Page 49 of Resurgence of the Pack

I giggled.Rock and roll.

Why would you rockandroll?she complained. In my head she swayed from side to side.Rocking is quite enough,she muttered as she stilled.

Focus,I chided her.We need to face the mysterious and potentially deadly Librarian.

If he’s deadly, he needs a new nickname. ‘The Librarian’ doesn’t inspire fear. There is nothing dangerous about books.

Au contraire, my dear wolf, the written word has more power than you know.

She huffed.Come on then, let’s walk into the lion’s bookish den.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. I reached forward, pulled on the heavy metal ring to open the ancient door, and then I stepped through it.

Chapter 26

Some sort of magic tingled over me as I walked through. ‘Hello?’ I called. There was no answer so I grimaced and started walking down a corridor.

I had been walking for a minute or two when I noticed that I’d passed the same painting twice. I kept on moving forward – and saw it for the third time. I was trapped in some sort of illusory loop.

We’re not really walking anywhere,I said to Esme as I panicked a little.At least, I don’t think so. We’re just moving down the same stretch of corridor over and over again.

I felt her frown.No, it’s not the same. Our scent is not here and if we’d walked it before, it would be.

Be that as it may, we’ve walked past this painting three times.

We stopped and examined it: it was humorous, quite at odds with the ambiance of the Bodleian. It was a painting of a red dragon sprawled under an apple tree, neat glassespoised on the end of his nose and a book clutched in his claws. Its title wasA book wyrm.Someone thought they were a comedian.

As I stared at the picture, the dragon set down his book and looked at me. ‘Only three goes!’ the thin, reedy voice of an old man warbled. ‘Not too shabby, my dear, not too shabby at all.’

I gaped. Had I watched too muchPuff the Magic Dragonas a kid?

‘Come on in!’ the dragon invited me, and suddenly the painting was hanging on a door rather than a wall as it had appeared moments earlier.

I pushed it open, strode through – and stopped.Thisred dragon wasn’t painted. He must have been twenty feet long, and the room I’d just walked into was absurdly hot. I’d be sweating in minutes.

I’d met dragons before, but mostly in their human form. On the rare occasions I’d seen Emory as a dragon, he’d been busy razing zombies for me so it wasn’t like I’d had a lot of time to examine him in detail.

What I noticed first about the Librarian was that his teethgleamed.‘Do you use teeth whitening?’ I blurted out.

He looked amused. ‘Ah. You’re oneof those,’ he said.

A moment later he shifted into his human form. Despite the heat, he was dressed in a jumper with leather elbow patches and he had wire-framed glasses perched on his nose. I wondered if they were necessary or an affectation like David’s.

‘One of those what?’ I asked belatedly.

‘I’d say you’re new to the Other realm. Are you?’

‘Don’t you know who I am?’ I asked curiously. Surely if he knew my question, he knew who I was.

‘Should I?’ he asked.

Well, there went my over-inflated ego. I gave him an awkward finger wave. ‘I’m Lucy, Queen of the Werewolves. For the UK, I mean, not the whole world.’

‘Ah, that must be nice for you.’

‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘Most of the other alphas want to kill me.’

‘And isthatwhy you want to recover the orb? To kill them first?’

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