“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.
Chapter 13
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 façade. 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 blasé 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.
“Did you tell anyone else?” Miriam’s question to me reflected centuries of suspicion.
“If you mean Peter Knox, no. Only my aunt and her partner, Emily, know.”
“Three witches and three vampires sharing a secret,” Marcus said thoughtfully, glancing at Matthew. “Interesting.”
“Let’s hope we can do a better job keeping it than we have done at hiding this.” Matthew slid the file toward me.
Three sets of vampire eyes watched me attentively as I opened it. VAMPIRE ON THE LOOSE IN LONDON, the headline screamed. My stomach flopped over, and I moved the newspaper clipping aside. Underneath was the report of another mysterious death involving a bloodless corpse. Below that was a magazine story accompanied by a picture that made its contents clear despite my inability to read Russian. The victim’s throat had been ripped open from jaw to carotid artery.
There were dozens more murders, and reports in every language imaginable. Some of the deaths involved beheadings. Some involved corpses drained of blood, without a speck of blood evidence found at the scene. Others suggested an animal attack, due to the ferocity of the injuries to the neck and torso.
“We’re dying,” Matthew said when I pushed the last of the stories aside.
“Humans are dying, that’s for sure.” My voice was harsh.
“Not just the humans,” he said. “Based on this evidence, vampires are exhibiting signs of species deterioration.”
“This is what you wanted to show me?” My voice shook. “What do these have to do with the origin of creatures or Ashmole 782?” Gillian’s recent warnings had stirred painful memories, and these pictures only brought them into sharper focus.
“Hear me out,” Matthew said quietly. “Please.”
He might not be making sense, but he wasn’t deliberately frightening me either. Matthew must have had a good reason for sharing this. Hugging the file folder, I sat down on my stool.
“These deaths,” he began, drawing the folder gently away from me, “result from botched attempts to transform humans into vampires. What was once second nature to us has become difficult. Our blood is increasingly incapable of making new life out of death.”
Failure to reproduce would make any species extinct. Based on the pictures I’d just seen, however, the world didn’t need more vampires.
“It’s easier for those who are older—vampires such as myself who fed predominantly on human blood when we were young,” Matthew continued. “As a vampire ages, however, we feel less compulsion to make new vampires. Younger vampires, though, are a different story. They want to start families to dispel the loneliness of their new lives. When they find a human they want to mate with, or try to make children, some discover that their blood isn’t powerful enough.”
“You said we’re all going extinct,” I reminded him evenly, my anger still simmering.
“Modern witches aren’t as powerful as their ancestors were.” Miriam’s voice was matter-of-fact. “And you don’t produce as many children as in times past.”
“That doesn’t sound like evidence—it sounds like a subjective assessment,” I said.
“You want to see the evidence?” Miriam picked up two more file folders and tossed them across the gleaming surface so that they slid into my arms. “There it is—though I doubt you’ll understand much of it.”
One had a purple-edged label with “Benvenguda” typed neatly on it. The other had a red-edged label, bearing the name “Good, Beatrice.” The folders contained nothing
but graphs. Those on top were hoop-shaped and brilliantly colored. Underneath, more graphs showed black and gray bars marching across white paper.
“That’s not fair,” Marcus protested. “No historian could read those.”
“These are DNA sequences,” I said, pointing to the black-and-white images. “But what are the colored graphs?”
Matthew rested his elbows on the table next to me. “They’re also genetic test results,” he said, drawing the hoop-covered page closer. “These tell us about the mitochondrial DNA of a woman named Benvenguda, which she inherited from her mother, and her mother’s mother, and every female ancestor before her. They tell us the story of her matrilineage.”
“What about her father’s genetic legacy?”
Matthew picked up the black-and-white DNA results. “Benvenguda’s human father is here, in her nuclear DNA—her genome—along with her mother, who was a witch.” He returned to the multicolored hoops. “But the mitochondrial DNA, outside the cell’s nucleus, records only her maternal ancestry.”
“Why are you studying both her genome and her mitochondrial DNA?” I had heard of the genome, but mitochondrial DNA was new territory for me.
“Your nuclear DNA tells us about you as a unique individual—how the genetic legacy of your mother and father recombined to create you. It’s the mixture of your father’s genes and your mother’s genes that gave you blue eyes, blond hair, and freckles. Mitochondrial DNA can help us to understand the history of a whole species.”
“That means the origin and evolution of the species is recorded in every one of us,” I said slowly. “It’s in our blood and every cell in our body.”
Matthew nodded. “But every origin story tells another tale—not of beginnings but of endings.”
“We’re back to Darwin,” I said, frowning. “Origin wasn’t entirely about where different species came from. It was about natural selection and species extinction, too.”
“Some would say Origin was mostly about extinction,” Marcus agreed, rolling up to the other side of the lab bench.
A Discovery of Witches: A Novel (All Souls Trilogy) Page 20