CHAPTER 1
OLIVER
BARREN’S PEAK, WEST VIRGINIA
Oliver White crouched down in the thick weeds at the edge of the forest and took a deep breath of death.
His satchel fell to the ground with a thump. The flower looked innocent enough with bright pink petals surrounding a velvety stamen, but as he reached forward, it shied away, curling in on itself and releasing another puff of rancid-meat scent.
Oliver’s heart quickened in his chest, and he sank back on his haunches, silently reaching for the camera around his neck and pulling it to his face.
Through the specialized lens—one he’d spent months tracking down across all of Nevada—the innocence was lost. Perched in the center of the plant was a small creature the size of his thumb tip. Its black carapace shone in the beating sunlight. Two wings extended from its back, both razor sharp, both shimmering with leftover pollen. And as its head swung to regard Oliver, its tiny mandible opened, revealing a mouth full of glittering fangs.
A death weevil. Or, as Oliver had taken to not-so-affectionately calling them when they infested his rooms one spring at Sanctuary—a fucking asshole. It may be perfectly happy within the petals of the flower right now, but there was one thing death weevils liked more than high-summer pollen.
Blood.
Oliver frowned and let out a breath slowly, trying his hardest not to move. Even though the weevil had already set its sights on his face, he didn’t need to taunt it further. Not before getting a picture. Not before proving to himself that he wasn’t hallucinating. Again.
His finger found the trigger by instinct more than actual expertise. He carefully depressed the old lever, trying his hardest to coax it into clicking without activating the grinding sound of a centuries-old camera. The shutter closed. The shutter opened.
And the camera let out a low groan of anguish, before it unleashed a heavy belch of thick black smoke.
Swearing, Oliver pressed it to his face harder, trying to keep his eyes on the flower through the clog of smoke.
The weevil was gone.
He swung the camera around, peering at the surrounding woods through the small peephole.
A bright pain exploded in his forearm, and Oliver yelped, dropping the camera so hard the strap jerked, burning the back of his neck. He gritted his teeth as the gnawing agony in his arm grew worse, barely keeping himself from smacking his other hand against the spot. (Years of fending the asshole bugs off had taught him that a swat would only push it deeper and piss it off even more.)
“Why?” he hissed to himself, rifling through his satchel that was still on the ground and coming up with a small vial. He brought it to his mouth, yanked the cork out with his teeth, and doused his arm in a homebrew of vinegar, 192-proof alcohol, and enough lavender oil to make his nostrils burn and his stomach roil.
The burrowing pain immediately stopped, but the burn from the solution was almost as bad. Oliver scrubbed his arm raw, grinding his molars against a groan of pain. “I finally get a sign, and it’s one of you assholes.” He upended the last of the vial over his arm. “Serves you right,” he chastised the monster. The weevil fell to the ground, paralyzed by the lavender, but blood kept bubbling up from the wound, droplets falling to the grass. The bite was dime sized, and due to the weevil’s special kind of poison, it wouldn’t start clotting for days. He’d be stuck wrapping his arm in gauze near constantly and probably bleeding through his sweater a dozen times while he waited for it to finally close, which absolutely sucked because it was his favorite sweater. What were the odds that he found more cashmere wadded in the bottom of a thrift store dollar bin?
Low.
As the sting from the solution finally lessened and the ringing of his heartbeat in his ears faded, Oliver knelt down over his bag again and pulled out a couple of rags. He carefully wrapped the empty vial in one and tucked it safely back in a pocket of the satchel. The other he wrapped around his forearm, yanking tight around the wound that was still pumping enough blood that he could smell the metallic scent of it over the rancid burn of the lavender. He reached for the camera again, intent on finding the thing’s body through the lens and making sure it was well and truly dead, but froze as his naked gaze landed at his feet.
The tiny corpse of the death weevil lay smoking, sharp wings crumbling to ash in front of his eyes, shiny black carapace breaking apart.
Oliver’s stomach dropped out of his body entirely.
“No way,” he whispered, sinking back down to his haunches and reaching for a long blade of grass. Dead, the weevil posed no danger to him, as long as he avoided the dripping venom of its burrowing fangs, but he still wasn’t going to touch it barehanded. He poked at the body with the stalk, rolling it over. The bottom thorax completely fell off as it crumbled to a pile of dust. Oliver blinked and swallowed heavily. The trees of the forest moaned as the wind picked up and branches creaked overhead.
He’d spent a solid year searching for the camera around his neck, locating it only by trading far more information than he should have to a Redditor named ENTSFOREVER81—someone with both a desperate desire to real-life cosplay a magic user and way too much time on their hands. Still, despite their fanatical obsession with fake wizards, they’d provided solid information. To most, it looked like a plain old vintage camera—a plastic box with bright silver dials, requiring stupidly overpriced film for which hipsters were all too willing to shell out. Only a select few would realize that the lens was different. Wrong. Concave instead of convex, a swirl of color in the center that shimmered like a mirage if you looked too closely.
It revealed monsters if you looked through the viewfinder. Monsters that shouldn’t exist on Earth. Monsters that Oliver had been tracking for over two years, ever since…
He shook his head, scowling. Even the smallest thought of Sanctuary was enough to set him twitching, enough for fiery anger to burn through his veins even hotter than the weevil’s bite. But that didn’t matter.
What did matter was that the weevil’s corpse lay at his feet, blowing away in the gusty wind… and that he could see it with no help from the camera at all.
Monsters were secret things, rare on Earth, only found in the dark of night and the nightmares of small children. But if he was seeing one with his naked eyes?
“Labyrinth,” Oliver whispered, a word that was stolen by the wind as quickly as the weevil’s corpse.
What did matter was that the barrier was breaking. And magicians wouldn’t be far behind.
Excerpted from The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams, copyright © 2026 by Michelle Kulwicki.
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