Gallowglass handed me the folder.
“Phoebe should do the honors,” I said. “If not for her, we wouldn’t be here.” I passed the folder on to her.
Phoebe cracked it open. The image inside was so vivid that it might have been painted yesterday, and its striking colors and the details of trunk and leaf only increased the sense of vibrancy that came from the page. There was power in it. That much was unmistakable.
“It’s beautiful.” Phoebe lifted her eyes. “Is this the page you’ve been looking for?”
“Aye,” Gallowglass said. “That’s it, all right.”
Phoebe placed the page in my waiting hands. As soon as the parchment touched them, they brightened, shooting little sparks of color into the room. Filaments of power erupted from my fingertips, connecting to the parchment with an almost audible snap of electricity.
“There’s a lot of energy on that page. Not all of it good,” Timothy said, backing away. “It needs to go back into that book you discovered in the Bodleian.”
“I know you don’t want to sell the page,” I said, “but could I borrow it? Just for a day?” I could go straight to the Bodleian, recall Ashmole 782, and have the page back tomorrow afternoon—provided the Book of Life let me remove it again, once I’d returned it to the binding.
“Nope.” Timothy shook his head.
“You won’t let me buy it. You won’t let me borrow it,” I said, exasperation mounting. “Do you have some sentimental attachment to it?”
“Of course I do. I mean, he’s my ancestor, isn’t he?”
Every eye in the room went to the illustration of the tree in my hands. Even Puddles looked at it with renewed interest, sniffing the air with her long, delicate nose.
“How do you know that?” I whispered.
“I see things—microchips, crossword puzzles, you, the guy whose skin made that parchment. I knew who you were from the moment you walked into Duke Humfrey’s.” Timothy looked sad. “I told you as much. But you didn’t listen to me and left with the big vampire. You’re the one.”
“The one for what?” My throat closed. Daemon visions were bizarre and surreal, but they could be shockingly accurate.
“The one who will learn how it all began—the blood, the death, the fear. And the one who can put a stop to it, once and for all.” Timothy sighed. “You can’t buy my grandfather, and you can’t borrow him. But if I give him to you, for safekeeping, you’ll make his death mean something?”
“I can’t promise you that, Timothy.” There was no way I could swear to something so enormous and imprecise. “We don’t know what the book will reveal. And I certainly can’t guarantee that anything will change.”
“Can you make sure his name won’t be forgotten, once you learn what it is?” Timothy asked. “Names are important, you know.”
A sense of the uncanny washed over me. Ysabeau had told me the same thing shortly after I met her. I saw Edward Kelley in my mind’s eye. “You will find your name in it, too,” he had cried when Emperor Rudolf made him hand over the Book of Life. The hackles on my neck rose.
“I won’t forget his name,” I promised.
“Sometimes that’s enough,” Timothy said.
It was several hours past midnight, and any hope I had of sleep was gone. The fog had lifted slightly, and the brightness of the full moon pierced through the gray wisps that still clung to the trunks of trees and the low places in the park where the deer slept. One or two members of the herd were still out, picking over the grass in search of the last remaining fodder. A hard frost was coming; I could sense it. I was attuned to the rhythms of the earth and sky in ways that I had not been before I lived in a time when the day was organized around the height of the sun instead of the dial of a clock, and the season of the year determined everything from what you ate to the physic that you took.
I was in our bedchamber again, the one where Matthew and I had spent our first night in the sixteenth century. Only a few things had changed: the electricity that powered the lamps, the Victorian bellpull that hung by the fire to call the servants to tend to it or bring tea (though why this was necessary in a vampire household, I could not fathom), the closet that had been carved out of an adjoining room.
Our return to the Old Lodge after meeting Timothy Weston had been unexpectedly tense. Gallowglass had flatly refused to take me to Oxford after we located the final page of the Book of Life, though it was not yet the supper hour and Duke Humfrey’s was open until seven o’clock during term time. When Leonard offered to drive, Gallowglass threatened to kill him in disturbingly detailed and graphic terms. Fernando and Gallowglass had departed, ostensibly to talk, and Gallowglass had returned with a rapidly healing split lip, a slightly bruised eye, and a mumbled apology to Leonard.
“You aren’t going,” Fernando said when I headed for the door. “I’ll take you tomorrow, but not tonight. Gallowglass is right: You look like death.”
“Stop coddling me,” I said through gritted teeth, my hands still shooting out intermittent sparks.
“I’ll coddle you until your mate—and my sire—returns,” Fernando said. “The only creature on this earth who could make me take you to Oxford is Matthew. Feel free to call him.” He held out his phone.
That had been the end of the discussion. I’d accepted Fernando’s ultimatum with poor grace, though my head was pounding and I’d worked more magic in the past week than I had my whole life previous.
“So long as you have these three pages, no other creature can possess the book,” Amira said, trying to comfort me. But it seemed like a poor consolation when the book was so close.
Not even the sight of the three pages, lined up on the long table in the great hall, had improved my mood. I’d been anticipating and dreading this moment since we left Madison, but now that it was here, it felt strangely anticlimactic.
Phoebe had arranged the images carefully, making sure they didn’t touch. We’d learned the hard way that they seemed to have a magnetic affinity. When I’d arrived home and bundled them together in preparation for going to the Bodleian, a soft keening had come from the pages, followed by a chattering that everybody heard—even Phoebe.
“You can’t just march into the Bodleian with these three pages and stuff them back into an enchanted book,” Sarah said. “It’s crazy. There are bound to be witches in the room. They’ll come running.”
“And who knows how the Book of Life will respond?” Ysabeau poked at the illustration of the tree with her finger. “What if it shrieks? Ghosts might be released. Or Diana might set off a rain of fire.” After her experiences in London, Ysabeau had been doing some reading. She was now prepared to discuss a wide variety of topics, including spectral apparitions and the number of occult phenomena that had been observed in the British Isles over the past two years.