The Key at Closing Time (The Living Crossroads)

Previously published as The Keykeeper's Awakening: A Keykeeper's Journey Begins by Douglas Lima.

Alice has eighteen minutes left in another late shift when a stranger walks into her café and leaves an impossible Key behind.

By the end of the night, Alice and her seven-year-old son, Leo, are no longer on Earth.

The Key has brought them to the Tavern of Realms, a living inn hidden between worlds, where dragons drink at the bar, corridors rearrange themselves, and every door can open somewhere impossible. The Tavern needs a new Keykeeper. Apparently, it has chosen Alice.

At first, she's more worried about keeping Leo safe and figuring out how to get home than saving anyone else's world. But rifts are beginning to tear through the realms connected to the Tavern, and someone is deliberately making them worse.

Learning to use the Key means stepping through those doors herself.

As Alice is pulled deeper into the Tavern's past, Leo discovers that the place responds to him in ways no one can explain. Their strange new home is hiding secrets of its own, and the enemy hunting the Key may know more about it than Alice does.

The longer they stay, the harder it becomes to imagine leaving, and the more they have to lose if the Tavern falls.