Something bit me in the ass.

I shrieked like a toddler deprived of her ice cream cone, whirled around with my jade knife poised to gut the offender, and found myself staring at yet another endless wall of musty old books.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been ambushed in the nexus library — the books were damn ornery — but it had been getting worse since I’d admitted to myself that I was lost.

Yes, I — a dowser of some skill — was lost in a library full of magic. I could taste, but not pinpoint, the spiced magic of the dragonskin map that I’d left at the table I was camped out at doing research today. I just couldn’t seem to follow that taste back through the shelves and the random stacks of books.

Tomes, not books. That was the proper word to use when the book was leather-bound and handwritten in foreign, dead, or runed languages.

The problem — according to Branson — was that the librarian hadn’t been seen in a few centuries. So, organization had crumbled into disarray verging on chaos. Though I had an inkling that the sword master was joking or exaggerating, because there weren’t so many dragons in the world that one could go missing for centuries and have no one looking for him.

I sighed and craned my neck in the opposite direction, seeing only an endless row of dusty, haphazardly piled books. I had purposefully made sure I could see the library entrance from my table so that I wouldn’t get lost. Except now I couldn’t find the entrance or the table.

Something shifted in my peripheral vision and I spun to jab my knife at it.

Nothing was there.

“We’ll see who has the last laugh if I get my hands on you,” I said. “I’m an alchemist, you know!”

Right. Now I was declaring my magical prowess to a bookshelf. It was childish, but I had a lingering suspicion that the books were only disrespectful because I wasn’t a full-blooded dragon.

Dragon prejudice permeated the nexus, and I was the only half-witch walking the halls … or, at least, currently trying to walk the aisles of the library.

I felt as if I’d been trapped in this damn room since September. And maybe I had. Time moved oddly in the nexus — sometimes incredibly slowly, and what would feel like hours of training turned out to only be thirty minutes when I returned to the bakery. And sometimes — say, if there were any guardians around — minutes turned into hours when I walked back through a portal. My study sessions in the library were usually pretty bang-on in real-world time, though.

And I remembered Christmas, so I couldn’t have been stuck here since autumn. It only felt like that because I was getting nothing accomplished but moving the dust around and being a plaything for the books.

Actually, I had accomplished one thing. My outfit rocked. I was wearing the black cashmere and silk sweater dress that my mother, Scarlett, had given me for Christmas. Today I’d paired the midthigh-length sweater with thick black tights and my wine-colored Bondgirl Fluevog boots — a gift from Gran. The sturdy but still stylish boots dressed down the outfit, but I wasn’t stupid enough to wear heels anywhere near the nexus anymore, even on my nontraining days.

I’d left my blond curls loose and reapplied my rosy lip gloss frequently to compensate for the lack of heels.

Yeah, I was hoping to run into Warner.

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Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser 5) ebook will be available THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2015 on Amazon, Kobo, iTunes, B&N, and Smashwords. The paperback will follow about two weeks later. Pre-orders are going up this week.

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