The potential sneaky trapdoor continued to deny its existence, and Skulduggery began to wonder what the sticking book meant. It was one of the classic ways to hide a secret passage. Skulduggery himself had managed to find quite a few secrets by poking around in libraries like this. If everything changed to be more dangerous at night, as practically everyone Skulduggery had spoken to confirmed, then... maybe whatever the book triggered only worked at night.

Pushing the thought to the back of his mind for now, Skulduggery returned his attention to the girl's questions. "Yes," he answered her first one. "Some are more useful than others, however." An image of Ghastly as a statue swam briefly back to mind. He ignored it.

It turned out that she was a mage as well, but in a completely different sense than Skulduggery was familiar with. "I see," he responded, intrigued. "My sorcery is a little different, I'm afraid. Relatively few people can actually use magic, but those that can become very different from non-mages." He used her word for now, with only a slight hint of hesitation. "Such as a much longer life span. I'm over four hundred years old, for example, and that's not even the oldest I've met. If it weren't for magic, we wouldn't be able to fit all the candles on the cake."

He was joking, of course. Skulduggery didn't have birthdays anymore. They tended to lose all meaning after you had died.

He was about to ask her another question when she interrupted with one of her own. He glanced back at the Oxford Book of English Verse. "Perhaps. Are you familiar with the cliche of the book that triggers a rotating bookcase?"