Institute of Magic (Dragon's Gift: The Druid Book 1)

by Linsey Hall

  High against the wall, I caught sight of Mayhem, the winged ghost pug. She had a rag gripped in her teeth and was rubbing it against the spines of the books.

  “Earning your keep?” I asked her.

  She yipped.

  In front of the fire, two plush dog beds contained the other Pugs of Destruction—Chaos and Ruckus. They snored in front of the flames. Chaos’s devil horns glinted in the light, while Ruckus’s fangs gleamed on either side of his lolling tongue.

  I grinned at them, then searched the library for any sign of Potts, the day librarian. He’d chew my head off if I messed around in his library without him knowing it. I was willing to face down a half dozen demons, but I was not willing to get on Potts’s bad side more than I already was.

  “Oooooh, oooooh!” Ghostly wails echoed from somewhere in the library’s recesses.

  I grinned.

  Jackpot. It was Florian, my favorite ghost librarian. Bonus—I’d get to avoid the miserable Potts too.

  “Oh my fates, what terrifying apparition is this?” I cried, laying on an accent that I most closely associated with a rich lady from the 1800s.

  It probably sucked.

  A ghost drifted out from the wall. He was young, with thick glasses that magnified his eyes and clothes from the eighteenth century. His fancy wig was a bit askew, but I wouldn’t dare tell him. Florian Bumbledomber, the ghostly night librarian, could be quite sensitive.

  “Did I scare you?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Totally.”

  It was Florian’s greatest hobby, scaring the library visitors.

  “I’m glad you’re here, but why isn’t Potts? It’s the middle of the day.”

  “He had to attend the meeting in the round room.” Florian sniffed, as if offended he hadn’t been invited. “So I’ve taken over for him.”

  “Thank fates,” I said. “Because I really need your help.”

  He brightened. “You do? But why aren’t you at the meeting?”

  “I’m hunting answers. I already know what they’ll talk about.” I tapped my comms charm. “And Bree will update me.”

  “Excellent plan. What do you need?”

  I explained the clues I’d been given—an ancient conqueror’s city, likely in Italy. A place that was literally full of ancient cities.

  “Ooh, that’s a doozy,” he said. “There are quite a lot of places like that there. You’re going to need the ghost library.”

  I smiled. I loved the ghost library.

  He led me toward the far wall, which towered high, piled with books, then veered toward the left corner. A large wooden door was hidden in a nook, and he pushed it open.

  A wall of cold air rushed out, carrying along the scent of paper and leather and magic. Shining sparks drifted on the air as I followed him into the best part of the library.

  It was an enormous circular area, making the huge room we’d left behind look miniscule. We stepped out onto a platform in the middle of the ten-story space. The walls soared high above us and dropped down far below. The huge empty section in the middle allowed me to see all of the circular levels filled with books.

  Florian drifted onto the platform, sighing with contentment. “My domain.”

  It was much grayer and darker than the other library—but it was massive. And there was something hauntingly magical about it.

  Beams of light streamed down from the domed ceiling above, and dust motes glittered in the air. Shining golden balls of light floated near the ceiling.

  There were hundreds of nooks and crannies and different sections, all crammed with millions of books. I’d been here a couple times before, and it was still a maze my mind could hardly comprehend.

  I walked toward the railing, realizing that no stairs had appeared to admit me to the rest of the library like they often did. Which meant there was no way to access the books. If I jumped over the railing, I’d plummet five stories to the huge mosaic map that made up the floor.

  No thanks.

  I turned to Florian. “Do I have to make a contribution?”

  He looked around. “It seems that the library demands it.”

  Dang. I chewed on my lip.

  In order to access this part of the library, one had to occasionally make an offering. The first time I’d been here, Bree and I had been in search of answers. In order to gain access and get those answers, we’d written down everything we knew about crossing Death Valley.

  The library had been pleased and traded us info for info.

  But this time? I’d already told the library all the good stuff I knew.

  What new thing could I contribute?

  Florian took his usual seat by the door to wait, and I walked toward the table at the side of the platform. It was piled high with empty books and magical pens. All I had to do was think of something that I alone knew, and then put magical pen to magical paper.

  And voila!

  Except….

  I was fresh out of original ideas. I fiddled with a pen as my gaze traced over the table, catching sight of a box. It was ornately carved and about as large as a takeout pizza.

  Muffin sat on top of the box, staring at me.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  Just being helpful.

  Mayhem, the winged pug, flew into the room. She made a beeline for Muffin but didn’t chase him. The Cat Sìth was much scarier than Mayhem anyway. Muffin jumped off the table to join Mayhem.

  Off to find some hams. He flicked his tail. Use your talents.

  Use my talents? I watched him trot away, then opened the box. An array of paints and brushes sat there.

  Was that new? I hadn’t seen this last time I’d been here.

  A flash of white near the corner of the desk caught my eye. I leaned over and looked. Canvasses.

  Clearly the library wanted me to paint it something. I had no idea what, but since I didn’t feel prepared to write a treatise on something, I picked up the canvas.

  This, at least, I understood.

  I propped it on the desk, picked up some paints, and squirted colors on the palette that had sat under the paint box. I chose red on instinct, putting a broad swath across the white canvas.

  Most of my painting was done this way, colors flowing out of me like words. I rarely had a plan—just followed what was in my soul. Ever since I’d been little, painting had fascinated me. You could make your own reality on the canvas. In a world that had been full of fear and hiding, that had been intoxicating.

  But we’d never had the money for supplies, or the time. I’d put my creativity into the buggy, which had provided our desperately needed living.

  As a result, the buggy was an incredible work of art, though some might mistake it for simple machinery.

  But it wasn’t painting.

  Something in this spoke to my soul in a different way.

  So I kept at it, imagining what the library might want. As I worked, magic began to flow through me. It started as a tingle in my stomach, then spread out to my limbs. Unmistakable, but also a bit foreign.

  It was the new magic.

  The prophecy or seeing or sight or whatever it was.

  The magic directed my hand, taking over instinct and melding the two together. I chose brown, slashing it on the canvass. Then a lighter beige, black, white. The painting that began to form was unlike anything I’d ever painted.

  I covered up the slashes of bright color, replacing them instead with a more realistic rendering of a trapdoor in the corner of the library. It was beaten and old, with the corner of a bright rug overtop of it.

  When I stepped back, finished, the strangest sensation came over me.

  That door was real. And it was somewhere in the library.

  “Finished?” Florian asked, his voice sleepy.

  I turned. As usual, he’d fallen asleep in his chair while waiting.

  He stood and came closer. His eyes widened. “What is this?”

  “I have no idea.” I set the paintbrush down. “I painted i
t, but magic directed my hand.” I could probably tell Florian about the prophecy power I was beginning to develop—we could trust the ghost.

  But old habits died hard.

  He leaned toward the painting and squinted. “That’s the southwest corner of the ghost library. Rarely used anymore. I didn’t realize there was a trapdoor under there.”

  “Did I find it?”

  “I suppose we’d have to check to see if it’s really there.” He stood upright, then pointed to the railing that separated the platform from the rest of the library.

  Magic swirled around it, and the railing disappeared, replaced with stairs leading down to the next level. “The library seems to agree that you’ve contributed something of value, though.”

  “Can we go check out that trapdoor? Like, now?” I needed to know. Had my power really found something that even Florian didn’t know existed?

  9

  “Let’s go!” Florian’s voice was tinged with excitement, and he rubbed his hands together. “An adventure! To find a secret passage.”

  I grinned and followed him down the stairs, around the lower level to the left. Occasionally, the ghostly form of Mayhem, the winged pug, appeared in the corner of my vision. She must already be done with the hams.

  “How are you able to say which part of this round room is the southwest corner? It has no corners.”

  “I guess, mostly.” He grinned. “It’s my domain. I do what I want.”

  Fair enough. He led me toward a set of bookshelves that looked just like the ones I’d painted. And there was the rug, though it was no longer as bright as it had once been. As I’d painted it in my picture.

  So had my power seen into the past as well?

  Weird.

  Florian bent down and flipped up the rug.

  It revealed only bare wooden floor.

  Shit.

  But relief followed. Was this good or bad, that my magic hadn’t been a real vision?

  Did that mean I was going insane?

  Florian frowned. “This can’t be right.”

  “No?”

  He knelt down and began knocking at the wooden floorboards, inspecting the edges of each piece of wood. As he worked, he hummed to himself.

  I got down on my knees, joining him. As I poked at the floorboards, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to find something or not.

  Then my fingertips slipped into a larger than normal crevice between the boards. The board jiggled. I pulled it up easily.

  “Florian.”

  He swung around from where he was kneeling, eyes brightening. “Now this is something!”

  We removed the board, which made it easy to pry up the next one and the next. Soon, we’d revealed a trapdoor, long ago covered over by a false floor.

  “Wow.” I looked up at Florian. “That’s cool.”

  “Indeed.” He pulled on the trapdoor, but it was locked. He yanked harder, straining. His wig tipped to the side, going slightly askew.

  Mayhem appeared, little wings fluttering wildly to keep her chubby body aloft, and she pulled at the back of his coat, trying to help. Then Muffin appeared, joining the endeavor with Mayhem.

  I stifled a laugh. Their efforts weren’t doing much, so laughing out loud would just add salt to the wound.

  “Let me try.” Some ghosts could interact with the real world, but they weren’t always very strong. I replaced Florian, pulling on the metal ring on the trapdoor. Magic sparked against my hands, and the door held fast. “It’s enchanted.”

  Florian grinned. “That means there is something good down there!”

  I wondered if it had anything to do with the mystery I was trying to solve but doubted it. I’d painted the door, revealing it as my admittance price to the library, but I felt no pull toward it. Whatever was down there interested me, but I didn’t think it held answers to my most pressing problems.

  So unfortunately, it would have to wait.

  “I’ll come back to help with it later,” I said. “But right now, I really need to figure out where the thieves took the ancientus spell.”

  Florian nodded eagerly. “Indeed. That is a problem of the utmost importance.” He shook his head. “What’s happening to the people who are hunting it is terrible! To lose your magic.” He shuddered. “Unimaginable!”

  “Agreed.” My magic was only partially gone, and it felt awful. I stood, turning to the library. “I’m trying to identify an ancient place, one torn down by heat and the rage of nature. An ancient place of conquerors and villains that has grown again.” Mordaca’s words came to me naturally. “And I think it’s in Italy.”

  Caro’s clue.

  The magic in my comms charm crackled, and I touched the metal with my fingertips.

  “Ana?” Bree’s voice whispered out. “Another team found a clue. The name Abbondanza. No one knows who that is, though.”

  “Thank you, Bree,” I said.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Another team found a group of demons wearing the silver circle tattoo. That makes at least five us to find them. We think that there are bases of operation all over the world.”

  And we were all working together to find the answer. Competing to find the spell and win the prize, but together, we were finding the clues to solve this.

  I smiled. This was my kind of place.

  It fueled my determination to find the answer.

  “Good luck,” Bree whispered.

  “That name sounds Roman,” Florian said.

  “It does, doesn’t it? But Rome…” I felt nothing when I thought of Rome. Even though it was the conqueror’s city, was it the one I sought?

  Florian cleared his throat. “Dearest library. Could you help our guest?”

  Nothing happened at first. Then a light glowed across the great open space in the middle of the room. It was two levels down, close to the bottom.

  “Let’s go!” Florian hurried off, a skip in his step.

  I followed, my heart thundering as we neared the glowing light. A sense of excitement filled me. Of knowing.

  There would be answers here.

  We found a collection of dusty old books that were just begging for Mayhem’s dusting cloth. In fact, she zipped forward, the rag gripped in her teeth, and shined up the spines of the books. Muffin had disappeared, no doubt to take a nap or steal something tiny.

  I knelt down to inspect the books, but the golden titles were long faded with time. Gently, I pulled two off the shelf and stood. I turned, looking for a table and chairs.

  The items in question were floating toward me, carried by a sparkle of golden magic. They stopped in front of me.

  “I think the library knows you’re doing important work,” Florian said.

  “Wow.” Talk about cool.

  I sat, slowly flipping open the pages of the books. The first showed the ruins of an ancient city. Herculaneum, in southern Italy.

  It was from the Roman period. But I felt nothing.

  I flipped through the next book, having no more luck. I reached for another, realizing the Florian was stacking them up next to me. “Thank you.”

  “For the cause.”

  I hoped I was up to the cause. My eyes began to cross as I carefully turned pages, looking at old illustrations and photographs of ancient sites all over Italy.

  The problem was that our clues were so vague. The jerks who’d stolen the spell were probably laughing their asses off, knowing that they were so well concealed we’d never find them.

  I couldn’t blame them, though. After I’d seen Lachlan fight, covering my tracks like a super pro was the only way I’d ever steal anything from him.

  I was on the last book when a page glowed with light. I blinked. “Florian, do you see that?”

  “See what?”

  Magic vibrated inside me, drawing me to the glowing page.

  But the page wasn’t glowing. It was my vision.

  What the heck was this new magic?

  It wasn’t quite like being a seer.

  But it
was definitely guiding me.

  “Pompeii?” Florian asked.

  I looked at the image of the destroyed city. Bodies cased in ash lay in the street, a horrifying image of what had happened in the ancient town in 79 A.D.

  “I guess so.” I pointed to the word Abbondanza on the page. Apparently, it was a street in the destroyed city. “It looks like I’m going to Pompeii.”

  I made it back to the round room just as the meeting was dispersing. Bree and Rowan were already gone, but Lachlan stood near the front.

  I pushed through the departing crowd and made my way up to him.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “Hunting answers. My sisters kept me informed during the meeting.” I pointed to the comms charm around my neck.

  “So that’s why they were whispering. Did you find anything?”

  “A couple of things.” I thought of the trapdoor but didn’t mention it. “I think the spell has gone to Pompeii.”

  “That’s possible. It fits the clues. But why there?”

  “Like you said, it fits the clues. And my gut is telling me.” My gut being some unfamiliar new magic.

  “Your gut told you Paris, too.”

  “It’s a reliable gut.” Okay, this convo was getting weird. “Should we tell everyone to look in Pompeii?”

  I wanted that half-a-million-pound prize, but I wasn’t going to risk the world to get it. We needed every advantage we could get.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “When the groups split up last time, they still found good information. And if your gut is wrong, we need more people hunting in other places.”

  He was right. There was no guarantee that my gut would be right—or that we’d find exactly what we sought in Pompeii.

  “Okay, good. What about everyone’s missing magic?”

  “We think it’s linked to the stolen ancientus spell. When we find the spell, we’ll find the person who cursed us. But the Protectorate is trying to locate another solution in the meantime.”

  “Good. I don’t like our chances of retrieving the spell without our magic.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I need to change before we go to Pompeii. Can I meet you at the entrance hall in thirty?”

  “I look forward to it.”

  I hurried out of the room and raced up the stairs to my apartment door. I slipped inside and ran up more stairs—sometimes it seemed as if the castle was nothing but halls and stairs—and I slipped through into my apartment.