Dragon Keepers #3: The Dragon in the Library (12 page)

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and Daisy and Emmy into Daisy's, too exhausted to even zip themselves in. All three fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

As soon as Daisy opened her eyes, she had a feeling that she was the last one to wake up. She looked around the library. All the other kids had already rolled up their sleeping bags and now sat in a circle on the floor eating breakfast. Daisy rolled over and dozed off again.

The next time she opened her eyes, she saw the blue washcloth. Hadn't she left it behind in the Scriptorium? She reached for it. It was neatly folded and smelled clean and yet deliciously spicy, like the Scriptorium. She smiled, imagining Mr. Wink leaning over a washtub full of soapsuds with his sleeves rolled up to his very sharp elbows. She turned her head the other way and saw Jesse sitting on his rolled-up sleeping bag, reading and eating.

"Is that a sandwich?" Daisy croaked, her voice hoarse from all the screaming she had done while flying on Emmy's back.
Flying on Emmy's back!
She hugged herself with happiness.

"It's a Green Eggs and Hamwich," Jesse said. He had her wildflower notebook open in his lap, and she could tell he was studying the plans she had copied down from Balthazaar's book the night

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before. She looked around for Emmy and saw her crouched nearby, eyeing Jesse's breakfast and licking her chops.

"Hey," Daisy said. "How come you guys didn't wake me up?" She sat up and stretched.

"You looked really exhausted," Jesse said. "Your hair, especially," he added with a snicker.

Daisy reached up and felt the large rat's nest up there. She got to her feet and rolled up her sleeping bag. Then she trudged off to the washroom and used a comb to work the tangles out. It took a long time. When she was finished, her hair stood up around her head like a lopsided lamp shade. So much for the beautiful princess she had seen in the Toilet Glass.

Daisy went into the big room and swiped the last two Green Eggs and Hamwiches off the tray. Then she wandered casually off into the back room, where she tossed one of the Hamwiches to Emmy. Emmy swallowed it whole. It wasn't until the sheepdog was licking her chops and begging for another that Daisy realized Emmy had eaten her first meat without spitting it out.

"I gotta tell Jess!" she said.

But when she and Emmy went back into the big room, Mr. Stenson and Mrs. Thackeray were bundling paper plates into garbage bags and

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clapping their hands to remind everyone to pack up all their stuff.

"We wouldn't want you to leave anything valuable behind...like a gerbil turd or a rabbit pellet," Mr. Stenson said with a tired smile.

Grown-ups had begun to show up, parents of the younger kids and those who lived too far away to walk home. Mr. Stenson and Mrs. Thackeray flung open the front doors and cheerfully said goodbye to the kids, their pets, and their parents. It looked to Daisy as if the librarians couldn't wait to air the place out and return it to its normal book-smelling,
No
Pets Allowed state.

As soon as she stepped outside, Daisy felt a burst of cool, fresh air on her face. "Emmy's got her wings, we've got the castle plans, and the heat wave's over!" she crowed.

Emmy barked joyfully.

"Yay!" Jesse joined in.

On the way home, Daisy told Jesse about Emmy eating her first meat for breakfast.

Jesse nodded thoughtfully and said, "So maybe now that she has wings, her eating habits will change. I wonder if anything else will change."

Daisy wasn't sure how she felt about that.

When they had closed the garage door and Emmy had unmasked, the first question out of

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Emmy's mouth was "Is there any of your mother's pot roast in the refrigerator?"

Daisy hesitated, then said, "I don't think so, but there's a package of minimally processed sliced turkey."

"Bring it on," Emmy said eagerly. "I'll
gobble
it right up."

Jesse pointed at Emmy and burst out laughing. "Gobble! That's a good one, Em. Did you hear that, Daze? Emmy made
another
joke!"

But Daisy was too unsettled by the new carnivorous Emmy to find anything funny. She couldn't help but think that the next step in Emmy's evolutionary development was the hunting and eating of small, defenseless woodland creatures.

When they went into the house, they saw a "welcome home" note on the kitchen table from Aunt Maggie, who had already left for work. They looked around for Uncle Joe and found him in the upstairs hallway switching off the attic exhaust fan.

"It'll be nice to give this poor overworked sucker a rest," he said. He turned and gave Daisy a long, curious look. "Did you do something new to your hair?"

Jesse snorted.

"I like it," Uncle Joe said, cocking his head to one side. "It's light and...poufy."

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"I slept on it funny," Daisy muttered. Then they followed Uncle Joe from room to room as he switched off the other fans and they told him all about the party. He chuckled over
Poodles for Pinheads
and then asked, "Where are you three gallivanting off to today?"

"After I take a shower and wash my
poufy
hair, we're going back up to Old Mine Lane," Daisy told him.

Uncle Joe grinned. "That's some place, eh? But I'm not sure how Ms. Huffington will feel about you playing Storm the Castle with her brand-new old home."

"Don't worry. She's too busy bossing the landscapers around to even notice us," Daisy said.

"I bet she's showing them who's Top Dog," Uncle Joe said.

The cousins showered and changed clothes and then went down to the kitchen to make lunch, including the entire package of sliced turkey for Emmy. Then they packed Miss Alodie's tin of Knock-'em, Sock-'em Dog Biscuits, the nearly full thermos of valerian tea, their weird earmuffs, the Toilet Glass, and, most important of all, Daisy's wildflower notebook with the floor plans of the castle inside it.

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After that, they made a quick detour to the Dell to drop off the sphere at the Museum of Magic. While they were disappointed that it was back to being a rust-encrusted sphere, it had certainly proven itself to be even more magical than either of them had ever imagined. On the way to get their bikes, they passed the Rock Shop. Uncle Joe called out to them through the screen, "Have fun storming the castle!"

"We will!" they shouted back as they hopped on their bikes and headed off. This time, Daisy led the way and Jesse rode behind holding onto Emmy's leash. They took care riding through town--which was much more lively now that the heat had broken--then rode up into the foothills of the Hobhorn and down to the dead end of Old Mine Lane. They stashed their bikes in some overgrown lilac bushes there near the turnabout and waded through the weeds toward the wall.

"Okay. What's the plan?" Daisy said.

Jesse took out the wildflower notebook, opened to the plans, and passed it to Daisy. "We find the secret passageway, rescue the professor, and then..." He trailed off.

"Sounds like Storming the Castle to me," said Daisy.

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"More like a
stealth
storm," Jesse said.

Daisy, studying the plans, tried hard to remember the precise position of the towers behind the plywood walls. She turned slowly and stopped, facing the side of the mountain. "If the towers are lined up the way they were back in the kingdom of Uffington, the outside entrance to the secret passageway should be right about
there,"
she said, pointing to a wall of sheer rock in the side of the hill.

The three of them walked over to the hillside. There they found a neat square hole cut into the rock.

"If I didn't know better," Jesse said, "I'd swear that was a little doggie door."

Daisy nodded. "No way we're going to fit through it."

"So it's probably not the secret passageway," Jesse said.

Emmy lifted her head and barked twice, which meant
you've got that right
.

Daisy was greatly relieved. She hated the idea of crawling into a dark hole, the way they had done the day they had discovered the door in the earth near the barn.

"Okay, now what?" Jesse said.

"Any ideas, Emmy?" Daisy asked.

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Perhaps because it wasn't a question that had a one-bark or two-bark answer, Emmy unmasked. Daisy stole a quick look around to make sure they were alone.

Emmy said, "Maybe when the Slayer had this place built, he changed the location of the entrance to the secret passage."

"Okay," said Jesse, "so we circle the plywood fence until we find it."

"Plan!" said Daisy. "And if someone comes, Emmy, mask quickly."

"Quick as a lightning bolt!" Emmy assured her.

Three abreast and spaced widely apart, they proceeded to move in a slow circle around the plywood fence. They came upon an old unicycle with a flat tire, a crumpled shopping cart, an ancient icebox, the long front seat of an old pickup truck with the stuffing oozing out, some rusted wire bed-springs, and three busted umbrellas. Eventually, they arrived back where they had started.

That was when Emmy shouted, "Bingo!"

The cousins joined her. She was standing about ten yards away from the sheer rock face, next to a moss-covered statue of a skinny dog facing the castle.

"It's a whippet!" said Jesse.

"What's a whippet?" asked Daisy.

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"It's a superskinny dog once bred for hunting. And look," he said, clearing away the moss. "It's got jeweled eyes."

"Wow! Are those real emeralds?" Daisy asked.

"Peridots," said Emmy, peering closely at them. "Trifling stones...compared to emeralds."

Jesse muttered under his breath.

"What did you say?" Daisy asked him.

"I said, 'yellowish green, like a snake.'" He shivered gloomily. "This is the entrance to the secret passageway, all right."

Daisy scraped away the moss from the dog's face and neck. Its slender neck appeared to be jointed. She grasped the head in both hands and tried to move it.

"Let me," said Emmy. She held the head in one hand and turned it easily, like unscrewing the cap on a bottle. The dog's sharp muzzle now pointed toward the cliff face.

Daisy said to Emmy, "Try pressing the eyeballs."

Emmy poked her talons into the dog's eyeballs. Sure enough, the eyeballs could be pressed inward and a section of the cliff face before the three opened up, like a set of sliding stone doors.

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Chapter 8 CHAPTER EIGHT A COLD SPELL

Jesse got that sudden sinking feeling in his chest.

Daisy boldly approached the doorway. Jesse hesitated, then went along with her. Through the wide doorway, a set of marble steps wound off to the right and disappeared into the pitch-dark.

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Daisy pounded her forehead and groaned. "We forgot the flashlight!"

"Not a problem!" said Emmy. She knelt and gathered a few rocks from the ground, rubbing them briskly in her hands.

"What are you doing, Em?" Jesse asked.

"I'm making light of things," she said, chuckling. She opened her hands. The stones gave off a bright glow.

"Holy moly," said Daisy.

"Better than a flashlight," said Emmy, "and no batteries required." She handed Jesse a stone. He was afraid it might be hot, but it was as cool as...stone. Emmy handed a stone to Daisy and kept a much larger one for herself.

"All set, then," said Jesse. He remained rooted to the spot, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

"I'm the one with claustrophobia, so you go first," Daisy said, nudging him forward.

"Right," he said, and stepped up to the opening. It was like entering a sort of foyer, with the walls and ceiling all made of the same smooth golden marble as the stairs. The tawny stone sparkled in the light from his hand. It didn't
feel
like an underground space. It wasn't like the old mine, all made of packed dirt. This was more like an underground

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palace, spanking clean. Why, then, did it make him feel so uneasy? He put on a bold front. "Daze, I don't think you're going to mind this a bit," he told her.

Daisy went behind him, with Emmy at her heels. "Not bad," she said, looking around. "Beats the heck out of tree roots and earthworms." When she spoke, her breath came out in puffs of steam, the way it does on a wintry day.

"Yeah, but somebody forgot to turn on the furnace. It's freezing in here," said Jesse.

Daisy gave him a superior look. "It's just a secret passageway, Jess," she said. "We're not moving in."

"Right," Jesse said shortly. "In that case, let's get going." He tramped down the steps as they curved away in the direction of the castle. "So far, so good." But the deeper they went, the colder it got. Jesse's nose started to run and his fingertips grew numb.

"Not good," Emmy said from behind him. "The Scriptorium was much nicer. It smelled good. This place smells...like a doo-doo factory. This place is bad."

"I'm with you there," said Daisy, rubbing her arms for warmth.

Jesse took a whiff. They were right. The air smelled gassy. "It reminds me of a catacomb!" he said, forcing some enthusiasm into his voice.