The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable. To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, ancient and worn. But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.

Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room was deserted on this late-September afternoon, and requests for library materials were filled quickly now that the summer crush of visiting scholars was over and the madness of the fall term had not yet begun. Even so, I was surprised when Sean stopped me at the call desk.

“Dr. Bishop, your manuscripts are up,” he whispered, voice tinged with a touch of mischief. The front of his argyle sweater was streaked with the rusty traces of old leather bindings, and he brushed at it self-consciously. A lock of sandy hair tumbled over his forehead when he did.

“Thanks,” I said, flashing him a grateful smile. I was flagrantly disregarding the rules limiting the number of books a scholar could call in a single day. Sean, who’d shared many a drink with me in the pink-stuccoed pub across the street in our graduate-student days, had been filling my requests without complaint for more than a week. “And stop calling me Dr. Bishop. I always think you’re talking to someone else.”

He grinned back and slid the manuscripts—all containing fine examples of alchemical illustrations from the Bodleian’s collections—over his battered oak desk, each one tucked into a protective gray cardboard box. “Oh, there’s one more.” Sean disappeared into the cage for a moment and returned with a thick, quarto-size manuscript bound simply in mottled calfskin. He laid it on top of the pile and stooped to inspect it. The thin gold rims of his glasses sparked in the dim light provided by the old bronze reading lamp that was attached to a shelf. “This one’s not been called up for a while. I’ll make a note that it needs to be boxed after you return it.”

“Do you want me to remind you?”

“No. Already made a note here.” Sean tapped his head with his fingertips.

“Your mind must be better organized than mine.” My smile widened.

Sean looked at me shyly and tugged on the call slip, but it remained where it was, lodged between the cover and the first pages. “This one doesn’t want to let go,” he commented.

Muffled voices chattered in my ear, intruding on the familiar hush of the room.

“Did you hear that?” I looked around, puzzled by the strange sounds.

“What?” Sean replied, looking up from the manuscript.

Traces of gilt shone along its edges and caught my eye. But those faded touches of gold could not account for a faint, iridescent shimmer that seemed to be escaping from between the pages. I blinked.

“Nothing.” I hastily drew the manuscript toward me, my skin prickling when it made contact with the leather. Sean’s fingers were still holding the call slip, and now it slid easily out of the binding’s grasp. I hoisted the volumes into my arms and tucked them under my chin, assailed by a whiff of the uncanny that drove away the library’s familiar smell of pencil shavings and floor wax.

“Diana? Are you okay?” Sean asked with a concerned frown.

“Fine. Just a bit tired,” I replied, lowering the books away from my nose.

I walked quickly through the original, fifteenth-century part of the library, past the rows of Elizabethan reading desks with their three ascending bookshelves and scarred writing surfaces. Between them, Gothic windows directed the reader’s attention up to the coffered ceilings, where bright paint and gilding picked out the details of the university’s crest of three crowns and open book and where its motto, “God is my illumination,” was proclaimed repeatedly from on high.

Another American academic, Gillian Chamberlain, was my sole companion in the library on this Friday night. A classicist who taught at Bryn Mawr, Gillian spent her time poring over scraps of papyrus sandwiched between sheets of glass. I sped past her, trying to avoid eye contact, but the creaking of the old floor gave me away.

My skin tingled as it always did when another witch looked at me.

“Diana?” she called from the gloom. I smothered a sigh and stopped.

“Hi, Gillian.” Unaccountably possessive of my hoard of manuscripts, I remained as far from the witch as possible and angled my body so they weren’t in her line of sight.

“What are you doing for Mabon?” Gillian was always stopping by my desk to ask me to spend time with my “sisters” while I was in town. With the Wiccan celebrations of the autumn equinox just days away, she was redoubling her efforts to bring me into the Oxford coven.

“Working,” I said promptly.

“There are some very nice witches here, you know,” Gillian said with prim disapproval. “You really should join us on Monday.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it,” I said, already moving in the direction of the Selden End, the airy seventeenth-century addition that ran perpendicular to the main axis of Duke Humfrey’s. “I’m working on a conference paper, though, so don’t count on it.” My aunt Sarah had always warned me it wasn’t possible for one witch to lie to another, but that hadn’t stopped me from trying.

Gillian made a sympathetic noise, but her eyes followed me.

Back at my familiar seat facing the arched, leaded windows, I resisted the temptation to dump the manuscripts on the table and wipe my hands. Instead, mindful of their age, I lowered the stack carefully.

The manuscript that had appeared to tug on its call slip lay on top of the pile. Stamped in gilt on the spine was a coat of arms belonging to Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782. I reached out, touching the brown leather.

A mild shock made me withdraw my fingers quickly, but not quickly enough. The tingling traveled up my arms, lifting my skin into tiny goose pimples, then spread across my shoulders, tensing the muscles in my back and neck. These sensations quickly receded, but they left behind a hollow feeling of unmet desire. Shaken by my response, I stepped away from the library table.

Even at a safe distance, this manuscript was challenging me—threatening the walls I’d erected to separate my career as a scholar from my birthright as the last of the Bishop witches. Here, with my hard-earned doctorate, tenure, and promotions in hand and my career beginning to blossom, I’d renounced my family’s heritage and created a life that depended on reason and scholarly abilities, not inexplicable hunches and spells. I was in Oxford to complete a research project. Upon its conclusion, my findings would be published, substantiated with extensive analysis and footnotes, and presented to human colleagues, leaving no room for mysteries and no place in my work for what could be known only through a witch’s sixth sense.

But—albeit unwittingly—I had called up an alchemical manuscript that I needed for my research and that also seemed to possess an otherworldly power that was impossible to ignore. My fingers itched to open it and learn more. Yet an even stronger impulse held me back: Was my curiosity intellectual, related to my scholarship? Or did it have to do with my family’s connection to witchcraft?

I drew the library’s familiar air into my lungs and shut my eyes, hoping that would bring clarity. The Bodleian had always been a sanctuary to me, a place unassociated with the Bishops. Tucking my shaking hands under my elbows, I stared at Ashmole 782 in the growing twilight and wondered what to do.

My mother would instinctively have known the answer, had she been standing in my place. Most members of the Bishop family were talented witches, but my mother, Rebecca, was special. Everyone said so. Her supernatural abilities had manifested early, and by the time she was in grade school, she could outmagic most of the senior witches in the local coven with her intuitive understanding of spells, startling foresight, and uncanny knack for seeing beneath the surface of people and events. My mother’s younger sister, my Aunt Sarah, was a skilled witch, too, but her talents were more mainstream: a deft hand with potions and a perfect command of witchcraft’s traditional lore of spells and charms.

My fellow historians didn’t know about the family, of course, but everyone in Madison, the remote town in upstate New York where I’d lived with Sarah since the age of seven, knew all about the Bishops. My ancestors had moved from Massachusetts after the Revolutionary War. By then more than a century had passed since Bridget Bishop was executed at Salem. Even so, rumors and gossip followed them to their new home. After pulling up stakes and resettling in Madison, the Bishops worked hard to demonstrate how useful it could be to have witchy neighbors for healing the sick and predicting the weather. In time the family set down roots in the community deep enough to withstand the inevitable outbreaks of superstition and human fear.

But my mother had a curiosity about the world that led her beyond the safety of Madison. She went first to Harvard, where she met a young wizard named Stephen Proctor. He also had a long magical lineage and a desire to experience life outside the scope of his family’s New England history and influence. Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor were a charming couple, my mother’s all-American frankness a counterpoint to my father’s more formal, old-fashioned ways. They became anthropologists, immersing themselves in foreign cultures and beliefs, sharing their intellectual passions along with their deep devotion to each other. After securing positions on the faculty in area schools—my mother at her alma mater, my father at Wellesley—they made research trips abroad and made a home for their new family in Cambridge.

I have few memories of my childhood, but each one is vivid and surprisingly clear. All feature my parents: the feel of corduroy on my father’s elbows, the lily of the valley that scented my mother’s perfume, the clink of their wineglasses on Friday nights when they’d put me to bed and dine together by candlelight. My mother told me bedtime stories, and my father’s brown briefcase clattered when he dropped it by the front door. These memories would strike a familiar chord with most people.

Other recollections of my parents would not. My mother never seemed to do laundry, but my clothes were always clean and neatly folded. Forgotten permission slips for field trips to the zoo appeared in my desk when the teacher came to collect them. And no matter what condition my father’s study was in when I went in for a good-night kiss (and it usually looked as if something had exploded), it was always perfectly orderly the next morning. In kindergarten I’d asked my friend Amanda’s mother why she bothered washing the dishes with soap and water when all you needed to do was stack them in the sink, snap your fingers, and whisper a few words. Mrs. Schmidt laughed at my strange idea of housework, but confusion had clouded her eyes.

That night my parents told me we had to be careful about how we spoke about magic and with whom we discussed it. Humans outnumbered us and found our power frightening, my mother explained, and fear was the strongest force on earth. I hadn’t confessed at the time that magic—my mother’s especially—frightened me, too.

By day my mother looked like every other kid’s mother in Cambridge: slightly unkempt, a bit disorganized, and perpetually harassed by the pressures of home and office. Her blond hair was fashionably tousled even though the clothes she wore remained stuck in 1977—long billowy skirts, oversize pants and shirts, and men’s vests and blazers she picked up in thrift stores the length and breadth of Boston in imitation of Annie Hall. Nothing would have made you look twice if you passed her in the street or stood behind her in the supermarket.

In the privacy of our home, with the curtains drawn and the door locked, my mother became someone else. Her movements were confident and sure, not rushed and hectic. Sometimes she even seemed to float. As she went around the house, singing and picking up stuffed animals and books, her face slowly transformed into something otherworldly and beautiful. When my mother was lit up with magic, you couldn’t tear your eyes away from her.

“Mommy’s got a firecracker inside her,” was the way my father explained it with his wide, indulgent grin. But firecrackers, I learned, were not simply bright and lively. They were unpredictable, and they could startle and frighten you, too.

My father was at a lecture one night when my mother decided to clean the silver and became mesmerized by a bowl of water she’d set on the dining-room table. As she stared at the glassy surface, it became covered with a fog that twisted itself into tiny, ghostly shapes. I gasped with delight as they grew, filling the room with fantastic beings. Soon they were crawling up the drapes and clinging to the ceiling. I cried out for my mother’s help, but she remained intent on the water. Her concentration didn’t waver until something half human and half animal crept near and pinched my arm. That brought her out of her reveries, and she exploded into a shower of angry red light that beat back the wraiths and left an odor of singed feathers in the house. My father noticed the strange smell the moment he returned, his alarm evident. He found us huddled in bed together. At the sight of him, my mother burst into apologetic tears. I never felt entirely safe in the dining room again.

Any remaining sense of security evaporated after I turned seven, when my mother and father went to Africa and didn’t come back alive.

 

I shook myself and focused again on the dilemma that faced me. The manuscript sat on the library table in a pool of lamplight. Its magic pulled on something dark and knotted inside me. My fingers returned to the smooth leather. This time the prickling sensation felt familiar. I vaguely remembered experiencing something like it once before, looking through some papers on the desk in my father’s study.

Turning resolutely away from the leather-bound volume, I occupied myself with something more rational: searching for the list of alchemical texts I’d generated before leaving New Haven. It was on my desk, hidden among the loose papers, book call slips, receipts, pencils, pens, and library maps, neatly arranged by collection and then by the number assigned to each text by a library clerk when it had entered into the Bodleian. Since arriving a few weeks ago, I had been working through the list methodically. The copied-out catalog description for Ashmole 782 read, “Anthropologia, or a treatis containing a short description of Man in two parts: the first Anatomical, the second Psychological.” As with most of the works I studied, there was no telling what the contents were from the title.

My fingers might be able to tell me about the book without even cracking open the covers. Aunt Sarah always used her fingers to figure out what was in the mail before she opened it, in case the envelope contained a bill she didn’t want to pay. That way she could plead ignorance when it turned out she owed the electric company money.

The gilt numbers on the spine winked.

I sat down and considered the options.

Ignore the magic, open the manuscript, and try to read it like a human scholar?

Push the bewitched volume aside and walk away?

Sarah would chortle with delight if she knew my predicament. She had always maintained that my efforts to keep magic at arm’s length were futile. But I’d been doing so ever since my parents’ funeral. There the witches among the guests had scrutinized me for signs that the Bishop and Proctor blood was in my veins, all the while patting me encouragingly and predicting it was only a matter of time before I took my mother’s place in the local coven. Some had whispered their doubts about the wisdom of my parents’ decision to marry.

“Too much power,” they muttered when they thought I wasn’t listening. “They were bound to attract attention—even without studying ancient ceremonial religion.”

This was enough to make me blame my parents’ death on the supernatural power they wielded and to search for a different way of life. Turning my back on anything to do with magic, I buried myself in the stuff of human adolescence—horses and boys and romantic novels—and tried to disappear among the town’s ordinary residents. At puberty I had problems with depression and anxiety. It was all very normal, the kindly human doctor assured my aunt.

Sarah didn’t tell him about the voices, about my habit of picking up the phone a good minute before it rang, or that she had to enchant the doors and windows when there was a full moon to keep me from wandering into the woods in my sleep. Nor did she mention that when I was angry the chairs in the house rearranged themselves into a precarious pyramid before crashing to the floor once my mood lifted.

When I turned thirteen, my aunt decided it was time for me to channel some of my power into learning the basics of witchcraft. Lighting candles with a few whispered words or hiding pimples with a time-tested potion—these were a teenage witch’s habitual first steps. But I was unable to master even the simplest spell, burned every potion my aunt taught me, and stubbornly refused to submit to her tests to see if I’d inherited my mother’s uncannily accurate second sight.

The voices, the fires, and other unexpected eruptions lessened as my hormones quieted, but my unwillingness to learn the family business remained. It made my aunt anxious to have an untrained witch in the house, and it was with some relief that Sarah sent me off to a college in Maine. Except for the magic, it was a typical coming-of-age story.

What got me away from Madison was my intellect. It had always been precocious, leading me to talk and read before other children my age. Aided by a prodigious, photographic memory—which made it easy for me to recall the layouts of textbooks and spit out the required information on tests—my schoolwork was soon established as a place where my family’s magical legacy was irrelevant. I’d skipped my final years of high school and started college at sixteen.

There I’d first tried to carve out a place for myself in the theater department, my imagination drawn to the spectacle and the costumes—and my mind fascinated by how completely a playwright’s words could conjure up other places and times. My first few performances were heralded by my professors as extraordinary examples of the way good acting could transform an ordinary college student into someone else. The first indication that these metamorphoses might not have been the result of theatrical talent came while I was playing Ophelia in Hamlet. As soon as I was cast in the role, my hair started growing at an unnatural rate, tumbling down from shoulders to waist. I sat for hours beside the college’s lake, irresistibly drawn to its shining surface, with my new hair streaming all around me. The boy playing Hamlet became caught up in the illusion, and we had a passionate though dangerously volatile affair. Slowly I was dissolving into Ophelia’s madness, taking the rest of the cast with me.

The result might have been a riveting performance, but each new role brought fresh challenges. In my sophomore year, the situation became impossible when I was cast as Annabella in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Like the character, I attracted a string of devoted suitors—not all of them human—who followed me around campus. When they refused to leave me alone after the final curtain fell, it was clear that whatever had been unleashed couldn’t be controlled. I wasn’t sure how magic had crept into my acting, and I didn’t want to find out. I cut my hair short. I stopped wearing flowing skirts and layered tops in favor of the black turtlenecks, khaki trousers, and loafers that the solid, ambitious prelaw students were wearing. My excess energy went into athletics.

After leaving the theater department, I attempted several more majors, looking for a field so rational that it would never yield a square inch to magic. I lacked the precision and patience for mathematics, and my efforts at biology were a disaster of failed quizzes and unfinished laboratory experiments.

At the end of my sophomore year, the registrar demanded I choose a major or face a fifth year in college. A summer study program in England offered me the opportunity to get even farther from all things Bishop. I fell in love with Oxford, the quiet glow of its morning streets. My history courses covered the exploits of kings and queens, and the only voices in my head were those that whispered from books penned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was entirely attributable to great literature. Best of all, no one in this university town knew me, and if there were witches in the city that summer, they stayed well away. I returned home, declared a major in history, took all the required courses in record time, and graduated with honors before I turned twenty.

When I decided to pursue my doctorate, Oxford was my first choice among the possible programs. My specialty was the history of science, and my research focused on the period when science supplanted magic—the age when astrology and witch-hunts yielded to Newton and universal laws. The search for a rational order in nature, rather than a supernatural one, mirrored my own efforts to stay away from what was hidden. The lines I’d already drawn between what went on in my mind and what I carried in my blood grew more distinct.

My Aunt Sarah had snorted when she heard of my decision to specialize in seventeenth-century chemistry. Her bright red hair was an outward sign of her quick temper and sharp tongue. She was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense witch who commanded a room as soon as she entered it. A pillar of the Madison community, Sarah was often called in to manage things when there was a crisis, large or small, in town. We were on much better terms now that I wasn’t subjected to a daily dose of her keen observations on human frailty and inconsistency.

Though we were separated by hundreds of miles, Sarah thought my latest attempts to avoid magic were laughable—and told me so. “We used to call that alchemy,” she said. “There’s a lot of magic in it.”

“No, there’s not,” I protested hotly. The whole point of my work was to show how scientific this pursuit really was. “Alchemy tells us about the growth of experimentation, not the search for a magical elixir that turns lead into gold and makes people immortal.”

“If you say so,” Sarah said doubtfully. “But it’s a pretty strange subject to choose if you’re trying to pass as human.”

After earning my degree, I fought fiercely for a spot on the faculty at Yale, the only place that was more English than England. Colleagues warned that I had little chance of being granted tenure. I churned out two books, won a handful of prizes, and collected some research grants. Then I received tenure and proved everyone wrong.

More important, my life was now my own. No one in my department, not even the historians of early America, connected my last name with that of the first Salem woman executed for witchcraft in 1692. To preserve my hard-won autonomy, I continued to keep any hint of magic or witchcraft out of my life. Of course there were exceptions, like the time I’d drawn on one of Sarah’s spells when the washing machine wouldn’t stop filling with water and threatened to flood my small apartment on Wooster Square. Nobody’s perfect.

Now, taking note of this current lapse, I held my breath, grasped the manuscript with both hands, and placed it in one of the wedge-shaped cradles the library provided to protect its rare books. I had made my decision: to behave as a serious scholar and treat Ashmole 782 like an ordinary manuscript. I’d ignore my burning fingertips, the book’s strange smell, and simply describe its contents. Then I’d decide—with professional detachment—whether it was promising enough for a longer look. My fingers trembled when I loosened the small brass clasps nevertheless.

The manuscript let out a soft sigh.

A quick glance over my shoulder assured me that the room was still empty. The only other sound was the loud ticking of the reading room’s clock.

Deciding not to record “Book sighed,” I turned to my laptop and opened up a new file. This familiar task—one that I’d done hundreds if not thousands of times before—was as comforting as my list’s neat checkmarks. I typed the manuscript name and number and copied the title from the catalog description. I eyed its size and binding, describing both in detail.

The only thing left to do was open the manuscript.

It was difficult to lift the cover, despite the loosened clasps, as if it were stuck to the pages below. I swore under my breath and rested my hand flat on the leather for a moment, hoping that Ashmole 782 simply needed a chance to know me. It wasn’t magic, exactly, to put your hand on top of a book. My palm tingled, much as my skin tingled when a witch looked at me, and the tension left the manuscript. After that, it was easy to lift the cover.

The first page was rough paper. On the second sheet, which was parchment, were the words “Anthropologia, or a treatis containing a short description of Man,” in Ashmole’s handwriting. The neat, round curves were almost as familiar to me as my own cursive script. The second part of the title—“in two parts: the first Anatomical, the second Psychological”—was written in a later hand, in pencil. It was familiar, too, but I couldn’t place it. Touching the writing might give me some clue, but it was against the library’s rules and it would be impossible to document the information that my fingers might gather. Instead I made notes in the computer file regarding the use of ink and pencil, the two different hands, and the possible dates of the inscriptions.

As I turned the first page, the parchment felt abnormally heavy and revealed itself as the source of the manuscript’s strange smell. It wasn’t simply ancient. It was something more—a combination of must and musk that had no name. And I noticed immediately that three leaves had been cut neatly out of the binding.

Here, at last, was something easy to describe. My fingers flew over the keys: “At least three folios removed, by straightedge or razor.” I peered into the valley of the manuscript’s spine but couldn’t tell whether any other pages were missing. The closer the parchment to my nose, the more the manuscript’s power and odd smell distracted me.

I turned my attention to the illustration that faced the gap where the missing pages should be. It showed a tiny baby girl floating in a clear glass vessel. The baby held a silver rose in one hand, a golden rose in the other. On its feet were tiny wings, and drops of red liquid showered down on the baby’s long black hair. Underneath the image was a label written in thick black ink indicating that it was a depiction of the philosophical child—an allegorical representation of a crucial step in creating the philosopher’s stone, the chemical substance that promised to make its owner healthy, wealthy, and wise.

The colors were luminous and strikingly well preserved. Artists had once mixed crushed stone and gems into their paints to produce such powerful colors. And the image itself had been drawn by someone with real artistic skill. I had to sit on my hands to keep them from trying to learn more from a touch here and there.

But the illuminator, for all his obvious talent, had the details all wrong. The glass vessel was supposed to point up, not down. The baby was supposed to be half black and half white, to show that it was a hermaphrodite. It should have had male genitalia and female breasts—or two heads, at the very least.

Alchemical imagery was allegorical, and notoriously tricky. That’s why I was studying it, searching for patterns that would reveal a systematic, logical approach to chemical transformation in the days before the periodic table of the elements. Images of the moon were almost always representations of silver, for example, while images of the sun referred to gold. When the two were combined chemically, the process was represented as a wedding. In time the pictures had been replaced by words. Those words, in turn, became the grammar of chemistry.

But this manuscript put my belief in the alchemists’ logic to the test. Each illustration had at least one fundamental flaw, and there was no accompanying text to help make sense of it.

I searched for something—anything—that would agree with my knowledge of alchemy. In the softening light, faint traces of handwriting appeared on one of the pages. I slanted the desk lamp so that it shone more brightly.

There was nothing there.

Slowly I turned the page as if it were a fragile leaf.

Words shimmered and moved across its surface—hundreds of words—invisible unless the angle of light and the viewer’s perspective were just right.

I stifled a cry of surprise.

Ashmole 782 was a palimpsest—a manuscript within a manuscript. When parchment was scarce, scribes carefully washed the ink from old books and then wrote new text on the blank sheets. Over time the former writing often reappeared underneath as a textual ghost, discernible with the help of ultraviolet light, which could see under ink stains and bring faded text back to life.

There was no ultraviolet light strong enough to reveal these traces, though. This was not an ordinary palimpsest. The writing hadn’t been washed away—it had been hidden with some sort of spell. But why would anyone go to the trouble of bewitching the text in an alchemical book? Even experts had trouble puzzling out the obscure language and fanciful imagery the authors used.

Dragging my attention from the faint letters that were moving too quickly for me to read, I focused instead on writing a synopsis of the manuscript’s contents. “Puzzling,” I typed. “Textual captions from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, images mainly fifteenth century. Image sources possibly older? Mixture of paper and vellum. Colored and black inks, the former of unusually high quality. Illustrations are well executed, but details are incorrect, missing. Depicts the creation of the philosopher’s stone, alchemical birth/creation, death, resurrection, and transformation. A confused copy of an earlier manuscript? A strange book, full of anomalies.”

My fingers hesitated above the keys.

Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn’t bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery. If this book hadn’t been under a spell, I might have been tempted to do the latter. Because it was bewitched, I was strongly inclined toward the former.

And when in doubt, scholars usually postpone a decision.

I typed an ambivalent final line: “Needs more time? Possibly recall later?”

Holding my breath, I fastened the cover with a gentle tug. Currents of magic still thrummed through the manuscript, especially fierce around the clasps.

Relieved that it was closed, I stared at Ashmole 782 for a few more moments. My fingers wanted to stray back and touch the brown leather. But this time I resisted, just as I had resisted touching the inscriptions and illustrations to learn more than a human historian could legitimately claim to know.

Aunt Sarah had always told me that magic was a gift. If it was, it had strings attached that bound me to all the Bishop witches who had come before me. There was a price to be paid for using this inherited magical power and for working the spells and charms that made up the witches’ carefully guarded craft. By opening Ashmole 782, I’d breached the wall that divided my magic from my scholarship. But back on the right side of it again, I was more determined than ever to remain there.

I packed up my computer and notes and picked up the stack of manuscripts, carefully putting Ashmole 782 on the bottom. Mercifully, Gillian wasn’t at her desk, though her papers were still strewn around. She must be planning on working late and was off for a cup of coffee.

“Finished?” Sean asked when I reached the call desk.

“Not quite. I’d like to reserve the top three for Monday.”

“And the fourth?”

“I’m done with it,” I blurted, pushing the manuscripts toward him. “You can send it back to the stacks.”

Sean put it on top of a pile of returns he had already gathered. He walked with me as far as the staircase, said good-bye, and disappeared behind a swinging door. The conveyor belt that would whisk Ashmole 782 back into the bowels of the library clanged into action.

I almost turned and stopped him but let it go.

My hand was raised to push open the door on the ground floor when the air around me constricted, as if the library were squeezing me tight. The air shimmered for a split second, just as the pages of the manuscript had shimmered on Sean’s desk, causing me to shiver involuntarily and raising the tiny hairs on my arms.

Something had just happened. Something magical.

My face turned back toward Duke Humfrey’s, and my feet threatened to follow.

It’s nothing, I thought, resolutely walking out of the library.

Are you sure? whispered a long-ignored voice.

Oxford’s bells chimed seven times. Night didn’t follow twilight as slowly as it would have a few months ago, but the transformation was still lingering. The library staff had turned on the lamps only thirty minutes before, casting small pools of gold in the gray light.

It was the twenty-first day of September. All over the world, witches were sharing a meal on the eve of the autumn equinox to celebrate Mabon and greet the impending darkness of winter. But the witches of Oxford would have to do without me. I was slated to give the keynote address at an important conference next month. My ideas were still unformed, and I was getting anxious.

At the thought of what my fellow witches might be eating somewhere in Oxford, my stomach rumbled. I’d been in the library since half past nine that morning, with only a short break for lunch.

Sean had taken the day off, and the person working at the call desk was new. She’d given me some trouble when I requested one crumbling item and tried to convince me to use microfilm instead. The reading room’s supervisor, Mr. Johnson, overheard and came out of his office to intervene.

“My apologies, Dr. Bishop,” he’d said hurriedly, pushing his heavy, dark-rimmed glasses over the bridge of his nose. “If you need to consult this manuscript for your research, we will be happy to oblige.” He disappeared to fetch the restricted item and delivered it with more apologies about the inconvenience and the new staff. Gratified that my scholarly credentials had done the trick, I spent the afternoon happily reading.

I pulled two coiled weights from the upper corners of the manuscript and closed it carefully, pleased at the amount of work I’d completed. After encountering the bewitched manuscript on Friday, I’d devoted the weekend to routine tasks rather than alchemy in order to restore a sense of normalcy. I filled out financial-reimbursement forms, paid bills, wrote letters of recommendation, and even finished a book review. These chores were interspersed with more homely rituals like doing laundry, drinking copious amounts of tea, and trying recipes from the BBC’s cooking programs.

After an early start this morning, I’d spent the day trying to focus on the work at hand, rather than dwelling on my recollections of Ashmole 782’s strange illustrations and mysterious palimpsest. I eyed the short list of todos jotted down over the course of the day. Of the four questions on my follow-up list, the third was easiest to resolve. The answer was in an arcane periodical, Notes and Queries, which was shelved on one of the bookcases that stretched up toward the room’s high ceilings. I pushed back my chair and decided to tick one item off my list before leaving.

The upper shelves of the section of Duke Humfrey’s known as the Selden End were reachable by means of a worn set of stairs to a gallery that looked over the reading desks. I climbed the twisting treads to where the old buckram-covered books sat in neat chronological rows on wooden shelves. No one but me and an ancient literature don from Magdalen College seemed to use them. I located the volume and swore softly under my breath. It was on the top shelf, just out of reach.

A low chuckle startled me. I turned my head to see who was sitting at the desk at the far end of the gallery, but no one was there. I was hearing things again. Oxford was still a ghost town, and anyone who belonged to the university had left over an hour earlier to down a glass of free sherry in their college’s senior common room before dinner. Given the Wiccan holiday, even Gillian had left in the late afternoon, after extending one final invitation and glancing at my pile of reading material with narrowed eyes.

I searched for the gallery’s stepstool, which was missing. The Bodleian was notoriously short on such items, and it would easily take fifteen minutes to locate one in the library and haul it upstairs so that I could retrieve the volume. I hesitated. Even though I’d held a bewitched book, I’d resisted considerable temptations to work further magic on Friday. Besides, no one would see.

Despite my rationalizations, my skin prickled with anxiety. I didn’t break my rules very often, and I kept mental accounts of the situations that had spurred me to turn to my magic for assistance. This was the fifth time this year, including putting the spell on the malfunctioning washing machine and touching Ashmole 782. Not too bad for the end of September, but not a personal best either.

I took a deep breath, held up my hand, and imagined the book in it.

Volume 19 of Notes and Queries slid backward four inches, tipped at an angle as if an invisible hand were pulling it down, and fell into my open palm with a soft thwack. Once there, it flopped open to the page I needed.

It had taken all of three seconds. I let out another breath to exhale some of my guilt. Suddenly two icy patches bloomed between my shoulder blades.

I had been seen, and not by an ordinary human observer.

When one witch studies another, the touch of their eyes tingles. Witches aren’t the only creatures sharing the world with humans, however. There are also daemons—creative, artistic creatures who walk a tightrope between madness and genius. “Rock stars and serial killers” was how my aunt described these strange, perplexing beings. And there are vampires, ancient and beautiful, who feed on blood and will charm you utterly if they don’t kill you first.

When a daemon takes a look, I feel the slight, unnerving pressure of a kiss.

But when a vampire stares, it feels cold, focused, and dangerous.

I mentally shuffled through the readers in Duke Humfrey’s. There had been one vampire, a cherubic monk who pored over medieval missals and prayer books like a lover. But vampires aren’t often found in rare-book rooms. Occasionally one succumbed to vanity and nostalgia and came in to reminisce, but it wasn’t common.

Witches and daemons were far more typical in libraries. Gillian Chamberlain had been in today, studying her papyri with a magnifying glass. And there were definitely two daemons in the music reference room. They’d looked up, dazed, as I walked by on the way to Blackwell’s for tea. One told me to bring him back a latte, which was some indication of how immersed he was in whatever madness gripped him at the moment.

No, it was a vampire who watched me now.

I’d happened upon a few vampires, since I worked in a field that put me in touch with scientists, and there were vampires aplenty in laboratories around the world. Science rewards long study and patience. And thanks to their solitary work habits, scientists were unlikely to be recognized by anyone except their closest co-workers. It made a life that spanned centuries rather than decades much easier to negotiate.

These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.

I clutched my ill-gotten copy of Notes and Queries and turned to face the witness. He was in the shadows on the opposite side of the room in front of the paleography reference books, lounging against one of the graceful wooden pillars that held up the gallery. An open copy of Janet Roberts’s Guide to Scripts Used in English Handwriting Up to 1500 was balanced in his hands.

I had never seen this vampire before—but I was fairly certain he didn’t need pointers on how to decipher old penmanship.

Anyone who has read paperback bestsellers or even watched television knows that vampires are breathtaking, but nothing prepares you to actually see one. Their bone structures are so well honed that they seem chiseled by an expert sculptor. Then they move, or speak, and your mind can’t begin to absorb what you’re seeing. Every movement is graceful; every word is musical. And their eyes are arresting, which is precisely how they catch their prey. One long look, a few quiet words, a touch: once you’re caught in a vampire’s snare you don’t stand a chance.

Staring down at this vampire, I realized with a sinking feeling that my knowledge on the subject was, alas, largely theoretical. Little of it seemed useful now that I was facing one in the Bodleian Library.

The only vampire with whom I had more than a passing acquaintance worked at the nuclear particle accelerator in Switzerland. Jeremy was slight and gorgeous, with bright blond hair, blue eyes, and an infectious laugh. He’d slept with most of the women in the canton of Geneva and was now working his way through the city of Lausanne. What he did after he seduced them I had never wanted to inquire into too closely, and I’d turned down his persistent invitations to go out for a drink. I’d always figured that Jeremy was representative of the breed. But in comparison to the one who stood before me now, he seemed raw-boned, gawky, and very, very young.

This one was tall—well over six feet even accounting for the problems of perspective associated with looking down on him from the gallery. And he definitely was not slight. Broad shoulders narrowed into slender hips, which flowed into lean, muscular legs. His hands were strikingly long and agile, a mark of physiological delicacy that made your eyes drift back to them to figure out how they could belong to such a large man.

As my eyes swept over him, his own were fixed on me. From across the room, they seemed black as night, staring up under thick, equally black eyebrows, one of them lifted in a curve that suggested a question mark. His face was indeed striking—all distinct planes and surfaces, with high-angled cheekbones meeting brows that shielded and shadowed his eyes. Above his chin was one of the few places where there was room for softness—his wide mouth, which, like his long hands, didn’t seem to make sense.

But the most unnerving thing about him was not his physical perfection. It was his feral combination of strength, agility, and keen intelligence that was palpable across the room. In his black trousers and soft gray sweater, with a shock of black hair swept back from his forehead and cropped close to the nape of his neck, he looked like a panther that could strike at any moment but was in no rush to do so.

He smiled. It was a small, polite smile that didn’t reveal his teeth. I was intensely aware of them anyway, sitting in perfectly straight, sharp rows behind his pale lips.

The mere thought of teeth sent an instinctive rush of adrenaline through my body, setting my fingers tingling. Suddenly all I could think was, Get out of this room NOW.

The staircase seemed farther away than the four steps it took to reach it. I raced down to the floor below, stumbled on the last step, and pitched straight into the vampire’s waiting arms.

Of course he had beaten me to the bottom of the stairs.

His fingers were cool, and his arms felt steelier than flesh and bone. The scent of clove, cinnamon, and something that reminded me of incense filled the air. He set me on my feet, picked Notes and Queries off the floor, and handed it to me with a small bow. “Dr. Bishop, I presume?”

Shaking from head to toe, I nodded.

The long, pale fingers of his right hand dipped into a pocket and pulled out a blue-and-white business card. He extended it. “Matthew Clairmont.”

I gripped the edge of the card, careful not to touch his fingers in the process. Oxford University’s familiar logo, with the three crowns and open book, was perched next to Clairmont’s name, followed by a string of initials indicating he had already been made a member of the Royal Society.

Not bad for someone who appeared to be in his mid- to late thirties, though I imagined that his actual age was at least ten times that.

As for his research specialty, it came as no surprise that the vampire was a professor of biochemistry and affiliated with Oxford Neuroscience at the John Radcliffe Hospital. Blood and anatomy—two vampire favorites. The card bore three different laboratory numbers in addition to an office number and an e-mail address. I might not have seen him before, but he was certainly not unreachable.

“Professor Clairmont.” I squeaked it out before the words caught in the back of my throat, and I quieted the urge to run screaming toward the exit.

“We’ve not met,” he continued in an oddly accented voice. It was mostly Oxbridge but had a touch of softness that I couldn’t place. His eyes, which never left my face, were not actually dark at all, I discovered, but dominated by dilated pupils bordered with a gray-green sliver of iris. Their pull was insistent, and I found myself unable to look away.

The vampire’s mouth was moving again. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

My eyes widened. It was not impossible that a professor of biochemistry would be interested in seventeenth-century alchemy, but it seemed highly unlikely. I picked at the collar of my white shirt and scanned the room. We were the only two in it. There was no one at the old oak card file or at the nearby banks of computers. Whoever was at the collection desk was too far away to come to my aid.

“I found your article on the color symbolism of alchemical transformation fascinating, and your work on Robert Boyle’s approach to the problems of expansion and contraction was quite persuasive,” Clairmont continued smoothly, as if he were used to being the only active participant in a conversation. “I’ve not yet finished your latest book on alchemical apprenticeship and education, but I’m enjoying it a great deal.”

“Thank you,” I whispered. His gaze shifted from my eyes to my throat.

I stopped picking at the buttons around my neck.

His unnatural eyes floated back to mine. “You have a marvelous way of evoking the past for your readers.” I took that as a compliment, since a vampire would know if it was wrong. Clairmont paused for a moment. “Might I buy you dinner?”

My mouth dropped open. Dinner? I might not be able to escape from him in the library, but there was no reason to linger over a meal—especially one he would not be sharing, given his dietary preferences.

“I have plans,” I said abruptly, unable to formulate a reasonable explanation of what those plans might involve. Matthew Clairmont must know I was a witch, and I was clearly not celebrating Mabon.

“That’s too bad,” he murmured, a touch of a smile on his lips. “Another time, perhaps. You are in Oxford for the year, aren’t you?”

Being around a vampire was always unnerving, and Clairmont’s clove scent brought back the strange smell of Ashmole 782. Unable to think straight, I resorted to nodding. It was safer.

“I thought so,” said Clairmont. “I’m sure our paths will cross again. Oxford is such a small town.”

“Very small,” I agreed, wishing I had taken leave in London instead.

“Until then, Dr. Bishop. It has been a pleasure.” Clairmont extended his hand. With the exception of their brief excursion to my collar, his eyes had not drifted once from mine. I didn’t think he had blinked either. I steeled myself not to be the first to look away.

My hand went forward, hesitating for a moment before clasping his. There was a fleeting pressure before he withdrew. He stepped backward, smiled, then disappeared into the darkness of the oldest part of the library.

I stood still until my chilled hands could move freely again, then walked back to my desk and switched off my computer. Notes and Queries asked me accusingly why I had bothered to go and get it if I wasn’t even going to look at it; my to-do list was equally full of reproach. I ripped it off the top of the pad, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the wicker basket under the desk.

“‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’” I muttered under my breath.

The reading room’s night proctor glanced down at his watch when I returned my manuscripts. “Leaving early, Dr. Bishop?”

I nodded, my lips closed tightly to keep myself from asking whether he knew there had been a vampire in the paleography reference section.

He picked up the stack of gray cardboard boxes that held the manuscripts. “Will you need these tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Tomorrow.”

Having observed the last scholarly propriety of exiting the library, I was free. My feet clattered against the linoleum floors and echoed against the stone walls as I sped through the reading room’s lattice gate, past the books guarded with velvet ropes to keep them from curious fingers, down the worn wooden stairs, and into the enclosed quadrangle on the ground floor. I leaned against the iron railings surrounding the bronze statue of William Herbert and sucked the chilly air into my lungs, struggling to get the vestiges of clove and cinnamon out of my nostrils.

There were always things that went bump in the night in Oxford, I told myself sternly. So there was one more vampire in town.

 

No matter what I told myself in the quadrangle, my walk home was faster than usual. The gloom of New College Lane was a spooky proposition at the best of times. I ran my card through the reader at New College’s back gate and felt some of the tension leave my body when the gate clicked shut behind me, as if every door and wall I put between me and the library somehow kept me safe. I skirted under the chapel windows and through the narrow passage into the quad that had views of Oxford’s only surviving medieval garden, complete with the traditional mound that had once offered a green prospect for students to look upon and contemplate the mysteries of God and nature. Tonight the college’s spires and archways seemed especially Gothic, and I was eager to get inside.

When the door of my apartment closed behind me, I let out a sigh of relief. I was living at the top of one of the college’s faculty staircases, in lodgings reserved for visiting former members. My rooms, which included a bedroom, a sitting room with a round table for dining, and a decent if small kitchen, were decorated with old prints and warm wainscoting. All the furniture looked as if it had been culled from previous incarnations of the senior common room and the master’s house, with down-at-the-heels late-nineteenth-century design predominant.

In the kitchen I put two slices of bread in the toaster and poured myself a cold glass of water. Gulping it down, I opened the window to let cool air into the stuffy rooms.

Carrying my snack back into the sitting room, I kicked off my shoes and turned on the small stereo. The pure tones of Mozart filled the air. When I sat on one of the maroon upholstered sofas, it was with the intention to rest for a few moments, then take a bath and go over my notes from the day.

At half past three in the morning, I woke with a pounding heart, a stiff neck, and the strong taste of cloves in my mouth.

I got a fresh glass of water and closed the kitchen window. It was chilly, and I shivered at the touch of the damp air.

After a glance at my watch and some quick calculations, I decided to call home. It was only ten-thirty there, and Sarah and Em were as nocturnal as bats. Slipping around the rooms, I turned off all the lights except the one in my bedroom and picked up my mobile. I was out of my grimy clothes in a matter of minutes—how do you get so filthy in a library?—and into a pair of old yoga pants and a black sweater with a stretched-out neck. They were more comfortable than any pajamas.

The bed felt welcoming and firm underneath me, comforting me enough that I almost convinced myself a phone call home was unnecessary. But the water had not been able to remove the vestiges of cloves from my tongue, and I dialed the number.

“We’ve been waiting for your call,” were the first words I heard.

Witches.

I sighed. “Sarah, I’m fine.”

“All signs to the contrary.” As usual, my mother’s younger sister was not going to pull any punches. “Tabitha has been skittish all evening, Em got a very clear picture of you lost in the woods at night, and I haven’t been able to eat anything since breakfast.”

The real problem was that damn cat. Tabitha was Sarah’s baby and picked up any tension within the family with uncanny precision. “I’m fine. I had an unexpected encounter in the library tonight, that’s all.”

A click told me that Em had picked up the extension. “Why aren’t you celebrating Mabon?” she asked.

Emily Mather had been a fixture in my life for as long as I could remember. She and Rebecca Bishop had met as high-school students working in the summer at Plimoth Plantation, where they dug holes and pushed wheel-barrows for the archaeologists. They became best friends, then devoted pen pals when Emily went to Vassar and my mother to Harvard. Later the two reconnected in Cambridge when Em became a children’s librarian. After my parents’ death, Em’s long weekends in Madison soon led to a new job in the local elementary school. She and Sarah became inseparable partners, even though Em had maintained her own apartment in town and the two of them had made a big deal of never being seen heading into a bedroom together while I was growing up. This didn’t fool me, the neighbors, or anyone else living in town. Everybody treated them like the couple they were, regardless of where they slept. When I moved out of the Bishop house, Em moved in and had been there ever since. Like my mother and my aunt, Em came from a long line of witches.

“I was invited to the coven’s party but worked instead.”

“Did the witch from Bryn Mawr ask you to go?” Em was interested in the classicist, mostly (it had turned out over a fair amount of wine one summer night) because she’d once dated Gillian’s mother. “It was the sixties,” was all Em would say.

“Yes.” I sounded harassed. The two of them were convinced I was going to see the light and begin taking my magic seriously now that I was safely tenured. Nothing cast any doubt on this wishful prognostication, and they were always thrilled when I had any contact with a witch. “But I spent the evening with Elias Ashmole instead.”

“Who’s he?” Em asked Sarah.

“You know, that dead guy who collected alchemy books,” was Sarah’s muffled reply.

“Still here, you two,” I called into the phone.

“So who rattled your cage?” Sarah asked.

Given that both were witches, there was no point in trying to hide anything. “I met a vampire in the library. One I’ve never seen before, named Matthew Clairmont.”

There was silence on Em’s end as she flipped through her mental card file of notable creatures. Sarah was quiet for a moment, too, deciding whether or not to explode.

“I hope he’s easier to get rid of than the daemons you have a habit of attracting,” she said sharply.

“Daemons haven’t bothered me since I stopped acting.”

“No, there was that daemon who followed you into the Beinecke Library when you first started working at Yale, too,” Em corrected me. “He was just wandering down the street and came looking for you.”

“He was mentally unstable,” I protested. Like using witchcraft on the washing machine, the fact that I’d somehow caught the attention of a single, curious daemon shouldn’t count against me.

“You draw creatures like flowers draw bees, Diana. But daemons aren’t half as dangerous as vampires. Stay away from him,” Sarah said tightly.

“I have no reason to seek him out.” My hands traveled to my neck again. “We have nothing in common.”

“That’s not the point,” Sarah said, voice rising. “Witches, vampires, and daemons aren’t supposed to mix. You know that. Humans are more likely to notice us when we do. No daemon or vampire is worth the risk.” The only creatures in the world that Sarah took seriously were other witches. Humans struck her as unfortunate little beings blind to the world around them. Daemons were perpetual teenagers who couldn’t be trusted. Vampires were well below cats and at least one step below mutts within her hierarchy of creatures.

“You’ve told me the rules before, Sarah.”

“Not everyone obeys the rules, honey,” Em observed. “What did he want?”

“He said he was interested in my work. But he’s a scientist, so that’s hard to believe.” My fingers fiddled with the duvet cover on the bed. “He invited me to dinner.”

“To dinner?” Sarah was incredulous.

Em just laughed. “There’s not much on a restaurant menu that would appeal to a vampire.”

“I’m sure I won’t see him again. He’s running three labs from the look of his business card, and he holds two faculty positions.”

“Typical,” Sarah muttered. “That’s what happens when you have too much time on your hands. And stop picking at that quilt—you’ll put a hole in it.” She’d switched on her witch’s radar full blast and was now seeing as well as hearing me.

“It’s not as if he’s stealing money from old ladies and squandering other people’s fortunes on the stock market,” I countered. The fact that vampires were reputed to be fabulously wealthy was a sore spot with Sarah. “He’s a biochemist and a physician of some sort, interested in the brain.”

“I’m sure that’s fascinating, Diana, but what did he want?” Sarah matched my irritation with impatience—the one-two punch mastered by all Bishop women.

“Not dinner,” Em said with certainty.

Sarah snorted. “He wanted something. Vampires and witches don’t go on dates. Unless he was planning to dine on you, of course. They love nothing more than the taste of a witch’s blood.”

“Maybe he was just curious. Or maybe he does like your work.” Em said it with such doubt that I had to laugh.

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation at all if you’d just take some elementary precautions,” Sarah said tartly. “A protection spell, some use of your abilities as a seer, and—”

“I’m not using magic or witchcraft to figure out why a vampire asked me to dinner,” I said firmly. “Not negotiable, Sarah.”

“Then don’t call us looking for answers when you don’t want to hear them,” Sarah said, her notoriously short temper flaring. She hung up before I could think of a response.

“Sarah does worry about you, you know,” Em said apologetically. “And she doesn’t understand why you won’t use your gifts, not even to protect yourself.”

Because the gifts had strings attached, as I’d explained before. I tried again.

“It’s a slippery slope, Em. I protect myself from a vampire in the library today, and tomorrow I protect myself from a hard question at a lecture. Soon I’ll be picking research topics based on knowing how they’ll turn out and applying for grants that I’m sure to win. It’s important to me that I’ve made my reputation on my own. If I start using magic, nothing would belong entirely to me. I don’t want to be the next Bishop witch.” I opened my mouth to tell Em about Ashmole 782, but something made me close it again.

“I know, I know, honey.” Em’s voice was soothing. “I do understand. But Sarah can’t help worrying about your safety. You’re all the family she has now.”

My fingers slid through my hair and came to rest at my temples. Conversations like this always led back to my mother and father. I hesitated, reluctant to mention my one lingering concern.

“What is it?” Em asked, her sixth sense picking up on my discomfort.

“He knew my name. I’ve never seen him before, but he knew who I was.”

Em considered the possibilities. “Your picture’s on the inside of your latest book cover, isn’t it?”

My breath, which I hadn’t been aware I was holding, came out with a soft whoosh. “Yes. That must be it. I’m just being silly. Can you give Sarah a kiss from me?”

“You bet. And, Diana? Be careful. English vampires may not be as well behaved around witches as the American ones are.”

I smiled, thinking of Matthew Clairmont’s formal bow. “I will. But don’t worry. I probably won’t see him again.”

Em was quiet.

“Em?” I prompted.

“Time will tell.”

Em wasn’t as good at seeing the future as my mother was reputed to have been, but something was niggling at her. Convincing a witch to share a vague premonition was almost impossible. She wasn’t going to tell me what worried her about Matthew Clairmont. Not yet.

The vampire sat in the shadows on the curved expanse of the bridge that spanned New College Lane and connected two parts of Hertford College, his back resting against the worn stone of one of the college’s newer buildings and his feet propped up on the bridge’s roof.

The witch appeared, moving surprisingly surely across the uneven stones of the sidewalk outside the Bodleian. She passed underneath him, her pace quickening. Her nervousness made her look younger than she was and accentuated her vulnerability.

So that’s the formidable historian, he thought wryly, mentally going over her vita. Even after looking at her picture, Matthew expected Bishop to be older, given her professional accomplishments.

Diana Bishop’s back was straight and her shoulders square, in spite of her apparent agitation. Perhaps she would not be as easy to intimidate as he had hoped. Her behavior in the library had suggested as much. She’d met his eyes without a trace of the fear that Matthew had grown to rely upon from those who weren’t vampires—and many of those who were.

When Bishop rounded the corner, Matthew crept along the rooflines until he reached the New College wall. He slipped silently down into its boundaries. The vampire knew the college’s layout and had anticipated where her rooms would be. He was already tucked into a doorway opposite her staircase when she began her climb.

Matthew’s eyes followed her around the apartment as she moved from room to room, turning on the lights. She pushed the kitchen window open, left it ajar, disappeared.

That will save me from me breaking the window or picking her lock, he thought.

Matthew darted across the open space and scaled her building, his feet and hands finding sure holds in the old mortar with the help of a copper downspout and some robust vines. From his new vantage point, he could detect the witch’s distinctive scent and a rustle of turning pages. He craned his neck to peer into the window.

Bishop was reading. In repose her face looked different, he reflected. It was as if her skin fit the underlying bones properly. Her head bobbed slowly, and she slid against the cushions with a soft sigh of exhaustion. Soon the sound of regular breathing told Matthew she was asleep.

He swung out from the wall and kicked his feet up and through the witch’s kitchen window. It had been a very long time since the vampire had climbed into a woman’s rooms. Even then the occasions were rare and usually linked to moments when he was in the grip of infatuation. This time there was a far different reason. Nonetheless, if someone caught him, he’d have a hell of a time explaining what it was.

Matthew had to know if Ashmole 782 was still in Bishop’s possession. He hadn’t been able to search her desk at the library, but a quick glance had suggested that it wasn’t among the manuscripts she’d been consulting today. Still, there was no chance that a witch—a Bishop—would have let the volume slip through her fingers. With inaudible steps he traveled through the small set of rooms. The manuscript wasn’t in the witch’s bathroom or her bedroom. He crept quietly past the couch where she lay sleeping.

The witch’s eyelids were twitching as if she were watching a movie only she could see. One of her hands was drawn into a fist, and every now and then her legs danced. Bishop’s face was serene, however, unperturbed by whatever the rest of her body thought it was doing.

Something wasn’t right. He’d sensed it from the first moment he saw Bishop in the library. Matthew crossed his arms and studied her, but he still couldn’t figure out what it was. This witch didn’t give off the usual scents—henbane, sulfur, and sage. She’s hiding something, the vampire thought, something more than the lost manuscript.

Matthew turned away, seeking out the table she was using as a desk. It was easy to spot, littered with books and papers. That was the likeliest place for her to have put the smuggled volume. As he took a step toward it, he smelled electricity and froze.

Light was seeping from Diana Bishop’s body—all around the edges, escaping from her pores. The light was a blue so pale it was almost white, and at first it formed a cloudlike shroud that clung to her for a few seconds. For a moment she seemed to shimmer. Matthew shook his head in disbelief. It was impossible. It had been centuries since he’d seen such a luminous outpouring from a witch.

But other, more urgent matters beckoned, and Matthew resumed the hunt for the manuscript, hurriedly searching through the items on her desk. He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. The witch’s scent was everywhere, distracting him. Matthew’s eyes returned to the couch. Bishop was stirring and shifting again, her knees creeping toward her chest. Once more, luminosity pulsed to the surface, shimmered for a moment, retreated.

Matthew frowned, puzzled at the discrepancy between what he’d overheard last night and what he was witnessing with his own eyes. Two witches had been gossiping about Ashmole 782 and the witch who’d called it. One had suggested that the American historian didn’t use her magical power. But Matthew had seen it in the Bodleian—and now watched it wash through her with evident intensity. He suspected she used magic in her scholarship, too. Many of the men she wrote about had been friends of his—Cornelius Drebbel, Andreas Libavius, Isaac Newton. She’d captured their quirks and obsessions perfectly. Without magic how could a modern woman understand men who had lived so long ago? Fleetingly, Matthew wondered if Bishop would be able to understand him with the same uncanny accuracy.

The clocks struck three, startling him. His throat felt parched. He realized he’d been standing for several hours, motionless, watching the witch dream while her power rose and fell in waves. He briefly considered slaking his thirst with this witch’s blood. A taste of it might reveal the location of the missing volume and indicate what secrets the witch was keeping. But he restrained himself. It was only his desire to find Ashmole 782 that made him linger with the enigmatic Diana Bishop.

If the manuscript wasn’t in the witch’s rooms, then it was still in the library.

He padded to the kitchen, slid out the window, and melted into the night.

Four hours later I woke up on top of the duvet, clutching the phone. At some point I’d kicked off my right slipper, leaving my foot trailing over the edge of the bed. I looked at the clock and groaned. There was no time for my usual trip to the river, or even for a run.

Cutting my morning ritual short, I showered and then drank a scalding cup of tea while drying my hair. It was straw blond and unruly, despite the ministrations of a hairbrush. Like most witches, I had a problem getting the shoulder-length strands to stay put. Sarah blamed it on pent-up magic and promised that the regular use of my power would keep the static electricity from building and make my hair more obedient.

After brushing my teeth, I slipped on a pair of jeans, a fresh white blouse, and a black jacket. It was a familiar routine, and this was my habitual outfit, but neither proved comforting today. My clothes seemed confining, and I felt self-conscious in them. I jerked on the jacket to see if that would make it fit any better, but it was too much to expect from inferior tailoring.

When I looked into the mirror, my mother’s face stared back. I could no longer remember when I’d developed this strong resemblance to her. Sometime in college, perhaps? No one had commented on it until I came home for Thanksgiving break during freshman year. Since then it was the first thing I heard from those who had known Rebecca Bishop.

Today’s check in the mirror also revealed that my skin was pale from lack of sleep. This made my freckles, which I’d inherited from my father, stand out in apparent alarm, and the dark blue circles under my eyes made them appear lighter than usual. Fatigue also managed to lengthen my nose and render my chin more pronounced. I thought of the immaculate Professor Clairmont and wondered what he looked like first thing in the morning. Probably just as pristine as he had last night, I decided—the beast. I grimaced at my reflection.

On my way out the door, I stopped and surveyed my rooms. Something niggled at me—a forgotten appointment, a deadline. There was something I was missing that was important. The sense of unease wrapped around my stomach, squeezed, then let go. After checking my datebook and the stacks of mail on my desk, I wrote it off as hunger and went downstairs. The obliging ladies in the kitchen offered me toast when I passed by. They remembered me as a graduate student and still tried to force-feed me custard and apple pie when I looked stressed.

Munching on toast and slipping along the cobblestones of New College Lane was enough to convince me that last night had been a dream. My hair swung against my collar, and my breath showed in the crisp air. Oxford is quintessentially normal in the morning, with the delivery vans pulled up to college kitchens, the aromas of burned coffee and damp pavement, and fresh rays of sunlight slanting through the mist. It was not a place that seemed likely to harbor vampires.

The Bodleian’s blue-jacketed attendant went through his usual routine of scrutinizing my reader’s card as if he had never seen me before and suspected I might be a master book thief. Finally he waved me through. I deposited my bag in the cubbyholes by the door after first removing my wallet, computer, and notes, and then I headed up to the twisting wooden stairs to the third floor.

The smell of the library always lifted my spirits—that peculiar combination of old stone, dust, woodworm, and paper made properly from rags. Sun streamed through the windows on the staircase landings, illuminating the dust motes flying through the air and shining bars of light on the ancient walls. There the sun highlighted the curling announcements for last term’s lecture series. New posters had yet to go up, but it would only be a matter of days before the floodgates opened and a wave of undergraduates arrived to disrupt the city’s tranquillity.

Humming quietly to myself, I nodded to the busts of Thomas Bodley and King Charles I that flanked the arched entrance to Duke Humfrey’s and pushed through the swinging gate by the call desk.

“We’ll have to set him up in the Selden End today,” the supervisor was saying with a touch of exasperation.

The library had been open for just a few minutes, but Mr. Johnson and his staff were already in a flap. I’d seen this kind of behavior before, but only when the most distinguished scholars were expected.

“He’s already put in his requests, and he’s waiting down there.” The unfamiliar female attendant from yesterday scowled at me and shifted the stack of books in her arms. “These are his, too. He had them sent up from the New Bodleian Reading Room.”

That’s where they kept the East Asia books. It wasn’t my field, and I quickly lost interest.

“Get those to him now, and tell him we’ll bring the manuscripts down within the hour.” The supervisor sounded harassed as he returned to his office.

Sean rolled his eyes heavenward as I approached the collection desk. “Hi, Diana. Do you want the manuscripts you put on reserve?”

“Thanks,” I whispered, thinking of my waiting stack with relish. “Big day, huh?”

“Apparently,” he said drily, before disappearing into the locked cage that held the manuscripts overnight. He returned with my stack of treasures. “Here you go. Seat number?”

“A4.” It’s where I always sat, in the far southeastern corner of the Selden End, where the natural light was best.

Mr. Johnson came scurrying toward me. “Ah, Dr. Bishop, we’ve put Professor Clairmont in A3. You might prefer to sit in A1 or A6.” He shifted nervously from one foot to the other and pushed his glasses up, blinking at me through the thick glass.

I stared at him. “Professor Clairmont?”

“Yes. He’s working on the Needham papers and requested good light and room to spread out.”

“Joseph Needham, the historian of Chinese science?” Somewhere around my solar plexus, my blood started to seethe.

“Yes. He was a biochemist, too, of course—hence Professor Clairmont’s interest,” Mr. Johnson explained, looking more flustered by the moment. “Would you like to sit in A1?”

“I’ll take A6.” The thought of sitting next to a vampire, even with an empty seat between us, was deeply unsettling. Sitting across from one in A4 was unthinkable, however. How could I concentrate, wondering what those strange eyes were seeing? Had the desks in the medieval wing been more comfortable, I would have parked myself under one of the gargoyles that guarded the narrow windows and braved Gillian Chamberlain’s prim disapproval instead.

“Oh, that’s splendid. Thank you for understanding.” Mr. Johnson sighed with relief.

As I came into the light of the Selden End, my eyes narrowed. Clairmont looked immaculate and rested, his pale skin startling against his dark hair. This time his open-necked gray sweater had flecks of green, and his collar stood up slightly in the back. A peek under the table revealed charcoal gray trousers, matching socks, and black shoes that surely cost more than the average academic’s entire wardrobe.

The unsettled feeling returned. What was Clairmont doing in the library? Why wasn’t he in his lab?

Making no effort to muffle my footsteps, I strode in the vampire’s direction. Clairmont, seated diagonally across from me at the far end of the cluster of desks and seemingly oblivious to my approach, continued reading. I dumped my plastic bag and manuscripts onto the space marked A5, staking out the outer edges of my territory.

He looked up, brows arching in apparent surprise. “Dr. Bishop. Good morning.”

“Professor Clairmont.” It occurred to me that he’d overheard everything said about him at the reading room’s entrance, given that he had the hearing of a bat. I refused to meet his eyes and started pulling individual items out of my bag, building a small fortification of desk supplies between me and the vampire. Clairmont watched until I ran out of equipment, then lowered his eyebrows in concentration and returned to his reading.

I took out the cord for my computer and disappeared under the desk to shove it into the power strip. When I righted myself, he was still reading but was also trying not to smile.

“Surely you’d be more comfortable in the northern end,” I grumbled under my breath, rooting around for my list of manuscripts.

Clairmont looked up, dilating pupils making his eyes suddenly dark. “Am I bothering you, Dr. Bishop?”

“Of course not,” I said hastily, my throat closing at the sudden, sharp aroma of cloves that accompanied his words, “but I’m surprised you find a southern exposure comfortable.”

“You don’t believe everything you read, do you?” One of his thick, black eyebrows rose into the shape of a question mark.

“If you’re asking whether I think you’re going to burst into flames the moment the sunlight hits you, the answer is no.” Vampires didn’t burn at the touch of sunlight, nor did they have fangs. These were human myths. “But I’ve never met . . . someone like you who liked to bask in its glow either.”

Clairmont’s body remained still, but I could have sworn he was repressing a laugh. “How much direct experience have you had, Dr. Bishop, with ‘someone like me’?”

How did he know I hadn’t had much experience with vampires? Vampires had preternatural senses and abilities—but no supernatural ones, like mind reading or precognition. Those belonged to witches and, on rare occasions, could sometimes crop up in daemons, too. This was the natural order, or so my aunt had explained when I was a child and couldn’t sleep for fear that a vampire would steal my thoughts and fly out the window with them.

I studied him closely. “Somehow, Professor Clairmont, I don’t think years of experience would tell me what I need to know right now.”

“I’d be happy to answer your question, if I can,” he said, closing his book and placing it on the desk. He waited with the patience of a teacher listening to a belligerent and not very bright student.

“What is it that you want?”

Clairmont sat back in his chair, his hands resting easily on the arms. “I want to examine Dr. Needham’s papers and study the evolution of his ideas on morphogenesis.”

“Morphogenesis?”

“The changes to embryonic cells that result in differentiation—”

“I know what morphogenesis is, Professor Clairmont. That’s not what I’m asking.”

His mouth twitched. I crossed my arms protectively across my chest.

“I see.” He tented his long fingers, resting his elbows on the chair. “I came into Bodley’s Library last night to request some manuscripts. Once inside, I decided to look around a bit—I like to know my environment, you understand, and don’t often spend time here. There you were in the gallery. And of course what I saw after that was quite unexpected.” His mouth twitched again.

I flushed at the memory of how I’d used magic just to get a book. And I tried not to be disarmed by his old-fashioned use of “Bodley’s Library” but was not entirely successful.

Careful, Diana, I warned myself. He’s trying to charm you.

“So your story is that this has just been a set of odd coincidences, culminating in a vampire and a witch sitting across from each other and examining manuscripts like two ordinary readers?”

“I don’t think anyone who took the time to examine me carefully would think I was ordinary, do you?” Clairmont’s already quiet voice dropped to a mocking whisper, and he tilted forward in his chair. His pale skin caught the light and seemed to glow. “But otherwise, yes. It’s just a series of coincidences, easily explained.”

“I thought scientists didn’t believe in coincidences anymore.”

He laughed softly. “Some have to believe in them.”

Clairmont kept staring at me, which was unnerving in the extreme. The female attendant rolled the reading room’s ancient wooden cart up to the vampire’s elbow, boxes of manuscripts neatly arrayed on the trolley’s shelves.

The vampire dragged his eyes from my face. “Thank you, Valerie. I appreciate your assistance.”

“Of course, Professor Clairmont,” Valerie said, gazing at him raptly and turning pink. The vampire had charmed her with no more than a thank-you. I snorted. “Do let us know if you need anything else,” she said, returning to her bolt-hole by the entrance.

Clairmont picked up the first box, undid the string with his long fingers, and glanced across the table. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

Matthew Clairmont had taken the upper hand. I’d had enough dealings with senior colleagues to recognize the signs and to know that any response would only make the situation worse. I opened my computer, punched the power button with more force than necessary, and picked up the first of my manuscripts. Once the box was unfastened, I placed its leather-bound contents on the cradle in front of me.

Over the next hour and a half, I read the first pages at least thirty times. I started at the beginning, reading familiar lines of poetry attributed to George Ripley that promised to reveal the secrets of the philosopher’s stone. Given the surprises of the morning, the poem’s descriptions of how to make the Green Lion, create the Black Dragon, and concoct a mystical blood from chemical ingredients were even more opaque than usual.

Clairmont, however, got a prodigious amount done, covering pages of creamy paper with rapid strokes of his Montblanc Meisterstьck mechanical pencil. Every now and again, he’d turn over a sheet with a rustle that set my teeth on edge and begin once more.

Occasionally Mr. Johnson drifted through the room, making sure no one was defacing the books. The vampire kept writing. I glared at both of them.

At 10:45, there was a familiar tingle when Gillian Chamberlain bustled into the Selden End. She started toward me—no doubt to tell me what a splendid time she’d had at the Mabon dinner. Then she saw the vampire and dropped her plastic bag full of pencils and paper. He looked up and stared until she scampered back to the medieval wing.

At 11:10, I felt the insidious pressure of a kiss on my neck. It was the confused, caffeine-addicted daemon from the music reference room. He was repeatedly twirling a set of white plastic headphones around his fingers, then unwinding them to send them spinning through the air. The daemon saw me, nodded at Matthew, and sat at one of the computers in the center of the room. A sign was taped to the screen: OUT OF ORDER. TECHNICIAN CALLED. He remained there for the next several hours, glancing over his shoulder and then at the ceiling periodically as if trying to figure out where he was and how he’d gotten there.

I returned my attention to George Ripley, Clairmont’s eyes cold on the top of my head.

At 11:40, icy patches bloomed between my shoulder blades.

This was the last straw. Sarah always said that one in ten beings was a creature, but in Duke Humfrey’s this morning the creatures outnumbered humans five to one. Where had they all come from?

I stood abruptly and whirled around, frightening a cherubic, tonsured vampire with an armful of medieval missals just as he was lowering himself into a chair that was much too small for him. He let out a squeak at the sudden, unwanted attention. At the sight of Clairmont, he turned a whiter shade than I thought was possible, even for a vampire. With an apologetic bow, he scuttled off to the library’s dimmer recesses.

Over the course of the afternoon, a few humans and three more creatures entered the Selden End.

Two unfamiliar female vampires who appeared to be sisters glided past Clairmont and came to a stop among the local-history shelves under the window, picking up volumes about the early settlement of Bedfordshire and Dorset and writing notes back and forth on a single pad of paper. One of them whispered something, and Clairmont’s head swiveled so fast it would have snapped the neck of a lesser being. He made a soft hissing sound that ruffled the hair on my own neck. The two exchanged looks and departed as quietly as they had appeared.

The third creature was an elderly man who stood in a full beam of sunlight and stared raptly at the leaded windows before turning his eyes to me. He was dressed in familiar academic garb—brown tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, corduroy pants in a slightly jarring tone of green, and a cotton shirt with a button-down collar and ink stains on the pocket—and I was ready to dismiss him as just another Oxford scholar before my skin tingled to tell me that he was a witch. Still, he was a stranger, and I returned my attention to my manuscript.

A gentle sensation of pressure on the back of my skull made it impossible to keep reading, however. The pressure flitted to my ears, growing in intensity as it wrapped around my forehead, and my stomach clenched in panic. This was no longer a silent greeting, but a threat. Why, though, would he be threatening me?

The wizard strolled toward my desk with apparent casualness. As he approached, a voice whispered in my now-throbbing head. It was too faint to distinguish the words. I was sure it was coming from this male witch, but who on earth was he?

My breath became shallow. Get the hell out of my head, I said fiercely if silently, touching my forehead.

Clairmont moved so quickly I didn’t see him round the desks. In an instant he was standing with one hand on the back of my chair and the other resting on the surface in front of me. His broad shoulders were curved around me like the wings of a falcon shielding his prey.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I replied with a shaking voice, utterly confused as to why a vampire would need to protect me from another witch.

In the gallery above us, a reader craned her neck to see what all the fuss was about. She stood, her brow creased. Two witches and a vampire were impossible for a human to ignore.

“Leave me alone. The humans have noticed us,” I said between clenched teeth.

Clairmont straightened to his full height but kept his back to the witch and his body angled between us like an avenging angel.

“Ah, my mistake,” the witch murmured from behind Clairmont. “I thought this seat was available. Excuse me.” Soft steps retreated into the distance, and the pressure on my head gradually subsided.

A slight breeze stirred as the vampire’s cold hand reached toward my shoulder, stopped, and returned to the back of the chair. Clairmont leaned over. “You look quite pale,” he said in his soft, low voice. “Would you like me to take you home?”

“No.” I shook my head, hoping he would go sit down and let me gather my composure. In the gallery the human reader kept a wary eye on us.

“Dr. Bishop, I really think you should let me take you home.”

“No!” My voice was louder than I intended. It dropped to a whisper. “I am not being driven out of this library—not by you, not by anyone.”

Clairmont’s face was disconcertingly close. He took a slow breath in, and once again there was a powerful aroma of cinnamon and cloves. Something in my eyes convinced him I was serious, and he drew away. His mouth flattened into a severe line, and he returned to his seat.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon in a state of dйtente. I tried to read beyond the second folio of my first manuscript, and Clairmont leafed through scraps of paper and closely written notebooks with the attention of a judge deciding on a capital case.

By three o’clock my nerves were so frayed that I could no longer concentrate. The day was lost.

I gathered my scattered belongings and returned the manuscript to its box.

Clairmont looked up. “Going home, Dr. Bishop?” His tone was mild, but his eyes glittered.

“Yes,” I snapped.

The vampire’s face went carefully blank.

Every creature in the library watched me on my way out—the threatening wizard, Gillian, the vampire monk, even the daemon. The afternoon attendant at the collection desk was a stranger to me, because I never left at this time of day. Mr. Johnson pushed his chair back slightly, saw it was me, and looked at his watch in surprise.

In the quadrangle I pushed the glass doors of the library open and drank in the fresh air. It would take more than fresh air, though, to turn the day around.

Fifteen minutes later I was in a pair of fitted, calf-length pants that stretched in six different directions, a faded New College Boat Club tank, and a fleece pullover. After tying on my sneakers I set off for the river at a run.

When I reached it, some of my tension had already abated. “Adrenaline poisoning,” one of my doctors had called these surges of anxiety that had troubled me since childhood. The doctors explained that, for reasons they could not understand, my body seemed to think it was in a constant state of danger. One of the specialists my aunt consulted explained earnestly that it was a biochemical leftover from hunter-gatherer days. I’d be all right so long as I rid my bloodstream of the adrenaline load by running, just as a frightened ibex would run from a lion.

Unfortunately for that doctor, I’d gone to the Serengeti with my parents as a child and had witnessed such a pursuit. The ibex lost. It had made quite an impression on me.

Since then I’d tried medication and meditation, but nothing was better for keeping panic at bay than physical activity. In Oxford it was rowing each morning before the college crews turned the narrow river into a thorough-fare. But the university was not yet in session, and the river would be clear this afternoon.

My feet crunched against the crushed gravel paths that led to the boathouses. I waved at Pete, the boatman who prowled around with wrenches and tubs of grease, trying to put right what the undergraduates mangled in the course of their training. I stopped at the seventh boathouse and bent over to ease the stitch in my side before retrieving the key from the top of the light outside the boathouse doors.

Racks of white and yellow boats greeted me inside. There were big, eight-seated boats for the first men’s crew, slightly leaner boats for the women, and other boats of decreasing quality and size. A sign hung from the bow of one shiny new boat that hadn’t been rigged yet, instructing visitors that NO ONE MAY TAKE THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN OUT OF THIS HOUSE WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE NCBC PRESIDENT. The boat’s name was freshly stenciled on its side in a Victorian-style script, in homage to the New College graduate who had created the character.

At the back of the boathouse, a whisper of a boat under twelve inches wide and more than twenty-five feet long rested in a set of slings positioned at hip level. God bless Pete, I thought. He’d taken to leaving the scull on the floor of the boathouse. A note resting on the seat read, “College training next Monday. Boat will be back in racks.”

I kicked off my sneakers, picked two oars with curving blades from the stash near the doors, and carried them down to the dock. Then I went back for the boat.

I plopped the scull gently into the water and put one foot on the seat to keep it from floating away while I threaded the oars into the oarlocks. Holding both oars in one hand like a pair of oversize chopsticks, I carefully stepped into the boat and pushed the dock with my left hand. The scull floated out onto the river.

Rowing was a religion for me, composed of a set of rituals and movements repeated until they became a meditation. The rituals began the moment I touched the equipment, but its real magic came from the combination of precision, rhythm, and strength that rowing required. Since my undergraduate days, rowing had instilled a sense of tranquillity in me like nothing else.

My oars dipped into the water and skimmed along the surface. I picked up the pace, powering through each stroke with my legs and feeling the water when my blade swept back and slipped under the waves. The wind was cold and sharp, cutting through my clothes with every stroke.

As my movements flowed into a seamless cadence, it felt as though I were flying. During these blissful moments, I was suspended in time and space, nothing but a weightless body on a moving river. My swift little boat darted along, and I swung in perfect unison with the boat and its oars. I closed my eyes and smiled, the events of the day fading in significance.

The sky darkened behind my closed lids, and the booming sound of traffic overhead indicated that I’d passed underneath the Donnington Bridge. Coming through into the sunlight on the other side, I opened my eyes—and felt the cold touch of a vampire’s gaze on my sternum.

A figure stood on the bridge, his long coat flapping around his knees. Though I couldn’t see his face clearly, the vampire’s considerable height and bulk suggested that it was Matthew Clairmont. Again.

I swore and nearly dropped one oar. The City of Oxford dock was nearby. The notion of pulling an illegal maneuver and crossing the river so that I could smack the vampire upside his beautiful head with whatever piece of boat equipment was handy was very tempting. While formulating my plan, I spotted a slight woman standing on the dock wearing paint-stained overalls. She was smoking a cigarette and talking into a mobile phone.

This was not a typical sight for the City of Oxford boathouse.

She looked up, her eyes nudging my skin. A daemon. She twisted her mouth into a wolfish smile and said something into the phone.

This was just too weird. First Clairmont and now a host of creatures appearing whenever he did? Abandoning my plan, I poured my unease into my rowing.

I managed to get down the river, but the serenity of the outing had evaporated. Turning the boat in front of the Isis Tavern, I spotted Clairmont standing beside one of the pub’s tables. He’d managed to get there from the Donnington Bridge—on foot—in less time than I’d done it in a racing scull.

Pulling hard on both oars, I lifted them two feet off the water like the wings of an enormous bird and glided straight into the tavern’s rickety wooden dock. By the time I’d climbed out, Clairmont had crossed the twenty-odd feet of grass lying between us. His weight pushed the floating platform down slightly in the water, and the boat wiggled in adjustment.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, stepping clear of the blade and across the rough planks to where the vampire now stood. My breath was ragged from exertion, my cheeks flushed. “Are you and your friends stalking me?”

Clairmont frowned. “They aren’t my friends, Dr. Bishop.”

“No? I haven’t seen so many vampires, witches, and daemons in one place since my aunts dragged me to a pagan summer festival when I was thirteen. If they’re not your friends, why are they always hanging around you?” I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead and pushed the damp hair away from my face.

“Good God,” the vampire murmured incredulously. “The rumors are true.”

“What rumors?” I said impatiently.

“You think these . . . things want to spend time with me?” Clairmont’s voice dripped with contempt and something that sounded like surprise. “Unbelievable.”

I worked my fleece pullover up above my shoulders and yanked it off. Clairmont’s eyes flickered to my collarbones, over my bare arms, and down to my fingertips. I felt uncharacteristically naked in my familiar rowing clothes.

“Yes,” I snapped. “I’ve lived in Oxford. I visit every year. The only thing that’s been different this time is you. Since you showed up last night, I’ve been pushed out of my seat in the library, stared at by strange vampires and daemons, and threatened by unfamiliar witches.”

Clairmont’s arms rose slightly, as if he were going to take me by the shoulders and shake me. Though I was by no means short at just under five-seven, he was so tall that my neck had to bend sharply so I could make eye contact. Acutely aware of his size and strength relative to my own, I stepped back and crossed my arms, calling upon my professional persona to steel my nerves.

“They’re not interested in me, Dr. Bishop. They’re interested in you.”

“Why? What could they possibly want from me?”

“Do you really not know why every daemon, witch, and vampire south of the Midlands is following you?” There was a note of disbelief in his voice, and the vampire’s expression suggested he was seeing me for the first time.

“No,” I said, my eyes on two men enjoying their afternoon pint at a nearby table. Thankfully, they were absorbed in their own conversation. “I’ve done nothing in Oxford except read old manuscripts, row on the river, prepare for my conference, and keep to myself. It’s all I’ve ever done here. There’s no reason for any creature to pay this kind of attention to me.”

“Think, Diana.” Clairmont’s voice was intense. A ripple of something that wasn’t fear passed across my skin when he said my first name. “What have you been reading?”

His eyelids dropped over his strange eyes, but not before I’d seen their avid expression.

My aunts had warned me that Matthew Clairmont wanted something. They were right.

He fixed his odd, gray-rimmed black eyes on me once more. “They’re following you because they believe you’ve found something lost many years ago,” he said reluctantly. “They want it back, and they think you can get it for them.”

I thought about the manuscripts I’d consulted over the past few days. My heart sank. There was only one likely candidate for all this attention.

“If they’re not your friends, how do you know what they want?”

“I hear things, Dr. Bishop. I have very good hearing,” he said patiently, reverting to his characteristic formality. “I’m also fairly observant. At a concert on Sunday evening, two witches were talking about an American—a fellow witch—who found a book in Bodley’s Library that had been given up for lost. Since then I’ve noticed many new faces in Oxford, and they make me uneasy.”

“It’s Mabon. That explains why the witches are in Oxford.” I was trying to match his patient tone, though he hadn’t answered my last question.

Smiling sardonically, Clairmont shook his head. “No, it’s not the equinox. It’s the manuscript.”

“What do you know about Ashmole 782?” I asked quietly.

“Less than you do,” said Clairmont, his eyes narrowing to slits. It made him look even more like a large, lethal beast. “I’ve never seen it. You’ve held it in your hands. Where is it now, Dr. Bishop? You weren’t so foolish as to leave it in your room?”

I was aghast. “You think I stole it? From the Bodleian? How dare you suggest such a thing!”

“You didn’t have it Monday night,” he said. “And it wasn’t on your desk today either.”

“You are observant,” I said sharply, “if you could see all that from where you were sitting. I returned it Friday, if you must know.” It occurred to me, belatedly, that he might have rifled through the things on my desk. “What’s so special about the manuscript that you’d snoop through a colleague’s work?”

He winced slightly, but my triumph at catching him doing something so inappropriate was blunted by a twinge of fear that this vampire was following me as closely as he obviously was.

“Simple curiosity,” he said, baring his teeth. Sarah had not misled me—vampires don’t have fangs.

“I hope you don’t expect me to believe that.”

“I don’t care what you believe, Dr. Bishop. But you should be on your guard. These creatures are serious. And when they come to understand what an unusual witch you are?” Clairmont shook his head.

“What do you mean?” All the blood drained from my head, leaving me dizzy.

“It’s uncommon these days for a witch to have so much . . . potential.” Clairmont’s voice dropped to a purr that vibrated in the back of his throat. “Not everyone can see it—yet—but I can. You shimmer with it when you concentrate. When you’re angry, too. Surely the daemons in the library will sense it soon, if they haven’t already.”

“I appreciate the warning. But I don’t need your help.” I prepared to stalk away, but his hand shot out and gripped my upper arm, stopping me in my tracks.

“Don’t be too sure of that. Be careful. Please.” Clairmont hesitated, his face shaken out of its perfect lines as he wrestled with something. “Especially if you see that wizard again.”

I stared fixedly at the hand on my arm. Clairmont released me. His lids dropped, shuttering his eyes.

My row back to the boathouse was slow and steady, but the repetitive movements weren’t able to carry away my lingering confusion and unease. Every now and again, there was a gray blur on the towpath, but nothing else caught my attention except for people bicycling home from work and a very ordinary human walking her dog.

After returning the equipment and locking the boathouse, I set off down the towpath at a measured jog.

Matthew Clairmont was standing across the river in front of the University Boat House.

I began to run, and when I looked back over my shoulder, he was gone.

After dinner I sat down on the sofa by the sitting room’s dormant fireplace and switched on my laptop. Why would a scientist of Clairmont’s caliber want to see an alchemical manuscript—even one under a spell—so much that he’d sit at the Bodleian all day, across from a witch, and read through old notes on morphogenesis? His business card was tucked into one of the pockets of my bag. I fished it out, propping it up against the screen.

On the Internet, below an unrelated link to a murder mystery and the unavoidable hits from social-networking sites, a string of biographical listings looked promising: his faculty Web page, a Wikipedia article, and links to the current fellows of the Royal Society.

I clicked on the faculty Web page and snorted. Matthew Clairmont was one of those faculty members who didn’t like to post any information—even academic information—on the Net. On Yale’s Web site, a visitor could get contact information and a complete vita for practically every member of the faculty. Oxford clearly had a different attitude toward privacy. No wonder a vampire taught here.

There hadn’t been a hit for Clairmont at the hospital, though the affiliation was on his card. I typed “John Radcliffe Neurosciences” into the search box and was led to an overview of the department’s services. There wasn’t a single reference to a physician, however, only a lengthy list of research interests. Clicking systematically through the terms, I finally found him on a page dedicated to the “frontal lobe,” though there was no additional information.

The Wikipedia article was no help at all, and the Royal Society’s site was no better. Anything useful hinted at on the main pages was hidden behind passwords. I had no luck imagining what Clairmont’s user name and password might be and was refused access to anything at all after my sixth incorrect guess.

Frustrated, I entered the vampire’s name into the search engines for scientific journals.

“Yes.” I sat back in satisfaction.

Matthew Clairmont might not have much of a presence on the Internet, but he was certainly active in the scholarly literature. After clicking a box to sort the results by date, I was provided with a snapshot of his intellectual history.

My initial sense of triumph faded. He didn’t have one intellectual history. He had four.

The first began with the brain. Much of it was beyond me, but Clairmont seemed to have made a scientific and medical reputation at the same time by studying how the brain’s frontal lobe processes urges and cravings. He’d made several major breakthroughs related to the role that neural mechanisms play in delayed-gratification responses, all of which involved the prefrontal cortex. I opened a new browser window to view an anatomical diagram and locate which bit of the brain was at issue.

Some argued that all scholarship is thinly veiled autobiography. My pulse jumped. Given that Clairmont was a vampire, I sincerely hoped delayed gratification was something he was good at.

My next few clicks showed that Clairmont’s work took a surprising turn away from the brain and toward wolves—Norwegian wolves, to be precise. He must have spent a considerable amount of time in the Scandinavian nights in the course of his research—which posed no problem for a vampire, considering their body temperature and ability to see in the dark. I tried to imagine him in a parka and grubby clothes with a notepad in the snow—and failed.

After that, the first references to blood appeared.

While the vampire was with the wolves in Norway, he’d started analyzing their blood to determine family groups and inheritance patterns. Clairmont had isolated four clans among the Norwegian wolves, three of which were indigenous. The fourth he traced back to a wolf that had arrived in Norway from Sweden or Finland. There was, he concluded, a surprising amount of mating across packs, leading to an exchange of genetic material that influenced species evolution.

Now he was tracing inherited traits among other animal species as well as in humans. Many of his most recent publications were technical—methods for staining tissue samples and processes for handling particularly old and fragile DNA.

I grabbed a fistful of my hair and held tight, hoping the pressure would increase blood circulation and get my tired synapses firing again. This made no sense. No scientist could produce this much work in so many different subdisciplines. Acquiring the skills alone would take more than a lifetime—a human lifetime, that is.

A vampire might well pull it off, if he had been working on problems like this over the span of decades. Just how old was Matthew Clairmont behind that thirty-something face?

I got up and made a fresh cup of tea. With the mug steaming in one hand, I rooted through my bag until I found my mobile and punched in a number with my thumb.

One of the best things about scientists was that they always had their phones. They answered them on the second ring, too.

“Christopher Roberts.”

“Chris, it’s Diana Bishop.”

“Diana!” Chris’s voice was warm, and there was music blaring in the background. “I heard you won another prize for your book. Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” I said, shifting in my seat. “It was quite unexpected.”

“Not to me. Speaking of which, how’s the research going? Have you finished writing your keynote?”

“Nowhere near,” I said. That’s what I should be doing, not tracking down vampires on the Internet. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you in the lab. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure.” He shouted for someone to turn down the noise. It remained at the same volume. “Hold on.” There were muffled sounds, then quiet. “That’s better,” he said sheepishly. “The new kids are pretty high energy at the beginning of the semester.”

“Grad students are always high energy, Chris.” I felt a tiny pang at missing the rush of new classes and new students.

“You know it. But what about you? What do you need?”

Chris and I had taken up our faculty positions at Yale in the same year, and he wasn’t supposed to get tenure either. He’d beaten me to it by a year, picking up a MacArthur Fellowship along the way for his brilliant work as a molecular biologist.

He didn’t behave like an aloof genius when I cold-called him to ask why an alchemist might describe two substances heated in an alembic as growing branches like a tree. Nobody else in the chemistry department had been interested in helping me, but Chris sent two Ph.D. students to get the materials necessary to re-create the experiment, then insisted I come straight to the lab. We’d watched through the walls of a glass beaker while a lump of gray sludge underwent a glorious evolution into a red tree with hundreds of branches. We’d been friends ever since.

I took a deep breath. “I met someone the other day.”

Chris whooped. He’d been introducing me to men he’d met at the gym for years.

“There’s no romance,” I said hastily. “He’s a scientist.”

“A gorgeous scientist is exactly what you need. You need a challenge—and a life.”

“Look who’s talking. What time did you leave the lab yesterday? Besides, there’s already one gorgeous scientist in my life,” I teased.

“No changing the subject.”

“Oxford is such a small town, I’m bound to keep running into him. And he seems to be a big deal around here.” Not strictly true, I thought, crossing my fingers, but close enough. “I’ve looked up his work and can understand some of it, but I must be missing something, because it doesn’t seem to fit together.”

“Tell me he’s not an astrophysicist,” Chris said. “You know I’m weak on physics.”

“You’re supposed to be a genius.”

“I am,” he said promptly. “But my genius doesn’t extend to card games or physics. Name, please.” Chris tried to be patient, but no one’s brain moved fast enough for him.

“Matthew Clairmont.” His name caught in the back of my throat, just as the scent of cloves had the night before.

Chris whistled. “The elusive, reclusive Professor Clairmont.” Gooseflesh rose on my arms. “What did you do, put him under a spell with those eyes of yours?”

Since Chris didn’t know I was a witch, his use of the word “spell” was entirely accidental. “He admires my work on Boyle.”

“Right,” Chris scoffed. “You turned those crazy blue-and-gold starbursts on him and he was thinking about Boyle’s law? He’s a scientist, Diana, not a monk. And he is a big deal, incidentally.”

“Really?” I said faintly.

“Really. He was a phenom, just like you, and started publishing while he was still a grad student. Good stuff, not crap—work you’d be happy to have your name on if you managed to produce it over the course of a career.”

I scanned my notes, scratched out on a yellow legal pad. “This was his study of neural mechanisms and the prefrontal cortex?”

“You’ve done your homework,” he said approvingly. “I didn’t follow much of Clairmont’s early work—his chemistry is what interests me—but his publications on wolves caused a lot of excitement.”

“How come?”

“He had amazing instincts—why the wolves picked certain places to live, how they formed social groups, how they mated. It was almost like he was a wolf, too.”

“Maybe he is.” I tried to keep my voice light, but something bitter and envious bloomed in my mouth and it came out harshly instead.

Matthew Clairmont didn’t have a problem using his preternatural abilities and thirst for blood to advance his career. If the vampire had been making the decisions about Ashmole 782 on Friday night, he would have touched the manuscript’s illustrations. I was sure of it.

“It would have been easier to explain the quality of his work if he were a wolf,” Chris said patiently, ignoring my tone. “Since he isn’t, you just have to admit he’s very good. He was elected to the Royal Society on the basis of it, after they published his findings. People were calling him the next Attenborough. After that, he dropped out of sight for a while.”

I’ll bet he did. “Then he popped up again, doing evolution and chemistry?”

“Yeah, but his interest in evolution was a natural progression from the wolves.”

“So what is it about his chemistry that interests you?”

Chris’s voice got tentative. “Well, he’s behaving like a scientist does when he’s discovered something big.”

“I don’t understand.” I frowned.

“We get jumpy and weird. We hide in our labs and don’t go to conferences for fear we might say something and help someone else have a breakthrough.”

“You behave like wolves.” I now knew a great deal about wolves. The possessive, guarded behaviors Chris described fit the Norwegian wolf nicely.

“Exactly.” Chris laughed. “He hasn’t bitten anyone or been caught howling at the moon?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” I murmured. “Has Clairmont always been so reclusive?”

“I’m the wrong person to ask,” Chris admitted. “He does have a medical degree, and must have seen patients, although he never had any reputation as a clinician. And the wolves liked him. But he hasn’t been at any of the obvious conferences in the past three years.” He paused. “Wait a minute, though, there was something a few years back.”

“What?”

“He gave a paper—I can’t remember the particulars—and a woman asked him a question. It was a smart question, but he was dismissive. She was persistent. He got irritated and then mad. A friend who was there said he’d never seen anybody go from courteous to furious so fast.”

I was already typing, trying to find information about the controversy. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, huh? There’s no sign of the ruckus online.”

“I’m not surprised. Chemists don’t air their dirty laundry in public. It hurts all of us at grant time. We don’t want the bureaucrats thinking we’re high-strung megalomaniacs. We leave that to the physicists.”

“Does Clairmont get grants?”

“Oho. Yes. He’s funded up to his eyeballs. Don’t you worry about Professor Clairmont’s career. He may have a reputation for being contemptuous of women, but it hasn’t dried up the money. His work is too good for that.”

“Have you ever met him?” I asked, hoping to get Chris’s judgment of Clairmont’s character.

“No. You probably couldn’t find more than a few dozen people who could claim they had. He doesn’t teach. There are lots of stories, though—he doesn’t like women, he’s an intellectual snob, he doesn’t answer his mail, he doesn’t take on research students.”

“Sounds like you think that’s all nonsense.”

“Not nonsense,” Chris said thoughtfully. “I’m just not sure it matters, given that he might be the one to unlock the secrets of evolution or cure Parkinson’s disease.”

“You make him sound like a cross between Salk and Darwin.”

“Not a bad analogy, actually.”

“He’s that good?” I thought of Clairmont studying the Needham papers with ferocious concentration and suspected he was better than good.

“Yes.” Chris dropped his voice. “If I were a betting man, I’d put down a hundred dollars that he’ll win a Nobel before he dies.”

Chris was a genius, but he didn’t know that Matthew Clairmont was a vampire. There would be no Nobel—the vampire would see to that, to preserve his anonymity. Nobel Prize winners have their photos taken.

“It’s a bet,” I said with a laugh.

“You should start saving up, Diana, because you’re going to lose this one.” Chris chuckled.

He’d lost our last wager. I’d bet him fifty dollars that he’d be tenured before I was. His money was stuck inside the same frame that held his picture, taken the morning the MacArthur Foundation had called. In it, Chris was dragging his hands over his tight black curls, a sheepish smile lighting his dark face. His tenure had followed nine months later.

“Thanks, Chris. You’ve been a big help,” I said sincerely. “You should get back to the kids. They’ve probably blown something up by now.”

“Yeah, I should check on them. The fire alarms haven’t gone off, which is a good sign.” He hesitated. “’Fess up, Diana. You’re not worried about saying the wrong thing if you see Matthew Clairmont at a cocktail party. This is how you behave when you’re working on a research problem. What is it about him that’s hooked your imagination?”

Sometimes Chris seemed to suspect I was different. But there was no way to tell him the truth.

“I have a weakness for smart men.”

He sighed. “Okay, don’t tell me. You’re a terrible liar, you know. But be careful. If he breaks your heart, I’ll have to kick his ass, and this is a busy semester for me.”

“Matthew Clairmont isn’t going to break my heart,” I insisted. “He’s a colleague—one with broad reading interests, that’s all.”

“For someone so smart, you really are clueless. I bet you ten dollars he asks you out before the week is over.”

I laughed. “Are you ever going to learn? Ten dollars, then—or the equivalent in British sterling—when I win.”

We said our good-byes. I still didn’t know much about Matthew Clairmont—but I had a better sense of the questions that remained, most important among them being why someone working on a breakthrough in evolution would be interested in seventeenth-century alchemy.

I surfed the Internet until my eyes were too tired to continue. When the clocks struck midnight, I was surrounded by notes on wolves and genetics but was no closer to unraveling the mystery of Matthew Clairmont’s interest in Ashmole 782.

The next morning was gray and much more typical of early autumn. All I wanted to do was cocoon myself in layers of sweaters and stay in my rooms.

One glance at the heavy weather convinced me not to return to the river. I set out for a run instead, waving at the night porter in the lodge, who gave me an incredulous look followed by an encouraging thumbs-up.

With each slap of my feet on the sidewalk, some stiffness left my body. By the time they reached the gravel paths of the University Parks, I was breathing deeply and felt relaxed and ready for a long day in the library—no matter how many creatures were gathered there.

When I got back, the porter stopped me. “Dr. Bishop?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry about turning your friend away last night, but it’s college policy. Next time you’re having guests, let us know and we’ll send them straight up.”

The clearheadedness from my run evaporated.

“Was it a man or a woman?” I asked sharply.

“A woman.”

My shoulders floated down from around my ears.

“She seemed perfectly nice, and I always like Australians. They’re friendly without being, you know . . . ” The porter trailed off, but his meaning was clear. Australians were like Americans—but not so pushy. “We did call up to your rooms.”

I frowned. I’d switched off the phone’s ringer, because Sarah never calculated the time difference between Madison and Oxford correctly and was always calling in the middle of the night. That explained it.

“Thank you for letting me know. I’ll be sure to tell you about any future visitors,” I promised.

Back in my rooms, I flipped on the bathroom light and saw that the past two days had taken a toll. The circles that had appeared under my eyes yesterday had now blossomed into something resembling bruises. I checked my arm for bruises, too, and was surprised not to find any. The vampire’s grip had been so strong that I was sure Clairmont had broken the blood vessels under the skin.

I showered and dressed in loose trousers and a turtleneck. Their unalleviated black accentuated my height and minimized my athletic build, but it also made me resemble a corpse, so I tied a soft periwinkle sweater around my shoulders. That made the circles under my eyes look bluer, but at least I no longer looked dead. My hair threatened to stand straight up from my head and crackled every time I moved. The only solution for it was to scrape it back into a messy knot at the nape of my neck.

Clairmont’s trolley had been stuffed with manuscripts, and I was resigned to seeing him in Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room. I approached the call desk with shoulders squared.

Once again the supervisor and both attendants were flapping around like nervous birds. This time their activity was focused on the triangle between the call desk, the manuscript card catalogs, and the supervisor’s office. They carried stacks of boxes and pushed carts loaded with manuscripts under the watchful eyes of the gargoyles and into the first three bays of ancient desks.

“Thank you, Sean.” Clairmont’s deep, courteous voice floated from their depths.

The good news was that I would no longer have to share a desk with a vampire.

The bad news was that I couldn’t enter or leave the library—or call a book or manuscript—without Clairmont’s tracking my every move. And today he had backup.

A diminutive girl was stacking up papers and file folders in the second alcove. She was dressed in a long, baggy brown sweater that reached almost to her knees. When she turned, I was startled to see a full-grown adult. Her eyes were amber and black, and as cold as frostbite.

Even without their touch, her luminous, pale skin and unnaturally thick, glossy hair gave her away as a vampire. Snaky waves of it undulated around her face and over her shoulders. She took a step toward me, making no effort to disguise the swift, sure movements, and gave me a withering glance. This was clearly not where she wanted to be, and she blamed me.

“Miriam,” Clairmont called softly, walking out into the center aisle. He stopped short, and a polite smile shaped his lips. “Dr. Bishop. Good morning.” He raked his fingers through his hair, which only made it look more artfully tousled. I patted my own hair self-consciously and tucked a stray strand behind my ear.

“Good morning, Professor Clairmont. Back again, I see.”

“Yes. But today I won’t be joining you in the Selden End. They’ve been able to accommodate us here, where we won’t disturb anyone.”

The female vampire rapped a stack of papers sharply against the top of the desk.

Clairmont smiled. “May I introduce my research colleague, Dr. Miriam Shephard. Miriam, this is Dr. Diana Bishop.”

“Dr. Bishop,” Miriam said coolly, extending her hand in my direction. I took it and felt a shock at the contrast between her tiny, cold hand and my own larger, warmer one. I began to draw back, but her grip grew firmer, crushing the bones together. When she finally let go, I had to resist the urge to shake out my hand.

“Dr. Shephard.” The three of us stood awkwardly. What were you supposed to ask a vampire first thing in the morning? I fell back on human platitudes. “I should really get to work.”

“Have a productive day,” Clairmont said, his nod as cool as Miriam’s greeting.

Mr. Johnson appeared at my elbow, my small stack of gray boxes waiting in his arms.

“We’ve got you in A4 today, Dr. Bishop,” he said with a pleased puff of his cheeks. “I’ll just carry these back for you.” Clairmont’s shoulders were so broad that I couldn’t see around him to tell if there were bound manuscripts on his desk. I stifled my curiosity and followed the reading-room supervisor to my familiar seat in the Selden End.

Even without Clairmont sitting across from me, I was acutely aware of him as I took out my pencils and turned on my computer. My back to the empty room, I picked up the first box, pulled out the leather-bound manuscript, and placed it in the cradle.

The familiar task of reading and taking notes soon absorbed my attention, and I finished with the first manuscript in less than two hours. My watch revealed that it was not yet eleven. There was still time for another before lunch.

The manuscript inside the next box was smaller than the last, but it contained interesting sketches of alchemical apparatus and snippets of chemical procedures that read like some unholy combination of Joy of Cooking and a poisoner’s notebook. “Take your pot of mercury and seethe it over a flame for three hours,” began one set of instructions, “and when it has joined with the Philosophical Child take it and let it putrefy until the Black Crow carries it away to its death.” My fingers flew over the keyboard, picking up momentum as the minutes ticked by.

I had prepared myself to be stared at today by every creature imaginable. But when the clocks chimed one, I was still virtually alone in the Selden End. The only other reader was a graduate student wearing a red-, white-, and blue-striped Keble College scarf. He stared morosely at a stack of rare books without reading them and bit his nails with occasional loud clicks.

After filling out two new request slips and packing up my manuscripts, I left my seat for lunch, satisfied with the morning’s accomplishments. Gillian Chamberlain stared at me malevolently from an uncomfortable-looking seat near the ancient clock as I passed by, the two female vampires from yesterday drove icicles into my skin, and the daemon from the music reference room had picked up two other daemons. The three of them were dismantling a microfilm reader, the parts scattered all around them and a roll of film unspooling, unnoticed, on the floor at their feet.

Clairmont and his vampire assistant were still stationed near the reading room’s call desk. The vampire claimed that the creatures were flocking to me, not to him. But their behavior today suggested otherwise, I thought with triumph.

While I was returning my manuscripts, Matthew Clairmont eyed me coldly. It took a considerable effort, but I refrained from acknowledging him.

“All done with these?” Sean asked.

“Yes. There are still two more at my desk. If I could have these as well, that would be great.” I handed over the slips. “Do you want to join me for lunch?”

“Valerie just stepped out. I’m stuck here for a while, I’m afraid,” he said with regret.

“Next time.” Gripping my wallet, I turned to leave.

Clairmont’s low voice stopped me in my tracks. “Miriam, it’s lunchtime.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said in a clear, melodic soprano that contained a rumble of anger.

“The fresh air will improve your concentration.” The note of command in Clairmont’s voice was indisputable. Miriam sighed loudly, snapped her pencil onto her desk, and emerged from the shadows to follow me.

My usual meal consisted of a twenty-minute break in the nearby bookstore’s second-floor cafй. I smiled at the thought of Miriam occupying herself during that time, trapped in Blackwell’s where the tourists congregated to look at postcards, smack between the Oxford guidebooks and the true-crime section.

I secured a sandwich and some tea and squeezed into the farthest corner of the crowded room between a vaguely familiar member of the history faculty who was reading the paper and an undergraduate dividing his attention between a music player, a mobile phone, and a computer.

After finishing my sandwich, I cupped the tea in my hands and glanced out the windows. I frowned. One of the unfamiliar daemons from Duke Humfrey’s was lounging against the library gates and looking up at Black-well’s windows.

Two nudges pressed against my cheekbones, as gentle and fleeting as a kiss. I looked up into the face of another daemon. She was beautiful, with arresting, contradictory features—her mouth too wide for her delicate face, her chocolate brown eyes too close together given their enormous size, her hair too fair for skin the color of honey.

“Dr. Bishop?” The woman’s Australian accent sent cold fingers moving around the base of my spine.

“Yes,” I whispered, glancing at the stairs. Miriam’s dark head failed to emerge from below. “I’m Diana Bishop.”

She smiled. “I’m Agatha Wilson. And your friend downstairs doesn’t know I’m here.”

It was an incongruously old-fashioned name for someone who was only about ten years older than I was, and far more stylish. Her name was familiar, though, and I dimly remembered seeing it in a fashion magazine.

“May I sit down?” she asked, gesturing at the seat just vacated by the historian.

“Of course,” I murmured.

On Monday I’d met a vampire. On Tuesday a witch tried to worm his way into my head. Wednesday, it would appear, was daemon day.

Even though they’d followed me around college, I knew even less about daemons than I did about vampires. Few seemed to understand the creatures, and Sarah had never been able to answer my questions about them. Based on her accounts, daemons constituted a criminal underclass. Their superabundance of cleverness and creativity led them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill, because they felt they could get away with it. Even more troublesome, as far as Sarah was concerned, were the conditions of their birth. There was no telling where or when a daemon would crop up, since they were typically born to human parents. To my aunt this only compounded their already marginal position in the hierarchy of beings. She valued a witch’s family traditions and bloodlines, and she didn’t approve of daemonic unpredictability.

Agatha Wilson was content to sit next to me quietly at first, watching me hold my tea. Then she started to talk in a bewildering swirl of words. Sarah always said that conversations with daemons were impossible, because they began in the middle.

“So much energy is bound to attract us,” she said matter-of-factly, as if I’d asked her a question. “The witches were in Oxford for Mabon, and chattering as if the world weren’t full of vampires who hear everything.” She fell silent. “We weren’t sure we’d ever see it again.”

“See what?” I said softly.

“The book,” she confided in a low voice.

“The book,” I repeated, my voice flat.

“Yes. After what the witches did to it, we didn’t think we’d catch a glimpse of it again.”

The daemon’s eyes were focused on a spot in the middle of the room. “Of course, you’re a witch, too. Perhaps it’s wrong to talk to you. I would have thought you of all witches would be able to figure out how they did it, though. And now there’s this,” she said sadly, picking up the abandoned newspaper and handing it to me.

The sensational headline immediately caught my attention: VAMPIRE ON THE LOOSE IN LONDON. I hurriedly read the story.

Metropolitan Police have no new leads in the puzzling murder of two men in Westminster. The bodies of Daniel Bennett, 22, and Jason Enright, 26, were found in an alley behind the White Hart pub on St Alban’s Street early Sunday morning by the pub’s owner, Reg Scott. Both men had severed carotid arteries and multiple lacerations on the neck, arms, and torso. Forensic tests revealed that massive loss of blood was the cause of death, although no blood evidence was found at the scene.

Authorities investigating the “vampire murders,” as they were dubbed by local residents, sought the advice of Peter Knox. The author of bestselling books on modern occultism, including Dark Matters: The Devil in Modern Times and Magic Rising: The Need for Mystery in the Age of Science, Knox has been consulted by agencies around the world in cases of suspected satanic and serial killings.

“There is no evidence that these are ritual murders,” Knox told reporters at a news conference. “Nor does it seem that this is the work of a serial killer,” he concluded, in spite of the similar murders of Christiana Nilsson in Copenhagen last summer and Sergei Morozov in St Petersburg in the fall of 2007. When pressed, Knox conceded that the London case may involve a copycat killer or killers.

Concerned residents have instituted a public watch, and local police have launched a door-to-door safety campaign to answer questions and provide support and guidance. Officials urge London residents to take extra precautions for their safety, especially at night.

“That’s just the work of a newspaper editor in search of a story,” I said, handing the paper back to the daemon. “The press is preying on human fears.”

“Are they?” she asked, glancing around the room. “I’m not so sure. I think it’s much more than that. One never knows with vampires. They’re only a step away from animals.” Agatha Wilson’s mouth drew tight in a sour expression. “And you think we’re the unstable ones. Still, it’s dangerous for any of us to catch human attention.”

This was too much talk of witches and vampires for a public place. The undergraduate still had his earphones in, however, and all the other patrons were deep into their own thoughts or had their heads close to their lunch companions’.

“I don’t know anything about the manuscript or what the witches did to it, Ms. Wilson. I don’t have it either,” I said hastily, in case she, too, thought I might have stolen it.

“You must call me Agatha.” She focused on the pattern of the carpet. “The library has it now. Did they tell you to send it back?”

Did she mean witches? Vampires? The librarians? I picked the likeliest culprits.

“Witches?” I whispered.

Agatha nodded, her eyes drifting around the room.

“No. When I was done with it, I simply returned it to the stacks.”

“Ah, the stacks,” Agatha said knowingly. “Everybody thinks the library is just a building, but it isn’t.”

Once again I remembered the eerie constriction I’d felt after Sean had put the manuscript on the conveyor belt.

“The library is whatever the witches want it to be,” she went on. “But the book doesn’t belong to you. Witches shouldn’t get to decide where it’s kept and who sees it.”

“What’s so special about this manuscript?”

“The book explains why we’re here,” she said, her voice betraying a hint of desperation. “It tells our story—beginning, middle, even the end. We daemons need to understand our place in the world. Our need is greater than that of the witches or vampires.” There was nothing addled about her now. She was like a camera that had been chronically out of focus until someone came by and twisted the lenses into alignment.

“You know your place in the world,” I began. “There are four kinds of creatures—humans, daemons, vampires, and witches.”

“And where do daemons come from? How are we made? Why are we here?” Her brown eyes snapped. “Do you know where your power comes from? Do you?”

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head.

“Nobody knows,” she said wistfully. “Every day we wonder. Humans thought daemons were guardian angels at first. Then they believed we were gods, bound to the earth and victims of our own passions. Humans hated us because we were different and abandoned their children if they turned out to be daemons. They accused us of possessing their souls and making them insane. Daemons are brilliant, but we’re not vicious—not like the vampires.” Her voice was clearly angry now, though it never lifted above a murmur. “We would never make someone insane. Even more than witches, we’re victims of human fear and envy.”

“Witches have their share of nasty legends to contend with,” I said, thinking of the witch-hunts and the executions that followed.

“Witches are born to witches. Vampires make other vampires. You have family stories and memories to comfort you when you’re lonely or confused. We have nothing but tales told to us by humans. It’s no wonder so many daemons are broken in spirit. Our only hope lies in brushing against other daemons one day and knowing we’re like them. My son was one of the lucky ones. Nathaniel had a daemon for a mother, someone who saw the signs and could help him understand.” She looked away for a moment, regaining her composure. When her eyes again met mine, they were sad. “Maybe the humans are right. Maybe we are possessed. I see things, Diana. Things I shouldn’t.”

Daemons could be visionaries. No one knew if their visions were reliable, like the visions that witches had.

“I see blood and fear. I see you,” she said, her eyes losing focus again. “Sometimes I see the vampire. He’s wanted this book for a very long time. Instead he’s found you. Curious.”

“Why does Matthew Clairmont want the book?”

Agatha shrugged. “Vampires and witches don’t share their thoughts with us. Not even your vampire tells us what he knows, though he’s fonder of daemons than most of his kind. So many secrets, and so many clever humans these days. They’ll figure it out if we’re not careful. Humans like power—secrets, too.”

“He’s not my vampire.” I flushed.

“Are you sure?” she asked, staring into the chrome on the espresso machine as if it were a magic mirror.

“Yes,” I said tightly.

“A little book can hold a big secret—one that might change the world. You’re a witch. You know words have power. And if your vampire knew the secret, he wouldn’t need you.” Agatha’s brown eyes were now melting and warm.

“Matthew Clairmont can call the manuscript himself if he wants it so badly.” The idea that he might be doing so now was unaccountably chilling.

“When you get it back,” she said urgently, grabbing my arm, “promise me you’ll remember that you aren’t the only ones who need to know its secrets. Daemons are part of the story, too. Promise me.”

I felt a flicker of panic at her touch, felt suddenly aware of the heat of the room and the press of people in it. Instinctively I searched for the nearest exit while focusing on my breathing, trying to curb the beginnings of a fight-or-flight response.

“I promise,” I murmured hesitantly, not sure what it was I was agreeing to.

“Good,” she said absently, dropping my arm. Her eyes drifted away. “It was good of you to speak with me.” Agatha was staring at the carpet once more. “We’ll see each other again. Remember, some promises matter more than others.”

I dropped my teapot and cup into the gray plastic tub on top of the trash and threw away the bag from my sandwich. When I glanced over my shoulder, Agatha was reading the sports section of the historian’s discarded London daily.

On my way out of Blackwell’s, I didn’t see Miriam, but I could feel her eyes.

 

The Selden End had filled with ordinary human beings while I was gone, all of them busy with their own work and completely oblivious to the creature convention around them. Envious of their ignorance, I took up a manuscript, determined to concentrate, but instead found myself reviewing my conversation in Blackwell’s and the events of the past few days. On an immediate level, the illustrations in Ashmole 782 didn’t seem related to what Agatha Wilson had said the book was about. And if Matthew Clairmont and the daemon were so interested in the manuscript, why didn’t they request it?

I closed my eyes, recalling the details of my encounter with the manuscript and trying to make some pattern of the events of the past few days by emptying my mind and imagining the problem as a jigsaw puzzle sitting on a white table, then rearranging the colorful shapes. But no matter where they were placed, no clear picture emerged. Frustrated, I pushed my chair away from my desk and walked toward the exit.

“Any requests?” Sean asked as he took the manuscripts from my arms. I handed him a bunch of freshly filled-out call slips. He smiled at the stack’s thickness but didn’t say a word.

Before leaving, I needed to do two things. The first was a matter of simple courtesy. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, but the vampires had kept me from being distracted by an endless stream of creatures in the Selden End. Witches and vampires didn’t often have occasion to thank one another, but Clairmont had protected me twice in two days. I was determined not to be ungrateful, or bigoted like Sarah and her friends in the Madison coven.

“Professor Clairmont?”

The vampire looked up.

“Thank you,” I said simply, meeting his gaze and holding it until he looked away.

“You’re welcome,” he murmured, a note of surprise in his voice.

The second was more calculated. If Matthew Clairmont needed me, I needed him, too. I wanted him to tell me why Ashmole 782 was attracting so much attention.

“Perhaps you should call me Diana,” I said quickly, before I lost my nerve.

Matthew Clairmont smiled.

My heart stopped beating for a fraction of a second. This was not the small, polite smile with which I was now familiar. His lips curved toward his eyes, making his whole face sparkle. God, he was beautiful, I thought again, slightly dazzled.

“All right,” he said softly, “but then you must call me Matthew.”

I nodded in agreement, my heart still beating in erratic syncopation. Something spread through my body, loosening the vestiges of anxiety that remained after the unexpected meeting with Agatha Wilson.

Matthew’s nose flared delicately. His smile grew a bit wider. Whatever my body was doing, he had smelled it. What’s more, he seemed to have identified it.

I flushed.

“Have a pleasant evening, Diana.” His voice lingered on my name, making it sound exotic and strange.

“Good night, Matthew,” I replied, beating a hasty retreat.

That evening, rowing on the quiet river as sunset turned to dusk, I saw an occasional smoky smudge on the towpath, always slightly ahead of me, like a dark star guiding me home.

At two-fifteen I was ripped from sleep by a terrible sensation of drowning. Flailing my way out from under the covers, transformed into heavy, wet seaweed by the power of the dream, I moved toward the lighter water above me. Just when I was making progress, something grabbed me by the ankle and pulled me down deeper.

As usual with nightmares, I awoke with a start before finding out who had caught me. For several minutes I lay disoriented, my body drenched with sweat and my heart sounding a staccato beat that reverberated through my rib cage. Gingerly, I sat up.

A white face stared at me from the window with dark, hollow eyes.

Too late I realized that it was just my reflection in the glass. I barely made it to the bathroom before being sick. Then I spent the next thirty minutes curled into a ball on the cold tile floor, blaming Matthew Clairmont and the other, gathering creatures for my unease. Finally I crawled back into bed and slept for a few hours. At dawn I dragged myself into rowing gear.

When I got to the lodge, the porter gave me an amazed look. “You’re not going out at this hour in the fog, Dr. Bishop? You look like you’ve been burning the candle at both ends, if you don’t mind me saying so. Wouldn’t a nice lie-in be a better idea? The river will still be there tomorrow.”

After considering Fred’s advice, I shook my head. “No, I’ll feel better for it.” He looked doubtful. “And the students are back this weekend.”

The pavement was slick with moisture, so I ran more slowly than usual to make allowances for the weather as well as my fatigue. My familiar route took me past Oriel College and to the tall, black iron gates between Merton and Corpus Christi. They were locked from dusk until dawn to keep people out of the meadows that bordered the river, but the first thing you learned when you rowed at Oxford was how to scale them. I climbed them with ease.

The familiar ritual of putting the boat in the water did its work. By the time it slipped away from the dock and into the fog, I felt almost normal.

When it’s foggy, rowing feels even more like flying. The air muffles the normal sounds of birds and automobiles and amplifies the soft thwack of oars in the water and the swoosh of the boat seats. With no shorelines and familiar landmarks to orient you, there’s nothing to steer by but your instincts.

I fell into an easy, swinging rhythm in the scull, my ears and eyes tuned to the slightest change in the sound of my oars that would tell me I was getting too close to the banks or a shadow that would indicate the approach of another boat. The fog was so thick that I considered turning back, but the prospect of a long, straight stretch of river was too enticing.

Just shy of the tavern, I carefully turned the boat. Two rowers were downstream, engaged in a heated discussion about competing strategies for winning the idiosyncratic Oxbridge style of racing known as “bumps.”

“Do you want to go ahead of me?” I called.

“Sure!” came the quick response. The pair shot past, never breaking their stroke.

The sound of their oars faded. I decided to row back to the boathouse and call it quits. It was a short workout, but the stiffness from my third consecutive night of little sleep had lessened.

The equipment put away, I locked the boathouse and walked slowly along the path toward town. It was so quiet in the early-morning mist that time and place receded. I closed my eyes, imagining that I was nowhere—not in Oxford, nor anywhere that had a name.

When I opened them, a dark outline had risen up in front of me. I gasped in fear. The shape shot toward me, and my hands instinctively warded off the danger.

“Diana, I’m so sorry. I thought you had seen me.” It was Matthew Clairmont, his face creased with concern.

“I was walking with my eyes closed.” I grabbed at the neck of my fleece, and he backed away slightly. I propped myself against a tree until my breathing slowed.

“Can you tell me something?” Clairmont asked once my heart stopped pounding.

“Not if you plan to ask why I’m out on the river in the fog when there are vampires and daemons and witches following me.” I wasn’t up for a lecture—not this morning.

“No”—his voice held a touch of acid—“although that’s an excellent question. I was going to ask why you walk with your eyes closed.”

I laughed. “What—you don’t?”

Matthew shook his head. “Vampires have only five senses. We find it best to use all of them,” he said sardonically.

“There’s nothing magical about it, Matthew. It’s a game I’ve played since I was a child. It made my aunt crazy. I was always coming home with bruised legs and scratches from running into bushes and trees.”

The vampire looked thoughtful. He shoved his hands into his slate gray trouser pockets and gazed off into the fog. Today he was wearing a blue-gray sweater that made his hair appear darker, but no coat. It was a striking omission, given the weather. Suddenly feeling unkempt, I wished my rowing tights didn’t have a hole in the back of the left thigh from catching on the boat’s rigging.

“How was your row this morning?” Clairmont asked finally, as if he didn’t already know. He wasn’t out for a morning stroll.

“Good,” I said shortly.

“There aren’t many people here this early.”

“No, but I like it when the river isn’t crowded.”

“Isn’t it risky to row in this kind of weather, when so few people are out?” His tone was mild, and had he not been a vampire watching my every move, I might have taken his inquiry for an awkward attempt at conversation.

“Risky how?”

“If something were to happen, it’s possible nobody would see it.”

I’d never been afraid before on the river, but he had a point. Nevertheless, I shrugged it off. “The students will be here on Monday. I’m enjoying the peace while it lasts.”

“Does term really start next week?” Clairmont sounded genuinely surprised.

“You are on the faculty, aren’t you?” I laughed.

“Technically, but I don’t really see students. I’m here in more of a research capacity.” His mouth tightened. He didn’t like being laughed at.

“Must be nice.” I thought of my three-hundred-seat introductory lecture class and all those anxious freshmen.

“It’s quiet. My laboratory equipment doesn’t ask questions about my long hours. And I have Dr. Shephard and another assistant, Dr. Whitmore, so I’m not entirely alone.”

It was damp, and I was cold. Besides, there was something unnatural about exchanging pleasantries with a vampire in the pea-soup gloom. “I really should go home.”

“Would you like a ride?”

Four days ago I wouldn’t have accepted a ride home from a vampire, but this morning it seemed like an excellent idea. Besides, it gave me an opportunity to ask why a biochemist might be interested in a seventeenth-century alchemical manuscript.

“Sure,” I said.

Clairmont’s shy, pleased look was utterly disarming. “My car’s parked nearby,” he said, gesturing in the direction of Christ Church College. We walked in silence for a few minutes, wrapped up in the gray fog and the strangeness of being alone, witch and vampire. He deliberately shortened his stride to keep in step with me, and he seemed more relaxed outdoors than he had in the library.

“Is this your college?”

“No, I’ve never been a member here.” The way he phrased it made me wonder what colleges he had been a member of. Then I began to consider how long his life had been. Sometimes he seemed as old as Oxford itself.

“Diana?” Clairmont had stopped.

“Hmm?” I’d started to wander off toward the college’s parking area.

“It’s this way,” he said, pointing in the opposite direction.

Matthew led me to a tiny walled enclave. A low-slung black Jaguar was parked under a bright yellow sign that proclaimed POSITIVELY NO PARKING HERE. The car had a John Radcliffe Hospital permit hanging from the rearview mirror.

“I see,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “You park pretty much wherever you want.”

“Normally I’m a good citizen when it comes to parking, but this morning’s weather suggested that an exception might be made,” Matthew said defensively. He reached a long arm around me to unlock the door. The Jaguar was an older model, without the latest technology of keyless entries and navigation systems, but it looked as if it had just rolled off the show-room floor. He pulled the door open, and I climbed in, the caramel-colored leather upholstery fitting itself to my body.

I’d never been in a car so luxurious. Sarah’s worst suspicions about vampires would be confirmed if she knew they drove Jaguars while she drove a broken-down purple Honda Civic that had oxidized to the brownish lavender of roasted eggplant.

Clairmont rolled along the drive to the gates of Christ Church, where he waited for an opening in the early-morning traffic dominated by delivery trucks, buses, and bicycles. “Would you like some breakfast before I take you home?” he asked casually, gripping the polished steering wheel. “You must be hungry after all that exercise.”

This was the second meal Clairmont had invited me to (not) share with him. Was this a vampire thing? Did they like to watch other people eat?

The combination of vampires and eating turned my mind to the vampire’s dietary habits. Everyone on the planet knew that vampires fed on human blood. But was that all they ate? No longer sure that driving around in a car with a vampire was a good idea, I zipped up the neck of my fleece pullover and moved an inch closer to the door.

“Diana?” he prompted.

“I could eat,” I admitted hesitantly, “and I’d kill for some tea.”

He nodded, his eyes back on the traffic. “I know just the place.”

Clairmont steered up the hill and took a right down the High Street. We passed the statue of George II’s wife standing under the cupola at The Queen’s College, then headed toward Oxford’s botanical gardens. The hushed confines of the car made Oxford seem even more otherworldly than usual, its spires and towers appearing suddenly out of the quiet and fog.

We didn’t talk, and his stillness made me realize how much I moved, constantly blinking, breathing, and rearranging myself. Not Clairmont. He never blinked and seldom breathed, and his every turn of the steering wheel or push of the pedals was as small and efficient as possible, as if his long life required him to conserve energy. I wondered again how old Matthew Clairmont was.

The vampire darted down a side street, pulling up in front of a tiny cafй that was packed with locals bolting down plates of food. Some were reading the newspaper; others were chatting with their neighbors at adjoining tables. All of them, I noted with pleasure, were drinking huge mugs of tea.

“I didn’t know about this place,” I said.

“It’s a well-kept secret,” he said mischievously. “They don’t want university dons ruining the atmosphere.”

I automatically turned to open my car door, but before I could touch the handle, Clairmont was there, opening it for me.

“How did you get here so fast?” I grumbled.

“Magic,” he replied through pursed lips. Apparently Clairmont did not approve of women who opened their own car doors any more than he reportedly approved of women who argued with him.

“I am capable of opening my own door,” I said, getting out of the car.

“Why do today’s women think it’s important to open a door themselves?” he said sharply. “Do you believe it’s a testament to your physical power?”

“No, but it is a sign of our independence.” I stood with my arms crossed, daring him to contradict me and remembering what Chris had said about Clairmont’s behavior toward a woman who’d asked too many questions at a conference.

Wordlessly he closed the car’s door behind me and opened the cafй door. I stood resolutely in place, waiting for him to enter. A gust of warm, humid air carried the smell of bacon fat and toasted bread. My mouth started to water.

“You’re impossibly old-fashioned,” I said with a sigh, deciding not to fight it. He could open doors for me this morning so long as he was prepared to buy me a hot breakfast.

“After you,” he murmured.

Once inside, we wended our way through the crowded tables. Clairmont’s skin, which had looked almost normal in the fog, was conspicuously pale under the cafй’s stark overhead lighting. A couple of humans stared as we passed. The vampire stiffened.

This wasn’t a good idea, I thought uneasily as more human eyes studied us.

“Hiya, Matthew,” a cheerful female voice called from behind the counter. “Two for breakfast?”

His face lightened. “Two, Mary. How’s Dan?”

“Well enough to complain that he’s fed up being in bed. I’d say he’s definitely on the mend.”

“That’s wonderful news,” Clairmont said. “Can you get this lady some tea when you have a chance? She’s threatened to kill for it.”

“Won’t be necessary, dearie,” Mary told me with a smile. “We serve tea without bloodshed.” She eased her ample body out from behind the Formica counter and led us to a table tucked into the far corner next to the kitchen door. Two plastic-covered menus hit the table with a slap. “You’ll be out of the way here, Matthew. I’ll send Steph around with the tea. Stay as long as you like.”

Clairmont made a point of settling me with my back to the wall. He sat opposite, between me and the rest of the room, curling the laminated menu into a tube and letting it gently unfurl in his fingers, visibly bristling. In the presence of others, the vampire was restless and prickly, just as he had been in the library. He was much more comfortable when the two of us were alone.

I recognized the significance of this behavior thanks to my new knowledge of the Norwegian wolf. He was protecting me.

“Just who do you think poses a threat, Matthew? I told you I could take care of myself.” My voice came out a little more tartly than I had intended.

“Yes, I’m sure you can,” he said doubtfully.

“Look,” I said, trying to keep my tone even, “you’ve managed to keep . . . them away from me so I could get some work done.” The tables were too close together for me to include any more details. “I’m grateful for that. But this cafй is full of humans. The only danger now would come from your drawing their attention. You’re officially off duty.”

Clairmont cocked his head in the direction of the cash register. “That man over there told his friend that you looked ‘tasty.’” He was trying to make light of it, but his face darkened. I smothered a laugh.

“I don’t think he’s going to bite me,” I said.

The vampire’s skin took on a grayish hue.

“From what I understand of modern British slang, ‘tasty’ is a compliment, not a threat.”

Clairmont continued to glower.

“If you don’t like what you’re hearing, stop listening in on other people’s conversations,” I offered, impatient with his male posturing.

“That’s easier said than done,” he pronounced, picking up a jar of Marmite.

A younger, slightly svelter version of Mary came up with an enormous brown stoneware teapot and two mugs. “Milk and sugar are on the table, Matthew,” she said, eyeing me with curiosity.

Matthew made the necessary introductions. “Steph, this is Diana. She’s visiting from America.”

“Really? Do you live in California? I’m dying to get to California.”

“No, I live in Connecticut,” I said regretfully.

“That’s one of the little states, isn’t it?” Steph was clearly disappointed.

“Yes. And it snows.”

“I fancy palm trees and sunshine, myself.” At the mention of snow, she’d lost interest in me entirely. “What’ll it be?”

“I’m really hungry,” I said apologetically, ordering two scrambled eggs, four pieces of toast, and several rashers of bacon.

Steph, who had clearly heard far worse, wrote down the order without comment and picked up our menus. “Just tea for you, Matthew?”

He nodded.

Once Steph was out of earshot, I leaned across the table. “Do they know about you?”

Clairmont tilted forward, his face a foot away from mine. This morning he smelled sweeter, like a freshly picked carnation. I inhaled deeply.

“They know I’m a little different. Mary may suspect I’m more than a little different, but she’s convinced that I saved Dan’s life, so she’s decided it doesn’t matter.”

“How did you save her husband?” Vampires were supposed to take human lives, not save them.

“I saw him on a rotation at the Radcliffe when they were short staffed. Mary had seen a program that described the symptoms of stroke, and she recognized them when her husband began to struggle. Without her he’d be dead or seriously incapacitated.”

“But she thinks you saved Dan?” The vampire’s spiciness was making me dizzy. I lifted the lid from the teapot, replacing the aroma of carnations with the tannic smell of black tea.

“Mary saved him the first time, but after he was admitted into hospital he had a terrible reaction to his medication. I told you she’s observant. When she took her concerns to one of the physicians, he brushed them aside. I . . . overheard—and intervened.”

“Do you often see patients?” I poured each of us a steaming mug of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it. My hands trembled slightly at the idea of a vampire prowling the wards at the John Radcliffe among the sick and injured.

“No,” he said, toying with the sugar jar, “only when they have an emergency.”

Pushing one of the mugs toward him, I fixed my eyes on the sugar. He handed it to me. I put precisely half a teaspoon of sugar and half a cup of milk into my tea. This was just how I liked it—black as tar, a hint of sugar to cut the edge off the bitterness, then enough milk to make it look less like stew. This done, I stirred the concoction clockwise. As soon as experience told me it wouldn’t burn my tongue, I took a sip. Perfect.

The vampire was smiling.

“What?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen anyone approach tea with that much attentiveness to detail.”

“You must not spend much time with serious tea drinkers. It’s all about being able to gauge the strength before you put the sugar and milk in it.” His steaming mug sat untouched in front of him. “You like yours black, I see.”

“Tea’s not really my drink,” he said, his voicing dropping slightly.

“What is your drink?” The minute the question was out of my mouth, I wished I could call it back. His mood went from amusement to tight-lipped fury.

“You have to ask?” he said scathingly. “Even humans know the answer to that question.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.” I gripped the mug, trying to steady myself.

“No, you shouldn’t.”

I drank my tea in silence. We both looked up when Steph approached with a toast rack full of grilled bread and a plate heaped high with eggs and bacon.

“Mum thought you needed veg,” Steph explained when my eyes widened at the mound of fried mushrooms and tomatoes that accompanied the breakfast. “She said you looked like death.”

“Thank you!” I said. Mary’s critique of my appearance did nothing to diminish my appreciation for the extra food.

Steph grinned and Clairmont offered me a small smile when I picked up the fork and applied myself to the plate.

Everything was piping hot and fragrant, with the perfect ratio of fried surface to melting, tender insides. My hunger appeased, I started a methodical attack on the toast rack, taking up the first triangle of cold toast and scraping butter over its surface. The vampire watched me eat with the same acute attention he’d devoted to watching me make my tea.

“So why science?” I ventured, tucking the toast into my mouth so he’d have to answer.

“Why history?” His voice was dismissive, but he wasn’t going to fend me off that easily.

“You first.”

“I suppose I need to know why I’m here,” he said, looking fixedly at the table. He was building a moated castle from the sugar jar and a ring of blue artificial-sweetener packets.

I froze at the similarity between his explanation and what Agatha had told me the day before about Ashmole 782. “That’s a question for philosophers, not scientists.” I sucked a drop of butter off my finger to hide my confusion.

His eyes glittered with another wave of sudden anger. “You don’t really believe that—that scientists don’t care about why.”

“They used to be interested in the whys,” I conceded, keeping a wary eye on him. His sudden shifts in mood were downright frightening. “Now it seems all they’re concerned with is the question of how—how does the body work, how do the planets move?”

Clairmont snorted. “Not the good scientists.” The people behind him got up to leave, and he tensed, ready if they decided to rush the table.

“And you’re a good scientist.”

He let my assessment pass without comment.

“Someday you’ll have to explain to me the relationship between neuroscience, DNA research, animal behavior, and evolution. They don’t obviously fit together.” I took another bite of toast.

Clairmont’s left eyebrow rose toward his hairline. “You’ve been catching up on your scientific journals,” he said sharply.

I shrugged. “You had an unfair advantage. You knew all about my work. I was just leveling the playing field.”

He mumbled something under his breath that sounded French. “I’ve had a lot of time to think,” he replied flatly in English, enlarging the moat around his castle with another ring of sweetener packets. “There’s no connection between them.”

“Liar,” I said softly.

Not surprisingly, my accusation made Clairmont furious, but the speed of the transformation still took me aback. It was a reminder that I was having breakfast with a creature who could be lethal.

“Tell me what the connection is, then,” he said through clenched teeth.

“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “Something’s holding them all together, a question that links your research interests and gives meaning to them. The only other explanation is that you’re an intellectual magpie—which is ridiculous, given how highly regarded your work is—or maybe you get bored easily. You don’t seem the type to be prone to intellectual ennui. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Clairmont studied me until the silence grew uncomfortable. My stomach was starting to complain at the amount of food I’d expected it to absorb. I poured fresh tea and doctored it while waiting for him to speak.

“For a witch you’re observant, too.” The vampire’s eyes showed grudging admiration.

“Vampires aren’t the only creatures who can hunt, Matthew.”

“No. We all hunt something, don’t we Diana?” He lingered over my name. “Now it’s my turn. Why history?”

“You haven’t answered all my questions.” And I hadn’t yet asked him my most important question.

He shook his head firmly, and I redirected my energy from ferreting out information to protecting myself from Clairmont’s attempts to obtain it.

“At first it was the neatness of it, I suppose.” My voice sounded surprisingly tentative. “The past seemed so predictable, as if nothing that happened there was surprising.”

“Spoken like someone who wasn’t there,” the vampire said drily.

I gave a short laugh. “I found that out soon enough. But in the beginning that’s how it seemed. At Oxford the professors made the past a tidy story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything seemed logical, inevitable. Their stories hooked me, and that was it. No other subject interested me. I became a historian and have never looked back.”

“Even though you discovered that human beings—past or present—aren’t logical?”

“History only became more challenging when it became less neat. Every time I pick up a book or a document from the past, I’m in a battle with people who lived hundreds of years ago. They have their secrets and obsessions—all the things they won’t or can’t reveal. It’s my job to discover and explain them.”

“What if you can’t? What if they defy explanation?”

“That’s never happened,” I said after considering his question. “At least I don’t think it has. All you have to do is be a good listener. Nobody really wants to keep secrets, not even the dead. People leave clues everywhere, and if you pay attention, you can piece them together.”

“So you’re the historian as detective,” he observed.

“Yes. With far lower stakes.” I sat back in my chair, thinking the interview was over.

“Why the history of science, then?” he continued.

“The challenge of great minds, I suppose?” I tried not to sound glib, nor to let my voice rise up at the end of the sentence into a question, and failed on both counts.

Clairmont bowed his head and slowly began to take apart his moated castle.

Common sense told me to remain silent, but the knotted threads of my own secrets began to loosen. “I wanted to know how humans came up with a view of the world that had so little magic in it,” I added abruptly. “I needed to understand how they convinced themselves that magic wasn’t important.”

The vampire’s cool gray eyes lifted to mine. “Have you found out?”

“Yes and no.” I hesitated. “I saw the logic that they used, and the death of a thousand cuts as experimental scientists slowly chipped away at the belief that the world was an inexplicably powerful, magical place. Ultimately they failed, though. The magic never really went away. It waited, quietly, for people to return to it when they found the science wanting.”

“So alchemy,” he said.

“No,” I protested. “Alchemy is one of the earliest forms of experimental science.”

“Perhaps. But you don’t believe that alchemy is devoid of magic.” Matthew’s voice was certain. “I’ve read your work. Not even you can keep it away entirely.”

“Then it’s science with magic. Or magic with science, if you prefer.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“I’m not sure,” I said defensively.

“Thank you.” Clairmont’s look suggested he knew how difficult it was for me to talk about this.

“You’re welcome. I think.” I pushed my hair back from my eyes, feeling a little shaky. “Can I ask you something else?” His eyes were wary, but he nodded. “Why are you interested in my work—in alchemy?”

He almost didn’t answer, ready to brush the question aside, then reconsidered. I’d given him a secret. Now it was his turn.

“The alchemists wanted to know why we’re here, too.” Clairmont was telling the truth—I could see that—but it got me no closer to understanding his interest in Ashmole 782. He glanced at his watch. “If you’re finished, I should get you back to college. You must want to get into warm clothes before you go to the library.”

“What I need is a shower.” I stood and stretched, twisting my neck in an effort to ease its chronic tightness. “And I have to go to yoga tonight. I’m spending too much time sitting at a desk.”

The vampire’s eyes glinted. “You practice yoga?”

“Couldn’t live without it,” I replied. “I love the movement, and the meditation.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “That’s the way you row—a combination of movement and meditation.”

My cheeks colored. He was watching me as closely on the river as he had in the library.

Clairmont put a twenty-pound note on the table and waved at Mary. She waved back, and he touched my elbow lightly, steering me between the tables and the few remaining customers.

“Whom do you take class with?” he asked after he opened the car door and settled me inside.

“I go to that studio on the High Street. I haven’t found a teacher I like yet, but it’s close, and beggars can’t be choosers.” New Haven had several yoga studios, but Oxford was lagging behind.

The vampire settled himself in the car, turned the key, and neatly reversed in a nearby driveway before heading back to town.

“You won’t find the class you need there,” he said confidently.

“You do yoga, too?” I was fascinated by the image of his massive body twisting itself through a practice.

“Some,” he said. “If you want to go to yoga with me tomorrow, I could pick you up outside Hertford at six. This evening you’d have to brave the studio in town, but tomorrow you’d have a good practice.”

“Where’s your studio? I’ll call and see if they have a class tonight.”

Clairmont shook his head. “They aren’t open tonight. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday evenings only.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “What’s the class like?”

“You’ll see. It’s hard to describe.” He was trying not to smile.

To my surprise, we’d arrived at the lodge. Fred craned his neck to see who was idling inside the gates, saw the Radcliffe tag, and strolled over to see what was going on.

Clairmont let me out of the car. Outside, I gave Fred a wave, and extended my hand. “I enjoyed breakfast. Thanks for the tea and company.”

“Anytime,” he said. “I’ll see you in the library.”

Fred whistled as Clairmont pulled away. “Nice car, Dr. Bishop. Friend of yours?” It was his job to know as much as possible about what happened in the college for safety’s sake as well as to satisfy the unabashed curiosity that was part of a porter’s job description.

“I suppose so,” I said thoughtfully.

In my rooms I pulled out my passport case and removed a ten-dollar bill from my stash of American currency. It took me a few minutes to find an envelope. After slipping the bill inside without a note, I addressed it to Chris, wrote “AIR MAIL” on the front in capital letters, and stuck the required postage in the upper corner.

Chris was never going to let me forget he’d won this bet. Never.

Honestly, that car is such a clichй.” The hair clung to my fingers, crackling and snapping as I tried to push it from my face.

Clairmont was lounging against the side of his Jaguar looking un-rumpled and at ease. Even his yoga clothes, characteristically gray and black, looked bandbox fresh, though considerably less tailored than what he wore to the library.

Contemplating the sleek black car and the elegant vampire, I felt unaccountably cross. It had not been a good day. The conveyor belt broke in the library, and it took forever for them to fetch my manuscripts. My keynote address remained elusive, and I was beginning to look at the calendar with alarm, imagining a roomful of colleagues peppering me with difficult questions. It was nearly October, and the conference was in November.

“You think a subcompact would be better subterfuge?” he asked, holding out his hand for my yoga mat.

“Not really, no.” Standing in the fall twilight, he positively screamed vampire, yet the rising tide of undergraduates and dons passed him without a second glance. If they couldn’t sense what he was—see what he was, standing in the open air—the car was immaterial. The irritation built under my skin.

“Have I done something wrong?” His gray-green eyes were wide and guileless. He opened the car door, taking a deep breath as I slid past.

My temper flared. “Are you smelling me?” After yesterday I suspected that my body was giving him all kinds of information I didn’t want him to have.

“Don’t tempt me,” he murmured, shutting me inside. The hair on my neck rose slightly as the implication of his words sank in. He popped open the trunk and put my mat inside.

Night air filled the car as the vampire climbed in without any visible effort or moment of limb-bent awkwardness. His face creased into the semblance of a sympathetic frown. “Bad day?”

I gave him a withering glance. Clairmont knew exactly how my day had been. He and Miriam had been in Duke Humfrey’s again, keeping the other creatures out of my immediate environment. When we left to change for yoga, Miriam had remained to make sure we weren’t followed by a train of daemons—or worse.

Clairmont started the car and headed down the Woodstock Road without further attempts at small talk. There was nothing on it but houses.

“Where are we going?” I asked suspiciously.

“To yoga,” he replied calmly. “Based on your mood, I’d say you need it.”

“And where is yoga?” I demanded. We were headed out to the countryside in the direction of Blenheim.

“Have you changed your mind?” Matthew’s voice was touched with exasperation. “Should I take you back to the studio on the High Street?”

I shuddered at the memory of last night’s uninspiring class. “No.”

“Then relax. I’m not kidnapping you. It can be pleasant to let someone else take charge. Besides, it’s a surprise.”

“Hmph,” I said. He switched on the stereo system, and classical music poured from the speakers.

“Stop thinking and listen,” he commanded. “It’s impossible to be tense around Mozart.”

Hardly recognizing myself, I settled in the seat with a sigh and shut my eyes. The Jaguar’s motion was so subtle and the sounds from outside so muffled that I felt suspended above the ground, held up by invisible, musical hands.

The car slowed, and we pulled up to a set of high iron gates that even I, though practiced, couldn’t have scaled. The walls on either side were warm red brick, with irregular forms and intricate woven patterns. I sat up a little straighter.

“You can’t see it from here,” Clairmont said, laughing. He rolled down his window and punched a series of numbers into a polished keypad. A tone sounded, and the gates swung open.

Gravel crunched under the tires as we passed through another set of gates even older than the first. There was no scrolled ironwork here, just an archway spanning brick walls that were much lower than the ones facing the Woodstock Road. The archway had a tiny room on top, with windows on all sides like a lantern. To the left of the gate was a splendid brick gatehouse, with twisted chimneys and leaded windows. A small brass plaque with weathered edges read THE OLD LODGE.

“Beautiful,” I breathed.

“I thought you’d like it.” The vampire looked pleased.

Through the growing darkness, we passed into a park. A small herd of deer skittered off at the sound of the car, jumping into the protective shadows as the Jaguar’s headlights swept the grounds. We climbed a slight hill and rounded a curve in the drive. The car slowed to a crawl as we reached the top of the rise and the headlights dipped over into blackness.

“There,” Clairmont said, pointing with his left hand.

A two-story Tudor manor house was arranged around a central courtyard. Its bricks glowed in the illumination of powerful spotlights that shone up through the branches of gnarled oak trees to light the face of the building.

I was so dumbfounded that I swore. Clairmont looked at me in shock, then chuckled.

He pulled the car in to the circular drive in front and parked behind a late-model Audi sports car. A dozen more cars were already parked there, and headlights continued to sweep down over the hill.

“Are you sure I’m going to be all right?” I’d been doing yoga for more than a decade, but that didn’t mean I was any good at it. It had never occurred to me to ask whether this might be the kind of class where people balanced on one forearm with their feet suspended in midair.

“It’s a mixed class,” he assured me.

“Okay.” My anxiety went up a notch in spite of his easy answer.

Clairmont took our yoga mats out of the trunk. Moving slowly as the last of the arrivals headed for the wide entry, he finally reached my door and put out his hand. This is new, I noted before putting my hand in his. I was still not entirely comfortable when our bodies came into contact. He was shockingly cold, and the contrast between our body temperatures took me aback.

The vampire held my hand lightly and tugged on it gently to help me out of the car. Before releasing me, he gave a soft encouraging squeeze. Surprised, I glanced at him and caught him doing the same thing. Both of us looked away in confusion.

We entered the house through another arched gate and a central courtyard. The manor was in an astonishing state of preservation. No later architects had been allowed to cut out symmetrical Georgian windows or affix fussy Victorian conservatories to it. We might have been stepping back in time.

“Unbelievable,” I murmured.

Clairmont grinned and steered me through a big wooden door propped open with an iron doorstop. I gasped. The outside was remarkable, but the inside was stunning. Miles of linenfold paneling extended in every direction, all burnished and glowing. Someone had lit a fire in the room’s enormous fireplace. A single trestle table and some benches looked about as old as the house, and electric lights were the only evidence that we were in the twenty-first century.

Rows of shoes sat in front of the benches, and mounds of sweaters and coats covered their dark oak surfaces. Clairmont laid his keys on the table and removed his shoes. I kicked off my own and followed him.

“Remember I said this was a mixed class?” the vampire asked when we reached a door set into the paneling. I looked up, nodded. “It is. But there’s only one way to get into this room—you have to be one of us.”

He pulled open the door. Dozens of curious eyes nudged, tingled, and froze in my direction. The room was full of daemons, witches, and vampires. They sat on brightly colored mats—some with crossed legs, others kneeling—waiting for class to begin. Some of the daemons had headphones jammed into their ears. The witches were gossiping in a steady hum. The vampires sat quietly, their faces displaying little emotion.

My jaw dropped.

“Sorry,” Clairmont said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come if I told you—and it really is the best class in Oxford.”

A tall witch who had short, jet-black hair and skin the color of coffee with cream walked toward us, and the rest of the room turned away, resuming their silent meditations. Clairmont, who’d tensed slightly when we entered, visibly relaxed as the witch approached us.

“Matthew.” Her husky voice was brushed with an Indian accent. “Welcome.”

“Amira.” He nodded in greeting. “This is the woman I told you about, Diana Bishop.”

The witch looked at me closely, her eyes taking in every detail of my face. She smiled. “Diana. Nice to meet you. Are you new to yoga?”

“No.” My heart pounded with a fresh wave of anxiety. “But this is my first time here.”

Her smile widened. “Welcome to the Old Lodge.”

I wondered if anyone here knew about Ashmole 782, but there wasn’t a single familiar face and the atmosphere in the room was open and easy, with none of the usual tension between creatures.

A warm, firm hand closed around my wrist, and my heart slowed immediately. I looked at Amira in astonishment. How had she done that?

She let loose my wrist, and my pulse remained steady. “I think that you and Diana will be most comfortable here,” she told Clairmont. “Get settled and we’ll begin.”

We unrolled our mats in the back of the room, close to the door. There was no one to my immediate right, but across a small expanse of open floor two daemons sat in lotus position with their eyes closed. My shoulder tingled. I started, wondering who was looking at me. The feeling quickly disappeared.

Sorry, a guilty voice said quite distinctly within my skull.

The voice came from the front of the room, from the same direction as the tingle. Amira frowned slightly at someone in the first row before bringing the class to attention.

Out of sheer habit, my body folded obediently into a cross-legged position when she began to speak, and after a few seconds Clairmont followed suit.

“It’s time to close your eyes.” Amira picked up a tiny remote control, and the soft strains of a meditative chant came out of the walls and ceiling. It sounded medieval, and one of the vampires sighed happily.

My eyes wandered, distracted by the ornate plasterwork of what must once have been the house’s great hall.

“Close your eyes,” Amira suggested again gently. “It can be hard to let go of our worries, our preoccupations, our egos. That’s why we’re here tonight.”

The words were familiar—I’d heard variations on this theme before, in other yoga classes—but they took on new meaning in this room.

“We’re here tonight to learn to manage our energy. We spend our time striving and straining to be something that we’re not. Let those desires go. Honor who you are.”

Amira took us through some gentle stretches and got us onto our knees to warm up our spines before we pushed back into downward dog. We held the posture for a few breaths before walking our hands to our feet and standing up.

“Root your feet into the earth,” she instructed, “and take mountain pose.”

I concentrated on my feet and felt an unexpected jolt from the floor. My eyes widened.

We followed Amira as she began her vinyasas. We swung our arms up toward the ceiling before diving down to place our hands next to our feet. We rose halfway, spines parallel to the floor, before folding over and shooting our legs back into a pushup position. Dozens of daemons, vampires, and witches dipped and swooped their bodies into graceful, upward curves. We continued to fold and lift, sweeping our arms overhead once more before touching palms lightly together. Then Amira freed us to move at our own pace. She pushed a button on the stereo’s remote, and a slow, melodic cover of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” filled the room.

The music was oddly appropriate, and I repeated the familiar movements in time to it, breathing into my tight muscles and letting the flow of the class push all thoughts from my head. After we’d started the series of poses for a third time, the energy in the room shifted.

Three witches were floating about a foot off the wooden floorboards.

“Stay grounded,” Amira said in a neutral voice.

Two quietly returned to the floor. The third had to swan-dive to get back down, and even then his hands reached the floor before his feet.

Both the daemons and the vampires were having trouble with the pacing. Some of the daemons were moving so slowly that I wondered if they were stuck. The vampires were having the opposite problem, their powerful muscles coiling and then springing with sudden intensity.

“Gently,” Amira murmured. “There’s no need to push, no need to strain.”

Gradually the room’s energy settled again. Amira moved us through a series of standing poses. Here the vampires were clearly at their best, able to sustain them for minutes without effort. Soon I was no longer concerned with who was in the room with me or whether I could keep up with the class. There was only the moment and the movement.

By the time we took to the floor for back bends and inversions, everyone in the room was dripping wet—except for the vampires, who didn’t even look dewy. Some performed death-defying arm balances and handstands, but I wasn’t among them. Clairmont was, however. At one point he looked to be attached to the ground by nothing more than his ear, his entire body in perfect alignment above him.

The hardest part of any practice for me was the final corpse pose—savasana. I found it nearly impossible to lie flat on my back without moving. The fact that everyone else seemed to find it relaxing only added to my anxiety. I lay as quietly as possible, eyes closed, trying not to twitch. A swoosh of feet moved between me and the vampire.

“Diana,” Amira whispered, “this pose is not for you. Roll over onto your side.”

My eyes popped open. I stared into the witch’s wide black eyes, mortified that she had somehow uncovered my secret.

“Curl into a ball.” Mystified, I did what she said. My body instantly relaxed. She patted me lightly on the shoulder. “Keep your eyes open, too.”

I had turned toward Clairmont. Amira lowered the lights, but the glow of his luminous skin allowed me to see his features clearly.

In profile he looked like a medieval knight lying atop a tomb in Westminster Abbey: long legs, long torso, long arms, and a remarkably strong face. There was something ancient about his looks, even though he appeared to be only a few years older than I was. I mentally traced the line of his forehead with an imaginary finger, from where it started at his uneven hairline up slightly over his prominent brow bone with its thick, black brows. My imaginary finger crested the tip of his nose and the bowing of his lips.

I counted as he breathed. At two hundred his chest lifted. He didn’t exhale for a long, long time afterward.

Finally Amira told the class it was time to rejoin the world outside. Matthew turned toward me and opened his eyes. His face softened, and my own did the same. There was movement all around us, but the socially correct had no pull on me. I stayed where I was, staring into a vampire’s eyes. Matthew waited, utterly still, watching me watch him. When I sat up, the room spun at the sudden movement of blood through my body.

At last the room stopped its dizzying revolutions. Amira closed the practice with chant and rang some tiny silver bells that were attached to her fingers. Class was over.

There were gentle murmurs throughout the room as vampire greeted vampire and witch greeted witch. The daemons were more ebullient, arranging for midnight meetings at clubs around Oxford, asking where the best jazz could be found. They were following the energy, I realized with a smile, thinking back to Agatha’s description of what tugged at a daemon’s soul. Two investment bankers from London—both vampires—were talking about a spate of unsolved London murders. I thought of Westminster and felt a flicker of unease. Matthew scowled at them, and they began arranging lunch tomorrow instead.

Everyone had to file by us as they left. The witches nodded at us curiously. Even the daemons made eye contact, grinning and exchanging meaningful glances. The vampires studiously avoided me, but every one of them said hello to Clairmont.

Finally only Amira, Matthew, and I remained. She gathered up her mat and padded toward us. “Good practice, Diana,” she said.

“Thank you, Amira. This was a class I’ll never forget.”

“You’re welcome anytime. With or without Matthew,” she added, tapping him lightly on the shoulder. “You should have warned her.”

“I was afraid Diana wouldn’t come. And I thought she’d like it, if she gave it a chance.” He looked at me shyly.

“Turn out the lights, will you, when you leave?” Amira called over her shoulder, already halfway out of the room.

My eyes traveled around the perfect jewel of a great hall. “This was certainly a surprise,” I said drily, not yet ready to let him off the hook.

He came up behind me, swift and soundless. “A pleasant one, I hope. You did like the class?”

I nodded slowly and turned to reply. He was disconcertingly close, and the difference in our heights meant that I had to lift my eyes so as not to be staring straight into his sternum. “I did.”

Matthew’s face split into his heart-stopping smile. “I’m glad.” It was difficult to pull free from the undertow of his eyes. To break their spell, I bent down and began rolling up my mat. Matthew turned off the lights and grabbed his own gear. We slid our shoes on in the gallery, where the fire had burned down to embers.

He picked up his keys. “Can I interest you in some tea before we head back to Oxford?”

“Where?”

“We’ll go to the gatehouse,” Matthew said matter-of-factly.

“There’s a cafй there?”

“No, but there’s a kitchen. A place to sit down, too. I can make tea,” he teased.

“Matthew,” I said, shocked, “is this your house?”

By that time we were standing in the doorway, looking out into the courtyard. I saw the keystone over the house’s gate: 1536.

“I built it,” he said, watching me closely.

Matthew Clairmont was at least five hundred years old.

“The spoils of the Reformation,” he continued. “Henry gave me the land, on the condition that I tear down the abbey that was here and start over. I saved what I could, but it was difficult to get away with much. The king was in a foul mood that year. There’s an angel here and there, and some stonework I couldn’t bear to destroy. Other than that, it’s all new construction.”

“I’ve never heard anyone describe a house built in the early sixteenth century as ‘new construction’ before.” I tried to see the house not only through Matthew’s eyes but as a part of him. This was the house he had wanted to live in nearly five hundred years ago. In seeing it I knew him better. It was quiet and still, just as he was. More than that, it was solid and true. There was nothing unnecessary—no extra ornamentation, no distractions.

“It’s beautiful,” I said simply.

“It’s too big to live in now,” he replied, “not to mention too fragile. Every time I open a window, something seems to fall off it, despite careful maintenance. I let Amira live in some of the rooms and open the house to her students a few times a week.”

“You live in the gatehouse?” I asked as we walked across the open expanse of cobbles and brick to the car.

“Part of the time. I live in Oxford during the week but come here on the weekends. It’s quieter.”

I thought that it must be challenging for a vampire to live surrounded by noisy undergraduates whose conversations he couldn’t help overhearing.

We got back into the car and drove the short distance to the gatehouse. As the manor’s onetime public face, it had slightly more frills and embellishments than the main house. I studied the twisted chimneys and the elaborate patterns in the brick.

Matthew groaned. “I know. The chimneys were a mistake. The stonemason was dying to try his hand at them. His cousin worked for Wolsey at Hampton Court, and the man simply wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

He flipped a light switch near the door, and the gatehouse’s main room was bathed in a golden glow. It had serviceable flagstone floors and a big stone fireplace suitable for roasting an ox.

“Are you cold?” Matthew asked as he went to the part of the space that had been turned into a sleek, modern kitchen. It was dominated by a refrigerator rather than a stove. I tried not to think about what he might keep in it.

“A little bit.” I drew my sweater closer. It was still relatively warm in Oxford, but my drying perspiration made the night air feel chilly.

“Light the fire, then,” Matthew suggested. It was already laid, and I set it alight with a long match drawn from an antique pewter tankard.

Matthew put the kettle on, and I walked around the room, taking in the elements of his taste. It ran heavily toward brown leather and dark polished wood, which stood out handsomely against the flagstones. An old carpet in warm shades of red, blue, and ocher provided jolts of color. Over the mantel there was an enormous portrait of a dark-haired, late-seventeenth-century beauty in a yellow gown. It had certainly been painted by Sir Peter Lely.

Matthew noticed my interest. “My sister Louisa,” he said, coming around the counter with a fully outfitted tea tray. He looked up at the canvas, his face touched with sadness. “Dieu, she was beautiful.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went to Barbados, intent on making herself queen of the Indies. We tried to tell her that her taste for young gentlemen was not likely to go unnoticed on a small island, but she wouldn’t listen. Louisa loved plantation life. She invested in sugar—and slaves.” A shadow flitted across his face. “During one of the island’s rebellions, her fellow plantation owners, who had figured out what she was, decided to get rid of her. They sliced off Louisa’s head and cut her body into pieces. Then they burned her and blamed it on the slaves.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, knowing that words were inadequate in the face of such a loss.

He mustered a small smile. “The death was only as terrible as the woman who suffered it. I loved my sister, but she didn’t make that easy. She absorbed every vice of every age she lived through. If there was excess to be had, Louisa found it.” Matthew shook himself free from his sister’s cold, beautiful face with difficulty. “Will you pour?” he asked. He put the tray on a low, polished oak table in front of the fireplace between two overstuffed leather sofas.

I agreed, happy to lighten the mood even though I had enough questions to fill more than one evening of conversation. Louisa’s huge black eyes watched me, and I made sure not to spill a drop of liquid on the shining wooden surface of the table just in case it had once been hers. Matthew had remembered the big jug of milk and the sugar, and I doctored my tea until it was precisely the right color before sinking back into the cushions with a sigh.

Matthew held his mug politely without once lifting it to his lips.

“You don’t have to for my sake, you know,” I said, glancing at the cup.

“I know.” He shrugged. “It’s a habit, and comforting to go through the motions.”

“When did you start practicing yoga?” I asked, changing the subject.