Bookworm Read Free Page B

twitching wand arm, and then passed it back to her tormentor. Maybe she could take longer than she would normally have done to locate all the books.
    “It seems to be in order,” she said, blandly. “Why don’t you take a seat and wait while I go find the books?”
    “I’m in Room Fourteen,” Millicent said, flatly. “Bring them to me there. I shall have others ready for you to find by then.”
    She swept out of the reading room, leaving Elaine staring after her in helpless rage. Millicent had always been a bitch, but then she’d had the breeding and magical power to back it up. She hadn’t even been significantly punished after the frog incident, even though the Administrator himself had lectured her in front of the entire school. A less well-connected girl might well have been expelled, or forced to serve as the test subject for junior potions. Shaking her head, she picked up the list and skimmed through it again. Some of the items on the list were definitely not books she wanted Millicent to read.
    But there was no choice. Leaving Daphne behind in the reading room, she stepped into the office and through the hanging mirror on the wall. Like most magical buildings, the Great Library had a reflection within the mirrors, an alternate dimension that could only be accessed by its staff. Elaine felt her head swim as she entered the mirror world and looked around. Great stacks of books lay everywhere, some covered with dust that suggested they hadn’t been touched for a thousand years. There were some books, Elaine knew, that hadn’t been opened even during the worst days of the Necromantic Wars. Miss Prim had told her that the sorcerers of those days had feared the secrets within the books far more than they’d feared the Witch-King and his armies of undead servants.
    Where the mundane world had the reading rooms and other compartments for the staff, the mirrored world had endless rooms of books. Elaine picked up the list, selected the first title, and concentrated, allowing the magic in the Great Library to guide her to the book. It had been stuffed into a nearby room and buried under a pile of other dusty tomes, as if the last user had taken care to hide it from casual view. Only the staff – and the senior wizards – were permitted access to the mirrored dimension, and the magic in the Library made it impossible to hide anything permanently, but someone had definitely tried to conceal it. Elaine glanced at the title as she pulled it out from its hiding place, shaking her head. A tome on ways to boost one’s own power reserves by uniting with other magicians was the last thing Millicent should have needed. Elaine knew, to her everlasting regret, that Millicent had power to spare. And why would her aunt have given her permission to read the books anyway?
    She mulled over the question as she found the other books on the list. One of them was on transfiguration, ways to maintain a change long enough for reality to catch up with the spell, while another was on ways to brew complicated potions. Two of the books were written in a language that had been dead and gone for a thousand years, although a simple translation spell would allow Millicent to read them. And one of them talked about bargains that could be made with the gods. Elaine smiled savagely as she added that one to the growing pile of books. There were enough cautionary tales about magicians who tried to bargain with the gods to make her hope that was what Millicent had in mind. But then, Millicent was good at avoiding blame for her actions. Maybe she’d manage to charm the gods too.
    One of the books was out already, according to the Library. It was a strange book, one that discussed ways to tame magical creatures like werewolves and mermaids, at least according to Millicent’s notes. Elaine suspected that it was actually something far darker. They’d learned about potions that could be made by someone with access to werewolf fur, or mermaid scales,