Matthew crossed the river Avon, driving over the bridge’s high, arched spans. He found the familiar Lanarkshire landscape of craggy hills, dark sky, and stark contrasts soothing. Little about this part of Scotland was soft or inviting, and its forbidding beauty suited his present mood. He downshifted through the lime alley that had once led to a palace and now led nowhere, an odd remnant of a grand life no one wanted to live anymore. Pulling up to what had been the back entrance of an old hunting lodge, where rough brown stone stood in sharp contrast to the creamy stuccoed front, he climbed out of his Jaguar and lifted his bags from the trunk.

The lodge’s welcoming white door opened. “You look like hell.” A wiry daemon with dark hair, twinkling brown eyes, and a hooked nose stood with his hand on the latch and inspected his best friend from head to foot.

Hamish Osborne had met Matthew Clairmont at Oxford nearly twenty years ago. Like most creatures, they’d been taught to fear each other and were uncertain how to behave. The two became inseparable once they’d realized they shared a similar sense of humor and the same passion for ideas.

Matthew’s face registered anger and resignation in quick succession. “Nice to see you, too,” he said gruffly, dropping his bags by the door. He drank in the house’s cold, clear smell, with its nuances of old plaster and aging wood, and Hamish’s unique aroma of lavender and peppermint. The vampire was desperate to get the smell of witch out of his nose.

Jordan, Hamish’s human butler, appeared silently and brought with him the scent of lemon furniture polish and starch. It didn’t drive Diana’s honeysuckle and horehound entirely from Matthew’s nostrils, but it helped.

“Good to see you, sir,” he said before heading for the stairs with Matthew’s bags. Jordan was a butler of the old school. Even had he not been paid handsomely to keep his employer’s secrets, he would never divulge to a soul that Osborne was a daemon or that he sometimes entertained vampires. It would be as unthinkable as letting slip that he was occasionally asked to serve peanut butter and banana sandwiches at breakfast.

“Thank you, Jordan.” Matthew surveyed the downstairs hall so that he wouldn’t have to meet Hamish’s eyes. “You’ve picked up a new Hamilton, I see.” He stared raptly at the unfamiliar landscape on the far wall.

“You don’t usually notice my new acquisitions.” Like Matthew’s, Hamish’s accent was mostly Oxbridge with a touch of something else. In his case it was the burr of Glasgow’s streets.

“Speaking of new acquisitions, how is Sweet William?” William was Hamish’s new lover, a human so adorable and easygoing that Matthew had nicknamed him after a spring flower. It stuck. Now Hamish used it as an endearment, and William had started bothering florists in the city for pots of it to give to friends.

“Grumpy,” Hamish said with a chuckle. “I’d promised him a quiet weekend at home.”

“You didn’t have to come, you know. I didn’t expect it.” Matthew sounded grumpy, too.

“Yes, I know. But it’s been awhile since we’ve seen each other, and Cadzow is beautiful this time of year.”

Matthew glowered at Hamish, disbelief evident on his face.

“Christ, you do need to go hunting, don’t you?” was all Hamish could say.

“Badly,” the vampire replied, his voice clipped.

“Do we have time for a drink first, or do you need to get straight to it?”

“I believe I can manage a drink,” Matthew said in a withering tone.

“Excellent. I’ve got a bottle of wine for you and some whiskey for me.” Hamish had asked Jordan to pull some of the good wine out of the cellar shortly after he’d received Matthew’s dawn call. He hated to drink alone, and Matthew refused to touch whiskey. “Then you can tell me why you have such an urgent need to go hunting this fine September weekend.”

Hamish led the way across the gleaming floors and upstairs to his library. The warm brown paneling had been added in the nineteenth century, ruining the architect’s original intention to provide an airy, spacious place for eighteenth-century ladies to wait while their husbands busied themselves with sport. The original white ceiling remained, festooned with plaster garlands and busy angels, a constant reproach to modernity.

The two men settled into the leather chairs that flanked the fireplace, where a cheerful blaze was already taking the edge off the autumn chill. Hamish showed Matthew the bottle of wine, and the vampire made an appreciative sound. “That will do nicely.”

“I should think so. The gentlemen at Berry Brothers and Rudd assured me it was excellent.” Hamish poured the wine and pulled the stopper from his decanter. Glasses in hand, the two men sat in companionable silence.

“I’m sorry to drag you into all this,” Matthew began. “I’m in a difficult situation. It’s . . . complicated.”

Hamish chuckled. “It always is, with you.”

Matthew had been drawn to Hamish Osborne in part because of his directness and in part because, unlike most daemons, he was levelheaded and difficult to unsettle. Over the years a number of the vampire’s friends had been daemons, gifted and cursed in equal measure. Hamish was far more comfortable to be around. There were no blazing arguments, bursts of wild activity, or dangerous depressions. Time with Hamish consisted of long stretches of silence, followed by blindingly sharp conversation, all colored by his serene approach to life.

Hamish’s differences extended to his work, which was not in the usual daemonic pursuits of art or music. Instead he had a gift for money—for making it and for spotting fatal weaknesses in international financial instruments and markets. He took a daemon’s characteristic creativity and applied it to spreadsheets rather than sonatas, understanding the intricacies of currency exchange with such remarkable precision that he was consulted by presidents, monarchs, and prime ministers.

The daemon’s uncommon predilection for the economy fascinated Matthew, as did his ease among humans. Hamish loved being around them and found their faults stimulating rather than aggravating. It was a legacy of his childhood, with an insurance broker for a father and a housewife as a mother. Having met the unflappable Osbornes, Matthew could understand Hamish’s fondness.

The crackling of the fire and the smooth smell of whiskey in the air began to do their work, and the vampire found himself relaxing. Matthew sat forward, holding his wineglass lightly between his fingers, the red liquid winking in the firelight.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he said shakily.

“At the end, of course. Why did you pick up the phone and call me?”

“I needed to get away from a witch.”

Hamish watched his friend for a moment, noting Matthew’s obvious agitation. Somehow Hamish was certain the witch wasn’t male.

“What makes this witch so special?” he asked quietly.

Matthew looked up from under his heavy brows. “Everything.”

“Oh. You are in trouble, aren’t you?” Hamish’s burr deepened in sympathy and amusement.

Matthew laughed unpleasantly. “You could say that, yes.”

“Does this witch have a name?”

“Diana. She’s a historian. And American.”

“The goddess of the hunt,” Hamish said slowly. “Apart from her ancient name, is she an ordinary witch?”

“No,” Matthew said abruptly. “She is far from ordinary.”

“Ah. The complications.” Hamish studied his friend’s face for signs that he was calming down but saw that Matthew was spoiling for a fight instead.

“She’s a Bishop.” Matthew waited. He’d learned it was never a good idea to anticipate that the daemon wouldn’t grasp the significance of a reference, no matter how obscure.

Hamish sifted and sorted through his mind and found what he was seeking. “As in Salem, Massachusetts?”

Matthew nodded grimly. “She’s the last of the Bishop witches. Her father is a Proctor.”

The daemon whistled softly. “A witch twice over, with a distinguished magical lineage. You never do things by half, do you? She must be powerful.”

“Her mother is. I don’t know much about her father. Rebecca Bishop, though—that’s a different story. She was doing spells at thirteen that most witches can’t manage after a lifetime of study and experience. And her childhood abilities as a seer were astonishing.”

“Do you know her, Matt?” Hamish had to ask. Matthew had lived many lives and crossed paths with too many people for his friend to keep track of them all.

Matthew shook his head. “No. There’s always talk about her, though—and plenty of envy. You know how witches are,” he said, his voice taking on the slightly unpleasant tone it did whenever he referred to the species.

Hamish let the remark about witches pass and eyed Matthew over the rim of his glass.

“And Diana?”

“She claims she doesn’t use magic.”

There were two threads in that brief sentence that needed pulling. Hamish tugged on the easier one first. “What, not for anything? Finding a lost earring? Coloring her hair?” Hamish sounded doubtful.

“She’s not the earrings and colored hair type. She’s more the three-mile run followed by an hour on the river in a dangerously tiny boat type.”

“With her background I find it difficult to believe she never uses her power.” Hamish was a pragmatist as well as a dreamer. It was why he was so good with other people’s money. “And you don’t believe it either, or you wouldn’t suggest that she’s lying.” There was the second thread pulled.

“She says she only uses magic occasionally—for little things.” Matthew hesitated, raked his fingers through his hair so half of it stood on end, and took a gulp of wine. “I’ve been watching her, though, and she’s using it more than that. I can smell it,” he said, his voice frank and open for the first time since his arrival. “The scent is like an electrical storm about to break, or summer lightning. There are times when I can see it, too. Diana shimmers when she’s angry or lost in her work.” And when she’s asleep, he thought, frowning. “Christ, there are times when I think I can even taste it.”

“She shimmers?”

“It’s nothing you would see, though you might sense the energy some other way. The chatoiement—her witch’s shimmer—is very faint. Even when I was a young vampire, only the most powerful witches emitted these tiny pulses of light. It’s rare to see it today. Diana’s unaware she’s doing it, and she’s oblivious to its significance.” Matthew shuddered and balled up his fist.

The daemon glanced at his watch. The day was young, but he already knew why his friend was in Scotland.

Matthew Clairmont was falling in love.

Jordan came in, his timing impeccable. “The gillie dropped off the Jeep, sir. I told him you wouldn’t need his services today.” The butler knew there was little need for a guide to track down deer when you had a vampire in the house.

“Excellent,” Hamish said, rising to his feet and draining his glass. He sorely wanted more whiskey, but it was better to keep his wits about him.

Matthew looked up. “I’ll go out by myself, Hamish. I’d rather hunt alone.” The vampire didn’t like hunting with warmbloods, a category that included humans, daemons, and witches. He usually made an exception for Hamish, but today he wanted to be on his own while he got his craving for Diana Bishop under control.

“Oh, we’re not going hunting,” Hamish said with a wicked glint in his eye. “We’re going stalking.” The daemon had a plan. It involved occupying his friend’s mind until he let down his guard and willingly shared what was going on in Oxford rather than requiring Hamish to drag it out of him. “Come on, it’s a beautiful day. You’ll have fun.”

Outside, Matthew grimly climbed into Hamish’s beat-up Jeep. It was what the two of them preferred to roam around in when they were at Cadzow, even though a Land Rover was the vehicle of choice in grand Scottish hunting lodges. Matthew didn’t mind that it was freezing to drive in, and Hamish found its hypermasculinity amusing.

In the hills Hamish ground the Jeep’s gears—the vampire cringed at the sound each time—as he climbed to where the deer grazed. Matthew spotted a pair of stags on the next crag and told Hamish to stop. He got out of the Jeep quietly and crouched by the front tire, already mesmerized.

Hamish smiled and joined him.

The daemon had stalked deer with Matthew before and understood what he needed. The vampire did not always feed, though today Hamish was certain that, left to his own devices, Matthew would have come home sated after dark—and there would be two fewer stags on the estate. His friend was as much predator as carnivore. It was the hunt that defined vampires’ identity, not their feeding or what they fed upon. Sometimes, when Matthew was restless, he just went out and tracked whatever he could chase without making a kill.

While the vampire watched the deer, the daemon watched Matthew. There was trouble in Oxford. He could feel it.

Matthew sat patiently for the next several hours, considering whether the stags were worth pursuing. Through his extraordinary senses of smell, sight, and hearing, he tracked their movements, figured out their habits, and gauged their every response to a cracking twig or a bird in flight. The vampire’s attention was avid, but he never showed impatience. For Matthew the crucial moment came when his prey acknowledged that it was beaten and surrendered.

The light was dimming when he finally rose and nodded to Hamish. It was enough for the first day, and though he didn’t need the light to see the deer, he knew that Hamish needed it to get back down the mountain.

By the time they reached the lodge, it was pitch black, and Jordan had turned on every lamp, which made the building look even more ridiculous, sitting on a rise in the middle of nowhere.

“This lodge never did make any sense,” Matthew said in a conversational tone that was nevertheless intended to sting. “Robert Adam was insane to take the commission.”

“You’ve shared your thoughts on my little extravagance many times, Matthew,” Hamish said serenely, “and I don’t care if you understand the principles of architectural design better than I do or whether you believe that Adam was a madman to construct—what do you always call it?—an ‘ill-conceived folly’ in the Lanarkshire wilderness. I love it, and nothing you say is going to change that.” They’d had versions of this conversation regularly since Hamish’s announcement he’d purchased the lodge—complete with all its furnishings, the gillie, and Jordan—from an aristocrat who had no use for the building and no money to repair it. Matthew had been horrified. To Hamish, however, Cadzow Lodge was a sign he had risen so far above his Glasgow roots that he could spend money on something impractical that he could love for its own sake.

“Hmph,” Matthew said with a scowl.

Grumpiness was preferable to agitation, Hamish thought. He moved on to the next step of his plan.

“Dinner’s at eight,” he said, “in the dining room.”

Matthew hated the dining room, which was grand, high-ceilinged, and drafty. More important, it upset the vampire because it was gaudy and feminine. It was Hamish’s favorite room.

Matthew groaned. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re famished,” Hamish said sharply, taking in the color and texture of Matthew’s skin. “When was your last real meal?”

“Weeks ago.” Matthew shrugged with his usual disregard for the passage of time. “I can’t remember.”

“Tonight you’re having wine and soup. Tomorrow—it’s up to you what you eat. Do you want some time alone before dinner, or will you risk playing billiards with me?” Hamish was extremely good at billiards and even better at snooker, which he had learned to play as a teenager. He’d made his first money in Glasgow’s billiards halls and could beat almost anyone. Matthew refused to play snooker with him anymore on the grounds that it was no fun to lose every time, even to a friend. The vampire had tried to teach him carambole instead, the old French game involving balls and cues, but Matthew always won those games. Billiards was the sensible compromise.

Unable to resist a battle of any sort, Matthew agreed. “I’ll change and join you.”

Hamish’s felt-covered billiards table was in a room opposite the library. He was there in a sweater and trousers when Matthew arrived in a white shirt and jeans. The vampire avoided wearing white, which made him look startling and ghostly, but it was the only decent shirt he had with him. He’d packed for a hunting trip, not a dinner party.

He picked up his cue and stood at the end of the table. “Ready?”

Hamish nodded. “Let’s say an hour of play, shall we? Then we’ll go down for a drink.”

The two men bent over their cues. “Be gentle with me, Matthew,” Hamish murmured just before they struck the balls. The vampire snorted as they shot to the far end, hit the cushion, and rebounded.

“I’ll take the white,” said Matthew when the balls stopped rolling and his was closest. He palmed the other and tossed it to Hamish. The daemon put a red ball on its mark and stood back.

As in hunting, Matthew was in no rush to score points. He shot fifteen hazards in a row, putting the red ball in a different pocket each time. “If you don’t mind,” he drawled, pointing to the table. The daemon put his yellow ball on it without comment.

Matthew mixed up simple shots that took the red ball into the pockets with trickier shots known as cannons that were not his forte. Cannons involved hitting both Hamish’s yellow ball and the red ball with one strike of the cue, and they required not only strength but finesse.

“Where did you find the witch?” Hamish asked casually after Matthew cannoned the yellow and red balls.

Matthew retrieved the white ball and prepared for his next shot. “The Bodleian.”

The daemon’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “The Bodleian? Since when have you been a regular at the library?”

Matthew fouled, his white ball hopping over the cushion and onto the floor. “Since I was at a concert and overheard two witches talking about an American who’d got her hands on a long-lost manuscript,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out why the witches would give a damn.” He stepped back from the table, annoyed at his error.

Hamish quickly played his fifteen hazards. Matthew placed his ball on the table and picked up the chalk to mark down Hamish’s score.

“So you just strolled in there and struck up a conversation with her to find out?” The daemon pocketed all three balls with a single shot.

“I went looking for her, yes.” Matthew watched while Hamish moved around the table. “I was curious.”

“Was she happy to see you?” Hamish asked mildly, making another tricky shot. He knew that vampires, witches, and daemons seldom mixed. They preferred to spend time within close-knit circles of similar creatures. His friendship with Matthew was a relative rarity, and Hamish’s daemonic friends thought it was madness to let a vampire get so close. On a night like this one, he thought they might have a point.

“Not exactly. Diana was frightened at first, even though she met my eyes without flinching. Her eyes are extraordinary—blue and gold and green and gray,” Matthew mused. “Later she wanted to hit me. She smelled so angry.”

Hamish bit back a laugh. “Sounds like a reasonable response to being ambushed by a vampire in the Bodleian.” He decided to be kind to Matthew and save him from a reply. The daemon shot his yellow ball over the red, deliberately nicking it just enough that the red ball drifted forward and collided with it. “Damn,” he groaned. “A foul.”

Matthew returned to the table, shot a few hazards, and tried a cannon or two.

“Have you seen each other outside the library?” Hamish asked when the vampire had regained some of his composure.

“I don’t see her much, actually, even in the library. I sit in one part and she sits in another. I’ve taken her to breakfast, though. And to the Old Lodge, to meet Amira.”

Hamish kept his jaw closed with difficulty. Matthew had known women for years without taking them to the Old Lodge. And what was this about sitting at opposite ends of the library?

“Wouldn’t it be easier to sit next to her in the library, if you’re interested in her?”

“I’m not interested in her!” Matthew’s cue exploded into the white ball. “I want the manuscript. I’ve been trying to get my hands on it for more than a hundred years. She just put in the slip and up it came from the stacks.” His voice was envious.

“What manuscript, Matt?” Hamish was doing his best to be patient, but the exchange was rapidly becoming unendurable. Matthew was giving out information like a miser parting with pennies. It was intensely aggravating for quick-minded daemons to deal with creatures who didn’t consider any division of time smaller than a decade particularly important.

“An alchemical book that belonged to Elias Ashmole. Diana Bishop is a highly respected historian of alchemy.”

Matthew fouled again by striking the balls too hard. Hamish respotted the balls and continued to rack up points while his friend simmered down. Finally Jordan came to tell them that drinks were available downstairs.

“What’s the score?” Hamish peered at the chalk marks. He knew he’d won, but the gentlemanly thing was to ask—or so Matthew had told him.

“You won, of course.”

Matthew stalked out of the room and pounded down the stairs at considerably more than a human pace. Jordan eyed the polished treads with concern.

“Professor Clairmont is having a difficult day, Jordan.”

“So it would seem,” the butler murmured.

“Better bring up another bottle of red. It’s going to be a long night.”

They had their drinks in what had once been the lodge’s reception area. Its windows looked out on the gardens, which were still kept in orderly, classical parterres despite the fact that their proportions were all wrong for a hunting lodge. They were too grand—they belonged to a palace, not a folly.

In front of the fireplace, drinks in hand, Hamish could at last press his way into the heart of the mystery. “Tell me about this manuscript of Diana’s, Matthew. It contains what, exactly? The recipe for the philosopher’s stone that turns lead into gold?” Hamish’s voice was lightly mocking. “Instructions on how to concoct the elixir of life so you can transform mortal into immortal flesh?”

The daemon stopped his teasing the instant Matthew’s eyes rose to meet his.

“You aren’t serious,” Hamish whispered, his voice shocked. The philosopher’s stone was just a legend, like the Holy Grail or Atlantis. It couldn’t possibly be real. Belatedly, he realized that vampires, daemons, and witches weren’t supposed to be real either.

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Matthew asked.

“No.” The daemon shuddered. Matthew had always been convinced that he could use his scientific skills to figure out what made vampires resistant to death and decay. The philosopher’s stone fit neatly into those dreams.

“It’s the lost book,” Matthew said grimly. “I know it.”

Like most creatures, Hamish had heard the stories. One version suggested the witches had stolen a precious book from the vampires, a book that held the secret of immortality. Another claimed the vampires had snatched an ancient spell book from the witches and then lost it. Some whispered that it was not a spell book at all, but a primer covering the basic traits of all four humanoid species on earth.

Matthew had his own theories about what the book might contain. An explanation of why vampires were so difficult to kill and accounts of early human and creature history were only a small part of it.

“You really think this alchemical manuscript is your book?” he asked. When Matthew nodded, Hamish let out his breath with a sigh. “No wonder the witches were gossiping. How did they discover Diana had found it?”

Matthew turned, ferocious. “Who knows or cares? The problems began when they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.”

Hamish was reminded once again that Matthew and his family really didn’t like witches.

“I wasn’t the only one to overhear them on Sunday. Other vampires did, too. And then the daemons sensed that something interesting was happening, and—”

“Now Oxford is crawling with creatures,” the daemon finished. “What a mess. Isn’t term about to start? The humans will be next. They’re about to return in droves.”

“It gets worse.” Matthew’s expression was grim. “The manuscript wasn’t simply lost. It was under a spell, and Diana broke it. Then she sent it back to the stacks and shows no interest in recalling it. And I’m not the only one waiting for her to do so.”

“Matthew,” Hamish said, voice tense, “are you protecting her from other witches?”

“She doesn’t seem to recognize her own power. It puts her at risk. I couldn’t let them get to her first.” Matthew seemed suddenly, disconcertingly, vulnerable.

“Oh, Matt,” Hamish said, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t interfere between Diana and her own people. You’ll only cause more trouble. Besides,” he continued, “no witch will be openly hostile to a Bishop. Her family’s too old and distinguished.”

Nowadays creatures no longer killed one another except in self-defense. Aggression was frowned on in their world. Matthew had told Hamish what it was like in the old days, when blood feuds and vendettas had raged and creatures were constantly catching human attention.

“The daemons are disorganized, and the vampires won’t dare to cross me. But the witches can’t be trusted.” Matthew rose, taking his wine to the fireplace.

“Let Diana Bishop be,” Hamish advised. “Besides, if this manuscript is bewitched, you’re not going to be able to examine it.”

“I will if she helps me,” Matthew said in a deceptively easy tone, staring into the fire.

“Matthew,” the daemon said in the same voice he used to let his junior partners know when they were on thin ice, “leave the witch and the manuscript alone.”

The vampire placed his wineglass carefully on the mantel and turned away. “I don’t think I can, Hamish. I’m . . . craving her.” Even saying the word made the hunger spread. When his hunger focused, grew insistent like this, not just any blood would do. His body demanded something more specific. If only he could taste it—taste Diana—he would be satisfied and the painful longing would subside.

Hamish studied Matthew’s tense shoulders. He wasn’t surprised that his friend craved Diana Bishop. A vampire had to desire another creature more than anyone or anything else in order to mate, and cravings were rooted in desire. Hamish strongly suspected that Matthew—despite his previous fervent declarations that he was incapable of finding anyone who would stir that kind of feeling—was mating.

“Then the real problem you’re facing at the moment is not the witches, nor Diana. And it’s certainly not some ancient manuscript that may or may not hold the answers to your questions.” Hamish let his words sink in before continuing. “You do realize you’re hunting her?”

The vampire exhaled, relieved that it had been said aloud. “I know. I climbed into her window when she was sleeping. I follow her when she’s running. She resists my attempts to help her, and the more she does, the hungrier I feel.” He looked so perplexed that Hamish had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from smiling. Matthew’s women didn’t usually resist him. They did what he told them to do, dazzled by his good looks and charm. No wonder he was fascinated.

“But I don’t need Diana’s blood—not physically. I won’t give in to this craving. Being around her needn’t be a problem.” Matthew’s face crumpled unexpectedly. “What am I saying? We can’t be near each other. We’ll attract attention.”

“Not necessarily. We’ve spent a fair bit of time together, and no one has been bothered,” Hamish pointed out. In the early years of their friendship, the two had struggled to mask their differences from curious eyes. They were brilliant enough separately to attract human interest. When they were together—their dark heads bent to share a joke at dinner or sitting in the quadrangle in the early hours of the morning with empty champagne bottles at their feet—they were impossible to ignore.

“It’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Matthew said impatiently.

“Oh, yes, I forgot.” Hamish’s temper snapped. “Nobody cares what daemons do. But a vampire and a witch? That’s important. You’re the creatures who really matter in this world.”

“Hamish!” Matthew protested. “You know that’s not how I feel.”

“You have the characteristic vampire contempt for daemons, Matthew. Witches, too, I might add. Think long and hard how you feel about other creatures before you take this witch to bed.”

“I have no intention of taking Diana to bed,” Matthew said, his voice acid.

“Dinner is served, sir.” Jordan had been standing in the doorway, unobserved, for some time.

“Thank God,” Hamish said with relief, getting up from his chair. The vampire was easier to manage if he was dividing his attention between the conversation and something—anything—else.

Seated in the dining room at one end of a vast table designed to feed a house party’s worth of guests, Hamish tucked into the first of several courses while Matthew toyed with a soup spoon until his meal cooled. The vampire leaned over the bowl and sniffed.

“Mushrooms and sherry?” he asked.

“Yes. Jordan wanted to try something new, and since it didn’t contain anything you find objectionable, I let him.”

Matthew didn’t ordinarily require much in the way of supplemental sustenance at Cadzow Lodge, but Jordan was a wizard with soup, and Hamish didn’t like to eat alone any more than he liked drinking alone.

“I’m sorry, Hamish,” Matthew said, watching his friend eat.

“I accept your apology, Matt,” Hamish said, the soup spoon hovering near his mouth. “But you cannot imagine how difficult it is to accept being a daemon or a witch. With vampires it’s definite and incontrovertible. You’re not a vampire, and then you are. No question, no room for doubt. The rest of us have to wait, watch, and wonder. It makes your vampire superiority doubly hard to take.”

Matthew was twirling the spoon’s handle in his fingers like a baton. “Witches know they’re witches. They’re not like daemons at all,” he said with a frown.

Hamish put his spoon down with a clatter and topped off his wineglass. “You know full well that having a witch for a parent is no guarantee. You can turn out perfectly ordinary. Or you can set your crib on fire. There’s no telling if, when, or how your powers are going to manifest.” Unlike Matthew, Hamish had a friend who was a witch. Janine did his hair, which had never looked better, and made her own skin lotion, which was nothing short of miraculous. He suspected that witchcraft was involved.

“It’s not a total surprise, though,” Matthew persisted, scooping some soup into his spoon and waving it slightly to cool it further. “Diana has centuries of family history to rely upon. It’s nothing like what you went through as a teenager.”

“I had a breeze of a time,” Hamish said, recalling some of the daemonic coming-of-age stories he’d been privy to over the years.

When Hamish was twelve, his life had gone topsy-turvy in the space of one afternoon. He had come to realize, over the long Scottish autumn, that he was far smarter than his teachers. Most children who reach twelve suspect this, but Hamish knew it with deeply upsetting certainty. He responded by feigning sickness so he could skip school and, when that no longer worked, by doing his schoolwork as rapidly as he could and abandoning all pretense of normalcy. In desperation his schoolmaster sent for someone from the university mathematics department to evaluate Hamish’s troublesome ability to solve in minutes problems that occupied his school-mates for a week or more.

Jack Watson, a young daemon from the University of Glasgow with red hair and brilliant blue eyes, took one look at elfin Hamish Osborne and suspected that he, too, was a daemon. After going through the motions of a formal evaluation, which produced the expected documentary proof that Hamish was a mathematical prodigy whose mind did not fit within normal parameters, Watson invited him to attend lectures at the university. He also explained to the headmaster that the child could not be accommodated within a normal classroom without becoming a pyromaniac or something equally destructive.

After that, Watson made a visit to the Osbornes’ modest home and told an astonished family how the world worked and exactly what kinds of creatures were in it. Percy Osborne, who came from a staunch Presbyterian background, resisted the notion of multiple supernatural and preternatural creatures until his wife pointed out that he had been raised to believe in witches—why not daemons and vampires, too? Hamish wept with relief, no longer feeling utterly alone. His mother hugged him fiercely and told him that she had always known he was special.

While Watson was still sitting in front of their electric fire drinking tea with her husband and son, Jessica Osborne thought she might as well take the opportunity to broach other aspects of Hamish’s life that might make him feel different. She informed her son over chocolate biscuits that she also knew he was unlikely to marry the girl next door, who was infatuated with him. Instead Hamish was drawn to the girl’s elder brother, a strapping lad of fifteen who could kick a football farther than anyone else in the neighborhood. Neither Percy nor Jack seemed remotely surprised or distressed by the revelation.

“Still,” Matthew said now, after his first sip of tepid soup, “Diana’s whole family must have expected her to be a witch—and she is, whether she uses her magic or not.”

“I should think that would be every bit as bad as being among a bunch of clueless humans. Can you imagine the pressure? Not to mention the awful sense that your life didn’t belong to you?” Hamish shuddered. “I’d prefer blind ignorance.”

“What did it feel like,” Matthew asked hesitantly, “the first day you woke up knowing you were a daemon?” The vampire didn’t normally ask such personal questions.

“Like being reborn,” Hamish said. “It was every bit as powerful and confusing as when you woke up craving blood and hearing the grass grow, blade by blade. Everything looked different. Everything felt different. Most of the time I smiled like a fool who’d won the lottery, and the rest of the time I cried in my room. But I don’t think I believed it—you know, really believed it—until you smuggled me into the hospital.”

Matthew’s first birthday present to Hamish, after they became friends, had involved a bottle of Krug and a trip to the John Radcliffe. There Matthew sent Hamish through the MRI while the vampire asked him a series of questions. Afterward they compared Hamish’s scans with those of an eminent brain surgeon on the staff, both of them drinking champagne and the daemon still in a surgical gown. Hamish made Matthew play the scans back repeatedly, fascinated by the way his brain lit up like a pinball machine even when he was replying to basic questions. It remained the best birthday present he’d ever received.

“From what you’ve told me, Diana is where I was before that MRI,” Hamish said. “She knows she’s a witch. But she still feels she’s living a lie.”

“She is living a lie,” Matthew growled, taking another sip of soup. “Diana’s pretending she’s human.”

“Wouldn’t it be interesting to know why that’s the case? More important, can you be around someone like that? You don’t like lies.”

Matthew looked thoughtful but didn’t respond.

“There’s something else,” Hamish continued. “For someone who dislikes lies as much as you do, you keep a lot of secrets. If you need this witch, for whatever reason, you’re going to have to win her trust. And the only way to do that is by telling her things you don’t want her to know. She’s roused your protective instincts, and you’re going to have to fight them.”

While Matthew mulled the situation over, Hamish turned the conversation to the latest catastrophes in the City and the government. The vampire calmed further, caught up in the intricacies of finance and policy.

“You’ve heard about the murders in Westminster, I presume,” Hamish said when Matthew was completely at ease.

“I have. Somebody needs to put a stop to it.”

“You?” Hamish asked.

“It’s not my job—yet.”

Hamish knew that Matthew had a theory about the murders, one that was linked to his scientific research. “You still think the murders are a sign that vampires are dying out?”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

Matthew was convinced that creatures were slowly becoming extinct. Hamish had dismissed his friend’s hypotheses at first, but he was beginning to think Matthew might be right.

They returned to less disturbing topics of conversation and, after dinner, retreated upstairs. The daemon had divided one of the lodge’s redundant reception rooms into a sitting room and a bedroom. The sitting room was dominated by a large, ancient chessboard with carved ivory and ebony pieces that by all rights should be in a museum under protective glass rather than in a drafty hunting lodge. Like the MRI, the chess set had been a present from Matthew.

Their friendship had deepened over long evenings like this one, spent playing chess and discussing their work. One night Matthew began to tell Hamish stories of his past exploits. Now there was little about Matthew Clairmont that the daemon did not know, and the vampire was the only creature Hamish had ever met who wasn’t frightened of his powerful intellect.

Hamish, as was his custom, sat down behind the black pieces.

“Did we finish our last game?” Matthew asked, feigning surprise at the neatly arranged board.

“Yes. You won,” Hamish said curtly, earning one of his friend’s rare, broad smiles.

The two began to move their pieces, Matthew taking his time and Hamish moving swiftly and decisively when it was his turn. There was no sound except for the crackle of the fire and the ticking of the clock.

After an hour of play, Hamish moved to the final stage of his plan.

“I have a question.” His voice was careful as he waited for his friend to make his next move. “Do you want the witch for herself—or for her power over that manuscript?”

“I don’t want her power!” Matthew exploded, making a bad decision with his rook, which Hamish quickly captured. He bowed his head, looking more than ever like a Renaissance angel focused on some celestial mystery. “Christ, I don’t know what I want.”

Hamish sat as still as possible. “I think you do, Matt.”

Matthew moved a pawn and made no reply.

“The other creatures in Oxford,” Hamish continued, “they’ll know soon, if they don’t know already, that you’re interested in more than this old book. What’s your endgame?”

“I don’t know,” the vampire whispered.

“Love? Tasting her? Making her like you?”

Matthew snarled.

“Very impressive,” Hamish said in a bored tone.

“There’s a lot I don’t understand about all this, Hamish, but there are three things I do know,” Matthew said emphatically, picking up his wineglass from the floor by his feet. “I will not give in to this craving for her blood. I do not want to control her power. And I certainly have no wish to make her a vampire.” He shuddered at the thought.

“That leaves love. You have your answer, then. You do know what you want.”

Matthew swallowed a gulp of wine. “I want what I shouldn’t want, and I crave someone I can never have.”

“You’re not afraid you’d hurt her?” Hamish asked gently. “You’ve had relationships with warm-blooded women before, and you’ve never harmed any of them.”

Matthew’s heavy crystal wine goblet snapped in two. The bowl toppled to the floor, red wine spreading on the carpet. Hamish saw the glint of powdered glass between the vampire’s index finger and thumb.

“Oh, Matt. Why didn’t you tell me?” Hamish governed his features, making sure that not a particle of his shock was evident.

“How could I?” Matthew stared at his hands and ground the shards between his fingertips until they sparkled reddish black from the mixture of glass and blood. “You always had too much faith in me, you know.”

“Who was she?”

“Her name was Eleanor.” Matthew stumbled over the name. He dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, a fruitless attempt to wipe the image of her face from his mind. “My brother and I were fighting. Now I can’t even remember what the argument was about. Back then I wanted to destroy him with my bare hands. Eleanor tried to make me see reason. She got between us and—” The vampire’s voice broke. He cradled his head without bothering to clean the bloody residue from his already healed fingers. “I loved her so much, and I killed her.”

“When was this?” Hamish whispered.

Matthew lowered his hands, turning them over to study his long, strong fingers. “Ages ago. Yesterday. What does it matter?” he asked with a vampire’s disregard for time.

“It matters enormously if you made this mistake when you were a newly minted vampire and not in control of your instincts and your hunger.”

“Ah. Then it will also matter that I killed another woman, Cecilia Martin, just over a century ago. I wasn’t ‘a newly minted vampire’ then.” Matthew got up from his chair and walked to the windows. He wanted to run into the night’s blackness and disappear so he wouldn’t have to see the horror in Hamish’s eyes.

“Are there more?” Hamish asked sharply.

Matthew shook his head. “Two is enough. There can’t be a third. Not ever.”

“Tell me about Cecilia,” Hamish commanded, leaning forward in his chair.

“She was a banker’s wife,” Matthew said reluctantly. “I saw her at the opera and became infatuated. Everyone in Paris was infatuated with someone else’s wife at the time.” His finger traced the outline of a woman’s face on the pane of glass before him. “It didn’t strike me as a challenge. I only wanted a taste of her, that night I went to her house. But once I started, I couldn’t stop. And yet I couldn’t let her die either—she was mine, and I wouldn’t give her up. I barely stopped feeding in time. Dieu, she hated being a vampire. Cecilia walked into a burning house before I could stop her.”

Hamish frowned. “Then you didn’t kill her, Matt. She killed herself.”

“I fed on her until she was at the brink of death, forced her to drink my blood, and turned her into a creature without her permission because I was selfish and scared,” he said furiously. “In what way did I not kill her? I took her life, her identity, her vitality—that’s death, Hamish.”

“Why did you keep this from me?” Hamish tried not to care that his best friend had done so, but it was difficult.

“Even vampires feel shame,” Matthew said tightly. “I hate myself—and I should—for what I did to those women.”

“This is why you have to stop keeping secrets, Matt. They’re going to destroy you from the inside.” Hamish thought about what he wanted to say before he continued. “You didn’t set out to kill Eleanor and Cecilia. You’re not a murderer.”

Matthew rested his fingertips on the white-painted window frame and pressed his forehead against the cold panes of glass. When he spoke, his voice was flat and dead. “No, I’m a monster. Eleanor forgave me for it. Cecilia never did.”

“You’re not a monster,” Hamish said, worried by Matthew’s tone.

“Maybe not, but I am dangerous.” He turned and faced Hamish. “Especially around Diana. Not even Eleanor made me feel this way.” The mere thought of Diana brought the craving back, the tightness spreading from his heart to his abdomen. His face darkened with the effort to bring it under control.

“Come back here and finish this game,” Hamish said, his voice rough.

“I could go, Hamish,” Matthew said uncertainly. “You don’t have to share your roof with me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Hamish replied as quick as a whip. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Matthew sat. “I don’t understand how you can know about Eleanor and Cecilia and not hate me, too,” he said after a few minutes.

“I can’t conceive of what you would have to do to make me hate you, Matthew. I love you like a brother, and I will until I draw my last breath.”

“Thank you,” Matthew said, his face somber. “I’ll try to deserve it.”

“Don’t try. Do it,” Hamish said gruffly. “You’re about to lose your bishop, by the way.”

The two creatures dragged their attention back to the game with difficulty, and they were still playing in the early morning when Jordan brought up coffee for Hamish and a bottle of port for Matthew. The butler picked up the ruined wineglass without comment, and Hamish sent him off to bed.

When Jordan was gone, Hamish surveyed the board and made his final move. “Checkmate.”

Matthew let out his breath and sat back in his chair, staring at the chessboard. His queen stood encircled by his own pieces—pawns, a knight, and a rook. Across the board his king was checked by a lowly black pawn. The game was over, and he had lost.

“There’s more to the game than protecting your queen,” Hamish said. “Why do you find it so difficult to remember that it’s the king who’s not expendable?”

“The king just sits there, moving one square at a time. The queen can move so freely. I suppose I’d rather lose the game than forfeit her freedom.”

Hamish wondered if he was talking about chess or Diana. “Is she worth the cost, Matt?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” Matthew said without a moment of hesitation, lifting the white queen from the board and holding it between his fingers.

“I thought so,” Hamish said. “You don’t feel this way now, but you’re lucky to have found her at last.”

The vampire’s eyes glittered, and his mouth twisted into a crooked smile. “But is she lucky, Hamish? Is she fortunate to have a creature like me in pursuit?”

“That’s entirely up to you. Just remember—no secrets. Not if you love her.”

Matthew looked into his queen’s serene face, his fingers closing protectively around the small carved figure.

He was still holding it when the sun rose, long after Hamish had gone to sleep.

Still trying to shake the ice from my shoulders left by Matthew’s stare, I opened the door to my rooms. Inside, the answering machine greeted me with a flashing red “13.” There were nine additional voice-mail messages on my mobile. All of them were from Sarah and reflected an escalating concern about what her sixth sense told her was happening in Oxford.

Unable to face my all-too-prescient aunts, I turned down the volume on the answering machine, turned off the ringers on both phones, and climbed wearily into bed.

Next morning, when I passed through the porter’s lodge for a run, Fred waved a stack of message slips at me.

“I’ll pick them up later,” I called, and he flashed his thumb in acknowledgment.

My feet pounded on familiar dirt paths through the fields and marshes north of the city, the exercise helping to keep at bay both my guilt over not calling my aunts and the memory of Matthew’s cold face.

Back in college I collected the messages and threw them into the trash. Then I staved off the inevitable call home with cherished weekend rituals: boiling an egg, brewing tea, gathering laundry, piling up the drifts of papers that littered every surface. After I’d wasted most of the morning, there was nothing left to do but call New York. It was early there, but there was no chance that anyone was still in bed.

“What do you think you’re up to, Diana?” Sarah demanded in lieu of hello.

“Good morning, Sarah.” I sank into the armchair by the defunct fireplace and crossed my feet on a nearby bookshelf. This was going to take awhile.

“It is not a good morning,” Sarah said tartly. “We’ve been beside ourselves. What’s going on?”

Em picked up the extension.

“Hi, Em,” I said, recrossing my legs. This was going to take a long while.

“Is that vampire bothering you?” Em asked anxiously.

“Not exactly.”

“We know you’ve been spending time with vampires and daemons,” my aunt broke in impatiently. “Have you lost your mind, or is something seriously wrong?”

“I haven’t lost my mind, and nothing’s wrong.” The last bit was a lie, but I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

“Do you really think you’re going to fool us? You cannot lie to a fellow witch!” Sarah exclaimed. “Out with it, Diana.”

So much for that plan.

“Let her speak, Sarah,” Em said. “We trust Diana to make the right decisions, remember?”

The ensuing silence led me to believe that this had been a matter of some controversy.

Sarah drew in her breath, but Em cut her off. “Where were you last night?”

“Yoga.” There was no way of squirming out of this inquisition, but it was to my advantage to keep all responses brief and to the point.

“Yoga?” Sarah asked, incredulous. “Why are you doing yoga with those creatures? You know it’s dangerous to mix with daemons and vampires.”

“The class was led by a witch!” I became indignant, seeing Amira’s serene, lovely face before me.

“This yoga class, was it his idea?” Em asked.

“Yes. It was at Clairmont’s house.”

Sarah made a disgusted sound.

“Told you it was him,” Em muttered to my aunt. She directed her next words to me. “I see a vampire standing between you and . . . something. I’m not sure what, exactly.”

“And I keep telling you, Emily Mather, that’s nonsense. Vampires don’t protect witches.” Sarah’s voice was crisp with certainty.

“This one does,” I said.

“What?” Em asked and Sarah shouted.

“He has been for days.” I bit my lip, unsure how to tell the story, then plunged in. “Something happened at the library. I called up a manuscript, and it was bewitched.”

There was silence.

“A bewitched book.” Sarah’s voice was keen with interest. “Was it a grimoire?” She was an expert on grimoires, and her most cherished possession was the ancient volume of spells that had been passed down in the Bishop family.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “All that was visible were alchemical illustrations.”

“What else?” My aunt knew that the visible was only the beginning when it came to bewitched books.

“Someone’s put a spell on the manuscript’s text. There were faint lines of writing—layers upon layers of them—moving underneath the surface of the pages.”

In New York, Sarah put down her coffee mug with a sharp sound. “Was this before or after Matthew Clairmont appeared?”

“Before,” I whispered.

“You didn’t think this was worth mentioning when you told us you’d met a vampire?” Sarah did nothing to disguise her anger. “By the goddess, Diana, you can be so reckless. How was this book bewitched? And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“It smelled funny. It felt . . . wrong. At first I couldn’t lift the book’s cover. I put my palm on it.” I turned my hand over on my lap, recalling the sense of instant recognition between me and the manuscript, half expecting to see the shimmer that Matthew had mentioned.

“And?” Sarah asked.

“It tingled against my hand, then sighed and . . . relaxed. I could feel it, through the leather and the wooden boards.”

“How did you manage to unravel this spell? Did you say any words? What were you thinking?” Sarah’s curiosity was now thoroughly roused.

“There was no witchcraft involved, Sarah. I needed to look at the book for my research, and I laid my palm flat on it, that’s all.” I took a deep breath. “Once it was open, I took some notes, closed it, and returned the manuscript.”

“You returned it?” There was a loud clatter as Sarah’s phone hit the floor. I winced and held the receiver away from my head, but her colorful language was still audible.

“Diana?” Em said faintly. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I said sharply.

“Diana Bishop, you know better.” Sarah’s voice was reproachful. “How could you send back a magical object you didn’t fully understand?”

My aunt had taught me how to recognize enchanted and bewitched objects—and what to do with them. You were to avoid touching or moving them until you knew how their magic worked. Spells could be delicate, and many had protective mechanisms built into them.

“What was I supposed to do, Sarah?” I could hear my defensiveness. “Refuse to leave the library until you could examine it? It was a Friday night. I wanted to go home.”

“What happened when you returned it?” Sarah said tightly.

“The air might have been a little funny,” I admitted. “And the library might have given the impression it shrank for just a moment.”

“You sent the manuscript back and the spell reactivated,” Sarah said. She swore again. “Few witches are adept enough to set up a spell that automatically resets when it’s broken. You’re not dealing with an amateur.”

“That’s the energy that drew them to Oxford,” I said, suddenly understanding. “It wasn’t my opening the manuscript. It was the resetting of the spell. The creatures aren’t just at yoga, Sarah. I’m surrounded by vampires and daemons in the Bodleian. Clairmont came to the library on Monday night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the manuscript after he heard two witches talking about it. By Tuesday the library was crawling with them.”

“Here we go again,” Sarah said with a sigh. “Before the month’s out, daemons will be showing up in Madison looking for you.”

“There must be witches you can rely on for help.” Em was making an effort to keep her voice level, but I could hear the concern in it.

“There are witches,” I said haltingly, “but they’re not helpful. A wizard in a brown tweed coat tried to force his way into my head. He would have succeeded, too, if not for Matthew.”

“The vampire put himself between you and another witch?” Em was horrified. “That’s not done. You never interfere in business between witches if you’re not one of us.”

“You should be grateful!” I might not want to be lectured by Clairmont or have breakfast with him again, but the vampire deserved some credit. “If he hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would have happened. No witch has ever been so . . . invasive with me before.”

“Maybe you should get out of Oxford for a while,” Em suggested.

“I’m not going to leave because there’s a witch with no manners in town.”

Em and Sarah whispered to each other, their hands over the receivers.

“I don’t like this one bit,” my aunt finally said in a tone that suggested that the world was falling apart. “Bewitched books? Daemons following you? Vampires taking you to yoga? Witches threatening a Bishop? Witches are supposed to avoid notice, Diana. Even the humans are going to know something’s going on.”

“If you stay in Oxford, you’ll have to be more inconspicuous,” Em agreed. “There’s nothing wrong with coming home for a while and letting the situation cool off, if that becomes impossible. You don’t have the manuscript anymore. Maybe they’ll lose interest.”

None of us believed that was likely.

“I’m not running away.”

“You wouldn’t be,” Em protested.

“I would.” And I wasn’t going to display a shred of cowardice so long as Matthew Clairmont was around.

“He can’t be with you every minute of every day, honey,” Em said sadly, hearing my unspoken thoughts.

“I should think not,” Sarah said darkly.

“I don’t need Matthew Clairmont’s help. I can take care of myself,” I retorted.

“Diana, that vampire isn’t protecting you out of the goodness of his heart,” Em said. “You represent something he wants. You have to figure out what it is.”

“Maybe he is interested in alchemy. Maybe he’s just bored.”

“Vampires do not get bored,” Sarah said crisply, “not when there’s a witch’s blood around.”

There was nothing to be done about my aunt’s prejudices. I was tempted to tell her about yoga class, where for over an hour I’d been gloriously free from fear of other creatures. But there was no point.

“Enough.” I was firm. “Matthew Clairmont won’t get any closer, and you needn’t worry about me fiddling with more bewitched manuscripts. But I’m not leaving Oxford, and that’s final.”

“All right,” Sarah said. “But there’s not much we can do from here if things go wrong.”

“I know, Sarah.”

“And the next time you get handed something magical—whether you expected it or not—behave like the witch you are, not some silly human. Don’t ignore it or tell yourself you’re imagining things.” Willful ignorance and dismissing the supernatural were at the top of Sarah’s list of human pet peeves. “Treat it with respect, and if you don’t know what to do, ask for help.”

“Promise,” I said quickly, wanting to get off the phone. But Sarah wasn’t through yet.

“I never thought I’d see the day when a Bishop relied on a vampire for protection, rather than her own power,” she said. “My mother must be turning in her grave. This is what comes from avoiding who you are, Diana. You’ve got a mess on your hands, and it’s all because you thought you could ignore your heritage. It doesn’t work that way.”

Sarah’s bitterness soured the atmosphere in my room long after I’d hung up the phone.

The next morning I stretched my way through some yoga poses for half an hour and then made a pot of tea. Its vanilla and floral aromas were comforting, and it had just enough caffeine to keep me from dozing in the afternoon without keeping me awake at night. After the leaves steeped, I wrapped the white porcelain pot in a towel to hold in the heat and carried it to the chair by the fireplace reserved for my deep thinking.

Calmed by the tea’s familiar scent, I pulled my knees up to my chin and reviewed my week. No matter where I started, I found myself returning to my last conversation with Matthew Clairmont. Had my efforts to prevent magic from seeping into my life and work meant nothing?

Whenever I was stuck with my research, I imagined a white table, gleaming and empty, and the evidence as a jigsaw puzzle that needed to be pieced together. It took the pressure off and felt like a game.

Now I tumbled everything from the past week onto that table—Ashmole 782, Matthew Clairmont, Agatha Wilson’s wandering attention, the tweedy wizard, my tendency to walk with my eyes closed, the creatures in the Bodleian, how I’d fetched Notes and Queries from the shelf, Amira’s yoga class. I swirled the bright pieces around, putting some together and trying to form a picture, but there were too many gaps, and no clear image emerged.

Sometimes picking up a random piece of evidence helped me figure out what was most important. Putting my imaginary fingers on the table, I drew out a shape, expecting to see Ashmole 782.

Matthew Clairmont’s dark eyes looked back at me.

Why was this vampire so important?

The pieces of my puzzle started to move of their own volition, swirling in patterns that were too fast to follow. I slapped my imaginary hands on the table, and the pieces stopped their dance. My palms tingled with recognition.

This didn’t seem like a game anymore. It seemed like magic. And if it was, then I’d been using it in my schoolwork, in my college courses, and now in my scholarship. But there was no room in my life for magic, and my mind closed resolutely against the possibility that I’d been violating my own rules without knowing it.

The next day I arrived in the library’s cloakroom at my normal time, went up the stairs, rounded the corner near the collection desk, and braced myself to see him.

Clairmont wasn’t there.

“Do you need something?” Miriam said in an irritable voice, scraping her chair against the floor as she stood.

“Where is Professor Clairmont?”

“He’s hunting,” Miriam said, eyes snapping with dislike, “in Scotland.”

Hunting. I swallowed hard. “Oh. When will he be back?”

“I honestly don’t know, Dr. Bishop.” Miriam crossed her arms and put out a tiny foot.

“I was hoping he’d take me to yoga at the Old Lodge tonight,” I said faintly, trying to come up with a reasonable excuse for stopping.

Miriam turned and picked up a ball of black fluff. She tossed it at me, and I grabbed it as it flew by my hip. “You left that in his car on Friday.”

“Thank you.” My sweater smelled of carnations and cinnamon.

“You should be more careful with your things,” Miriam muttered. “You’re a witch, Dr. Bishop. Take care of yourself and stop putting Matthew in this impossible situation.”

I turned on my heel without comment and went to pick up my manuscripts from Sean.

“Everything all right?” he asked, eyeing Miriam with a frown.

“Perfectly.” I gave him my usual seat number and, when he still looked concerned, a warm smile.

How dare Miriam speak to me like that? I fumed while settling into my workspace.

My fingers itched as if hundreds of insects were crawling under the skin. Tiny sparks of blue-green were arcing between my fingertips, leaving traces of energy as they erupted from the edges of my body. I clenched my hands and quickly sat on top of them.

This was not good. Like all members of the university, I’d sworn an oath not to bring fire or flame into Bodley’s Library. The last time my fingers had behaved like this, I was thirteen and the fire department had to be called to extinguish the blaze in the kitchen.

When the burning sensation abated, I looked around carefully and sighed with relief. I was alone in the Selden End. No one had witnessed my fireworks display. Pulling my hands from underneath my thighs, I scrutinized them for further signs of supernatural activity. The blue was already diminishing to a silvery gray as the power retreated from my fingertips.

I opened the first box only after ascertaining I wouldn’t set fire to it and pretended that nothing unusual had happened. Still, I hesitated to touch my computer for fear that my fingers would fuse to the plastic keys.

Not surprisingly, it was difficult to concentrate, and that same manuscript was still before me at lunchtime. Maybe some tea would calm me down.

At the beginning of term, one would expect to see a handful of human readers in Duke Humfrey’s medieval wing. Today there was only one: an elderly human woman examining an illuminated manuscript with a magnifying glass. She was squashed between an unfamiliar daemon and one of the female vampires from last week. Gillian Chamberlain was there, too, glowering at me along with four other witches as if I’d let down our entire species.

Hurrying past, I stopped at Miriam’s desk. “I presume you have instructions to follow me to lunch. Are you coming?”

She put down her pencil with exaggerated care. “After you.”

Miriam was in front of me by the time I reached the back staircase. She pointed to the steps on the other side. “Go down that way.”

“Why? What difference does it make?”

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged.

One flight down I glanced through the small window stuck into the swinging door that led to the Upper Reading Room, and I gasped.

The room was full to bursting with creatures. They had segregated themselves. One long table held nothing but daemons, conspicuous because not a single book—open or closed—sat in front of them. Vampires sat at another table, their bodies perfectly still and their eyes never blinking. The witches appeared studious, but their frowns were signs of irritation rather than concentration, since the daemons and vampires had staked out the tables closest to the staircase.

“No wonder we’re not supposed to mix. No human could ignore this,” Miriam observed.

“What have I done now?” I asked in a whisper.

“Nothing. Matthew’s not here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Why are they so afraid of Matthew?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Vampires don’t tell tales. But don’t worry,” she continued, baring her sharp, white teeth, “these work perfectly, so you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Shoving my hands into my pockets, I clattered down the stairs, pushing through the tourists in the quadrangle. At Blackwell’s, I swallowed a sandwich and a bottle of water. Miriam caught my eye as I passed by her on the way to the exit. She put aside a murder mystery and followed me.

“Diana,” she said quietly as we passed through the library’s gates, “what are you up to?”

“None of your business,” I snapped.

Miriam sighed.

Back in Duke Humfrey’s, I located the wizard in brown tweed. Miriam watched intently from the center aisle, still as a statue.

“Are you in charge?”

He tipped his head to the side in acknowledgment.

“I’m Diana Bishop,” I said, sticking out my hand.

“Peter Knox. And I know very well who you are. You’re Rebecca and Stephen’s child.” He touched my fingertips lightly with his own. There was a nineteenth-century grimoire sitting in front of him, a stack of reference books at his side.

The name was familiar, though I couldn’t place it, and hearing my parents’ names come out of this wizard’s mouth was disquieting. I swallowed, hard. “Please clear your . . . friends out of the library. The new students arrive today, and we wouldn’t want to frighten them.”

“If we could have a quiet word, Dr. Bishop, I’m sure we could come to some arrangement.” He pushed his glasses up over the bridge of his nose. The closer I was to Knox, the more danger I felt. The skin under my fingernails started to prickle ominously.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said sorrowfully. “That vampire, on the other hand—”

“You think I found something that belongs to the witches,” I interrupted. “I no longer have it. If you want Ashmole 782, there are request slips on the desk in front of you.”

“You don’t understand the complexity of the situation.”

“No, and I don’t want to know. Please, leave me alone.”

“Physically you are very like your mother.” Knox’s eyes swept over my face. “But you have some of Stephen’s stubbornness as well, I see.”

I felt the usual combination of envy and irritation that accompanied a witch’s references to my parents or family history—as if they had an equal claim to mine.

“I’ll try,” he continued, “but I don’t control those animals.” He waved across the aisle, where one of the Scary Sisters was watching Knox and me with interest. I hesitated, then crossed over to her seat.

“I’m sure you heard our conversation, and you must know I’m under the direct supervision of two vampires already,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay, if you don’t trust Matthew and Miriam. But clear the others out of the Upper Reading Room.”

“Witches are hardly ever worth a moment of a vampire’s time, but you are full of surprises today, Diana Bishop. Wait until I tell my sister Clarissa what she’s missed.” The female vampire’s words came out in a lush, unhurried drawl redolent of impeccable breeding and a fine education. She smiled, teeth gleaming in the low light of the medieval wing. “Challenging Knox—a child like you? What a tale I’ll have to tell.”

I dragged my eyes away from her flawless features and went off in search of a familiar daemonic face.

The latte-loving daemon was drifting around the computer terminals wearing headphones and humming under his breath to some unheard music as the end of the cord was swinging freely around the tops of his thighs. Once he pulled the white plastic disks from his ears, I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation.

“Listen, you’re welcome to keep surfing the Net up here. But we’ve got a problem downstairs. It’s not necessary for two dozen daemons to be watching me.”

The daemon made an indulgent sound. “You’ll know soon enough.”

“Could they watch me from farther away? The Sheldonian? The White Horse?” I was trying to be helpful. “If not, the human readers will start asking questions.”

“We’re not like you,” he said dreamily.

“Does that mean you can’t help or you won’t?” I tried not to sound impatient.

“It’s all the same thing. We need to know, too.”

This was impossible. “Whatever you can do to take some of the pressure off the seats would be greatly appreciated.”

Miriam was still watching me. Ignoring her, I returned to my desk.

At the end of the completely unproductive day, I pinched the bridge of my nose, swore under my breath, and packed up my things.

 

The next morning the Bodleian was far less crowded. Miriam was scribbling furiously and didn’t look up when I passed. There was still no sign of Clairmont. Even so, everybody was observing the rules that he had clearly, if silently, laid down, and they stayed out of the Selden End. Gillian was in the medieval wing, crouched over her papyri, as were both Scary Sisters and a few daemons. With the exception of Gillian, who was doing real work, the rest went through the motions with perfect respectability. And when I stuck my head around the swinging door into the Upper Reading Room after a hot cup of tea at midmorning, only a few creatures looked up. The musical, coffee-loving daemon was among them. He tipped his fingers and winked at me knowingly.

I got a reasonable amount of work done, although not enough to make up for yesterday. I began by reading alchemical poems—the trickiest of texts—that were attributed to Mary, the sister of Moses. “Three things if you three hours attend,” read one part of the poem, “Are chained together in the End.” The meaning of the verses remained a mystery, although the most likely subject was the chemical combination of silver, gold, and mercury. Could Chris produce an experiment from this poem? I wondered, noting the possible chemical processes involved.

When I turned to another, anonymous poem, entitled “Verse on the Threefold Sophic Fire,” the similarities between its imagery and an illumination I’d seen yesterday of an alchemical mountain, riddled with mines and miners digging in the ground for precious metals and stones, were unmistakable.

Within this Mine two Stones of old were found,

Whence this the Ancients called Holy Ground;

Who knew their Value, Power and Extent,

And Nature how with Nature to Ferment

For these if you Ferment with Natural Gold

Or Silver, their hid Treasures they unfold.

I stifled a groan. My research would become exponentially more complicated if I had to connect not only art and science but art and poetry.

“It must be hard to concentrate on your research with vampires watching you.”

Gillian Chamberlain was standing next to me, her hazel eyes sparking with suppressed malevolence.

“What do you want, Gillian?”

“I’m just being friendly, Diana. We’re sisters, remember?” Gillian’s shiny black hair swung above her collar. Its smoothness suggested that she was not troubled by surges of static electricity. Her power must be regularly released. I shivered.

“I have no sisters, Gillian. I’m an only child.”

“It’s a good thing, too. Your family has caused more than enough trouble. Look at what happened at Salem. It was all Bridget Bishop’s fault.” Gillian’s tone was vicious.

Here we go again, I thought, closing the volume before me. As usual, the Bishops were proving to be an irresistible topic of conversation.

“What are you talking about, Gillian?” My voice was sharp. “Bridget Bishop was found guilty of witchcraft and executed. She didn’t instigate the witch-hunt—she was a victim of it, just like the others. You know that, as does every other witch in this library.”

“Bridget Bishop drew human attention, first with those poppets of hers and then with her provocative clothes and immorality. The human hysteria would have passed if not for her.”

“She was found innocent of practicing witchcraft,” I retorted, bristling.

“In 1680—but no one believed it. Not after they found the poppets in her cellar wall, pins stuck through them and the heads ripped off. Afterward Bridget did nothing to protect her fellow witches from falling under suspicion. She was so independent.” Gillian’s voice dropped. “That was your mother’s fatal flaw, too.”

“Stop it, Gillian.” The air around us seemed unnaturally cold and clear.

“Your mother and father were standoffish, just like you, thinking they didn’t need the Cambridge coven’s support after they got married. They learned, didn’t they?”

I shut my eyes, but it was impossible to block out the image I’d spent most of my life trying to forget: my mother and father lying dead in the middle of a chalk-marked circle somewhere in Nigeria, their bodies broken and bloody. My aunt wouldn’t share the details of their death at the time, so I’d slipped into the public library to look them up. That’s where I’d first seen the picture and the lurid headline that accompanied it. The nightmares had gone on for years afterward.

“There was nothing the Cambridge coven could do to prevent my parents’ murder. They were killed on another continent by fearful humans.” I gripped the arms of my chair, hoping that she wouldn’t see my white knuckles.

Gillian gave an unpleasant laugh. “It wasn’t humans, Diana. If it had been, their killers would have been caught and dealt with.” She crouched down, her face close to mine. “Rebecca Bishop and Stephen Proctor were keeping secrets from other witches. We needed to discover them. Their deaths were unfortunate, but necessary. Your father had more power than we ever dreamed.”

“Stop talking about my family and my parents as though they belong to you,” I warned. “They were killed by humans.” There was a roaring in my ears, and the coldness that surrounded us was intensifying.

“Are you sure?” Gillian whispered, sending a fresh chill into my bones. “As a witch, you’d know if I was lying to you.”

I governed my features, determined not to show my confusion. What Gillian said about my parents couldn’t be true, and yet there were none of the subtle alarms that typically accompanied untruths between witches—the spark of anger, an overwhelming feeling of contempt.

“Think about what happened to Bridget Bishop and your parents the next time you turn down an invitation to a coven gathering,” Gillian murmured, her lips so close to my ear that her breath swept against my skin. “A witch shouldn’t keep secrets from other witches. Bad things happen when she does.”

Gillian straightened and stared at me for a few seconds, the tingle of her glance growing uncomfortable the longer it lasted. Staring fixedly at the closed manuscript before me, I refused to meet her eyes.

After she left, the air’s temperature returned to normal. When my heart stopped pounding and the roaring in my ears abated, I packed my belongings with shaking hands, badly wanting to be back in my rooms. Adrenaline was coursing through my body, and I wasn’t sure how long it would be possible to fend off my panic.

I managed to get out of the library without incident, avoiding Miriam’s sharp glance. If Gillian was right, it was the jealousy of fellow witches that I needed to be wary of, not human fear. And the mention of my father’s hidden powers made something half remembered flit at the edges of my mind, but it eluded me when I tried to fix it in place long enough to see it clearly.

At New College, Fred hailed me from the porter’s lodge with a fistful of mail. A creamy envelope, thick with a distinctive woven feeling, lay on top.

It was a note from the warden, summoning me for a drink before dinner.

In my rooms I considered calling his secretary and feigning illness to get out of the invitation. My head was reeling, and there was little chance I could keep down even a drop of sherry in my present state.

But the college had behaved handsomely when I’d requested a place to stay. The least I could do was express my thanks personally. My sense of professional obligation began to supplant the anxiety stirred up by Gillian. Holding on to my identity as a scholar like a lifeline, I resolved to make my appreciation known.

After changing, I made my way to the warden’s lodgings and rang the bell. A member of the college staff opened the door and ushered me inside, leading me to the parlor.

“Hello, Dr. Bishop.” Nicholas Marsh’s blue eyes crinkled at the corners, and his snowy white hair and round red cheeks made him look like Santa Claus. Soothed by his warmth and armored with a sense of professional duty, I smiled.

“Professor Marsh.” I took his outstretched hand. “Thank you for inviting me.”

“It’s overdue, I’m afraid. I was in Italy, you know.”

“Yes, the bursar told me.”

“Then you have forgiven me for neglecting you for so long,” he said. “I hope to make it up to you by introducing you to an old friend of mine who is in Oxford for a few days. He’s a well-known author and writes about subjects that might interest you.”

Marsh stood aside, giving me a glimpse of a thick head of brown hair peppered with gray and the sleeve of a brown tweed jacket. I froze in confusion.

“Come and meet Peter Knox,” the warden said, taking my elbow gently. “He’s acquainted with your work.”

The wizard stood. Finally I recognized what had been eluding me. Knox’s name had been in the newspaper story about vampire murders. He was the expert the police called in to examine deaths that had an occult twist. My fingers started to itch.

“Dr. Bishop,” Knox said, holding out his hand. “I’ve seen you in the Bodleian.”

“Yes, I believe you have.” I extended my own and was relieved to see that it was not emitting sparks. We clasped hands as briefly as possible.

His right fingertips flickered slightly, a tiny furl and a release of bones and skin that no human would have noticed. It reminded me of my childhood, when my mother’s hands had flickered and furled to produce pancakes and fold laundry. Shutting my eyes, I braced for an outpouring of magic.

The phone rang.

“I must get that, I’m afraid,” Marsh apologized. “Do sit down.”

I sat as far from Knox as possible, perched on a straight-backed wooden chair usually reserved for disgraced junior members of the college.

Knox and I remained silent while Marsh murmured and tutted into the phone. He punched a button on the console and approached me, a glass of sherry in his hand. “That’s the vice-chancellor. Two freshers have gone missing,” he said, using the university’s slang term for new students. “You two chat while I deal with this in my study. Please excuse me.”

Distant doors opened and closed, and muffled voices conferred in the hall before there was silence.

“Missing students?” I said blandly. Surely Knox had magically engineered both the crisis and the phone call that had drawn Marsh away.

“I don’t understand, Dr. Bishop,” Knox murmured. “It seems unfortunate for the university to misplace two children. Besides, this gives us a chance to talk privately.”

“What do we have to talk about?” I sniffed my sherry and prayed for the warden’s return.

“A great many things.”

I glanced at the door.

“Nicholas will be quite busy until we’re through.”

“Let’s get this over with, then, so that the warden can return to his drink.”

“As you wish,” Knox said. “Tell me what brought you to Oxford, Dr. Bishop.”

“Alchemy.” I would answer the man’s questions, if only to get Marsh back into the room, but wasn’t going to tell him more than was necessary.

“You must have known that Ashmole 782 was bewitched. No one with even a drop of Bishop blood in her veins could have failed to notice. Why did you send it back?” Knox’s brown eyes were sharp. He wanted the manuscript as much as Matthew Clairmont did—if not more.

“I was done with it.” It was difficult to keep my voice even.

“Was there nothing about the manuscript that piqued your interest?”

“Nothing.”

Peter Knox’s mouth twisted into an ugly expression. He knew I was lying. “Have you shared your observations with the vampire?”

“I take it you mean Professor Clairmont.” When creatures refused to use proper names, it was a way of denying that those who were not like you were your equals.

Knox’s fingers unwound once more. When I thought he might point them at me, he curled them around the arms of his chair instead. “We all respect your family and what you’ve endured. Nevertheless, questions have been raised about your unorthodox relationship with this creature. You are betraying your ancestral lineage with this self-indulgent behavior. It must stop.”

“Professor Clairmont is a professional colleague,” I said, steering the conversation away from my family, “and I know nothing about the manuscript. It was in my possession for a matter of minutes. Yes, I knew it was under a spell. But that was immaterial to me, since I’d requested it to study the contents.”

“The vampire has wanted that book for more than a century,” Knox said, his voice vicious. “He mustn’t be allowed to have it.”

“Why?” My voice crackled with suppressed anger. “Because it belongs to the witches? Vampires and daemons can’t enchant objects. A witch put that book under a spell, and now it’s back under the same spell. What are you worried about?”

“More than you could possibly comprehend, Dr. Bishop.”

“I’m confident I can keep up, Mr. Knox,” I replied. Knox’s mouth tightened with displeasure when I emphasized his position outside the academy. Every time the wizard used my title, his formality sounded like a taunt, as if he were trying to make a point that he, not I, was the real expert. I might not use my power, and I couldn’t have conjured up my own lost keys, but being patronized by this wizard was intolerable.

“I am disturbed that you—a Bishop—are associating with a vampire.” He held up his hand as a protest bubbled to my lips. “Let’s not insult each other with further untruths. Instead of the natural revulsion you should feel for that animal, you feel gratitude.”

I remained silent, seething.

“And I’m concerned because we are perilously close to catching human attention,” he continued.

“I tried to get the creatures out of the library.”

“Ah, but it’s not just the library, is it? A vampire is leaving drained, bloodless corpses around Westminster. The daemons are unusually restless, vulnerable as ever to their own madness and the swings of energy in the world. We can’t afford to be noticed.”

“You told the reporters that there was nothing supernatural about those deaths.”

Knox looked incredulous. “You don’t expect me to tell humans everything ?”

“I do, actually, when they’re paying you.”

“You’re not only self-indulgent, you’re foolish. That surprises me, Dr. Bishop. Your father was known for his good sense.”

“I’ve had a long day. Is that all?” Standing abruptly, I moved toward the door. Even in normal circumstances, it was difficult to listen to anyone but Sarah and Em talking about my parents. Now—after Gillian’s revelations—there was something almost obscene about it.

“No, it is not,” said Knox unpleasantly. “What I am most intrigued by, at present, is the question of how an ignorant witch with no training of any sort managed to break a spell that has defied the efforts of those far more adept than you will ever be.”

“So that’s why you’re all watching me.” I sat down, my back pressing against the chair’s slats.

“Don’t look so pleased with yourself,” he said curtly. “Your success may have been a fluke—an anniversary reaction related to when the spell was first cast. The passage of time can interfere with witchcraft, and anniversaries are particularly volatile moments. You haven’t tried to recall it yet, but when you do, it may not come as easily as it did the first time.”

“And what anniversary would we be celebrating?”

“The sesquicentennial.”

I had wondered why a witch would put a spell on the manuscript in the first place. Someone must have been looking for it all those years ago, too. I blanched.

We were back to Matthew Clairmont and his interest in Ashmole 782.

“You are managing to keep up, aren’t you? The next time you see your vampire, ask him what he was doing in the autumn of 1859. I doubt he’ll tell you the truth, but he might reveal enough for you to figure it out on your own.”

“I’m tired. Why don’t you tell me, witch to witch, what your interest is in Ashmole 782?” I’d heard why the daemons wanted the manuscript. Even Matthew had given me some explanation. Knox’s fascination with it was a missing piece of the puzzle.

“That manuscript belongs to us,” Knox said fiercely. “We’re the only creatures who can understand its secrets and the only creatures who can be trusted to keep them.”

“What is in the manuscript? ” I said, temper flaring at last.

“The first spells ever constructed. Descriptions of the enchantments that bind the world together.” Knox’s face grew dreamy. “The secret of immortality. How witches made the first daemon. How vampires can be destroyed, once and for all.” His eyes pierced mine. “It’s the source of all our power, past and present. It cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of daemons or vampires—or humans.”

The events of the afternoon were catching up with me, and I had to press my knees together to keep them from shaking. “Nobody would put all that information in a single book.”

“The first witch did,” Knox said. “And her sons and daughters, too, down through time. It’s our history, Diana. Surely you want to protect it from prying eyes.”

The warden entered the room as if he’d been waiting by the door. The tension was suffocating, but he seemed blissfully unaware of it.

“What a palaver over nothing.” Marsh shook his white head. “The freshers illegally obtained a punt. They were located, stuck under a bridge and a little worse for wine, utterly content with their situation. A romance may result.”

“I’m so glad,” I murmured. The clocks struck forty-five minutes past the hour, and I stood. “Is that the time? I have a dinner engagement.”

“You won’t be joining us for dinner?” the warden asked with a frown. “Peter has been looking forward to talking to you about alchemy.”

“Our paths will cross again. Soon,” Knox said smoothly. “My visit was such a surprise, and of course the lady has better things to do than have dinner with two men our age.”

Be careful with Matthew Clairmont. Knox’s voice rang in my head. He’s a killer.

Marsh smiled. “Yes, of course. I do hope to see you again—when the freshers have settled down.”

Ask him about 1859. See if he’ll share his secrets with a witch.

It’s hardly a secret if you know it. Surprise registered on Knox’s face when I replied to his mental warning in kind. It was the sixth time I’d used magic this year, but these were surely extenuating circumstances.

“It would be a pleasure, Warden. And thank you again for letting me stay in college this year.” I nodded to the wizard. “Mr. Knox.”

Fleeing from the warden’s lodgings, I turned toward my old refuge in the cloisters and walked among the pillars until my pulse stopped racing. My mind was occupied with only one question: what to do now that two witches—my own people—had threatened me in the space of a single afternoon. With sudden clarity I knew the answer.

In my rooms I searched my bag until my fingers found Clairmont’s crumpled business card, and then I dialed the first number.

He didn’t answer.

After a robotic voice indicated that it was ready to receive my message, I spoke.

“Matthew, it’s Diana. I’m sorry to bother you when you’re out of town.” I took a deep breath, trying to dispel some of the guilt associated with my decision not to tell Clairmont about Gillian and my parents, but only about Knox. “We need to talk. Something has happened. It’s that wizard from the library. His name is Peter Knox. If you get this message, please call me.”

I’d assured Sarah and Em that no vampire would meddle in my life. Gillian Chamberlain and Peter Knox had changed my mind. With shaking hands I lowered the shades and locked the door, wishing I’d never heard of Ashmole 782.

That night, sleep was impossible. I sat on the sofa, then on the bed, the phone at my side. Not even a pot of tea and a raft of e-mail took my mind off the day’s events. The notion that witches might have murdered my parents was beyond my comprehension. Pushing back those thoughts, I instead puzzled over the spell on Ashmole 782 and Knox’s interest in it.

Still awake at dawn, I showered and changed. The idea of breakfast was uncharacteristically unappetizing. Rather than eat, I perched by the door until the Bodleian opened, then walked the short distance to the library and took my regular seat. My phone was in my pocket, set to vibrate, even though I hated it when other people’s phones started buzzing and hopping in the quiet.

At half past ten, Peter Knox strolled in and sat at the opposite end of the room. On the premise of returning a manuscript, I walked back to the call desk to make sure that Miriam was still in the library. She was—and she was angry.

“Tell me that witch didn’t take a seat down there.”

“He did. He keeps staring at my back while I work.”

“I wish I were larger,” Miriam said with a frown.

“Somehow I think it would take more than size to deter that creature.” I gave her a lopsided smile.

When Matthew came into the Selden End, without warning or sound, no icy patches announced his arrival. Instead there were touches of snowflakes all along my hair, shoulders, and back, as if he were checking quickly to make sure I was all in one piece.

My fingers gripped the table in front of me. For a few moments, I didn’t dare turn in case it was simply Miriam. When I saw it was indeed Matthew, my heart gave a single loud thump.

But the vampire was no longer looking in my direction. He was staring at Peter Knox, his face ferocious.

“Matthew,” I called softly, rising to my feet.

He dragged his eyes from the witch and strode to my side. When I frowned uncertainly at his fierce expression, he gave me a reassuring smile. “I understand there’s been some excitement.” He was so close that the coolness of his body felt as refreshing as a breeze on a summer day.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” I said evenly, conscious of Peter Knox.

“Can our conversation wait—just until the end of the day?” he asked. Matthew’s fingers strayed up to touch a bump on his sternum that was visible under the soft fibers of his sweater. I wondered what he was wearing, close to his heart. “We could go to yoga.”

Though I’d had no sleep, a drive to Woodstock in a moving vehicle with very good sound insulation, followed by an hour and a half of meditative movement, sounded perfect.

“That would be wonderful,” I said sincerely.

“Would you like me to work here, with you?” he asked, leaning toward me. His scent was so powerful it was dizzying.

“That’s not necessary,” I said firmly.

“Let me know if you change your mind. Otherwise I’ll see you outside Hertford at six.” Matthew held my eyes a few moments longer. Then he sent a look of loathing in Peter Knox’s direction and returned to his seat.

When I passed his desk on the way to lunch, Matthew coughed. Miriam slammed her pencil down in irritation and joined me. Knox would not be following me to Blackwell’s. Matthew would see to that.

The afternoon dragged on interminably, and it was almost impossible to stay awake. By five o’clock, I was more than ready to leave the library. Knox remained in the Selden End, along with a motley assortment of humans. Matthew walked me downstairs, and my spirits lightened as I raced back to college, changed, and picked up my yoga mat. When his car pulled up to Hertford’s metal railings, I was waiting for him.

“You’re early,” he observed with a smile, taking my mat and putting it into the trunk. Matthew breathed in sharply as he helped me into the car, and I wondered what messages my body had passed on to him.

“We need to talk.”

“There’s no rush. Let’s get out of Oxford first.” He closed the car door behind me and climbed into the driver’s seat.

The traffic on the Woodstock Road was heavier due to the influx of students and dons. Matthew maneuvered deftly around the slow spots.

“How was Scotland?” I asked as we cleared the city limits, not caring what he talked about so long as he talked.

Matthew glanced at me and returned his eyes to the road. “Fine.”

“Miriam said you were hunting.”

He exhaled softly, his fingers rising to the bump under his sweater. “She shouldn’t have.”

“Why?”

“Because some things shouldn’t be discussed in mixed company,” he said with a touch of impatience. “Do witches tell creatures who aren’t witches that they’ve just returned from four days of casting spells and boiling bats?”

“Witches don’t boil bats!” I said indignantly.

“The point remains.”

“Were you alone?” I asked.

Matthew waited a long time before answering. “No.”

“I wasn’t alone in Oxford either,” I began. “The creatures—”

“Miriam told me.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “If I’d known that the witch bothering you was Peter Knox, I’d never have left Oxford.”

“You were right,” I blurted, needing to make my own confession before tackling the subject of Knox. “I’ve never kept the magic out of my life. I’ve been using it in my work, without realizing it. It’s in everything. I’ve been fooling myself for years.” The words tumbled from my mouth. Matthew remained focused on the traffic. “I’m frightened.”

His cold hand touched my knee. “I know.”

“What am I going to do?” I whispered.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said calmly, turning in to the Old Lodge’s gates. He scrutinized my face as we crested the rise and pulled in to the circular drive. “You’re tired. Can you manage yoga?”

I nodded.

Matthew got out of the car and opened the door for me. This time he didn’t help me out. Instead he fished around in the trunk, pulled out our mats, and shouldered both of them himself. Other members of the class filtered by, casting curious looks in our direction.

He waited until we were the only ones on the drive. Matthew looked down at me, wrestling with himself over something. I frowned, my head tilted back to meet his eyes. I’d just confessed to engaging in magic without realizing it. What was so awful that he couldn’t tell me?

“I was in Scotland with an old friend, Hamish Osborne,” he finally said.

“The man the newspapers want to run for Parliament so he can be chancellor of the exchequer?” I said in amazement.

“Hamish will not be running for Parliament,” Matthew said drily, adjusting the strap of his yoga bag with a twitch.

“So he is gay!” I said, thinking back to a recent late-night news program. Matthew gave me a withering glance. “Yes. More important, he’s a daemon.” I didn’t know much about the world of creatures, but participating in human politics or religion was also forbidden.

“Oh. Finance is an odd career choice for a daemon.” I thought for a moment. “It explains why he’s so good at figuring out what to do with all that money, though.”

“He is good at figuring things out.” The silence stretched on, and Matthew made no move for the door. “I needed to get away and hunt.”

I gave him a confused look.

“You left your sweater in my car,” he said, as if that were an explanation.

“Miriam gave it back to me already.”

“I know. I couldn’t hold on to it. Do you understand why?”

When I shook my head, he sighed and then swore in French.

“My car was full of your scent, Diana. I needed to leave Oxford.”

“I still don’t understand,” I admitted.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” He raked his hand through his hair and looked down the drive.

My heart was beating irregularly, and the reduced blood flow slowed my mental processes. Finally, though, I understood.

“You’re not afraid you would hurt me?” I had a healthy fear of vampires, but Matthew seemed different.

“I can’t be sure.” His eyes were wary, and his voice held a warning.

“So you didn’t go because of what happened Friday night.” My breath released in sudden relief.

“No,” he said gently, “it had nothing to do with that.”

“Are you two coming in, or are you going to practice out here on the drive?” Amira called from the doorway.

We went in to class, occasionally glancing at each other when one of us thought the other wasn’t looking. Our first honest exchange of information had altered things. We were both trying to figure out what was going to happen next.

After class ended, when Matthew swung his sweater over his head, something shining and silver caught my eye. The object was tied around his neck on a thin leather cord. It was what he kept touching through his sweater, over and over, like a talisman.

“What’s that?” I pointed.

“A reminder,” Matthew said shortly.

“Of what?”

“The destructive power of anger.”

Peter Knox had warned me to be careful around Matthew.

“Is it a pilgrim’s badge?” The shape reminded me of one in the British Museum. It looked ancient.

He nodded and pulled the badge out by the cord. It swung freely, glinting as the light struck it. “It’s an ampulla from Bethany.” It was shaped like a coffin and just big enough to hold a few drops of holy water.

“Lazarus,” I said faintly, eyeing the coffin. Bethany was where Christ had resurrected Lazarus from the dead. And though raised a pagan, I knew why Christians went on pilgrimage. They did it to atone for their sins.

Matthew slid the ampulla back into his sweater, concealing it from the eyes of the creatures who were still filing out of the room.

We said good-bye to Amira and stood outside the Old Lodge in the crisp autumn air. It was dark, despite the floodlights that bathed the bricks of the house.

“Do you feel better?” Matthew asked, breaking into my thoughts. I nodded. “Then tell me what’s happened.”

“It’s the manuscript. Knox wants it. Agatha Wilson—the creature I met in Blackwell’s—said the daemons want it. You want it, too. But Ashmole 782 is under a spell.”

“I know,” he said again.

A white owl swooped down in front of us, its wings beating the air. I flinched and lifted my arms to protect myself, convinced it was going to strike me with its beak and talons. But then the owl lost interest and soared up into the oak trees along the drive.

My heart was pounding, and a sudden rush of panic swept up from my feet. Without any warning, Matthew pulled open the back door of the Jaguar and pushed me into the seat. “Keep your head down and breathe,” he said, crouching on the gravel with his fingers resting on my knees. The bile rose—there was nothing in my stomach but water—and crawled up my throat, choking me. I covered my mouth with my hand and retched convulsively. He reached over and tucked a wayward piece of hair behind my ear, his fingers cool and soothing.

“You’re safe,” he said.

“I’m so sorry.” My shaking hand passed across my mouth as the nausea subsided. “The panic started last night after I saw Knox.”

“Do you want to walk a bit?”

“No,” I said hastily. The park seemed overly large and very black, and my legs felt like they were made of rubber bands.

Matthew inspected me with his keen eyes. “I’m taking you home. The rest of this conversation can wait.”

He pulled me up from the backseat and held my hand loosely until he had me settled in the front of the car. I closed my eyes while he climbed in. We sat for a moment in silence, and then Matthew turned the key in the ignition. The Jaguar quickly sprang to life.

“Does this happen often?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“No, thank God,” I said. “It happened a lot when I was a child, but it’s much better now. It’s just an excess of adrenaline.” Matthew’s glance settled on my hands as I pushed my hair from my face.

“I know,” he said yet again, disengaging the parking brake and pulling out onto the drive.

“Can you smell it?”

He nodded. “It’s been building up in you since you told me you were using magic. Is this why you exercise so much—the running, the rowing, the yoga?”

“I don’t like taking drugs. They make me feel fuzzy.”

“The exercise is probably more effective anyway.”

“It hasn’t done the trick this time,” I murmured, thinking of my recently electrified hands.

Matthew pulled out of the Old Lodge’s grounds and onto the road. He concentrated on his driving while the car’s smooth movements rocked me gently.

“Why did you call me?” Matthew asked abruptly, interrupting my reveries.

“Because of Knox and Ashmole 782,” I said, flickers of panic returning at his sudden shift in mood.

“I know that. What I’m asking is why you called me. Surely you have friends—witches, humans—who could help you.”

“Not really. None of my human friends know I’m a witch. It would take days just to explain what’s really happening in this world—if they stuck around long enough for me to finish, that is. I don’t have friends who are witches, and I can’t drag my aunts into this. It’s not their fault I did something stupid and sent the manuscript back when I didn’t understand it.” I bit my lip. “Should I not have called you?”

“I don’t know, Diana. On Friday you said witches and vampires couldn’t be friends.”

“On Friday I told you lots of things.”

Matthew was quiet, giving his full attention to the curves in the road.

“I don’t know what to think anymore.” I paused, considering my next words carefully. “But there is one thing I know for sure. I’d rather share the library with you than with Knox.”

“Vampires are never completely trustworthy—not when they’re around warmbloods.” Matthew’s eyes focused on me for a single, cold moment.

“Warmbloods?” I asked with a frown.

“Humans, witches, daemons—everyone who’s not a vampire.”

“I’ll risk your bite before I let Knox slither into my brain to fish for information.”

“Has he tried to do that?” Matthew’s voice was quiet, but there was a promise of violence in it.

“It was nothing,” I said hastily. “He was just warning me about you.”

“So he should. Nobody can be what he’s not, no matter how hard he tries. You mustn’t romanticize vampires. Knox may not have your best interests at heart, but he was right about me.”

“Other people don’t pick my friends—certainly not bigots like Knox.” My fingers began to prickle as my anger mounted, and I shoved them under my thighs.

“Is that what we are, then? Friends?” Matthew asked.

“I think so. Friends tell each other the truth, even when it’s difficult.” Disconcerted by the seriousness of the conversation, I toyed with the ties on my sweater.

“Vampires aren’t particularly good at friendship.” He sounded angry again.

“Look, if you want me to leave you alone—”

“Of course not,” Matthew interrupted. “It’s just that vampire relationships are . . . complicated. We can be protective—possessive, even. You might not like it.”

“A little protectiveness sounds pretty good to me about now.”

My answer brought a look of raw vulnerability to Matthew’s eyes. “I’ll remind you of that when you start complaining,” he said, the rawness quickly replaced with wry amusement.

He pulled off Holywell Street into the arched gates of the lodge. Fred glanced at the car and grinned before looking discreetly away. I waited for Matthew to open the door, checking the car carefully to make sure that nothing of mine was left there—not even a hair elastic—so as not to drive him back to Scotland.

“But there’s more to all this than Knox and the manuscript,” I said urgently when he handed me the mat. From his behavior you would think there weren’t creatures closing in on me from every direction.

“It can wait, Diana. And don’t worry. Peter Knox won’t get within fifty feet of you again.” His voice was grim, and he touched the ampulla under his sweater.

We needed time together—not in the library, but alone.

“Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow?” I asked him, my voice low. “We could talk about what happened then.”

Matthew froze, confusion flitting over his face along with something I couldn’t name. His fingers flexed slightly around the pilgrim’s badge before he released it.

“I’d like that,” he said slowly.

“Good.” I smiled. “How’s half past seven?”

He nodded and gave me a shy grin. I managed to walk two steps before realizing there was one matter that needed to be resolved before tomorrow night.

“What do you eat?” I whispered, my face flushing.

“I’m omnivorous,” Matthew said, his face brightening further into a smile that made my heart skip a beat.

“Half past seven, then.” I turned away, laughing and shaking my head at his unhelpful answer. “Oh, one more thing,” I said, turning back. “Let Miriam do her own work. I really can take care of myself.”

“So she tells me,” Matthew said, walking around to the driver’s side of the car. “I’ll consider it. But you’ll find me in Duke Humfrey’s tomorrow, as usual.” He got into the car, and when I showed no sign of moving, he rolled down his window.

“I’m not leaving until you’re out of my sight,” he said, looking at me in disapproval.

“Vampires,” I muttered, shaking my head at his old-fashioned ways.

Nothing in my culinary experience had taught me what to feed a vampire when he came for dinner.

In the library I spent most of the day on the Internet looking for recipes that involved raw foods, my manuscripts forgotten on the desk. Matthew said he was omnivorous, but that couldn’t be true. A vampire must be more likely to tolerate uncooked food if he was used to a diet of blood. But he was so civilized he would no doubt eat whatever I put in front of him.

After undertaking extensive gastronomical research, I left the library at midafternoon. Matthew had held down Fortress Bishop by himself today, which must have pleased Miriam. There was no sign of Peter Knox or Gillian Chamberlain anywhere in Duke Humfrey’s, which made me happy. Even Matthew looked in good humor when I trotted down the aisle to return my manuscripts.

Passing by the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, where the undergraduates read their assigned books, and the medieval walls of Jesus College, I went shopping along the aisles of Oxford’s Covered Market. List in hand, I made my first stop at the butcher for fresh venison and rabbit, and then to the fishmonger for Scottish salmon.

Did vampires eat greens?

Thanks to my mobile, I was able to reach the zoology department and inquire about the feeding habits of wolves. They asked me what kind of wolves. I’d seen gray wolves on a long-ago field trip to the Boston zoo, and it was Matthew’s favorite color, so that was my answer. After rattling off a long list of tasty mammals and explaining that they were “preferred foods,” the bored voice on the other end told me that gray wolves also ate nuts, seeds, and berries. “But you shouldn’t feed them!” the voice warned. “They’re not house pets!”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said, trying not to giggle.

The grocer apologetically sold me the last of the summer’s black currants and some fragrant wild strawberries. A bag of chestnuts found its way into my expanding shopping bag, too.

Then it was off to the wine store, where I found myself at the mercy of a viticultural evangelist who asked if “the gentleman knew wine.” That was enough to send me into a tailspin. The clerk seized upon my confusion to sell me what ended up being a remarkably few French and German bottles of wine for a king’s ransom. He then tucked me into a cab to recover from the sticker shock during the drive back to college.

In my rooms I swept all the papers off a battered eighteenth-century table that served as both desk and dining room and moved it closer to the fireplace. I set the table carefully, using the old porcelain and silver that was in my cupboards, along with heavy crystal glasses that had to be the final remainders of an Edwardian set once used in the senior common room. My loyal kitchen ladies had supplied me with stacks of crisp white linen, which were now draped over the table, folded next to the silver, and spread on the chipped wooden tray that would help me carry things the short distance from the kitchen.

Once I started making dinner, it became clear that cooking for a vampire doesn’t take much time. You don’t actually cook much of anything.

By seven o’clock the candles were lit, the food was ready except for what could be done only at the last minute, and all that was left to get ready was me.

My wardrobe contained precious little that said “dinner with a vampire.” There was no way I was dining with Matthew in a suit or in the outfit I’d worn to meet the warden. The number of black trousers and leggings I owned was mind-boggling, all with different degrees of spandex, but most were splotched with tea, boat grease, or both. Finally I found a pair of swishy black trousers that looked a bit like pajama bottoms but with slightly more style. They’d do.

Wearing nothing but a bra and the trousers, I ran into the bathroom and dragged a comb through my shoulder-length, straw-colored hair. Not only was it tied in knots at the end, it was daring me to make it behave by lifting up from my scalp with every touch of the comb. I briefly considered resorting to the curling iron, but chances were excellent I’d get only half my head done by the time Matthew arrived. He was going to be on time. I just knew it.

While brushing my teeth, I decided the only thing to do about my hair was to pull it away from my face and twist it into a knot. This made my chin and nose look more pointed but created the illusion of cheekbones and got my hair out of my eyes, which is where it gravitated these days. I pinned it back, and one piece immediately flopped forward. I sighed.

My mother’s face stared back at me from the mirror. I thought of how beautiful she’d looked when she sat down to dinner, and I wondered what she’d done to make her pale eyebrows and lashes stand out the way they did and why her wide mouth looked so different when she smiled at me or my father. The clock ruled out any idea of achieving a similar transformation cosmetically. I had only three minutes to find a shirt, or I was going to be greeting Matthew Clairmont, distinguished professor of biochemistry and neuroscience, in my underwear.

The wardrobe contained two possibilities, one black and one midnight blue. The midnight blue had the virtue of being clean, which was the determining factor in its favor. It also had a funny collar that stood up in the back and winged toward my face before descending into a V-shaped neckline. The arms were relatively snug and ended in long, stiff cuffs that flared out slightly and ended up somewhere around the middle of the back of my hand. I was sticking a pair of silver earrings through my ears when there was a knock at the door.

My chest fluttered at the sound, as if this were a date. I squashed the thought immediately.

When I pulled the door open, Matthew stood outside looking like the prince in a fairy tale, tall and straight. In a break with his usual habits, he wore unadulterated black, which only made him look more striking—and more a vampire.

He waited patiently on the landing while I examined him.

“Where are my manners? Please come in, Matthew. Will that do as a formal invitation to enter my house?” I had seen that on TV or read it in a book.

His lips curved into a smile. “Forget most of what you think you know about vampires, Diana. This is just normal politeness. I’m not being held back by a mystical barrier standing between me and a fair maiden.” Matthew had to stoop slightly to make it through the doorframe. He cradled a bottle of wine and carried some white roses.

“For you,” he said, giving me an approving look and handing me the flowers. “Is there somewhere I can put this until dessert?” He glanced down at the bottle.

“Thank you, I love roses. How about the windowsill?” I suggested, before heading to the kitchen to look for a vase. My other vase had turned out to be a decanter, according to the senior common room’s wine steward, who had come to my rooms a few hours earlier to point it out to me when I expressed doubt that I had such an item.

“Perfect,” Matthew replied.

When I returned with the flowers, he was drifting around the room looking at the engravings.

“You know, these really aren’t too bad,” he said as I set the vase on a scarred Napoleonic-era chest of drawers.

“Mostly hunting scenes, I’m afraid.”

“That had not escaped my attention,” Matthew said, his mouth curved in amusement. I flushed with embarrassment.

“Are you hungry?” I had completely forgotten the obligatory nibbles and drinks you were supposed to serve before dinner.

“I could eat,” the vampire said with a grin.

Safely back in the kitchen, I pulled two plates out of the refrigerator. The first course was smoked salmon with fresh dill sprinkled on top and a small pile of capers and gherkins arranged artistically on the side, where they could be construed as garnish if vampires didn’t eat greens.

When I returned with the food, Matthew was waiting by the chair that was farthest from the kitchen. The wine was waiting in a high-sided silver coaster I’d been using to hold change but which the same helpful member of the senior common room’s staff had explained was actually intended to hold wine. Matthew sat down while I extracted the cork from a bottle of German Riesling. I poured two glasses without spilling a drop and joined him.

My dinner guest was lost in concentration, holding the Riesling in front of his long, aquiline nose. I waited for him to finish whatever he was doing, wondering how many sensory receptors vampires had in their noses, as opposed to dogs.

I really didn’t know the first thing about vampires.

“Very nice,” he finally said, opening his eyes and smiling at me.

“I’m not responsible for the wine,” I said quickly, snapping my napkin onto my lap. “The man at the wine store picked everything out, so if it’s no good, it’s not my fault.”

“Very nice,” he said again, “and the salmon looks wonderful.”

Matthew picked up his knife and fork and speared a piece of fish. Watching him from under my lashes to see if he could actually eat it, I piled a bit of pickle, a caper, and some salmon on the back of my own fork.

“You don’t eat like an American,” he commented after he’d taken a sip of wine.

“No,” I said, looking at the fork in my left hand and the knife in my right. “I expect I’ve spent too much time in England. Can you really eat this?” I blurted, unable to stand it anymore.

He laughed. “Yes, I happen to like smoked salmon.”

“But you don’t eat everything,” I insisted, turning my attention back to my plate.

“No,” he admitted, “but I can manage a few bites of most food. It doesn’t taste like much to me, though, unless it’s raw.”

“That’s odd, considering that vampires have such perfect senses. I’d think that all food would taste wonderful.” My salmon tasted as clean as fresh, cold water.

He picked up his wineglass and looked into the pale, golden liquid. “Wine tastes wonderful. Food tastes wrong to a vampire once it’s been cooked to death.”

I reviewed the menu with enormous relief.

“If food doesn’t taste good, why do you keep inviting me out to eat?” I asked.

Matthew’s eyes flicked over my cheeks, my eyes, and lingered on my mouth. “It’s easier to be around you when you’re eating. The smell of cooked food nauseates me.”

I blinked at him, still confused.

“As long as I’m nauseated, I’m not hungry,” Matthew said, his voice exasperated.

“Oh!” The pieces clicked together. I already knew he liked the way I smelled. Apparently that made him hungry.

Oh. I flushed.

“I thought you knew that about vampires,” he said more gently, “and that’s why you invited me for dinner.”

I shook my head, tucking another bundle of salmon together. “I probably know less about vampires than most humans do. And the little my Aunt Sarah taught me has to be treated as highly suspect, given her prejudices. She was quite clear, for instance, on your diet. She said vampires will consume only blood, because it’s all you need to survive. But that isn’t true, is it?”

Matthew’s eyes narrowed, and his tone was suddenly frosty. “No. You need water to survive. Is that all you drink?”

“Should I not be talking about this?” My questions were making him angry. Nervously I wrapped my legs around the base of the chair and realized I’d never put on any shoes. I was entertaining in bare feet.

“You can’t help being curious, I suppose,” Matthew replied after considering my question for a long moment. “I drink wine and can eat food—preferably uncooked food, or food that’s cold, so that it doesn’t smell.”

“But the food and wine don’t nourish you,” I guessed. “You feed on blood—all kinds of blood.” He flinched. “And you don’t have to wait outside until I invite you into my house. What else do I have wrong about vampires?”

Matthew’s face adopted an expression of long-suffering patience. He sat back in his chair, taking the wineglass with him. I stood up slightly and reached across the table to pour him some more. If I was going to ply him with questions, I could at least ply him with wine, too. Leaning over the candles, I almost set my shirt on fire. Matthew grabbed the wine bottle.

“Why don’t I do that?” he suggested. He poured himself some more and topped up my glass as well before he answered. “Most of what you know about me—about vampires—was dreamed up by humans. These legends made it possible for humans to live around us. Creatures frighten them. And I’m not talking solely about vampires.”

“Black hats, bats, brooms.” It was the unholy trinity of witchcraft lore, which burst into spectacular, ridiculous life every year on Halloween.

“Exactly.” Matthew nodded. “Somewhere in each of these stories, there’s a nugget of truth, something that frightened humans and helped them deny we were real. The strongest distinguishing characteristic of humans is their power of denial. I have strength and long life, you have supernatural abilities, daemons have awe-inspiring creativity. Humans can convince themselves up is down and black is white. It’s their special gift.”

“What’s the truth in the story about vampires not being allowed inside without an invitation?” Having pressed him on his diet, I focused on the entrance protocols.

“Humans are with us all the time. They just refuse to acknowledge our existence because we don’t make sense in their limited world. Once they allow us in—see us for who we really are—then we’re in to stay, just as someone you’ve invited into your home can be hard to get rid of. They can’t ignore us anymore.”

“So it’s like the stories of sunlight,” I said slowly. “It’s not that you can’t be in sunlight, but when you are, it’s harder for humans to ignore you. Rather than admit that you’re walking among them, humans tell themselves you can’t survive the light.”

Matthew nodded again. “They manage to ignore us anyway, of course. We can’t stay indoors until it’s dark. But we make more sense to humans after twilight—and that goes for you, too. You should see the looks when you walk into a room or down the street.”

I thought about my ordinary appearance and glanced at him doubtfully. Matthew chuckled.

“You don’t believe me, I know. But it’s true. When humans see a creature in broad daylight, it makes them uneasy. We’re too much for them—too tall, too strong, too confident, too creative, too powerful, too different. They try very hard to push our square pegs into their round holes all day long. At night it’s a bit easier to dismiss us as merely odd.”

I stood up and removed the fish plates, happy to see that Matthew had eaten everything but the garnish. He poured a bit more of the German wine into his glass while I pulled two more plates out of the refrigerator. Each held neatly arranged slices of raw venison so thin that the butcher insisted you could read the Oxford Mail through them. Vampires didn’t like greens. We’d see about root vegetables and cheese. I heaped beets in the center of each plate and shaved Parmesan on top.

A broad-bottomed decanter full of red wine went into the center of the table, where it quickly caught Matthew’s attention.

“May I?” he asked, no doubt worried about my burning down the college. He reached for the plain glass container, poured a bit of wine into our glasses, then held it up to his nose.

“Cфte-Rфtie,” he said with satisfaction. “One of my favorites.”

I eyed the plain glass container. “You can tell that just from smelling it?”

He laughed. “Some vampire stories are true. I have an exceptional sense of smell—and excellent sight and hearing, too. But even a human could tell that this was Cфte-Rфtie.” He closed his eyes again. “Is it 2003?”

My mouth gaped open. “Yes!” This was better than watching a game show. There had been a little crown on the label. “Does your nose tell you who made it?”

“Yes, but that’s because I’ve walked the fields where the grapes were grown,” he confessed sheepishly, as if he’d been caught pulling a trick on me.

“You can smell the fields in this?” I stuck my nose in the glass, relieved that the odor of horse manure was no longer there.

“Sometimes I believe I can remember everything I’ve ever smelled. It’s probably vanity,” he said ruefully, “but scents bring back powerful memories. I remember the first time I smelled chocolate as if it were yesterday.”

“Really?” I pitched forward in my chair.

“It was 1615. War hadn’t broken out yet, and the French king had married a Spanish princess that no one liked—especially not the king.” When I smiled, he smiled back, though his eyes were fixed on some distant image. “She brought chocolate to Paris. It was as bitter as sin and as decadent, too. We drank the cacao straight, mixed with water and no sugar.”

I laughed. “It sounds awful. Thank goodness someone figured out that chocolate deserved to be sweet.”

“That was a human, I’m afraid. The vampires liked it bitter and thick.”

We picked up our forks and started in on the venison. “More Scottish food,” I said, gesturing at the meat with my knife.

Matthew chewed a piece. “Red deer. A young Highlands stag from the taste of it.”

I shook my head in amazement.

“As I said,” he continued, “some of the stories are true.”

“Can you fly?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

He snorted. “Of course not. We leave that to the witches, since you can control the elements. But we’re strong and fast. Vampires can run and jump, which makes humans think we can fly. We’re efficient, too.”

“Efficient?” I put my fork down, unsure whether raw venison was to my liking.

“Our bodies don’t waste much energy. We have a lot of it to spend on moving when we need to.”

“You don’t breathe much,” I said, thinking back to yoga and taking a sip of wine.

“No,” Matthew said. “Our hearts don’t beat very often. We don’t need to eat very often. We run cold, which slows down most bodily processes and helps explain why we live so long.”

“The coffin story! You don’t sleep much, but when you do, you sleep like the dead.”

He grinned. “You’re getting the hang of this, I see.”

Matthew’s plate was empty of everything except for the beets, and mine was empty except for the venison. I cleared away the second course and invited him to pour more wine.

The main dish was the only part of the meal that required heat, and not much of it. I had already made a bizarre biscuitlike thing from ground chestnuts. All that was left for me to do was sear some rabbit. The list of ingredients included rosemary, garlic, and celery. I decided to forgo the garlic. With his sense of smell, garlic must overpower everything else—there was the nugget of truth in that vampire legend. The celery was also ruled out. Vampires categorically did not like vegetables. Spices didn’t seem to pose a problem, so I kept the rosemary and ground some pepper over the rabbit while it seared in the pan.

Leaving Matthew’s rabbit a little underdone, I cooked mine a bit more than was required, in the hope that it would get the taste of raw venison out of my mouth. After assembling everything in an artistic pile, I delivered it to the table. “This is cooked, I’m afraid—but barely.”

“You don’t think this is a test of some sort, do you?” Matthew’s face creased into a frown.

“No, no,” I said hurriedly. “But I’m not used to entertaining vampires.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” he murmured. He gave the rabbit a sniff. “It smells delicious.” While he was bent over his plate, the heat from the rabbit amplified his distinctive scent of cinnamon and clove. Matthew forked up a bit of the chestnut biscuit. As it traveled to his mouth, his eyes widened. “Chestnuts?”

“Nothing but chestnuts, olive oil, and a bit of baking powder.”

“And salt. And water, rosemary, and pepper,” he commented calmly, taking another bite of the biscuit.

“Given your dietary restrictions, it’s a good thing you can figure out exactly what you’re putting in your mouth,” I grumbled jokingly.

With most of the meal behind us, I began to relax. We chatted about Oxford while I cleared the plates and brought cheese, berries, and roasted chestnuts to the table.

“Help yourself,” I said, putting an empty plate in front of him. Matthew savored the aroma of the tiny strawberries and sighed happily as he picked up a chestnut.

“These really are better warm,” he observed. He cracked the hard nut easily in his fingers and popped the meat out of the shell. The nutcracker hanging off the edge of the bowl was clearly optional equipment with a vampire at the table.

“What do I smell like?” I asked, toying with the stem of my wineglass.

For a few moments, it seemed as though he wasn’t going to answer. The silence stretched thin before he turned wistful eyes on me. His lids fell, and he inhaled deeply.

“You smell of willow sap. And chamomile that’s been crushed underfoot.” He sniffed again and smiled a small, sad smile. “There’s honeysuckle and fallen oak leaves, too,” he said softly, breathing out, “along with witch hazel blooming and the first narcissus of spring. And ancient things—horehound, frankincense, lady’s mantle. Scents I thought I’d forgotten.”

His eyes opened slowly, and I looked into their gray depths, afraid to breathe and break the spell his words had cast.

“What about me?” he asked, his eyes holding on to mine.

“Cinnamon.” My voice was hesitant. “And cloves. Sometimes I think you smell of carnations—not the kind in the florist shops but the old-fashioned ones that grow in English cottage gardens.”

“Clove pinks,” Matthew said, his eyes crinkling at the corners in amusement. “Not bad for a witch.”

I reached for a chestnut. Cupping the nut in my palms, I rolled it from one hand to the other, the warmth traveling up my suddenly chilly arms.

Matthew sat back in his chair again, surveying my face with little flicks of his eyes. “How did you decide what to serve for dinner tonight?” He gestured at the berries and nuts that were left from the meal.

“Well, it wasn’t magic. The zoology department helped a lot,” I explained.

He looked startled, then roared with laughter. “You asked the zoology department what to make me for dinner?”

“Not exactly,” I said defensively. “There were raw-food recipes on the Net, but I got stuck after I bought the meat. They told me what gray wolves ate.”

Matthew shook his head, but he was still smiling, and my irritation dissolved. “Thank you,” he said simply. “It’s been a very long time since someone made me a meal.”

“You’re welcome. The wine was the worst part.”

Matthew’s eyes brightened. “Speaking of wine,” he said, standing up and folding his napkin, “I brought us something to have after dinner.”

He asked me to fetch two fresh glasses from the kitchen. An old, slightly lopsided bottle was sitting on the table when I returned. It had a faded cream label with simple lettering and a coronet. Matthew was working the corkscrew carefully into a cork that was crumbly and black with age.

His nostrils flared when he pulled it free, his face taking on the look of a cat in secure possession of a delectable canary. The wine that came out of the bottle was syrupy, its golden color glinting in the light of the candles.

“Smell it,” he commanded, handing me one of the glasses, “and tell me what you think.”

I took a sniff and gasped. “It smells like caramels and berries,” I said, wondering how something so yellow could smell of something red.

Matthew was watching me closely, interested in my reactions. “Take a sip,” he suggested.

The wine’s sweet flavors exploded in my mouth. Apricots and vanilla custard from the kitchen ladies tumbled across my tongue, and my mouth tingled with them long after I’d swallowed. It was like drinking magic.

“What is this?” I finally said, after the taste of the wine had faded.

“It was made from grapes picked a long, long time ago. That summer had been hot and sunny, and the farmers worried that the rains were going to come and ruin the crop. But the weather held, and they got the grapes in just before the weather changed.”

“You can taste the sunshine,” I said, earning myself another beautiful smile.

“During the harvest a comet blazed over the vineyards. It had been visible through astronomers’ telescopes for months, but in October it was so bright you could almost read by its light. The workers saw it as a sign that the grapes were blessed.”

“Was this in 1986? Was it Halley’s comet?”

Matthew shook his head. “No. It was 1811.” I stared in astonishment at the almost two-hundred-year-old wine in my glass, fearing it might evaporate before my eyes. “Halley’s comet came in 1759 and 1835.” He pronounced the name “Hawley.”

“Where did you get it?” The wine store by the train station did not have wine like this.

“I bought it from Antoine-Marie as soon as he told me it was going to be extraordinary,” he said with amusement.

Turning the bottle, I looked at the label. Chвteau Yquem. Even I had heard of that.

“And you’ve had it ever since,” I said. He’d drunk chocolate in Paris in 1615 and received a building permit from Henry VIII in 1536—of course he was buying wine in 1811. And there was the ancient-looking ampulla he was wearing around his neck, the cord visible at his throat.

“Matthew,” I said slowly, watching him for any early warning signs of anger. “How old are you?”

His mouth hardened, but he kept his voice light. “I’m older than I look.”

“I know that,” I said, unable to curb my impatience.

“Why is my age important?”

“I’m a historian. If somebody tells me he remembers when chocolate was introduced into France or a comet passing overhead in 1811, it’s difficult not to be curious about the other events he might have lived through. You were alive in 1536—I’ve been to the house you had built. Did you know Machiavelli? Live through the Black Death? Attend the University of Paris when Abelard was teaching there?”

He remained silent. The hair on the back of my neck started to prickle.

“Your pilgrim’s badge tells me you were once in the Holy Land. Did you go on crusade? See Halley’s comet pass over Normandy in 1066?”

Still nothing.

“Watch Charlemagne’s coronation? Survive the fall of Carthage? Help keep Attila from reaching Rome?”

Matthew held up his right index finger. “Which fall of Carthage?”

“You tell me!”

“Damn you, Hamish Osborne,” he muttered, his hand flexing on the tablecloth. For the second time in two days, Matthew struggled over what to say. He stared into the candle, drawing his finger slowly through the flame. His flesh erupted into angry red blisters, then smoothed itself out into white, cold perfection an instant later without a flicker of pain evident on his face.

“I believe that my body is nearly thirty-seven years of age. I was born around the time Clovis converted to Christianity. My parents remembered that, or I’d have no idea. We didn’t keep track of birthdays back then. It’s tidier to pick the date of five hundred and be done with it.” He looked up at me, briefly, and returned his attention to the candles. “I was reborn a vampire in 537, and with the exception of Attila—who was before my time—you’ve touched on most of the high and low points in the millennium between then and the year I put the keystone into my house in Woodstock. Because you’re a historian, I feel obligated to tell you that Machiavelli was not nearly as impressive as you all seem to think he was. He was just a Florentine politician—and not a terribly good one at that.” A note of weariness had crept into his voice.

Matthew Clairmont was more than fifteen hundred years old.

“I shouldn’t pry,” I said by way of apology, unsure of where to look and mystified as to what had led me to think that knowing the historical events this vampire had lived through would help me know him better. A line from Ben Jonson floated into my mind. It seemed to explain Matthew in a way that the coronation of Charlemagne could not. “‘He was not of an age, but for all time,’” I murmured.

“‘With thee conversing I forget all time,’” he responded, traveling further into seventeenth-century literature and offering up a line from Milton.

We looked at each other for as long as we could stand it, working another fragile spell between us. I broke it.

“What were you doing in the fall of 1859?”

His face darkened. “What has Peter Knox been telling you?”

“That you were unlikely to share your secrets with a witch.” My voice sounded calmer than I felt.

“Did he?” Matthew said softly, sounding less angry than he clearly was. I could see it in the set of his jaw and shoulders. “In September 1859 I was looking through the manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum.”

“Why, Matthew?” Please tell me, I urged silently, crossing my fingers in my lap. I’d provoked him into revealing the first part of his secret but wanted him to freely give me the rest. No games, no riddles. Just tell me.

“I’d recently finished reading a book manuscript that was soon going to press. It was written by a Cambridge naturalist.” Matthew put down his glass.

My hand flew to my mouth as the significance of the date registered. “Origin.” Like Newton’s great work of physics, the Principia, this was a book that did not require a full citation. Anyone who’d passed high-school biology knew Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

“Darwin’s article the previous summer laid out his theory of natural selection, but the book was quite different. It was marvelous, the way he established easily observable changes in nature and inched you toward accepting something so revolutionary.”

“But alchemy has nothing to do with evolution.” Grabbing the bottle, I poured myself more of the precious wine, less concerned that it might vanish than that I might come unglued.

“Lamarck believed that each species descended from different ancestors and progressed independently toward higher forms of being. It’s remarkably similar to what your alchemists believed—that the philosopher’s stone was the elusive end product of a natural transmutation of base metals into more exalted metals like copper, silver, and gold.” Matthew reached for the wine, and I pushed it toward him.

“But Darwin disagreed with Lamarck, even if he did use the same word—‘transmutation’—in his initial discussions of evolution.”

“He disagreed with linear transmutation, it’s true. But Darwin’s theory of natural selection can still be seen as a series of linked transmutations.”

Maybe Matthew was right and magic really was in everything. It was in Newton’s theory of gravity, and it might be in Darwin’s theory of evolution, too.

“There are alchemical manuscripts all over the world.” I was trying to remain moored to the details while coming to terms with the bigger picture. “Why the Ashmole manuscripts?”

“When I read Darwin and saw how he seemed to explore the alchemical theory of transmutation through biology, I remembered stories about a mysterious book that explained the origin of our three species—daemons, witches, and vampires. I’d always dismissed them as fantastic.” He took a sip of wine. “Most suggested that the story was concealed from human eyes in a book of alchemy. The publication of Origin prompted me to look for it, and if such a book existed, Elias Ashmole would have bought it. He had an uncanny ability to find bizarre manuscripts.”

“You were looking for it here in Oxford, one hundred and fifty years ago?”

“Yes,” Matthew said. “And one hundred and fifty years before you received Ashmole 782, I was told that it was missing.”

My heart sped up, and he looked at me in concern. “Keep going,” I said, waving him on.

“I’ve been trying to get my hands on it ever since. Every other Ashmole manuscript was there, and none seemed promising. I’ve looked at manuscripts in other libraries—at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Germany, the Bibliothиque Nationale in France, the Medici Library in Florence, the Vatican, the Library of Congress.”

I blinked, thinking of a vampire wandering the hallways of the Vatican.

“The only manuscript I haven’t seen is Ashmole 782. By simple process of elimination, it must be the manuscript that contains our story—if it still survives.”

“You’ve looked at more alchemical manuscripts than I have.”

“Perhaps,” Matthew admitted, “but it doesn’t mean I understand them as well as you do. What all the manuscripts I’ve seen have in common, though, is an absolute confidence that the alchemist can help one substance change into another, creating new forms of life.”

“That sounds like evolution,” I said flatly.

“Yes,” Matthew said gently, “it does.”

We moved to the sofas, and I curled up into a ball at the end of one while Matthew sprawled in the corner of the other, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Happily, he’d brought the wine. Once we were settled, it was time for more honesty between us.

“I met a daemon, Agatha Wilson, at Blackwell’s last week. According to the Internet, she’s a famous designer. Agatha told me the daemons believe that Ashmole 782 is the story of all origins—even human origins. Peter Knox told me a different story. He said it was the first grimoire, the source of all witches’ power. Knox believes that the manuscript contains the secret of immortality,” I said, glancing at Matthew, “and how to destroy vampires. I’ve heard the daemon and witch versions of the story—now I want yours.”

“Vampires believe the lost manuscript explains our longevity and our strength,” he said. “In the past, our fear was that this secret—if it fell into witches’ hands—would lead to our extermination. Some fear that magic was involved in our making and that the witches might find a way to reverse the magic and destroy us. It seems that that part of the legend might be true.” He exhaled softly, looking worried.

“I still don’t understand why you’re so certain that this book of origins—whatever it may contain—is hidden inside an alchemy book.”

“An alchemy book could hide these secrets in plain sight—just like Peter Knox hides his identity as a witch under the veneer that he’s an expert in the occult. I think it was vampires who learned that the book was alchemical. It’s too perfect a fit to be coincidence. The human alchemists seemed to capture what it is to be a vampire when they wrote about the philosopher’s stone. Becoming a vampire makes us nearly immortal, it makes most of us rich, and it gives us the chance to accrue unimaginable knowledge and learning.”

“That’s the philosopher’s stone, all right.” The parallels between this mythic substance and the creature sitting opposite me were striking—and chilling. “But it’s still hard to imagine such a book really exists. For one thing, all the stories contradict one another. And who would be so foolish as to put so much information in one place?”

“As with the legends about vampires and witches, there’s at least a nugget of truth in all the stories about the manuscript. We just have to figure out what that nugget is and strip away the rest. Then we’ll begin to understand.”

Matthew’s face bore no trace of deceit or evasion. Encouraged by his use of “we,” I decided he’d earned more information.

“You’re right about Ashmole 782. The book you’ve been seeking is inside it.”

“Go on,” Matthew said softly, trying to control his curiosity.

“It’s an alchemy book on the surface. The images contain errors, or deliberate mistakes—I still can’t decide which.” I bit my lip in concentration, and his eyes fixed on the place where my teeth had drawn a tiny bead of blood to the surface.

“What do you mean ‘it’s an alchemy book on the surface’?” Matthew held his glass closer to his nose.

“It’s a palimpsest. But the ink hasn’t been washed away. Magic is hiding the text. I almost missed the words, they’re hidden so well. But when I turned one of the pages, the light was at just the right angle and I could see lines of writing moving underneath.”

“Could you read it?”

“No.” I shook my head. “If Ashmole 782 contains information about who we are, how we came to be, and how we might be destroyed, it’s deeply buried.”

“It’s fine if it remains buried,” Matthew said grimly, “at least for now. But the time is quickly coming when we will need that book.”

“Why? What makes it so urgent?”

“I’d rather show you than tell you. Can you come to my lab tomorrow?”

I nodded, mystified.

“We can walk there after lunch,” he said, standing up and stretching. We had emptied the bottle of wine amid all this talk of secrets and origins. “It’s late. I should go.”

Matthew reached for the doorknob and gave it a twist. It rattled, and the catch sprang open easily.

He frowned. “Have you had trouble with your lock?”

“No,” I said, pushing the mechanism in and out, “not that I’m aware of.”

“You should have them look at that,” he said, still jiggling the door’s hardware. “It might not close properly until you do.”

When I looked up from the door, an emotion I couldn’t name flitted across his face.

“I’m sorry the evening ended on such a serious note,” he said softly. “I did have a lovely time.”

“Was the dinner really all right?” I asked. We’d talked about the secrets of the universe, but I was more worried about how his stomach was faring.

“It was more than all right,” he assured me.

My face softened at his beautiful, ancient features. How could people walk by him on the street and not gasp? Before I could stop myself, my toes were gripping the old rug and I was stretching up to kiss him quickly on the cheek. His skin felt smooth and cold like satin, and my lips felt unusually warm against his flesh.

Why did you do that? I asked myself, coming down off my toes and gazing at the questionable doorknob to hide my confusion.

It was over in a matter of seconds, but as I knew from using magic to get Notes and Queries off the Bodleian’s shelf, a few seconds was all it took to change your life.

Matthew studied me. When I showed no sign of hysteria or an inclination to make a run for it, he leaned toward me and kissed me slowly once, twice in the French manner. His face skimmed over mine, and he drank in my scent of willow sap and honeysuckle. When he straightened, Matthew’s eyes looked smokier than usual.

“Good night, Diana,” he said with a smile.

Moments later, leaning against the closed door, I spied the blinking number one on my answering machine. Mercifully, the machine’s volume was turned down.

Aunt Sarah wanted to ask the same question I’d asked myself.

I just didn’t want to answer.

Matthew came to collect me after lunch—the only creature among the human readers in the Selden End. While he walked me under the ornately painted exposed beams, he kept up a steady patter of questions about my work and what I’d been reading.

Oxford had turned resolutely cold and gray, and I pulled my collar up around my neck, shivering in the damp air. Matthew seemed not to mind and wasn’t wearing a coat. The gloomy weather made him look a little less startling, but it wasn’t enough to make him blend in entirely. People turned and stared in the Bodleian’s central courtyard, then shook their heads.

“You’ve been noticed,” I told him.

“I forgot my coat. Besides, they’re looking at you, not me.” He gave me a dazzling smile. A woman’s jaw dropped, and she poked her friend, inclining her head in Matthew’s direction.

I laughed. “You are so wrong.”

We headed toward Keble College and the University Parks, making a right turn at Rhodes House before entering the labyrinth of modern buildings devoted to laboratory and computer space. Built in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History, the enormous redbrick Victorian cathedral to science, these were monuments of unimaginative, functional contemporary architecture.

Matthew pointed to our destination—a nondescript, low-slung building—and fished in his pocket for a plastic identity card. He swiped it through the reader at the door handle and punched in a set of codes in two different sequences. Once the door unlocked, he ushered me to the guard’s station, where he signed me in as a guest and handed me a pass to clip to my sweater.

“That’s a lot of security for a university laboratory,” I commented, fiddling with the badge.

The security only increased as we walked down the miles of corridors that somehow managed to fit behind the modest faзade. At the end of one hallway, Matthew took a different card out of his pocket, swiped it, and put his index finger on a glass panel next to a door. The glass panel chimed, and a touch pad appeared on its surface. Matthew’s fingers raced over the numbered keys. The door clicked softly open, and there was a clean, slightly antiseptic smell reminiscent of hospitals and empty professional kitchens. It derived from unbroken expanses of tile, stainless steel, and electronic equipment.

A series of glass-enclosed rooms stretched ahead of us. One held a round table for meetings, a black monolith of a monitor, and several computers. Another held an old wooden desk, a leather chair, an enormous Persian rug that must have been worth a fortune, telephones, fax machines, and still more computers and monitors. Beyond were other enclosures that held banks of file cabinets, microscopes, refrigerators, autoclaves, racks upon racks of test tubes, centrifuges, and dozens of unrecognizable devices and instruments.

The whole area seemed unoccupied, although from somewhere there came faint strains of a Bach cello concerto and something that sounded an awful lot like the latest hit recorded by the Eurovision song-contest winners.

As we passed by the two office spaces, Matthew gestured at the one with the rug. “My office,” he explained. He then steered me into the first laboratory on the left. Every surface held some combination of computers, microscopes, and specimen containers arranged neatly in racks. File cabinets ringed the walls. One of their drawers had a label that read “<0.”

“Welcome to the history lab.” The blue light made his face look whiter, his hair blacker. “This is where we’re studying evolution. We take in physical specimens from old burial sites, excavations, fossilized remains, and living beings, and extract DNA from the samples.” Matthew opened a different drawer and pulled out a handful of files. “We’re just one laboratory among hundreds all over the world using genetics to study problems of species origin and extinction. The difference between our lab and the rest is that humans aren’t the only species we’re studying.”

His words dropped, cold and clear, around me.

“You’re studying vampire genetics?”

“Witches and daemons, too.” Matthew hooked a wheeled stool with his foot and gently sat me on top of it.

A vampire wearing black Converse high-tops came rocketing around the corner and squeaked to a halt, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He was in his late twenties, with the blond hair and blue eyes of a California surfer. Standing next to Matthew, his average height and build made him look slight, but his body was wiry and energetic.

“AB-negative,” he said, studying me admiringly. “Wow, terrific find.” He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “And a witch, too!”

“Marcus Whitmore, meet Diana Bishop. She’s a professor of history from Yale”—Matthew frowned at the younger vampire—“and is here as a guest, not a pincushion.”

“Oh.” Marcus looked disappointed, then brightened. “Would you mind if I took some of your blood anyway?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.” I had no wish to be poked and prodded by a vampire phlebotomist.

Marcus whistled. “That’s some fight-or-flight response you have there, Dr. Bishop. Smell that adrenaline.”

“What’s going on?” a familiar soprano voice called out. Miriam’s diminutive frame was visible a few seconds later.

“Dr. Bishop is a bit overwhelmed by the laboratory, Miriam.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize it was her,” Miriam said. “She smells different. Is it adrenaline?”

Marcus nodded. “Yep. Are you always like this? All dressed up in adrenaline and no place to go?”

“Marcus.” Matthew could issue a bone-chilling warning in remarkably few syllables.

“Since I was seven,” I said, meeting his startling blue eyes.

Marcus whistled again. “That explains a lot. No vampire could turn his back on that.” Marcus wasn’t referring to my physical features, even though he gestured in my direction.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, curiosity overcoming my nerves.

Matthew pulled on the hair at his temples and gave Marcus a glare that would curdle milk. The younger vampire looked blasй and cracked his knuckles. I jumped at the sharp sound.

“Vampires are predators, Diana,” Matthew explained. “We’re attracted to the fight-or-flight response. When people or animals become agitated, we can smell it.”

“We can taste it, too. Adrenaline makes blood even more delicious,” Marcus said. “Spicy, silky, and then it turns sweet. Really good stuff.”

A low rumble started in Matthew’s throat. His lips curled away from his teeth, and Marcus stepped backward. Miriam placed her hand firmly on the blond vampire’s forearm.

“What? I’m not hungry!” Marcus protested, shaking off Miriam’s hand.

“Dr. Bishop may not know that vampires don’t have to be physically hungry to be sensitive to adrenaline, Marcus.” Matthew controlled himself with visible effort. “Vampires don’t always need to feed, but we always crave the hunt and the adrenaline reaction of prey to predator.”

Given my struggle to control anxiety, it was no wonder Matthew was always asking me out for a meal. It wasn’t my honeysuckle scent that made him hungry—it was my excess adrenaline.

“Thank you for explaining, Matthew.” Even after last night, I was still relatively ignorant about vampires. “I’ll try to calm down.”

“There’s no need,” Matthew said shortly. “It’s not your job to calm down. It’s our job to exercise a modicum of courtesy and control.” He glowered at Marcus and pulled one of the files forward.

Miriam shot a worried glance in my direction. “Maybe we should start at the beginning.”

“No. I think it’s better to start at the end,” he replied, opening the file.

“Do they know about Ashmole 782?” I asked Matthew when Miriam and Marcus showed no sign of leaving. He nodded. “And you told them what I saw?” He nodded again.