The Wolf King (The Wolf Kings #1) (MLM)

CHAPTER TWENTY.

                Jack found himself in the library, running into Isaac before anyone else.

"Oh thank god," he groaned, shutting the door with his foot.

Isaac closed his book and hurried to Jack, taking the volumes off his hands. "Tough morning?"

Jack took a second too long to answer, then mumbled, "Fine."

Isaac considered him a second too long, then mumbled, "Good." He set the books down, and tucked his own smaller book in his pocket. "I'm glad you're feeling more comfortable around King Tiberius."

"Comfortable is . . . definitely a word for it," he said. "Don't tell him, but I'm a lot more comfortable around you guys."

Isaac nearly knocked over the stack of Jack's books. "That's – I mean, thank you?"

Jack rolled his eyes, sitting on the edge of the table and taking the first book, flipping through it. "Not that I'm uncomfortable around him, I just don't know how to act around him, he's . . . I can't even explain it to myself, to be honest." His shoulders fell. "It's just that I don't exactly find a lot of other . . . normal people here."

Isaac huffed a chuckle, scratching the back of his head. "Normal. I've never been called that before."

Jack found a dogeared page and frowned. "I don't mean to be rude or anything." Isaac was starting to say something else, or trying to, and Jack spared him the necessity of answering as a passage in the book caught his attention.

T'was the sorceress Magenta Stormsteed, in her return from the war against the Bug People, who claimed to have used the Ring of Venus to find her way back to her fellow witches. Though this story is subject to many claims of falsehood, for the Ring of Venus is no more an actuality than the Moonstone Beacon of the werewolves.

"Hey, what's a Moonstone Beacon?"

"The Moonstone Beacon?" He shrugged. "A children's story. Graham used to tell me about it when we were younger. A thunderstorm separates a werewolf from his mate. The werewolf is so deeply anguished at being away from his love that the forest wisps take pity on him, and they use moonstones as a beacon to guide him back to his lover."

"Huh," Jack looked down at the page. "That's actually kind of sweet. If it's a werewolf story, then why's it in a book on witches?"

"Well," Isaac hooked his thumbs through his back pocket, "wisps are supposed to be servants to witches and play with fairies. Werewolves can't actually see them, that's why they used moonstones to show the wolf where to go. King Jack?"

But Jack had already retracted into his thoughts, considering what this could mean. He pulled out his notepad, jotted down the finer points of the story, and spent the next two hours looking through everything he could find on moonstones.

There was nothing but that one passage. As much as he searched, and even as Isaac helped him through a few volumes of his own, Jack couldn't find one description of what this beacon even looked like.

"I told you," Isaac said, "it's just a fairytale. And not a popular one either."

Jack rubbed the nape of his neck. "I guess I could ask Tiberius about it. He's immortal, he must've come across something useful."

"Useful for what?" Isaac asked.

Finding a ticket out of here, he thought. Finding a way to stop Graham before he does any damage. Too many things, really. Someone, however, opened the door to the library before he had to answer, and he found Everett with armfuls of different suits. Jack groaned.