“She’ll be there.” He closed the lid on the laptop, effectively shutting out his brother and his final demands.
“It’s too soon,” I repeated.
“Yes, it is—far too soon for me to travel to Venice and face Gerbert and Satu.” Matthew’s hands were heavy on my shoulders. “If we want the covenant formally set aside—and we do—one of us must make the case to the Congregation.”
“What about the children?” I was grasping at straws.
“The three of us will miss you, but we will manage. If I look sufficiently inept in front of Ysabeau and Sarah, I won’t have to change a single diaper while you’re gone.” Matthew’s fingers increased in pressure, as did the sense of responsibility resting on my shoulders. “You must do this. For me. For us. For every member of our family who has been harmed because of the covenant: Emily, Rebecca, Stephen, even Philippe. And for our children, so that they can grow up in love instead of fear.”
There was no way I could refuse to go to Venice after that.
The Bishop-Clairmont family swung into action, eager to help ready our case for the Congregation. It was a collaborative, multispecies effort that began with honing our argument down to its essential core. Hard as it was to strip away the insults and injuries, large and small, that we had suffered, success depended on being able to make our request not seem like a personal vendetta.
In the end it was breathtakingly simple—at least it was after Hamish took charge. All we needed to do, he said, was establish beyond a doubt that the covenant had been drawn up because of a fear of miscegenation and the desire to keep bloodlines artificially pure to preserve the power balance among creatures.
Like most simple arguments, ours required hours of mind-numbing work. We all contributed our talents to the project. Phoebe, who was a gifted researcher, searched the archives at Sept-Tours for documents that touched on the covenant’s inception and the Congregation’s first meetings and debates. She called Rima, who was thrilled to be asked to do something other than filing, and had her search for supporting documents in the Congregation library on Isola della Stella.
These documents helped us piece together a coherent picture of what the founders of the Congregation had truly feared: that relationships between creatures would result in children who were neither daemon nor vampire nor witch but same terrifying combination, muddying the ancient, supposedly pure creature bloodlines. Such a concern was warranted given a twelfth-century understanding of biology and the value that was placed on inheritance and lineage at that time. And Philippe de Clermont had had the political acumen to suspect that the children of such unions would be powerful enough to rule the world if they so desired.
What was more difficult, not to mention more dangerous, was demonstrating that this fear had actually contributed to the decline of the otherworldly creatures. Centuries of inbreeding meant that vampires found it difficult to make new vampires, witches were less powerful, and daemons were increasingly prone to madness. To make this part of our case, the Bishop-Clairmonts needed to expose both the blood rage and the weavers in our family.
I wrote up a history of weavers using information from the Book of Life. I explained that the weavers’ creative power was difficult to control and made them vulnerable to the animosity of their fellow witches. Over time witches grew complacent and had less use for new spells and charms. The old ones worked fine, and the weavers went from being treasured members of their communities to hunted outcasts. Sarah and I sat down together and drew up an account of my parents’ lives in painful detail to drive this point home—my father’s desperate attempts to hide his talents, Knox’s efforts to discover them, and their terrible deaths.
Matthew and Ysabeau recorded a similarly difficult tale, one of madness and the destructive power of anger. Fernando and Gallowglass scoured Philippe’s private papers for evidence of how he had kept his mate safe from extermination and their joint decision to protect Matthew in spite of his showing signs of the illness. Both Philippe and Ysabeau believed that careful upbringing and hard-won control would be a counterweight to whatever illness was present in his blood—a classic example of nurture over nature. And Matthew confessed that his own failures with Benjamin demonstrated just how dangerous blood rage could be if left to develop on its own.
Janet arrived at Les Revenants with the Gowdie grimoire and a copy of her great-grandmother Isobel’s trial transcript. The trial records described her amorous relationship with the devil known as Nickie-Ben in great detail, including his nefarious bite. The grimoire proved that Isobel was a weaver of spells, as she proudly identified her unique magical creations and the prices that she’d demanded for sharing them with her sisters in the Highlands. Isobel also identified her lover as Benjamin Fox—Matthew’s son. Benjamin had actually signed his name into the family record found in the front of the book.
“It’s still not sufficient,” Matthew worried, looking over the papers. “We still can’t explain why weavers and blood-rage vampires like you and I can conceive children.”
I could explain it. The Book of Life had shared that secret with me. But I didn’t want to say anything until Miriam and Chris delivered the scientific evidence.
I was beginning to think I would have to make our case to the Congregation without their help when a car pulled into the courtyard.
Matthew frowned. “Who could that be?” he asked, putting down his pen and going to the window. “Miriam and Chris are here. Something must be wrong at the Yale lab.”
Once the pair were inside and Matthew had received assurances that the research team he’d left in New Haven was thriving, Chris handed me a thick envelope.
“You were right,” he said. “Nice work, Professor Bishop.”
I hugged the packet to my chest, unspeakably relieved. Then I handed it to Matthew.
He tore into the envelope, his eyes racing over the lines of text and the black-and-white ideograms that accompanied them. He looked up, his lips parted in astonishment.
“I was surprised, too,” Miriam admitted. “As long as we approached daemons, vampires, and witches as separate species distantly related to humans but distinct from one another, the truth was going to elude us.”
“Then Diana told us the Book of Life was about what joined us together, not what separated us,” Chris continued. “She asked us to compare her genome to both the daemon genome and the genomes of other witches.”
“It was all there in the creature chromosome,” Miriam said, “hiding in plain sight.”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said, looking blank.
“Diana was able to conceive Matthew’s child because they both have daemon blood in them,” Chris explained. “It’s too early to know for sure, but our hypothesis is that weavers are descended from ancient witch-daemon unions. Blood-rage vampires like Matthew are produced when a vampire with the blood-rage gene creates another vampire from a human with some daemon DNA.”