Now

September 26, 2019, 1:15 p.m.

The Library of Fates lived tucked under the mansarded roof of a tall, charcoal- gray building in Harvard Yard. To a casual visitor, it was like any other library, lined with shelves for hours of pleasantly aimless browsing. But every student knew that if you came to the Library of Fates and asked for a book to guide you safely through turbulent times, the librarian would go straight to the shelf and put a book in your hands. And that book would change your life.

Eleanor Dennet was that librarian now, but the knowledge felt hollow. Her predecessor, Odile Vernet— her mentor, her guiding star, her best friend— had died suddenly three days ago, and she could barely process it.

Her throat still raw from crying, her brain still woozy from too much vodka, she stepped over the threshold of the library that had been her refuge for most of the past twenty-four years. On the surface, everything seemed the same: the dark oak paneling and moss- green area rugs and accents; the pearly glow that came through the recessed skylight; the sweet, faintly musty smell. The custodian had opened the curtains and blinds of the nine bay windows on each long side of the room. Sunlight bathed the books in a greenish haze and washed over the varnished seminar table and armchairs. The mural on the ceiling evoked the magic of stories.

But something felt different here. Something was wrong. 

Then Eleanor saw him.

From his seat in a green brocade armchair angled toward the window, he didn’t seem to have noticed her entrance. Barely daring to breathe, she took in black hair sprinkled with gray on the headrest and long lashes outlined on his cheek as he gazed down at a sheaf of papers in his hand.

Daniel Vernet, Odile’s son.

The last time they’d seen each other, in 1995, they’d been standing here in the library. Eleanor’s view of Daniel had been clouded by tears, but she would never forget his dark eyes gazing back as if she were a stranger. The bland way he’d smiled, as if she meant nothing to him after everything they’d been through.

And here were more damned tears, rising and choking her. She would have to face Daniel eventually, to give condolences and make arrangements for his mother’s memorial. But not yet. She wasn’t ready for that. She darted to the window bay farthest from his chair, silent on the thick carpet, and slipped behind the floor-length curtain.

Daniel sighed heavily. The papers crackled. Frozen in place, Eleanor watched through a gap as he stood up. He didn’t look his age, the lines of his chin and cheekbones still firm.

A sharp click- clack of heels sounded on the stairs behind them. “Ready, Daniel?” asked a slightly accented voice that Eleanor recognized as Liliana, Odile’s housekeeper and close friend.

Daniel nodded, but his gaze was still on the papers. “What the hell is this?” he asked. “What the hell?”

As the older woman put a soothing hand on Daniel’s shoulder, Eleanor saw his body heave. Was he grieving his mother, then? Their relationship had never been smooth. Though Odile visited her son in Europe on occasion, it had taken her death to bring him back to the States for the first time in decades.

Liliana gave Daniel a hug and led him toward the door. “Everything will work out. You’ll see. We don’t want to be late for our appointment.”

“I’m just so confused!” Eleanor heard him still exclaiming as their feet thudded down the stairs.

She emerged from behind the curtain and stood very still, waiting for the tension to dissipate and the atmosphere to settle. Listening for a faint but steady thrum on the edge of her awareness, a rumble that was neither pipes nor heating. Like Odile, Eleanor was attuned to the library’s vibrations, inaudible to most people.

But now, standing dead center in the library, straining her senses in the stillness, she detected no reassuring thrum. Nothing. As if the library were an immense machine that had stopped running.

Panic gripped her. It can’t be.

She hurried to the oak door at the far end of the room and unlocked it with trembling fingers. Here in the librarian’s small office, The Book of Dark Nights was kept, secure in a safe, its pages alive with the power of the secrets trapped inside, for the library drew its power from the Book. As long as the Book remained there, the library would function.

On top of the safe, she found a sticky note in Odile’s strong cursive:

A place of pages,

A subterranean secret,

Where love is shared.

One book brought you together.

 Start from there.

Eleanor stared at it for a dazed second. Odile often left literary quotes on sticky notes, but this didn’t seem like the style of poetry she would read— or write, if Odile had been a poet.

Then she knelt beside the safe to type in the code. Fumbling in her urgency, she had to enter it twice before the light turned green and she could swing the door open. Eleanor closed her eyes and said a silent prayer: Please let it be here.

The Book had been stolen only once, and the results had been disastrous. Eleanor tried not to think about them as she reached into the safe for the cracked calfskin of the Book’s binding, bracing herself to feel the usual tingle as her fingers made contact. Needing to experience that uncanny suggestion that the Book was alive. To know that it was only Daniel’s presence that had made the library feel wrong.

But there was nothing.

She knew people saw her as Odile’s mousy, adoring acolyte, hidden away in the library like a relic herself. A perennial student who had never even finished her PhD. A wan spinster, a living history display. Here in the library was the one place Eleanor mattered. In these books is your future, Odile had told her long ago. In these books are all the tools you need to live your life to the fullest. But all that depended on the magic.

And as she ran shaky fingers from corner to corner of the steel compartment, she found only shadows and a fine, powdery dust that came off on her fingertips.

The Book of Dark Nights was gone.

Excerpted from THE LIBRARY OF FATES by Margot Harrison, Copyright © 2025 by Margot Harrison. Published by Graydon House, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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Aphrodite I

I’m a liar, to begin with.

Well, if I’m being exceedingly honest with you – and I am trying – I was nothing at all, to begin with. Then I was my father’s testicles. Then the weaver of Fate itself, which is when the lying started. After that, it all got a bit complicated.

I was the daughter of Ouranos. The daughter of Zeus. The daughter of no one at all. A winner, a loser, though never much in between. The world standard of beauty and a crone, both. Olympus’ very own it-girl. Maybe the worst wife in all of history. A lover, a friend, a co-conspirator. A snitch. Selfless – once or twice. A bitch – more than twice. A monster, a villain, a victim – if you must. A good mother, a bad mother, a really bad mother. Lonely and famous and beloved and alone. Precious and worthless. A rival, a cheat. Afraid, often, and terrifying, also often. Oh, and I started a war. That’s very important.

The goddess Aphrodite. I was that too. I don’t think I am

anymore. Look, it’s all very knotted. Maybe I should start from the beginning.

First, there was Chaos, which meant something different then to what it does now. The time of Chaos was empty. It was a blank canvas for the optimists and an endless sinkhole for the pessimists. It was a time of absolutely nothing. I suppose I was nothing then, but we all were, so I won’t hold that against her.

Chaos was empty, until she met Nyx. I like to think that the two of them were in love, but I’ve never met my grandmothers, so I can’t say for certain. The two of them created the earth and the seas and the sky, and they had three children to gift them to.

Their daughters received the sea and the earth, and they were happy with them.

Their son wasn’t, as is the way of youngest children. He wanted to be the king of a world consisting of only five people, so they let him.

My father, given the world like a toy so he’d play nicely with his sisters. I suspect he was spoiled rotten, but then I quite like being spoiled, myself. And he did ask, before he took. He spoke with such conviction about the glittering future he would bring, the life he would spread across this world, that they believed him.

Ouranos became the first king of this world. He took his sister to be his wife and he made good on his promises. Together – let’s not give him all the credit; he didn’t carry their children – they filled the world with life. They brought forth the Titans, beings more powerful than even they were, who could control the elements around them more easily than breathing. And they brought forth the Cyclopes, and the Hecatonchires – the hundred-handed ones – who Gaia loved and who did not ask for power, only a life, which meant Ouranos did not respect them. He thought them irrelevant to the world, because they didn’t demand to own it. They lived between the oceans and created beautiful wonders with all the energy they saved from fighting.

I don’t know how many children they had together. It doesn’t matter. All that really matters is it was one child too many.

It’s always the youngest son who has the most to prove.

Their youngest was a Titan, Cronus. He wanted to be king too, only Ouranos wasn’t like his mothers. He didn’t want to give up what was his.

Cronus asked for power; his father said no. Cronus did not ask a second time.

So the world came to know a new word: war.

It didn’t last long, that first war. It couldn’t. All the Titans could be counted on fingers and toes.

Cronus armed himself. He went to the Cyclopes and asked for their support. He promised them positions in his new order, new lives beneath the sun instead of deep below the sea. He told them he would respect them as their father never did. And he let their conversation be heard just enough to build fear in his father.

It’s a bold strategy, to tell your enemy that you’re coming, but it works well with the men in my family. They’re so afraid of it, it eats away at them, into their very bones, and they forget that they’re anything other than the position they hold.

Ouranos ordered the Cyclopes sent to Tartarus, a prison in the underworld he’d had to create personally, because one had never been needed before.

(It’s a problem when you’re an immortal fighting other immortals. You have to be careful about who you piss off because there’s no getting rid of them. They’ll be there, hating you. Forever.)

How Cronus himself escaped being tied up in proto-damnation is beyond me, but he did. I suspect his mother helped. He promised her – how they promise! – he would free her sons, bring them to the power they deserved. When Cronus was king, everyone would live equally in a utopia, just below him.

He had his people behind him. He had his shining vision for the future. He had the weapons and the belief. It was only a matter of time.

He followed his father across the land, over the oceans, waited for the perfect storm to be whipping around them, for winds too loud for words – I know that for certain. I made my entrance soon enough.

I think it’s unlikely they’d have had much to chat about, anyway. When you get to weapons at dawn, what do you say?

I want power!

No, me!

No, me!

They were both armed, but Cronus’ reach was longer. That’s been true of every new generation I’ve seen, that they’re just a little bigger than their parents, trying to prove they’re better in the most

pointless of ways.

Cronus carried a sickle. I don’t know what my father’s weapon was. He lost.

There was no point in aiming to kill. There never has been, for us. Instead, Cronus thought of the worst shame he could possibly imagine, and he castrated his father.

Chopped his balls off.

De-testicled him.

I’ve heard every possible variation of the phrase, some with great solemnity and some with a snigger, and I’ve never been able to explain why I’m not laughing.

I can tell you now, though.

Those balls were me.

I grew from them. I was born from them. They were me and I am them and that will always be the truth. That is my beginning.

I made my debut at the end of the first great war, in a storm unlike any other, as the world turned itself upside down trying to find its way in the new order. All of this is true, yet my birth is reduced to a punchline.

I hid it for so long, not wanting my entire existence to be reduced to one man’s shame, but I’m over that now. I’m much more famous than him, after all.

I’ve always wondered how Cronus managed to castrate him so neatly. It was only my father’s testicles that made me – call my knowing that feminine intuition, if you want – but Cronus used a sickle.

How? Were they hanging so low? Was Ouranos’ stance so wide because he needed the world to see his mighty balls? What possible physical arrangement leads to one man being able to castrate another with a weapon made for cutting wheat?

Cronus would have had to practise, but he can’t have. Surely he had better things to do in the war, and I’ve met some of his generals. I can’t imagine them offering themselves up for the chop.

That one is a mystery for the ages, I’m afraid, but it doesn’t matter, because now I’m here. That’s it. All of the relevant history before I arrived. Done.

Cronus lifted his arms in mighty victory and bellowed so that all around him could cheer and crown him the new king of everything. Like his father, he went home and married his sister, ready to fill the world with people who looked just like him.

Ouranos, newly ball-less, gave an anguished cry.

‘You think yourself so smart, so powerful, but one day you will be just like me, dethroned by your own children.’

Cronus looked at his father’s crotch. ‘I will never be just like you, will I?’

He ordered Ouranos tied and bound in Tartarus, that prison of his own making, never to be seen again.1

So distracted were they by their respective shouting that the testicles fell into the ocean, instantly swallowed by the swells of the waves, pulled down into utter blackness, presumed lost.

Wrong.

1 For a certain value of never. We are immortals, after all. —A

Excerpted from Aphrodite by Phoenicia Rogerson. © 2025 by Phoenicia Rogerson, used with permission from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.

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How does the horse look?

Victoria Rogers pressed her good arm to her very bruised, almost broken ribs. “Dad, don’t,” she said, trying to stay as still as possible. “You can’t be funny. It already hurts to breathe. It wasn’t a horse.”

Her father frowned. “I was told you were thrown off a horse.” “I was thrown out of a truck.”

“Then how’d you get the black eyes?”

“The ground was a little bit pissy when I hit it and punched me back.”

There wasn’t a part of her that didn’t hurt. The good news was that now that the medical staff had determined she didn’t have a head injury, they were going to give her drugs to help with the pain. She’d already said she didn’t want any of that weak-ass pill stuff. She wanted a nurse to give her a shot of something that would work instantly and let her rest. Because in addition to the bruised ribs, requisite scrapes and contusions, she had a broken left leg and a sprained wrist. Her previously dislocated shoulder also throbbed, but that was kind of the least of it.

As she lay in her hospital bed, feeling like death on a tortilla, she had the thought that maybe stunt work wasn’t for her. Injuries came with the job, but this was the third time in five years she’d landed in the hospital. The first time she’d messed up, so that was on her, but the other two had just been plain bad luck. The incident with the truck had come about because one of the tires had blown, causing the however many ton vehicle to jump the curb—an action that had sent her flying up and over the side. Gravity, being the bitch it was, had flung her onto the sidewalk. Hence the injuries.

Her father studied her, his brows drawn together in concern. “None of this makes me happy,” he told her.

The incongruous statement nearly made her laugh. She remembered—just in time—that her ribs wouldn’t appreciate the subsequent movement and they would punish her big-time. 

“Today isn’t my favorite day either,” she admitted, trying not to groan. “I didn’t wake up with the thought that I should try to get thrown out of the back of a pickup.” Although technically getting thrown out of the truck had been the stunt. Just not when it had happened and without warning or a plan.

“I’m worried,” her father told her. 

“I’ll be fine.”

“This time.”

She winced, and not from pain. “Now you sound like Mom.” 

Her father, a handsome man only a few months from his sixtieth birthday, brightened. “Thank you, Victoria. That’s such a nice thing to say.”

Given her weakened condition, she let that comment slide. Honestly she didn’t have the strength to deal with it right now, even though she knew her father understood exactly what she’d been saying. He was only pretending to not get it.

“If you’re going to act like that, you should go,” she said, then amended what could be construed as a catty comment into something more kind. Mostly because she only had the emotional energy not to get along with one of her parents, and her mother had already claimed that prize. “Besides, they’ll be bringing my drugs any second. I plan to surrender to sleep, so I’m not going to be very conversational.”

As if to prove her point, one of the nurses walked in with a syringe. “Ready to feel better?” he asked cheerfully.

“Yes, and let me say, you’re my favorite person ever.” 

He winked. “I get that all the time.”

He slowly injected whatever the medication was into her IV. Victoria drew in a shallow breath as she waited to feel that first blurring of the edges of the pain. Modern medicine was a miracle she intended to embrace.

The nurse left. Milton took her good hand in his.

“I’ll let you rest,” he told her. “But I’ll be back later tonight.” He squeezed her fingers. “Tomorrow, when you’re released, I’m taking you home.”

Ugh. Victoria knew that her father wasn’t talking about the pretty condo he’d bought her when she’d turned twenty-one. Instead he meant the house where she’d grown up. The one where her mother still resided.

“I don’t need to move back,” she protested, feeling the first telltale easing of the pain. “I have a few bumps and bruises.”

“Along with a broken leg. And what about your ribs? You can barely move without wincing.”

“I have zero pain tolerance. I’m a total wimp.”

He frowned. “You’re tough and stoic. If you’re showing signs of pain, it’s bad. You’ll stay with your mother and me until you’re well enough to be on your own.” He pointed at her. “I mean it, Victoria. You don’t get a vote.”

Her father was rarely stern with her, so his sharp tone warned her he wasn’t kidding. And she knew from twenty-four years of experience that arguing with the man would get her nowhere. Milton didn’t take a stand very often, but when he did, he was the immovable object.

“I wish you loved me less,” she murmured, feeling a little floaty and stumbling over her words. “Okay, I feel drugs. Let me enjoy the experience of breathing without, you know, wanting to die.”

Oh, baby girl. You’ve always been difficult.”

“I know. It’s one of my best qualities.” Her eyes drifted closed. “Love you, Dad.”

“Love you more.” He kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you tonight.” 

“Come alone.”

His soft chuckle was the last thing she heard.

Excerpted from Otherwise Engaged by Susan Mallery, Copyright © 2025 by Susan Mallery Inc. Published by MIRA Books. 

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