Blurb/Excerpt from an unpublished book.

The Book of Secrets is published in real life. Books two and three are not, neither by a real publisher nor on Wattpad. So I chose a portion from book three to post here.

Enjoy 990 words with zero context.

He tore through the throngs of people without seeing any of them, into the house, up the stairs, into the furthest room and locked the door. He had just trapped himself but he didn't care. He dumped out his belongings, rooted for The Book of Secrets, and dropped the stone into its hole.

Nothing happened.

"Help us!" Gabriel yelled, and he shook the book now, hanging over it on the floor. "You promised this would help us defeat Rex Bellum. You promised." He slammed the book shut and opened it again, but still nothing.

"Then you're not real," he said, the words pounding his throat. "You don't care. You can't do anything."

He wanted to throw the book into the window. Instead he removed the stone and held it to his mouth. He still had to do something, anything. He heard Elowyn's voice in his head, and Edem's, but most of all John's, for it was that mysterious man in the skeleton realm who first christened him so.

"I am the stone-wielder," he said.

Still nothing.

He forced his anger to hold. He pressed his lips to the stone this time, whispering, "I am the stone-wielder."

He waited. One agonizing second passed, followed by another and another. Then the stone began to warm his hand.

Gabriel's heart banged. He dropped the stone and it rolled, and he caught it against his fingers, but just as quickly as the faint light flared, it faded, and the stone was cold and dead again.

John's voice entered again. He had said something, something strange and ominous about using the stone against its will. It would blow up. Work as a bomb.

"If you ever find yourself surrounded by your enemies. It would be suicide, but it would work."

"I am the stone-wielder," he said, "and I don't know what to do." He dropped his forehead onto the book. Without warning, a black despair filled his heart until he could barely breathe. The night deepened and the battle raged on and he felt something familiar wrap around his brain. Not mind control, but something slimy and shivery, deep claws binding and holding on.

"I'm the stone-wielder and I don't know what to do....and I'm scared." The words stacked up hot in his throat, and he let his voice spill broken out of his mouth. "I can't stop being scared." He pressed his fists into his eyes and he was in the heart of the mountain all over again, a confused boy shaking when confronted with his fear. A boy who had never left his island country, who believed whatever he heard, who feared those with foreign blood coursing through veins the same as his.

He had crossed the ocean twice now. He had defended and fought alongside those whose language and culture was not his own. But he was still the boy, just a little older and taller, running constantly from fear, and the realization of this deepened the pain in his heart. Ever since that day he brought home the book, he had never stopped moving, never stopped racing against time. Running from nighthags, escaping bombs, going back in time, sailing to the Highlands, trying with every desperate bone in his body to solve every problem himself—killing the king! All of it, every bit of it, helping him to forget his own mortality, helping to shove fear into a corner.

But now he pressed his face into the musty book and was still. His heart thudded. The fear washed through him—not the nauseating, panicking sort of terror he was so accustomed to, but a deep, hot dread that brought with it all his mistakes, all his cowardice. And there was nothing to do anymore but ride with it, to let the slimy, shivery claws grab on and do their bidding.

"I don't know what to do." He could not tell if he spoke the words aloud or not. "I need help."

He had no idea who he was talking to. But instantly, unbidden, a memory of the mountain came back like a breath of cold air.

Do you know how to fight it on your own?

He remembered his answer then."I can't."

But he had not held out his hand out to the help offered. Even when he had tasted the peace, felt it flood his soul, he clung to himself and ran, and ignored the voice telling him to be brave in the very first battle, and could not answer questions about any world deeper than this shallow, surface one; he just ran, and moved, and raced for his life, and longed to know things, like if Wes would come back to life at the end of all this, and if his mother ever loved Ren, and how to kill Rex Bellum and which one of the girls was supposed to do it...all these questions twisting and writhing in his mind, when there was only one truth, and it was the one he ignored.

"I need help," he said, and he found himself reduced back to that moment in the mountain, with the peace that filled the chasms of his soul the moment he admitted his helplessness, but this time he reached for it first and he found it; he hung on for dear life. He let himself break and he lay there, exposed, defenseless. "I can't keep running away."

The peace in his heart smoothed out and spread, chasing away the sliminess, and he could have sworn he felt a warmth on his skin, a good and pleased smile gazing upon him.

"You have to come with us," he said, and he was digging at that peace now, scooping it, not wanting his own heart to sneak away and fail him this time, or ever again. "Please come with us. Please be real. We can't do anything by ourselves."