The Book of Life Read online

  Becca frowned, indicating she was playing this game under protest.

  Back at Matthew's side, Jack reached for Philip.

  "No. I'll keep him." Matthew's eyes were getting ominously dark, too. "Take Ysabeau home, Jack. Everybody else go, too."

  "But, Matthieu," Ysabeau protested. Fernando whispered something in her ear. Reluctantly she nodded. "Come, Jack. On the way to Sept-Tours, I will tell you a story about the time Baldwin attempted to banish me from Jerusalem. Many men died."

  After delivering that thinly veiled warning, Ysabeau swept Jack from the room.

  "Thank you, Maman," Matthew murmured. He was still supporting Philip's weight, and his arms shook alarmingly.

  "Call if you need me," Marcus whispered as he headed out the door.

  As soon as it was just the four of us in the house, I took Philip from Matthew's lap and plunked both babies in the cradle by the fireplace.

  "Too heavy," Matthew said wearily as I tried to lift him from the chair. "Stay here."

  "You will not stay here." I studied the situation and decided on a solution. I marshaled the air to support my hastily woven levitation spell. "Stand back, I'm going to try magic." Matthew made a faint sound that might have been an attempt at laughter.

  "Don't. The floor's okay," he said, his words slurring with exhaustion.

  "The bed's better," I replied firmly as we skimmed over the floor to the elevator.

  During our first week at Les Revenants, Matthew permitted Ysabeau to come and feed him. He regained some of his strength and a bit more mobility. He still couldn't walk, but he could stand provided he had assistance, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  "You're making such quick progress," I said brightly, as though everything in the world were rosy.

  Inside my head it was very dark indeed. And I was screaming in anger, fear, and frustration as the man I loved struggled to find his way through the shadows of the past that had overtaken him in Chelm.

  Sol in Pisces

  When the sun is in Pisces, expect weariness and sadness. Those who can banish feare will experience forgiveness and understanding. You will be called to work in faraway places.

  --Anonymous English Commonplace Book, c. 1590,

  Goncalves MS 4890, f. 10r

  "I want some of my books," Matthew said with deceptive casualness. He rattled off a list of titles. "Hamish will know where to find them." His friend had gone back to London briefly, then returned to France. Hamish had been ensconced in Matthew's rooms at Sept-Tours ever since. He spent his days trying to keep clueless bureaucrats from ruining the world economy and his nights depleting Baldwin's wine cellar.

  Hamish arrived at Les Revenants with the books, and Matthew asked him to sit and have a glass of Champagne. Hamish seemed to understand that this attempt at normalcy was a turning point in Matthew's recovery.

  "Why not? Man cannot live on claret alone." With a subtle glance at me, Hamish indicated that he would take care of Matthew.

  Hamish was still there three hours later--and the two of them were playing chess. My knees weakened at the unexpected sight of Matthew sitting on the white side of the board, considering his options. Since Matthew's hands were still useless--the hand was a terribly complicated bit of anatomical engineering, it turned out--Hamish moved the pieces according to Matthew's encoded commands.

  "E4," Matthew said.

  "The Central Variation? How daring of you." Hamish moved one of the white pawns.

  "You accepted the Queen's Gambit," Matthew said mildly. "What did you expect?"

  "I expect you to mix things up. Once upon a time, you refused to put your queen at risk. Now you do it every game." Hamish frowned. "It's a poor strategy."

  "The queen did just fine last time," I whispered in Matthew's ear, and he smiled.

  When Hamish left, Matthew asked me to read to him. It was now a ritual for us to sit in front of the fire, the snow falling past the windows and one of Matthew's beloved books in my hand: Abelard, Marlowe, Darwin, Thoreau, Shelley, Rilke. Often Matthew's lips moved along with the words as I uttered them, proving to me--and, more important, to him--that his mind was as sharp and whole as ever.

  "'I am the daughter of Earth and Water, / And the nursling of the Sky,'" I read from his battered copy of Prometheus Unbound.

  "'I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores,'" Matthew whispered. "'I change, but I cannot die.'"

  After Hamish's visit our society at Les Revenants gradually expanded. Jack was invited to join Matthew and to bring his cello with him. He played Beethoven for hours on end, and not only did the music have positive effects on my husband, it unfailingly put my daughter to sleep as well.

  Matthew was improving, but he still had a long way to go. When he rested fitfully, I dozed at his side and hoped that the babies wouldn't stir. He let me help him bathe and dress, though he hated himself--and me--for it. Whenever I thought I couldn't endure another moment of watching him struggle, I focused on some patch of skin that had knit itself back together. Like the shadows of Chelm, the scars would never fully disappear.

  When Sarah came to see him, her worry was palpable. But Matthew was not the cause of her concern.

  "How much magic are you using to stay upright?" Accustomed to living with bat-eared vampires, she had waited until I walked her to the car before she asked.

  "I'm fine," I said, opening the car door for her.

  "That wasn't my question. I can see you're fine. That's what worries me," Sarah said. "Why aren't you at death's door?"

  "It doesn't matter," I said, dismissing her question.

  "It will when you collapse," Sarah retorted. "You can't possibly keep this up."

  "You forget, Sarah: The Bishop-Clairmont family specializes in the impossible." I closed the car door to muffle her ongoing protests.

  I should have known that my aunt would not be silenced so easily. Baldwin showed up twenty-four hours after her departure--uninvited and unannounced.

  "This is a bad habit of yours," I said, thinking back to the moment he'd returned to Sept-Tours and stripped the sheets from our bed. "Surprise us again and I'll put enough wards on this house to repel the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

  "They haven't been spotted in Limousin since Hugh died." Baldwin kissed me on each cheek, taking time in between to make a slow assessment of my scent.

  "Matthew isn't receiving visitors today," I said, drawing away. "He had a difficult night."

  "I'm not here to see Matthew." Baldwin fixed eagle eyes on me. "I'm here to warn you that if you don't start taking care of yourself, I will put myself in charge here."

  "You have no--"

  "Oh, but I do. You are my sister. Your husband is not able to look after your welfare at the moment. Look after it yourself or accept the consequences." Baldwin's voice was implacable.

  The two of us faced off in silence for a few moments. He sighed when I refused to break my stare.

  "It's really quite simple, Diana. If you collapse--and based on your scent, I'd say you have a week at most before that happens--Matthew's instincts will demand that he try to protect his mate. That will distract him from his primary job, which is to heal."

  Baldwin had a point.

  "The best way to handle a vampire mate--especially one with blood rage like Matthew--is to give him no reason to think you need any protection. Take care of yourself--first and always," Baldwin said. "Seeing you healthy and happy will do Matthew more good, mentally and physically, than his maker's blood or Jack's music. Do we understand each other?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm so glad." Baldwin's mouth lifted into a smile. "Answer your e-mail while you're at it. I send you messages. You don't answer. It's aggravating."

  I nodded, afraid that if I opened my mouth, detailed instructions on just what he could do with his e-mail might pop out.

  Baldwin stuck his head into the great hall to check on Matthew. He pronounced him utterly useless because he could not engage in wrestling, warfare, or other b
rotherly pursuits. Then, mercifully, he left.

  Dutifully I opened my laptop.

  Hundreds of messages awaited, most from the Congregation demanding explanations and Baldwin giving me orders.

  I lowered the lid on my computer and returned to Matthew and my children.

  *

  A few nights after Baldwin's visit, I woke to the sensation of a cold finger jerking against my spine as it traced the trunk of the tree on my neck.

  The finger moved in barely controlled fits and starts to my shoulders, where it found the outline left by the goddess's arrow and the star left by Satu Jarvinen.

  Slowly the finger traveled down to the dragon that encircled my hips.

  Matthew's hands were working again.

  "I needed the first thing I touched to be you," he said, realizing he'd awakened me.

  I was barely able to breathe, and any response on my part was out of the question. But my unspoken words wanted to be set free nevertheless. The magic rose within me, letters forming phrases under my skin.

  "The price of power." Matthew's hand circled my forearm, his thumb stroking the words as they appeared. The movement was rough and irregular at first, but it grew smoother and steadier with every pass over my skin. He had observed the changes in me since I'd become the Book of Life but never mentioned them until now.

  "So much to say," he murmured, his lips brushing my neck. His fingers delved, parted my flesh, touched my core.

  I gasped. It had been so long, but his touch was still familiar. Matthew's fingers went unerringly to the places that brought me the most pleasure.

  "But you don't need words to tell me what you feel," Matthew said. "I see you, even when you hide from the rest of the world. I hear you, even when you're silent."

  It was a pure definition of love. Like magic, the letters amassing on my forearms disappeared as Matthew stripped my soul bare and guided my body to a place where words were indeed unnecessary. I trembled through my release, and though Matthew's touch became light as a feather, his fingers never stopped moving.

  "Again," he said, when my pulse quickened once more.

  "It's not possible," I said. Then he did something that made me gasp.

  "Impossible n'est pas francais," Matthew replied, giving me a nip on the ear. "And next time your brother comes to call, tell him not to worry. I'm perfectly able to take care of my wife."

  Sol in Aries

  The signe of the ram signifies dominion and wisdom. While the sun resides in Aries, you will see growth in all your works. It is a time for new beginnings.

  --Anonymous English Commonplace Book, c. 1590,

  Goncalves MS 4890, f. 7v

  "Answer your fucking e-mail!"

  Apparently Baldwin was having a bad day. Like Matthew, I was beginning to appreciate the ways that modern technology allowed us to keep the other vampires in the family at arm's length.

  "I've put them off as long as I can." Baldwin glowered at me from the computer screen, the city of Berlin visible through the huge windows behind him. "You are going to Venice, Diana."

  "No I'm not." We had been having some version of this conversation for weeks.

  "Yes you are." Matthew leaned over my shoulder. He was walking now, slowly but just as silently as ever. "Diana will meet with the Congregation, Baldwin. But speak to her like that again and I'll cut your tongue out."

  "Two weeks," Baldwin said, completely unfazed by his brother's threat. "They've agreed to give her two more weeks."

  "It's too soon." The physical effects of Benjamin's torture were fading, but it had left Matthew's control over his blood rage as thin as a knife's edge and his temper just as sharp.

  "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 Is
obel'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."