A Discovery of Witches(10)

At half past three in the morning, I woke with a pounding heart, a stiff neck, and the strong taste of cloves in my mouth.

I got a fresh glass of water and closed the kitchen window. It was chilly, and I shivered at the touch of the damp air.

After a glance at my watch and some quick calculations, I decided to call home. It was only ten-thirty there, and Sarah and Em were as nocturnal as bats. Slipping around the rooms, I turned off all the lights except the one in my bedroom and picked up my mobile. I was out of my grimy clothes in a matter of minutes—how do you get so filthy in a library?—and into a pair of old yoga pants and a black sweater with a stretched-out neck. They were more comfortable than any pajamas.

The bed felt welcoming and firm underneath me, comforting me enough that I almost convinced myself a phone call home was unnecessary. But the water had not been able to remove the vestiges of cloves from my tongue, and I dialed the number.

“We’ve been waiting for your call,” were the first words I heard.

Witches.

I sighed. “Sarah, I’m fine.”

“All signs to the contrary.” As usual, my mother’s younger sister was not going to pull any punches. “Tabitha has been skittish all evening, Em got a very clear picture of you lost in the woods at night, and I haven’t been able to eat anything since breakfast.”

The real problem was that damn cat. Tabitha was Sarah’s baby and picked up any tension within the family with uncanny precision. “I’m fine. I had an unexpected encounter in the library tonight, that’s all.”

A click told me that Em had picked up the extension. “Why aren’t you celebrating Mabon?” she asked.

Emily Mather had been a fixture in my life for as long as I could remember. She and Rebecca Bishop had met as high-school students working in the summer at Plimoth Plantation, where they dug holes and pushed wheel-barrows for the archaeologists. They became best friends, then devoted pen pals when Emily went to Vassar and my mother to Harvard. Later the two reconnected in Cambridge when Em became a children’s librarian. After my parents’ death, Em’s long weekends in Madison soon led to a new job in the local elementary school. She and Sarah became inseparable partners, even though Em had maintained her own apartment in town and the two of them had made a big deal of never being seen heading into a bedroom together while I was growing up. This didn’t fool me, the neighbors, or anyone else living in town. Everybody treated them like the couple they were, regardless of where they slept. When I moved out of the Bishop house, Em moved in and had been there ever since. Like my mother and my aunt, Em came from a long line of witches.

“I was invited to the coven’s party but worked instead.”

“Did the witch from Bryn Mawr ask you to go?” Em was interested in the classicist, mostly (it had turned out over a fair amount of wine one summer night) because she’d once dated Gillian’s mother. “It was the sixties,” was all Em would say.

“Yes.” I sounded harassed. The two of them were convinced I was going to see the light and begin taking my magic seriously now that I was safely tenured. Nothing cast any doubt on this wishful prognostication, and they were always thrilled when I had any contact with a witch. “But I spent the evening with Elias Ashmole instead.”

“Who’s he?” Em asked Sarah.

“You know, that dead guy who collected alchemy books,” was Sarah’s muffled reply.

“Still here, you two,” I called into the phone.

“So who rattled your cage?” Sarah asked.

Given that both were witches, there was no point in trying to hide anything. “I met a vampire in the library. One I’ve never seen before, named Matthew Clairmont.”

There was silence on Em’s end as she flipped through her mental card file of notable creatures. Sarah was quiet for a moment, too, deciding whether or not to explode.

“I hope he’s easier to get rid of than the daemons you have a habit of attracting,” she said sharply.

“Daemons haven’t bothered me since I stopped acting.”

“No, there was that daemon who followed you into the Beinecke Library when you first started working at Yale, too,” Em corrected me. “He was just wandering down the street and came looking for you.”

“He was mentally unstable,” I protested. Like using witchcraft on the washing machine, the fact that I’d somehow caught the attention of a single, curious daemon shouldn’t count against me.

“You draw creatures like flowers draw bees, Diana. But daemons aren’t half as dangerous as vampires. Stay away from him,” Sarah said tightly.

“I have no reason to seek him out.” My hands traveled to my neck again. “We have nothing in common.”

“That’s not the point,” Sarah said, voice rising. “Witches, vampires, and daemons aren’t supposed to mix. You know that. Humans are more likely to notice us when we do. No daemon or vampire is worth the risk.” The only creatures in the world that Sarah took seriously were other witches. Humans struck her as unfortunate little beings blind to the world around them. Daemons were perpetual teenagers who couldn’t be trusted. Vampires were well below cats and at least one step below mutts within her hierarchy of creatures.

“You’ve told me the rules before, Sarah.”

“Not everyone obeys the rules, honey,” Em observed. “What did he want?”