Excerpt from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Father said to watch and listen," David said. "If you had found the words, I was supposed to let them live." He jerked the chain back to himself then, unpinning them. "Father says it's time to come home," he said, coiling the chain with deft, practiced motions. "It's time for your real studies to begin." He disappeared back into the storm.

Carolyn rose and stood alone in the dark, both in that moment and ever after.

iii

Now, a quarter century later, Carolyn knelt on all fours behind the base of a fallen pine, peeping through a thick stand of holly. If she angled her head just so, she had an unobstructed view down the hill to the clearing of the bull. It was twenty yards or so wide and mostly empty. The only features of note were the bull itself and the granite cairn of Margaret's grave. The bull, a hollow bronze cast slightly larger than life, stood in the clearing's precise center. It shone mellow and golden in the summer sun.

The clearing was bounded on the near side by the stand of wild cedar in which Carolyn now hid. On the far side, David and Michael stood at the edge of a sheer drop-off cut into the hill to make a little more room for Highway 78. Across the road, twenty feet or so below, the weathered wooden sign marking the entrance to Garrison Oaks hung from a rusty chain. When the breeze caught it right you could hear the creak all the way up here.

Carolyn had snuck in very close indeed, close enough to count the shaggy, twining braids of Michael's blond dreadlocks, close enough to hear the buzz of flies around David's head. David was amusing himself by quizzing Michael about his travels. Seeing this, Carolyn winced. Michael's catalog was animals, and he had learned it perhaps a bit too well. Human speech was difficult for him now, even painful—especially when he was fresh out of the woods. Worse, he lacked guile.

Emily had visited the librarians' dreams the night before, saying that David required them to assemble at the bull "before sundown." That was different from "as soon as possible," a distinction that no one but Michael would overlook. Still, it might be for the best. Jennifer had been stuck alone with David for weeks, the two of them waiting on news of Father. Now, as David tormented Michael, Jennifer—the smallest and slightest of the librarians—worked at tearing down Margaret's grave. She trudged back and forth across the clearing, stooped over from the weight of head-sized chunks of granite, her strawberry-blond hair drenched in sweat. Still, after weeks alone with David, lugging granite in the hot sun was probably a relief.

Mentally, Carolyn sighed. I suppose I should go down there and help them. If nothing else, this would encourage David to divide his attentions among three victims rather than two.

But Carolyn did not lack guile. She would listen first.

David and Michael stood looking down over Garrison Oaks. Michael, like his cougars around him, was naked. David wore an Israeli Army flak jacket and a lavender tutu, crusty with blood. The flak jacket was his. The tutu was from the closet of Mrs. McGillicutty's son. This was at least partly Carolyn's fault.

When it became clear that they could not return to the Library, at least not in the near term, Carolyn had explained to the others that they would need to wear American clothes in order to blend in. They nodded, not really understanding, and set about rummaging through Mrs. McGillicutty's closets. David chose the tutu because it was the closest thing he could find to his usual loin cloth. Carolyn thought about explaining why this was not "blending in," then decided against it. She had learned to take her giggles where she could find them.

Her nose wrinkled. The wind smelled of rot. Is Margaret back as well? But no, she realized, the rot was David. After a while you didn't notice so much, but she had been away. Flies buzzed around his head in a cloud.

Excerpted from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins. Copyright © 2015 by Scott Hawkins. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.