Dax called out behind me. “Yield, Brutus!”
The dog sat.
I clambered to my feet as Dax came up. “You okay, Quinn?”
“I’m fine!” I spotted the edge of the diary beneath the tablecloth and darted back down to grab it. Lifting it triumphantly, I waved it at Gia and Dax. “See! I found it.”
When I walked over to them, Dax had turned to introduce himself, and Gia stared slightly awestruck with her hand in his. I held up the diary again. “Told you. Totally fine.”
Dax raised an eyebrow. Gia smiled and nodded in a way that said, “that’s so great, sweetie,” loud and clear. I was pretty sure she’d thought I’d lost my mind, but I appreciated the show of support as I brushed myself off.
“Remember, Quinn. I told you what that means.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I glanced at the mutt sitting calmly beside him. “Why do you have Brutus?”
“I offered to walk him while Morty enjoys his bigger responsibilities.” Dax smiled as he moved to leave, taking Brutus with him by the collar. “See you at the party, yeah?”
My brow furrowed, but Gia called out as he walked away and distracted me. “Wouldn’t dream of missing it!” Once he was out of earshot, she turned to me. “Okay, seriously, I know it’s all high stakes and drama right now, but what the hell do they put in the water here?”
Laughing her off, I set the diary on the table and whacked it again. The lock cracked open, and I plopped into the nearest seat to thumb through it. “Gotcha!”
Gia sat beside me as I balanced my paddle on my knees.
“Ouch!” I winced and pulled the paddle away. “Dammit!”
Blood welled from the pinprick a splinter of wood had left in my thigh. A splinter of wood nicked my thigh, and blood welled from the pinprick. I wiped it, and then cursed myself for not sanding down and painting the paddle.
Then I un-cursed myself when I remembered why I hadn’t. Inspecting the wood, I accepted some of the blame and saw the real reason I’d been splintered.
My attempts at forced entry into the diary cracked the corner of my pledge paddle. Right at the spot where I’d carvedPrincessinto it with all my might.
“Seriously!”
Gia touched my shoulder, her voice gentle. “Are you sure you don’t want to go upstairs and get ready?”
I shook my head. “I need to figure this out and get ahead of the others. Let me just look through this.”
But after thumbing through every page of the diary, I found nothing but a bear drawn on the last page and a symbol on the inside back cover. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. All looping lines and what looked vaguely like letters.
“You could try reverse image searching on my phone?”
She handed it over, and I huffed at the blank page the reverse image search returned.
“Nothing. But at the very least, the diary leads me to the statue, so whether I start with the lockbox or the diary Max gave me, I end up with that.”
“Did they give you two sets of clues ending in the same place, so either way, you’d get to the right spot?”
“I guess so.” Her phrasing jarred my memory. “Paul kept going on about two paths and deciding which one to take before it was too late. And before this all started, Morty mentioned I’d need to make a choice. He said something about getting to the depths of this hellscape.”
“That’s ominous.”
I waved her off. “Par for the course, really.”
“Maybe you need to look at the map again, using the little loupe you got. Or maybe the black light will show more on the pages. We can get ready and keep hunting at the same time.”
Accepting temporary defeat, I followed her to my room. We passed a few more Knights as we went through Camelot Courtyard, and Gia reiterated her earlier thoughts on the men.
“Are you sure you want to cap your harem at three?” She bit her thumb as Austin walked by, his serious expression firmly in place. “God, the smolder on that one.”
