“Where will you go?” I asked.
“To ancient, forgotten places. There I will await those who will come when their weavers release them. You brought the magic back, as it was foretold. Now I will no longer be the last of my kind, but the first.” Corra’s exhale steamed in the air between us.
“Bring me the book, then go with my blessing.” I looked deep into her eyes and saw her yearning to be her own creature. “Thank you, Corra. I may have brought the magic back, but you gave it wings.”
“And now it is time for you to use them,” Corra said. With three beats of her own spangled, webbed appendages, she climbed to the rafters.
“Why is Corra flying around up here?” Sarah hissed. “Send her down the conveyor-belt shaft and into the library’s underground storage rooms. That’s where the book is.”
“Stop trying to shape the magic, Sarah.” Goody Alsop had taught me the dangers of thinking you were smarter than your own power. “Corra knows what she’s doing.”
“I hope so,” Gallowglass said, “for Matthew’s sake.”
Corra sang out notes of water and fire, and a low, hushed chattering filled the air.
“The Book of Life. Do you hear it?” I asked, looking around for the source of the sound. It wasn’t the pages on the guard’s desk, though they were starting to murmur, too.
My aunt shook her head.
Corra circled the oldest part of Duke Humfrey’s. The murmurs grew louder with every beat of her wings.
“I hear it,” Linda said, excited. “A hum of conversation. It’s coming from that direction.”
Fernando hopped over the lattice barrier into the main aisle of Duke Humfrey’s. I followed after him.
“The Book of Life can’t be up here,” Sarah protested. “Someone would have noticed.”
“Not if it’s hiding in plain sight,” I said, pulling priceless books off a nearby shelf, opening them to examine their contents, then sliding each back into place only to grasp another. The voices still cried out, calling to me, begging me to find them.
“Auntie? I think Corra found your book.” Gallowglass pointed.
Corra was perched on the barred cage of the book hold, where the manuscripts were locked away and stored for patrons to use the following day. Her head was inclined as though she were listening to the still-chattering voices. She cooed and clucked in response, her head bobbing up and down.
Fernando had followed the sound to the same place and was standing behind the call desk where Sean spent his days. He was looking up at one of the shelves. There, next to an Oxford University telephone directory, sat a gray cardboard box so ordinary in appearance that it was begging not to be noticed—though it was pretty eye-catching at the moment, with light seeping out from the joins at the corners. Someone had clipped a curling note to it: “Boxed. Return to stacks after inspection.”
“It can’t be.” But every instinct told me it was.
I held up my hand, and the box tipped backward and landed in my palm. I lowered it carefully to the desk. When I took my hands from it, the lid blew off, landing several feet away. Inside, the metal clasps were straining to hold the book closed.
Gently, aware of the many creatures within it, I lifted Ashmole 782 out of its protective carton and laid it down on the wooden surface. I rested my hand flat on the cover. The chattering ceased.
Choose, the many voices said as one.
“I choose you,” I whispered to the book, releasing the clasps on Ashmole 782. Their metal was warm and comforting to the touch. My father, I thought.
Linda thrust the pages that belonged in the Book of Life in my direction.
Slowly, deliberately, I opened the book.
I turned the rough paper that had been inserted into the binding to protect the contents and the parchment page that bore both Elias Ashmole’s handwritten title as well as my father’s pencil addition. The first of Ashmole 782’s alchemical illustrations—a female baby with black hair—stared at me from the next page.
When I first saw this image of the philosophical child, I had been struck by how it deviated from standard alchemical imagery. Now I couldn’t help noticing that the baby resembled my own daughter, her tiny hands clutching a silver rose in one hand and a golden rose in the other as though proclaiming to the world that she was the child of a witch and a vampire.
But the alchemical child had never been intended to serve as the first illumination in the Book of Life. She was supposed to follow the chemical wedding. After centuries of separation, it was time to replace the three pages Edward Kelley had removed from this precious book.
The page stubs were just visible in the valley of the Book of Life’s spine. I fitted the illustration of the chemical wedding into the gap, pressing the edge to its stub. Page and stub knit themselves together before my eyes, their severed threads joining up once more.
Lines of text raced across the page.
I took up the illumination of the orobouros and the firedrake shedding their blood to create new life and put it in its place.
A strange keening rose from the book. Corra chattered in warning.
Without hesitation and without fear, I slid the final page into Ashmole 782. The Book of Life was once more whole and complete.
A bloodcurdling howl tore what remained of the night in two. A wind rose at my feet, climbing up my body and lifting the hair away from my face and shoulders like strands of fire.
The force of the air turned the pages of the book, flipping them faster and faster. I tried to stop their progress, pressing my fingers against the vellum so that I could read the words that were emerging from the heart of the palimpsest as the alchemical illustrations faded. But there were too many to comprehend. Chris’s student was right. The Book of Life wasn’t simply a text.
It was a vast repository of knowledge: creature names and their stories, births and deaths, curses and spells, miracles wrought by magic and blood.
It was the story of us—weavers and the vampires who carried blood rage in their veins and the extraordinary children who were born to them.
It told me not only of my predecessors going back countless generations. It told me how such a miraculous creation was possible.
I struggled to absorb the tale the Book of Life told as the pages turned.
Here begins the lineage of the ancient tribe known as the Bright Born. Their father was Eternity and their mother Change, and Spirit nurtured them in her womb. . . .
My mind raced, trying to identify the alchemical text that was so similar.
. . . for when the three became one, their power was boundless as the night. . . .
And it came to pass that the absence of children was a burden to the Athanatoi. They sought the daughters. . . .