“Phoebe is adjusting to being a de Clermont,” I said, wiping at my eyes.
“Bonne chance,” Marthe said. This only made us laugh harder.
It was a welcome reminder that, different though we might be, we were a family of sorts—no stranger or more idiosyncratic than thousands that had come before us.
“And these pages you’ve brought—are they from Matthew’s collections as well?” Amira said, picking up the conversation where we’d abandoned it.
“No. One of them was given to my parents, and the other was in the hands of Matthew’s grandson, Andrew Hubbard.”
“Hmm. So much fear.” Amira’s eyes lost focus. She was a witch with significant insight and empathic powers.
“Amira?” I looked at her closely.
“Blood and fear.” She shuddered, not seeming to hear me. “It’s in the parchment itself, not just the words.”
“Should I stop her?” I asked Sarah. In most situations it was best to let a witch’s second sight play itself out, but Amira had slipped too quickly into her vision of another time and place. A witch might wander so far into a thicket of images and feelings that she couldn’t find her way out of them.
“Absolutely not,” Sarah said. “There are two of us to help her if she gets lost.”
“A young woman—a mother. She was killed in front of her children,” Amira murmured. My stomach flipped. “Their father was already dead. When the witches brought her husband’s body to her, they dropped it at her feet and made her look at what they had done to him. It was she who first cursed the book. So much knowledge, lost forever.” Amira’s eyes drifted closed. When they opened again, they were shining with unshed tears. “This parchment was made from the skin that stretched over her ribs.”
I knew that the Book of Life had dead creatures in it, but I never imagined I would know anything more about them than whatever their DNA was capable of revealing. I bolted for the door, stomach heaving. Corra flapped her wings in agitation, turning this way and that to stabilize her position, but there was little room for her to maneuver thanks to the growing presence of the twins.
“Shh. That will not be your fate. I promise you,” Ysabeau said, catching me in her arms. She was cool and solid, her strength evident in spite of her graceful build.
“Am I doing the right thing to try to mend this broken book?” I asked once the roiling in my guts had stopped. “And to do it without Matthew?”
“Right or wrong, it must be done.” Ysabeau smoothed back my hair, which had tumbled forward, obscuring my face. “Call him, Diana. He would not want you to suffer like this.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Matthew has his job to do. I have mine.”
“Let us finish it then,” Ysabeau said.
* * *
Chipping Weston was the type of picturesque English village where novelists liked to set murder mysteries. It looked like a postcard or a film set, but it was home to several hundred people who lived in thatched houses spread out over a handful of narrow lanes. The village green had retained its stocks for punishing its citizens found guilty of some wrongdoing, and there were two pubs so that even if you had a falling-out with half your neighbors, you’d still have a place to go where you could have your evening pint.
The Manor House was not difficult to find.
“The gates are open.” Gallowglass cracked his knuckles.
“What is your plan, Gallowglass? Running at the front door and battering it down with your bare hands?” I climbed out of Leonard’s car. “Come on, Phoebe. Let’s go ring the bell.”
Gallowglass was behind us as we walked straight through the open front gates and skirted the round stone planter that I suspected had been a fountain before it was filled in with soil. Standing in the middle were two box trees clipped to resemble dachshunds.
“How extraordinary,” Phoebe murmured, eyeing the green sculptures.
The door to the manor was set in the middle of a bank of low windows. There was no bell, but an iron knocker—also shaped like a dachshund—had been inexpertly affixed to the stout Elizabethan panels. Before Phoebe could give me a lecture about the preservation of old houses, I lifted the dog and rapped sharply.
Silence.
I rapped again, putting a bit more weight into it.
“We are standing in plain view of the road,” Gallowglass growled. “That’s the sorriest excuse for a wall I’ve ever seen. A child could step over it.”
“Not everybody can have a moat,” I said. “I hardly think Benjamin has ever heard of Chipping Weston, never mind followed us here.”
Gallowglass was unconvinced and continued to look around like an anxious owl.
I was about to rap again when the door was flung open. A man wearing goggles and a parachute slung around his shoulders like a cape stood in the entrance. Dogs swarmed around his feet, wriggling and barking.
“Whenever have you been?” The stranger engulfed me in a hug while I tried to sort out what his strange question meant. The dogs leaped and frolicked, excited to meet me now that their master had signaled his approval. He let me go and lifted his goggles, his nudging stare feeling like a buss of welcome.
“You’re a daemon,” I said unnecessarily.
“And you’re a witch.” With one green eye and one blue, he studied Gallowglass. “And he’s a vampire. Not the same one you had with you before, but still big enough to replace the lightbulbs.”
“I don’t do lightbulbs,” Gallowglass said.
“Wait. I know you,” I said, sifting through the faces in my memory. This was one of the daemons I’d seen in the Bodleian last year when I’d first encountered Ashmole 782. He liked lattes and taking apart microfilm readers. He always wore earbuds, even when they weren’t attached to anything. “Timothy?”
“The same.” Timothy turned his eyes to me and cocked his fingers and thumbs so they looked like six-shooters. He was, I noticed, still wearing mismatched cowboy boots, but this time one was green and the other blue—to match his eyes, one presumed. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Told you, babe: You’re the one.”
“Are you T. J. Weston?” Phoebe asked, trying to make her voice heard above the din of yelping, wriggling dogs.
Timothy stuffed his fingers in his ears and mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”
“Oy!” Gallowglass shouted. “Shut your gobs, little yappers.”
The barking stopped instantly. The dogs sat, jaws open and tongues lolling, and looked at Gallowglass adoringly. Timothy removed a finger from one of his ears.