A Discovery of Witches Read online

  Unfortunately for that doctor, I’d gone to the Serengeti with my parents as a child and had witnessed such a pursuit. The ibex lost. It had made quite an impression on me.

  Since then I’d tried medication and meditation, but nothing was better for keeping panic at bay than physical activity. In Oxford it was rowing each morning before the college crews turned the narrow river into a thorough-fare. But the university was not yet in session, and the river would be clear this afternoon.

  My feet crunched against the crushed gravel paths that led to the boathouses. I waved at Pete, the boatman who prowled around with wrenches and tubs of grease, trying to put right what the undergraduates mangled in the course of their training. I stopped at the seventh boathouse and bent over to ease the stitch in my side before retrieving the key from the top of the light outside the boathouse doors.

  Racks of white and yellow boats greeted me inside. There were big, eight-seated boats for the first men’s crew, slightly leaner boats for the women, and other boats of decreasing quality and size. A sign hung from the bow of one shiny new boat that hadn’t been rigged yet, instructing visitors that NO ONE MAY TAKE THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN OUT OF THIS HOUSE WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE NCBC PRESIDENT. The boat’s name was freshly stenciled on its side in a Victorian-style script, in homage to the New College graduate who had created the character.

  At the back of the boathouse, a whisper of a boat under twelve inches wide and more than twenty-five feet long rested in a set of slings positioned at hip level. God bless Pete, I thought. He’d taken to leaving the scull on the floor of the boathouse. A note resting on the seat read, “College training next Monday. Boat will be back in racks.”

  I kicked off my sneakers, picked two oars with curving blades from the stash near the doors, and carried them down to the dock. Then I went back for the boat.

  I plopped the scull gently into the water and put one foot on the seat to keep it from floating away while I threaded the oars into the oarlocks. Holding both oars in one hand like a pair of oversize chopsticks, I carefully stepped into the boat and pushed the dock with my left hand. The scull floated out onto the river.

  Rowing was a religion for me, composed of a set of rituals and movements repeated until they became a meditation. The rituals began the moment I touched the equipment, but its real magic came from the combination of precision, rhythm, and strength that rowing required. Since my undergraduate days, rowing had instilled a sense of tranquillity in me like nothing else.

  My oars dipped into the water and skimmed along the surface. I picked up the pace, powering through each stroke with my legs and feeling the water when my blade swept back and slipped under the waves. The wind was cold and sharp, cutting through my clothes with every stroke.

  As my movements flowed into a seamless cadence, it felt as though I were flying. During these blissful moments, I was suspended in time and space, nothing but a weightless body on a moving river. My swift little boat darted along, and I swung in perfect unison with the boat and its oars. I closed my eyes and smiled, the events of the day fading in significance.

  The sky darkened behind my closed lids, and the booming sound of traffic overhead indicated that I’d passed underneath the Donnington Bridge. Coming through into the sunlight on the other side, I opened my eyes—and felt the cold touch of a vampire’s gaze on my sternum.

  A figure stood on the bridge, his long coat flapping around his knees. Though I couldn’t see his face clearly, the vampire’s considerable height and bulk suggested that it was Matthew Clairmont. Again.

  I swore and nearly dropped one oar. The City of Oxford dock was nearby. The notion of pulling an illegal maneuver and crossing the river so that I could smack the vampire upside his beautiful head with whatever piece of boat equipment was handy was very tempting. While formulating my plan, I spotted a slight woman standing on the dock wearing paint-stained overalls. She was smoking a cigarette and talking into a mobile phone.

  This was not a typical sight for the City of Oxford boathouse.

  She looked up, her eyes nudging my skin. A daemon. She twisted her mouth into a wolfish smile and said something into the phone.

  This was just too weird. First Clairmont and now a host of creatures appearing whenever he did? Abandoning my plan, I poured my unease into my rowing.

  I managed to get down the river, but the serenity of the outing had evaporated. Turning the boat in front of the Isis Tavern, I spotted Clairmont standing beside one of the pub’s tables. He’d managed to get there from the Donnington Bridge—on foot—in less time than I’d done it in a racing scull.

  Pulling hard on both oars, I lifted them two feet off the water like the wings of an enormous bird and glided straight into the tavern’s rickety wooden dock. By the time I’d climbed out, Clairmont had crossed the twenty-odd feet of grass lying between us. His weight pushed the floating platform down slightly in the water, and the boat wiggled in adjustment.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, stepping clear of the blade and across the rough planks to where the vampire now stood. My breath was ragged from exertion, my cheeks flushed. “Are you and your friends stalking me?”

  Clairmont frowned. “They aren’t my friends, Dr. Bishop.”

  “No? I haven’t seen so many vampires, witches, and daemons in one place since my aunts dragged me to a pagan summer festival when I was thirteen. If they’re not your friends, why are they always hanging around you?” I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead and pushed the damp hair away from my face.

  “Good God,” the vampire murmured incredulously. “The rumors are true.”

  “What rumors?” I said impatiently.

  “You think these . . . things want to spend time with me?” Clairmont’s voice dripped with contempt and something that sounded like surprise. “Unbelievable.”

  I worked my fleece pullover up above my shoulders and yanked it off. Clairmont’s eyes flickered to my collarbones, over my bare arms, and down to my fingertips. I felt uncharacteristically naked in my familiar rowing clothes.

  “Yes,” I snapped. “I’ve lived in Oxford. I visit every year. The only thing that’s been different this time is you. Since you showed up last night, I’ve been pushed out of my seat in the library, stared at by strange vampires and daemons, and threatened by unfamiliar witches.”

  Clairmont’s arms rose slightly, as if he were going to take me by the shoulders and shake me. Though I was by no means short at just under five-seven, he was so tall that my neck had to bend sharply so I could make eye contact. Acutely aware of his size and strength relative to my own, I stepped back and crossed my arms, calling upon my professional persona to steel my nerves.

  “They’re not interested in me, Dr. Bishop. They’re interested in you.”

  “Why? What could they possibly want from me?”

  “Do you really not know why every daemon, witch, and vampire south of the Midlands is following you?” There was a note of disbelief in his voice, and the vampire’s expression suggested he was seeing me for the first time.

  “No,” I said, my eyes on two men enjoying their afternoon pint at a nearby table. Thankfully, they were absorbed in their own conversation. “I’ve done nothing in Oxford except read old manuscripts, row on the river, prepare for my conference, and keep to myself. It’s all I’ve ever done here. There’s no reason for any creature to pay this kind of attention to me.”

  “Think, Diana.” Clairmont’s voice was intense. A ripple of something that wasn’t fear passed across my skin when he said my first name. “What have you been reading?”

  His eyelids dropped over his strange eyes, but not before I’d seen their avid expression.

  My aunts had warned me that Matthew Clairmont wanted something. They were right.

  He fixed his odd, gray-rimmed black eyes on me once more. “They’re following you because they believe you’ve found something lost many years ago,” he said reluctantly. “They want it back, and
they think you can get it for them.”

  I thought about the manuscripts I’d consulted over the past few days. My heart sank. There was only one likely candidate for all this attention.

  “If they’re not your friends, how do you know what they want?”

  “I hear things, Dr. Bishop. I have very good hearing,” he said patiently, reverting to his characteristic formality. “I’m also fairly observant. At a concert on Sunday evening, two witches were talking about an American—a fellow witch—who found a book in Bodley’s Library that had been given up for lost. Since then I’ve noticed many new faces in Oxford, and they make me uneasy.”

  “It’s Mabon. That explains why the witches are in Oxford.” I was trying to match his patient tone, though he hadn’t answered my last question.

  Smiling sardonically, Clairmont shook his head. “No, it’s not the equinox. It’s the manuscript.”

  “What do you know about Ashmole 782?” I asked quietly.

  “Less than you do,” said Clairmont, his eyes narrowing to slits. It made him look even more like a large, lethal beast. “I’ve never seen it. You’ve held it in your hands. Where is it now, Dr. Bishop? You weren’t so foolish as to leave it in your room?”

  I was aghast. “You think I stole it? From the Bodleian? How dare you suggest such a thing!”

  “You didn’t have it Monday night,” he said. “And it wasn’t on your desk today either.”

  “You are observant,” I said sharply, “if you could see all that from where you were sitting. I returned it Friday, if you must know.” It occurred to me, belatedly, that he might have rifled through the things on my desk. “What’s so special about the manuscript that you’d snoop through a colleague’s work?”

  He winced slightly, but my triumph at catching him doing something so inappropriate was blunted by a twinge of fear that this vampire was following me as closely as he obviously was.

  “Simple curiosity,” he said, baring his teeth. Sarah had not misled me—vampires don’t have fangs.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to believe that.”

  “I don’t care what you believe, Dr. Bishop. But you should be on your guard. These creatures are serious. And when they come to understand what an unusual witch you are?” Clairmont shook his head.

  “What do you mean?” All the blood drained from my head, leaving me dizzy.

  “It’s uncommon these days for a witch to have so much . . . potential.” Clairmont’s voice dropped to a purr that vibrated in the back of his throat. “Not everyone can see it—yet—but I can. You shimmer with it when you concentrate. When you’re angry, too. Surely the daemons in the library will sense it soon, if they haven’t already.”

  “I appreciate the warning. But I don’t need your help.” I prepared to stalk away, but his hand shot out and gripped my upper arm, stopping me in my tracks.

  “Don’t be too sure of that. Be careful. Please.” Clairmont hesitated, his face shaken out of its perfect lines as he wrestled with something. “Especially if you see that wizard again.”

  I stared fixedly at the hand on my arm. Clairmont released me. His lids dropped, shuttering his eyes.

  My row back to the boathouse was slow and steady, but the repetitive movements weren’t able to carry away my lingering confusion and unease. Every now and again, there was a gray blur on the towpath, but nothing else caught my attention except for people bicycling home from work and a very ordinary human walking her dog.

  After returning the equipment and locking the boathouse, I set off down the towpath at a measured jog.

  Matthew Clairmont was standing across the river in front of the University Boat House.

  I began to run, and when I looked back over my shoulder, he was gone.

  Chapter 5

  After dinner I sat down on the sofa by the sitting room’s dormant fireplace and switched on my laptop. Why would a scientist of Clairmont’s caliber want to see an alchemical manuscript—even one under a spell—so much that he’d sit at the Bodleian all day, across from a witch, and read through old notes on morphogenesis? His business card was tucked into one of the pockets of my bag. I fished it out, propping it up against the screen.

  On the Internet, below an unrelated link to a murder mystery and the unavoidable hits from social-networking sites, a string of biographical listings looked promising: his faculty Web page, a Wikipedia article, and links to the current fellows of the Royal Society.

  I clicked on the faculty Web page and snorted. Matthew Clairmont was one of those faculty members who didn’t like to post any information—even academic information—on the Net. On Yale’s Web site, a visitor could get contact information and a complete vita for practically every member of the faculty. Oxford clearly had a different attitude toward privacy. No wonder a vampire taught here.

  There hadn’t been a hit for Clairmont at the hospital, though the affiliation was on his card. I typed “John Radcliffe Neurosciences” into the search box and was led to an overview of the department’s services. There wasn’t a single reference to a physician, however, only a lengthy list of research interests. Clicking systematically through the terms, I finally found him on a page dedicated to the “frontal lobe,” though there was no additional information.

  The Wikipedia article was no help at all, and the Royal Society’s site was no better. Anything useful hinted at on the main pages was hidden behind passwords. I had no luck imagining what Clairmont’s user name and password might be and was refused access to anything at all after my sixth incorrect guess.

  Frustrated, I entered the vampire’s name into the search engines for scientific journals.

  “Yes.” I sat back in satisfaction.

  Matthew Clairmont might not have much of a presence on the Internet, but he was certainly active in the scholarly literature. After clicking a box to sort the results by date, I was provided with a snapshot of his intellectual history.

  My initial sense of triumph faded. He didn’t have one intellectual history. He had four.

  The first began with the brain. Much of it was beyond me, but Clairmont seemed to have made a scientific and medical reputation at the same time by studying how the brain’s frontal lobe processes urges and cravings. He’d made several major breakthroughs related to the role that neural mechanisms play in delayed-gratification responses, all of which involved the prefrontal cortex. I opened a new browser window to view an anatomical diagram and locate which bit of the brain was at issue.

  Some argued that all scholarship is thinly veiled autobiography. My pulse jumped. Given that Clairmont was a vampire, I sincerely hoped delayed gratification was something he was good at.

  My next few clicks showed that Clairmont’s work took a surprising turn away from the brain and toward wolves—Norwegian wolves, to be precise. He must have spent a considerable amount of time in the Scandinavian nights in the course of his research—which posed no problem for a vampire, considering their body temperature and ability to see in the dark. I tried to imagine him in a parka and grubby clothes with a notepad in the snow—and failed.

  After that, the first references to blood appeared.

  While the vampire was with the wolves in Norway, he’d started analyzing their blood to determine family groups and inheritance patterns. Clairmont had isolated four clans among the Norwegian wolves, three of which were indigenous. The fourth he traced back to a wolf that had arrived in Norway from Sweden or Finland. There was, he concluded, a surprising amount of mating across packs, leading to an exchange of genetic material that influenced species evolution.

  Now he was tracing inherited traits among other animal species as well as in humans. Many of his most recent publications were technical—methods for staining tissue samples and processes for handling particularly old and fragile DNA.

  I grabbed a fistful of my hair and held tight, hoping the pressure would increase blood circulation and get my tired synapses firing again. This made no sense. No scientist could produce this much work in so
many different subdisciplines. Acquiring the skills alone would take more than a lifetime—a human lifetime, that is.

  A vampire might well pull it off, if he had been working on problems like this over the span of decades. Just how old was Matthew Clairmont behind that thirty-something face?

  I got up and made a fresh cup of tea. With the mug steaming in one hand, I rooted through my bag until I found my mobile and punched in a number with my thumb.

  One of the best things about scientists was that they always had their phones. They answered them on the second ring, too.

  “Christopher Roberts.”

  “Chris, it’s Diana Bishop.”

  “Diana!” Chris’s voice was warm, and there was music blaring in the background. “I heard you won another prize for your book. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” I said, shifting in my seat. “It was quite unexpected.”

  “Not to me. Speaking of which, how’s the research going? Have you finished writing your keynote?”

  “Nowhere near,” I said. That’s what I should be doing, not tracking down vampires on the Internet. “Listen, I’m sorry to bother you in the lab. Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” He shouted for someone to turn down the noise. It remained at the same volume. “Hold on.” There were muffled sounds, then quiet. “That’s better,” he said sheepishly. “The new kids are pretty high energy at the beginning of the semester.”

  “Grad students are always high energy, Chris.” I felt a tiny pang at missing the rush of new classes and new students.

  “You know it. But what about you? What do you need?”

  Chris and I had taken up our faculty positions at Yale in the same year, and he wasn’t supposed to get tenure either. He’d beaten me to it by a year, picking up a MacArthur Fellowship along the way for his brilliant work as a molecular biologist.