Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1)

by Leigh Bardugo

this was the moment he’d been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.

That was what girls did when their lives fell apart. They tried to find a window to climb out of. Community college. Homemade soaps. A little jewelry-making business on the side.