A Discovery of Witches

  daemons, and witches weren’t supposed to be real either.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?” Matthew asked.

  “No.” The daemon shuddered. Matthew had always been convinced that he could use his scientific skills to figure out what made vampires resistant to death and decay. The philosopher’s stone fit neatly into those dreams.

  “It’s the lost book,” Matthew said grimly. “I know it.”

  Like most creatures, Hamish had heard the stories. One version suggested the witches had stolen a precious book from the vampires, a book that held the secret of immortality. Another claimed the vampires had snatched an ancient spell book from the witches and then lost it. Some whispered that it was not a spell book at all, but a primer covering the basic traits of all four humanoid species on earth.

  Matthew had his own theories about what the book might contain. An explanation of why vampires were so difficult to kill and accounts of early human and creature history were only a small part of it.

  “You really think this alchemical manuscript is your book?” he asked. When Matthew nodded, Hamish let out his breath with a sigh. “No wonder the witches were gossiping. How did they discover Diana had found it?”

  Matthew turned, ferocious. “Who knows or cares? The problems began when they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.”

  Hamish was reminded once again that Matthew and his family really didn’t like witches.

  “I wasn’t the only one to overhear them on Sunday. Other vampires did, too. And then the daemons sensed that something interesting was happening, and—”

  “Now Oxford is crawling with creatures,” the daemon finished. “What a mess. Isn’t term about to start? The humans will be next. They’re about to return in droves.”

  “It gets worse.” Matthew’s expression was grim. “The manuscript wasn’t simply lost. It was under a spell, and Diana broke it. Then she sent it back to the stacks and shows no interest in recalling it. And I’m not the only one waiting for her to do so.”

  “Matthew,” Hamish said, voice tense, “are you protecting her from other witches?”

  “She doesn’t seem to recognize her own power. It puts her at risk. I couldn’t let them get to her first.” Matthew seemed suddenly, disconcertingly, vulnerable.

  “Oh, Matt,” Hamish said, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t interfere between Diana and her own people. You’ll only cause more trouble. Besides,” he continued, “no witch will be openly hostile to a Bishop. Her family’s too old and distinguished.”

  Nowadays creatures no longer killed one another except in self-defense. Aggression was frowned on in their world. Matthew had told Hamish what it was like in the old days, when blood feuds and vendettas had raged and creatures were constantly catching human attention.

  “The daemons are disorganized, and the vampires won’t dare to cross me. But the witches can’t be trusted.” Matthew rose, taking his wine to the fireplace.

  “Let Diana Bishop be,” Hamish advised. “Besides, if this manuscript is bewitched, you’re not going to be able to examine it.”

  “I will if she helps me,” Matthew said in a deceptively easy tone, staring into the fire.

  “Matthew,” the daemon said in the same voice he used to let his junior partners know when they were on thin ice, “leave the witch and the manuscript alone.”

  The vampire placed his wineglass carefully on the mantel and turned away. “I don’t think I can, Hamish. I’m . . . craving her.” Even saying the word made the hunger spread. When his hunger focused, grew insistent like this, not just any blood would do. His body demanded something more specific. If only he could taste it—taste Diana—he would be satisfied and the painful longing would subside.

  Hamish studied Matthew’s tense shoulders. He wasn’t surprised that his friend craved Diana Bishop. A vampire had to desire another creature more than anyone or anything else in order to mate, and cravings were rooted in desire. Hamish strongly suspected that Matthew—despite his previous fervent declarations that he was incapable of finding anyone who would stir that kind of feeling—was mating.

  “Then the real problem you’re facing at the moment is not the witches, nor Diana. And it’s certainly not some ancient manuscript that may or may not hold the answers to your questions.” Hamish let his words sink in before continuing. “You do realize you’re hunting her?”

  The vampire exhaled, relieved that it had been said aloud. “I know. I climbed into her window when she was sleeping. I follow her when she’s running. She resists my attempts to help her, and the more she does, the hungrier I feel.” He looked so perplexed that Hamish had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from smiling. Matthew’s women didn’t usually resist him. They did what he told them to do, dazzled by his good looks and charm. No wonder he was fascinated.

  “But I don’t need Diana’s blood—not physically. I won’t give in to this craving. Being around her needn’t be a problem.” Matthew’s face crumpled unexpectedly. “What am I saying? We can’t be near each other. We’ll attract attention.”

  “Not necessarily. We’ve spent a fair bit of time together, and no one has been bothered,” Hamish pointed out. In the early years of their friendship, the two had struggled to mask their differences from curious eyes. They were brilliant enough separately to attract human interest. When they were together—their dark heads bent to share a joke at dinner or sitting in the quadrangle in the early hours of the morning with empty champagne bottles at their feet—they were impossible to ignore.

  “It’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Matthew said impatiently.

  “Oh, yes, I forgot.” Hamish’s temper snapped. “Nobody cares what daemons do. But a vampire and a witch? That’s important. You’re the creatures who really matter in this world.”

  “Hamish!” Matthew protested. “You know that’s not how I feel.”

  “You have the characteristic vampire contempt for daemons, Matthew. Witches, too, I might add. Think long and hard how you feel about other creatures before you take this witch to bed.”

  “I have no intention of taking Diana to bed,” Matthew said, his voice acid.

  “Dinner is served, sir.” Jordan had been standing in the doorway, unobserved, for some time.

  “Thank God,” Hamish said with relief, getting up from his chair. The vampire was easier to manage if he was dividing his attention between the conversation and something—anything—else.

  Seated in the dining room at one end of a vast table designed to feed a house party’s worth of guests, Hamish tucked into the first of several courses while Matthew toyed with a soup spoon until his meal cooled. The vampire leaned over the bowl and sniffed.

  “Mushrooms and sherry?” he asked.

  “Yes. Jordan wanted to try something new, and since it didn’t contain anything you find objectionable, I let him.”

  Matthew didn’t ordinarily require much in the way of supplemental sustenance at Cadzow Lodge, but Jordan was a wizard with soup, and Hamish didn’t like to eat alone any more than he liked drinking alone.

  “I’m sorry, Hamish,” Matthew said, watching his friend eat.

  “I accept your apology, Matt,” Hamish said, the soup spoon hovering near his mouth. “But you cannot imagine how difficult it is to accept being a daemon or a witch. With vampires it’s definite and incontrovertible. You’re not a vampire, and then you are. No question, no room for doubt. The rest of us have to wait, watch, and wonder. It makes your vampire superiority doubly hard to take.”

  Matthew was twirling the spoon’s handle in his fingers like a baton. “Witches know they’re witches. They’re not like daemons at all,” he said with a frown.

  Hamish put his spoon down with a clatter and topped off his wineglass. “You know full well that having a witch for a parent is no guarantee. You can turn out perfectly ordinary. Or you can set your crib on fire. There’s no telling if, when, or how your powers are going to manifest.” Unlike Matthew, Hamish had a friend who was a witch. Ja
nine did his hair, which had never looked better, and made her own skin lotion, which was nothing short of miraculous. He suspected that witchcraft was involved.

  “It’s not a total surprise, though,” Matthew persisted, scooping some soup into his spoon and waving it slightly to cool it further. “Diana has centuries of family history to rely upon. It’s nothing like what you went through as a teenager.”

  “I had a breeze of a time,” Hamish said, recalling some of the daemonic coming-of-age stories he’d been privy to over the years.

  When Hamish was twelve, his life had gone topsy-turvy in the space of one afternoon. He had come to realize, over the long Scottish autumn, that he was far smarter than his teachers. Most children who reach twelve suspect this, but Hamish knew it with deeply upsetting certainty. He responded by feigning sickness so he could skip school and, when that no longer worked, by doing his schoolwork as rapidly as he could and abandoning all pretense of normalcy. In desperation his schoolmaster sent for someone from the university mathematics department to evaluate Hamish’s troublesome ability to solve in minutes problems that occupied his school-mates for a week or more.

  Jack Watson, a young daemon from the University of Glasgow with red hair and brilliant blue eyes, took one look at elfin Hamish Osborne and suspected that he, too, was a daemon. After going through the motions of a formal evaluation, which produced the expected documentary proof that Hamish was a mathematical prodigy whose mind did not fit within normal parameters, Watson invited him to attend lectures at the university. He also explained to the headmaster that the child could not be accommodated within a normal classroom without becoming a pyromaniac or something equally destructive.

  After that, Watson made a visit to the Osbornes’ modest home and told an astonished family how the world worked and exactly what kinds of creatures were in it. Percy Osborne, who came from a staunch Presbyterian background, resisted the notion of multiple supernatural and preternatural creatures until his wife pointed out that he had been raised to believe in witches—why not daemons and vampires, too? Hamish wept with relief, no longer feeling utterly alone. His mother hugged him fiercely and told him that she had always known he was special.

  While Watson was still sitting in front of their electric fire drinking tea with her husband and son, Jessica Osborne thought she might as well take the opportunity to broach other aspects of Hamish’s life that might make him feel different. She informed her son over chocolate biscuits that she also knew he was unlikely to marry the girl next door, who was infatuated with him. Instead Hamish was drawn to the girl’s elder brother, a strapping lad of fifteen who could kick a football farther than anyone else in the neighborhood. Neither Percy nor Jack seemed remotely surprised or distressed by the revelation.

  “Still,” Matthew said now, after his first sip of tepid soup, “Diana’s whole family must have expected her to be a witch—and she is, whether she uses her magic or not.”

  “I should think that would be every bit as bad as being among a bunch of clueless humans. Can you imagine the pressure? Not to mention the awful sense that your life didn’t belong to you?” Hamish shuddered. “I’d prefer blind ignorance.”

  “What did it feel like,” Matthew asked hesitantly, “the first day you woke up knowing you were a daemon?” The vampire didn’t normally ask such personal questions.

  “Like being reborn,” Hamish said. “It was every bit as powerful and confusing as when you woke up craving blood and hearing the grass grow, blade by blade. Everything looked different. Everything felt different. Most of the time I smiled like a fool who’d won the lottery, and the rest of the time I cried in my room. But I don’t think I believed it—you know, really believed it—until you smuggled me into the hospital.”

  Matthew’s first birthday present to Hamish, after they became friends, had involved a bottle of Krug and a trip to the John Radcliffe. There Matthew sent Hamish through the MRI while the vampire asked him a series of questions. Afterward they compared Hamish’s scans with those of an eminent brain surgeon on the staff, both of them drinking champagne and the daemon still in a surgical gown. Hamish made Matthew play the scans back repeatedly, fascinated by the way his brain lit up like a pinball machine even when he was replying to basic questions. It remained the best birthday present he’d ever received.

  “From what you’ve told me, Diana is where I was before that MRI,” Hamish said. “She knows she’s a witch. But she still feels she’s living a lie.”

  “She is living a lie,” Matthew growled, taking another sip of soup. “Diana’s pretending she’s human.”

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting to know why that’s the case? More important, can you be around someone like that? You don’t like lies.”

  Matthew looked thoughtful but didn’t respond.

  “There’s something else,” Hamish continued. “For someone who dislikes lies as much as you do, you keep a lot of secrets. If you need this witch, for whatever reason, you’re going to have to win her trust. And the only way to do that is by telling her things you don’t want her to know. She’s roused your protective instincts, and you’re going to have to fight them.”

  While Matthew mulled the situation over, Hamish turned the conversation to the latest catastrophes in the City and the government. The vampire calmed further, caught up in the intricacies of finance and policy.

  “You’ve heard about the murders in Westminster, I presume,” Hamish said when Matthew was completely at ease.

  “I have. Somebody needs to put a stop to it.”

  “You?” Hamish asked.

  “It’s not my job—yet.”

  Hamish knew that Matthew had a theory about the murders, one that was linked to his scientific research. “You still think the murders are a sign that vampires are dying out?”

  “Yes,” Matthew said.

  Matthew was convinced that creatures were slowly becoming extinct. Hamish had dismissed his friend’s hypotheses at first, but he was beginning to think Matthew might be right.

  They returned to less disturbing topics of conversation and, after dinner, retreated upstairs. The daemon had divided one of the lodge’s redundant reception rooms into a sitting room and a bedroom. The sitting room was dominated by a large, ancient chessboard with carved ivory and ebony pieces that by all rights should be in a museum under protective glass rather than in a drafty hunting lodge. Like the MRI, the chess set had been a present from Matthew.

  Their friendship had deepened over long evenings like this one, spent playing chess and discussing their work. One night Matthew began to tell Hamish stories of his past exploits. Now there was little about Matthew Clairmont that the daemon did not know, and the vampire was the only creature Hamish had ever met who wasn’t frightened of his powerful intellect.

  Hamish, as was his custom, sat down behind the black pieces.

  “Did we finish our last game?” Matthew asked, feigning surprise at the neatly arranged board.

  “Yes. You won,” Hamish said curtly, earning one of his friend’s rare, broad smiles.

  The two began to move their pieces, Matthew taking his time and Hamish moving swiftly and decisively when it was his turn. There was no sound except for the crackle of the fire and the ticking of the clock.

  After an hour of play, Hamish moved to the final stage of his plan.

  “I have a question.” His voice was careful as he waited for his friend to make his next move. “Do you want the witch for herself—or for her power over that manuscript?”

  “I don’t want her power!” Matthew exploded, making a bad decision with his rook, which Hamish quickly captured. He bowed his head, looking more than ever like a Renaissance angel focused on some celestial mystery. “Christ, I don’t know what I want.”

  Hamish sat as still as possible. “I think you do, Matt.”

  Matthew moved a pawn and made no reply.

  “The other creatures in Oxford,” Hamish continued, “they’ll know soon, if they don’t know already, that yo
u’re interested in more than this old book. What’s your endgame?”

  “I don’t know,” the vampire whispered.

  “Love? Tasting her? Making her like you?”

  Matthew snarled.

  “Very impressive,” Hamish said in a bored tone.

  “There’s a lot I don’t understand about all this, Hamish, but there are three things I do know,” Matthew said emphatically, picking up his wineglass from the floor by his feet. “I will not give in to this craving for her blood. I do not want to control her power. And I certainly have no wish to make her a vampire.” He shuddered at the thought.

  “That leaves love. You have your answer, then. You do know what you want.”

  Matthew swallowed a gulp of wine. “I want what I shouldn’t want, and I crave someone I can never have.”

  “You’re not afraid you’d hurt her?” Hamish asked gently. “You’ve had relationships with warm-blooded women before, and you’ve never harmed any of them.”

  Matthew’s heavy crystal wine goblet snapped in two. The bowl toppled to the floor, red wine spreading on the carpet. Hamish saw the glint of powdered glass between the vampire’s index finger and thumb.

  “Oh, Matt. Why didn’t you tell me?” Hamish governed his features, making sure that not a particle of his shock was evident.

  “How could I?” Matthew stared at his hands and ground the shards between his fingertips until they sparkled reddish black from the mixture of glass and blood. “You always had too much faith in me, you know.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Her name was Eleanor.” Matthew stumbled over the name. He dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, a fruitless attempt to wipe the image of her face from his mind. “My brother and I were fighting. Now I can’t even remember what the argument was about. Back then I wanted to destroy him with my bare hands. Eleanor tried to make me see reason. She got between us and—” The vampire’s voice broke. He cradled his head without bothering to clean the bloody residue from his already healed fingers. “I loved her so much, and I killed her.”

  “When was this?” Hamish whispered.

  Matthew lowered his hands, turning them over to study his long, strong fingers. “Ages ago. Yesterday. What does it matter?” he asked with a vampire’s disregard for time.

  “It matters enormously if you made this mistake when you were a newly minted vampire and not in control of your instincts and your hunger.”

  “Ah. Then it will also matter that I killed another woman, Cecilia Martin, just over a century ago. I wasn’t ‘a newly minted vampire’ then.” Matthew got up from his chair and walked to the windows. He wanted to run into the night’s blackness and disappear so he wouldn’t have to see the horror in Hamish’s eyes.

  “Are there more?” Hamish asked sharply.

  Matthew shook his head. “Two is enough. There can’t be a third. Not ever.”