Free The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh

crystalline cold. Opening his eyes, Jack realized that he was outside. The library was hundreds of feet below.
    “It’s okay,” Euri said. “I got you.”
    “That was weird,” Jack exclaimed.
    “What was?”
    “I felt like I floated. . . .”
    “That’s because I grabbed you. Good thing for you I’m fast.”
    Jack didn’t want to argue, but several seconds before Euri had grabbed him, he felt as if he had hovered on his own. His thoughts were interrupted by a gust of wind. Jack looked down and realized that they were higher than they’d been before. Euri was making ascending loops around a skyscraper with a pointy steel top lit up like a torch. “Where are we going?” he asked.
    “The Chrysler Building,” she said. They landed on the outstretched neck of one of the steel eagles that jutted from the building’s corners. The city below them was no longer made of steel and concrete but of a million white lights. Jack could see across it to the Empire State Building, its top floors and antenna dressed in holiday reds and greens, and beyond, to the dark expanse of New York Harbor. He tried to imagine the thousands of people eating and arguing and sleeping and working below. But this high up, except for the occasional gust of wind, it was quiet, and he couldn’t quite believe anyone else existed in Manhattan but Euri and him. He looked at her and realized that she had been watching him. “I could stay here forever,” he said.
    Euri grimaced. “And it wouldn’t change a bit. This isn’t life.” She pointed down at the city. “ That’s life.”
    Jack didn’t bother to look. “That’s having no friends at school and your mother being dead. . . .” He suddenly stopped. He had never said this to anyone.
    Euri sighed. “At least it’s life.” She shook her head and pulled him down to sit on the eagle’s neck. “Come on, let’s take a look at that book.”
    Jack propped open the Unofficial Guide and they bent over the first page. Euri pointed to an inscription below the title and read it aloud. “‘This volume has been compiled by truth seekers who shall go unnamed. Felix qui portuit rerum cognoscere causas .’”
    “That’s Latin, right? What does it mean?”
    “‘Happy is he who could know the cause of all things,’” Jack said. “It’s Virgil.”
    He turned a few more pages until he reached the table of contents, which was also handwritten. He glanced at a few of the chapter titles: Now That You’re Really Dead, The Real Truth about the Occult, Confessions of an Ex-Guard, Living Visitors to the Underworld. “Let’s take a look at that last one,” he said.
    Euri flipped to the chapter and began to read aloud as Jack looked on. “‘One of our favorite bits of misinformation from the Now That You’re Dead seminar concerns living visitors to the underworld. Contrary to regulation 41.5a, from time to time the living have ventured into the world of the dead. And rather than create more problems for the dead, often they are destined to help them.
    “‘In order to enter into the underworld, the living must possess a golden bough. This bough may take the form of any object (see Henry Luce Adams’s fascinating case study “The Golden Pastrami Sandwich”) but will only appear golden to the person fated to have it.’”
    “The subway token I gave Charon,” Jack explained to Euri. “That was my golden bough.”
    Euri nodded. “I guess you’re destined to be here, then.”
    “Destined to help my mom. Keep reading.”
    “‘Egbert Viele’s Sanitary and Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York is also recommended as a topographical guide to the underworld. There are also five other ...’”
    “Wait,” Jack interrupted. “You skipped a line.”
    “‘However,’” she read, “‘as the regulation correctly states, living visitors to the underworld are in constant danger of being caught and destroyed by Cerberus.’”
    Jack gave her a fierce look, but Euri just