroline had said once in the locker room, rolling her eyes and tossing her jersey away. “You’re sure you’re not gay?”

Shrugging them off just made it worse. But Connie wanted to come to that conclusion on her own, in her heart—she didn’t want to come out just because she looked a certain way or dressed a certain way. Nobody, she had thought then, as she did now, can make me something without my consent. She knew the truth in her heart, she just didn’t know if she was ready to say it aloud. It didn’t help that she and Adelle were, well, weird, more interested in tracking down after-school D&D games and going to midnight book releases than finding a good house party for a clandestine make-out sesh.

Caroline and Tonya would have a field day with this.

“Hey!” Adelle nudged her, and when Connie glanced over at her friend, she was surprised to find her smiling. “I know what we can do.”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s grab our bikes and head to the Emporium. Look at this!” Adelle pulled her own slender smartphone out of the tasseled bag dangling from her left wrist. After navigating to her email, she showed Connie a newsletter from their favorite oddities shop, the Witch’s Eye Emporium. A little creepy, she thought, that the email was personally addressed to Adelle, and sent only to her email.

“You gave Straven your email?” Connie asked.

“Sure, we both signed up for the newsletter.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t get this one,” Connie pointed out. Her skin prickled and she shivered. Whenever that happened, her mother always said it was someone walking over her grave.

“Probably just a server hiccup or something,” replied Adelle, who seemed completely unperturbed to be the sole recipient.

But Connie frowned. “Have you been hanging out there alone?”

“You mean more than usual?”

“Uh-huh.”

Adelle was suddenly uninterested in eye contact. “Sure. When I have a free minute. He’s teaching me advanced tarot techniques, and he gave me this book, What the F*ck Is Tarot?Oh man, Greg fliiiiipped out. He honest to God thinks I should be doing sudoku and SAT prep twenty-four hours a day.” She pushed the phone screen closer to Connie’s face.

NOV 13 ONLY—FULL MOON AFTER-HOURS TEATIME

“Mr. Straven wouldn’t shut up about it when I stopped by this week,” Adelle continued. “He says you should come by more often.”

No thanks, Connie thought. She had plenty on her plate with practice and weight-room time and study groups, but maybe Adelle needed more on her plate. Maybe all this tarot and Straven stuff was a cry for help. Maybe, she thought, she should’ve noticed those changes in her friend. But they had been to the Emporium a million times; her paranoia was surely just that. She shivered again. Someone walking over my grave.A minivan flew down the road, blasting hip-hop, the six teenagers crammed inside laughing maniacally on their way to the dance.

Adelle tilted her head to the side, one curl brushing her round cheek. “He was disappointed when I told him we couldn’t make it to the tea thing. Sadie Hawkins and all.”

“All right—why not?” Connie managed a smile. If Adelle could turn around this quickly after a disappointment, then Connie knew it was only fair to bolster her spirits further. She would feel better anyway if Adelle went to the shop accompanied, unable to shake the feeling that this email sent directly to Adelle was suspicious. The old man had always been kind to them, but years of stranger-danger curriculum hadn’t been lost on her. “All dressed up, might as well go out.”

“Psh, I’m not biking downtown in this thing,” Adelle said, fluffing out the tiered green skirts of her dress. “Greg would kill me. This rental wasn’t cheap.”

Greg turned out to be more interested in reruns of Everwood, posted up in his usual recliner, tucked behind a slew of bookshelves just to the left of the foyer. As the girls raced up the stairs of the spacious two-story colonial, Connie heard the TV cut out and the recliner squeak. Ahead of her, Adelle froze.

“Crap,” she whispered.

“Girls?” Greg appeared at the foot of the stairs. He was tall and nondescript, the human embodiment of a thrifted cardigan. Adelle liked to call her stepdad “a nonplayable character.” Adelle never knew what her mother, a world-famous death doula, saw in regular ol’ unassuming Greg. “I thought you were going to the dance. Did you forget something?”

“Um . . .” Connie could hear Adelle conjuring a lie as she stalled for time. “Yeah. I forgot our copy of Moira. Can’t forget that, not tonight!”

Greg blew out a frazzled breath and shook his head. “You could be reading Rebecca or Emma or, God, I don’t know, Catcher in the Rye. Real books. Real literature. Why do you have to rot your brains with that bodice-ripping junk?”

“It’s not junk, Greg!” Adelle shot back, heated. Bright points of red flooded her pale cheeks. “Why do you have to be so . . . so judgy? Mom says judgment is just unprocessed trauma being projected, remember?”

He rolled his eyes, adjusted his glasses, and returned to the recliner. “Do you need another ride?”

“No,” Adelle called back, continuing up the stairs. “Forget we were even here.” When they reached the upper landing and swerved toward her room, she muttered, “God, why does he have to suck so much?”

As soon as the door closed behind them, they were plunged into Adelle’s fantasy world. Twinkling fairy lights covered the far wall, except for the window. The curtains were a dark, dramatic purple. Lately, the design choices had gone in a more macabre direction. Less Chip and Jojo and more Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Adelle had stenciled alchemical designs on the walls in crimson and black, and her computer desk was pushed opposite the four-poster bed, partially concealed by scarlet mosquito netting. Their sanctuaries couldn’t have been more different—Adelle’s a darkly romantic, scatterbrained dream, and Connie’s covered in pennants, posters, and hooks holding her collection of MLS jerseys, weight belts, and trophies.

A glittery black banner had been strung between two of the four posts of Adelle’s bed, reading:

A BIT OF MADNESS IS KEY,

TO GIVE US NEW COLORS TO SEE

Adelle, Connie thought, a little uncharitably, was the only person in the world aside from the cast and crew who remained disappointed La La Land hadn’t actually won the Oscar that year. Adelle began to strip out of her green ball gown with quick, peevish movements that Connie couldn’t miss. While Connie pulled on her matching tracksuit bottoms and top, she felt her heart sink again. She looked at the banner hanging over the bed.

“Hey. I know I let you down tonight.”

“It’s totally okay.”

“No, it isn’t,” Connie replied, sitting on the bed while Adelle changed into black ankle boots and a frothy black dress—what Connie teasingly called her Goth Lite Uniform™. “I know you were really looking forward to the dance. I messed up. I just . . . I can’t explain it.”

Not yet, at least.

“Just go with me to the Emporium,” Adelle said seriously. She did, in fact, collect their shared, tattered copy of Moira and a lacy black mini backpack. “That will make up for it. Mr. Straven says the full moon is special, that he might even try casting spells tonight.”

Connie’s eyes opened wider. There was that warning shiver again. “Spells?”

“Mm-hmm.” Adelle dropped down onto the bed next to her, the book landing on the duvet between them. Connie put her hand on the cover and felt the familiar thrill she always did when she touched her favorite book. She didn’t love it nearly as much as Adelle did, but nobody loved the novel that much, probably not even the actual author. “I was thinking . . . even if we had gone to the dance, I was going to see if you wanted to go to the Emporium after,” Adelle continued.

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s . . .” Adelle licked her lips, evidently nervous. Her mismatched blue and green eyes roamed to the book and Connie’s hand. “He really wanted us to come by. There’s a spell—a real spell—that he wants to cast for us. I know it sounds bizarre, and, like, I don’t know if I believe it myself, but it might be cool, right? If anyone can perform magic, it’s Mr. Straven. He’s been teaching me so much, I think he might actually be . . . I don’t know. Gifted. Touched by something magical.”

They both loved the Witch’s Eye Emporium specifically because it was the weirdest, creepiest, coolest place in Boston. But it had always seemed like a safe creepy, a make-believe creepy. Connie remembered the time two years ago when they had gone to Salem for Halloween with Adelle’s mom. It was the first time she had believed that there truly were spirits and demons, and things that simply couldn’t be neatly explained. She believed in science, but Salem had made her believe in . . . something else. Just something else, unnamed and ill-defined but real enough, and kept not in a corner of her brain, but deep in her gut. The town vibrated on a different frequency, one that was enchanting at first but gradually got under her skin. Adelle, of course, had loved it. That is, until they’d slipped into an unassuming candle shop, and the proprietor took one glance at Adelle, saw her heterochromatic eyes, and offered to give them free palm readings.

Connie’s was perfunctory enough. She was pretty sure the goggle-eyed woman with her hair-sprayed tangle of yellow straw hair had just felt the weight-lifting calluses on Connie’s fingers and run with that. But with Adelle? She took her time, hovering over Adelle’s hand as if it were a cherished relic, made of glass, easily shattered.

“This line disappears into darkness,” the woman had almost whined, shuddering. “You . . . you disappear into darkness, my dear.”

Adelle’s mother thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. Working in the funerary business, she had muttered a sarcastic “Hon, we all end in darkness, one way or the other, coffin or dust or ash.”

But Adelle couldn’t let it go. She hardly spoke for the rest of the trip, chewing her nails and staring out the window on the way back to Boston with big, haunted eyes.

“What kind of spell?” Connie finally asked, feeling as if the book beneath her hand had also shuddered.

Adelle twisted and waited until their eyes met, and then she gave the biggest, strangest smile. “He thinks he can send us into the book. Into Moira. Would you go if he can do it? Could we do this together?”

2

ADELLE SWALLOWED THE SHARP thorn of disappointment with a smile. At least her best friend had agreed to her harebrained idea—spending the night not at the Sadie Hawkins dance as planned, but at the Emporium. Now she just had to convince Connie to actually go through with the spell, but that wouldn’t be so hard—Connie usually gave in and went along with whatever ridiculous scheme Adelle cooked up, like the time she’d made them leave out water for the full moon and then drink it the next morning, floating bugs, debris, and all. Or the time Adelle had convinced her to skip school so they could get their birth charts read by a visiting astrologer, or when, last summer, Adelle was convinced she could talk to her mother’s cat and spent all afternoon meowing at the poor thing while Connie recorded them on her phone.

Luckily, that footage was long gone. Connie was her partner in crime; she would go along with the spell, especially after having dashed Adelle’s dance dreams. That heady disappointment was still somewhat lodged in her throat, but it was time to wash it down.

If Mr. Straven really could perform magic, it would easily make her forget all about Sadie Hawkins.

First stop: Burger Buddies for two Pigmalions, cheeseburgers the size of a toddler’s head, with all the toppings and a massive mountain of fries, a big middle finger to Adelle’s stepdad, who’d made her family go vegan. It would probably make her puke the next morning, but the sense of rebellion was worth it. Little rebellions. Nothing big. The girls had pinky-promised two years ago, while freshmen, to not smoke or drink; they wanted to get into Yale together. Connie was a shoo-in for her athletics: soccer and track, swimming, and her true love, biathlon. Adelle, self-consciously book smart, would have to work harder.

“Big dreams,” Connie would tell her whenever they heard about a kickass party they hadn’t been invited to but had pretended to avoid, “big sacrifices.”

They wolfed down their burgers too fast and then ordered milkshakes to go.

Back on their bikes, they cruised across Arlington, riding by the Ether Monument and slapping the base for good luck, then southeast toward the pond and the swan boats. They had picked a secret spot there beneath a shady tree: an outcropping of rock that jutted out over the pond and gave them a quiet, peaceful view of the swans. This was the site of their most furious debates: Who was the best March sister? Jo, of course, they agreed, although Adelle silently agonized, suspecting she was probably more of an Amy. They ranked their favorite literary heroines (Laia, Elizabeth Bennet, Elisa, Katniss, Sierra Santiago, Jane Eyre, and, of course, Moira), and favorite books—Connie once outrageously placing Jane Eyre above theirbook, Moira, which felt like a betrayal. Nobody else seemed to care about Moira the way they did. It never got its sumptuous (and, in their opinion, much-deserved) costume-drama movie, never the Bridgerton treatment, never a BBC series.

No, Moira languished in the literary swamp where a million other books went to be forgotten.

That was why their guardianship of it mattered. They wouldn’t forget Moira, or the author, Robin Amery. Almost no information existed about her online, no fan pages or social media, no interviews. After all their searching, Robin remained a brief biography in the back of the novel and a black-and-white photo of a serious-faced white woman with short gray hair smiling vaguely at something off camera.

A lover of all things romance, Robin Amery is the author of Moira and the award-winning short-story collectionMoberly’s Adventure. Born in Paris, Robin lives with her cat, Fentz, in Boston, Massachusetts.

No amount of internet or library sleuthing turned up a copy of Moberly’s Adventure or the award it might have won. Every so often, Connie asked her mother, who worked as a bookseller at a local chain, to try to arrange a signing or event and invite Robin Amery. Rosie would try, but nobody at the store could devise a way to contact her. The publisher, White-Jones, didn’t prove to be much help either. Moira was long out of print, and they hadn’t published anything new of hers in years. Nobody currently at White-Jones even remembered working with her.

Robin and her book, it seemed, were in grave danger of disappearing altogether. They had to be preserved. Connie and Adelle were the founders, worshippers, and bishops in a church of two. The smallest literature-preservation society on earth.

The rock near the swans was also the place where they bared their souls.

Just a few weekends ago, Connie had confessed that she wasn’t looking forward to Sadie Hawkins. Not even a little bit. All the dresses she had tried on had made her feel like Aaron Rodgers stuffed into five yards of tulle. She had been called pretty and cute as a little girl, but that tapered off as she grew up and kept growing. Up and up and up. Then a steady diet of sports and protein shakes gave her broad shoulders and a more angular face, one aunts and uncles called “healthy” and “strong.” Strong, not pretty. Why not strong and pretty, she had always wondered, what made those things opposites to so many people? As she stood looking in that mirror while shopping for Sadie Hawkins dresses, those aunt and uncle voices boomed over a loudspeaker in her head. Adelle had sworn on every dead ancestor she could remember that Connie was an absolute vision, but her one voice couldn’t drown out the others.

Adelle had had her own confession to make: at one of Connie’s soccer matches, Adelle had started talking to a boy who’d reminded her of the male protagonist in Moira, Severin Sylvain—fair-skinned, with curly black hair, piercing gray eyes, a sleek, slender silhouette. He’d said he liked her weird eyes, and Adelle had blushed, telling him it was heterochromia iridis, and he nodded like he knew what that was. This boy’s name was Brady or Grady; she couldn’t hear well over the thunder of the crowd. They had made out behind the concession stand, but then he’d tried to put his hand up her shirt and Adelle had fled. That wasn’t something Severin would do. Afterward, she hated herself a little bit for having kissed him at all.

It was a sacred place, so of course they had to bike by it on the park path and make sure nobody was there smoking cigarettes or mooning the swan boats. The little patch by the pond was clear, and the girls biked on, full of burgers and slurping their milkshakes, giddy from the sugar as they cruised toward the Witch’s Eye Emporium. When Adelle glanced at her friend, Connie seemed calm, even content. She probably didn’t believe that Mr. Straven’s spell would work, but Adelle’s hands felt electric—she was certain.

“So who was your mystery date?” Connie asked as they pedaled furiously through the park.

Adelle demurred, trying to pull ahead of her, but Connie was too strong on the bike, too fast. “It’s stupid.”

“Come on, tell me, Delly.”

“No, it’s really, really stupid. You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“But I already think that.” Connie smirked.

“Ha. Ha.”

Connie let it drop while they coasted down the path and out of the park, then turned left, weaving between tourists, passing by horse-drawn carriages and nighttime tours of haunted Boston via bus, the guide’s voice flaring loud before vanishing as the girls dipped into an alley. When they finally reached the oddity shop, they parked their bikes in the usual spot, a cobwebbed nook just behind the brick stairwell that led to the double glass doors.

“So,” Connie said, not even a little winded as they jogged up the stairs, “who was it going to be?”

Adelle dodged behind her friend, and by the light of the green gas lamps outside the shop, she pulled open Connie’s backpack and withdrew Moira, anticipating the magic to come.

“Severin,” she muttered. “From the book.”

Connie snorted. “Like an imaginary friend?”

“I told you it was stupid.”

Adelle’s face felt hot with embarrassment as they entered the shop. She half expected a crowd of people dressed like her, all in black and lace, but there was nobody there for the big full-moon event. Weird. At least they wouldn’t have to wait long to talk to Mr. Straven. That was a bonus, she thought.

The Witch’s Eye Emporium was empty except for the girls, Mr. Straven, and one nondescript man dressed all in black, with a crisp felt fedora, who spent every day in the Emporium’s window, drinking endless cups of coffee. ...