A Discovery of Witches(15)

The vampire dragged his eyes from my face. “Thank you, Valerie. I appreciate your assistance.”

“Of course, Professor Clairmont,” Valerie said, gazing at him raptly and turning pink. The vampire had charmed her with no more than a thank-you. I snorted. “Do let us know if you need anything else,” she said, returning to her bolt-hole by the entrance.

Clairmont picked up the first box, undid the string with his long fingers, and glanced across the table. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

Matthew Clairmont had taken the upper hand. I’d had enough dealings with senior colleagues to recognize the signs and to know that any response would only make the situation worse. I opened my computer, punched the power button with more force than necessary, and picked up the first of my manuscripts. Once the box was unfastened, I placed its leather-bound contents on the cradle in front of me.

Over the next hour and a half, I read the first pages at least thirty times. I started at the beginning, reading familiar lines of poetry attributed to George Ripley that promised to reveal the secrets of the philosopher’s stone. Given the surprises of the morning, the poem’s descriptions of how to make the Green Lion, create the Black Dragon, and concoct a mystical blood from chemical ingredients were even more opaque than usual.

Clairmont, however, got a prodigious amount done, covering pages of creamy paper with rapid strokes of his Montblanc Meisterstück mechanical pencil. Every now and again, he’d turn over a sheet with a rustle that set my teeth on edge and begin once more.

Occasionally Mr. Johnson drifted through the room, making sure no one was defacing the books. The vampire kept writing. I glared at both of them.

At 10:45, there was a familiar tingle when Gillian Chamberlain bustled into the Selden End. She started toward me—no doubt to tell me what a splendid time she’d had at the Mabon dinner. Then she saw the vampire and dropped her plastic bag full of pencils and paper. He looked up and stared until she scampered back to the medieval wing.

At 11:10, I felt the insidious pressure of a kiss on my neck. It was the confused, caffeine-addicted daemon from the music reference room. He was repeatedly twirling a set of white plastic headphones around his fingers, then unwinding them to send them spinning through the air. The daemon saw me, nodded at Matthew, and sat at one of the computers in the center of the room. A sign was taped to the screen: OUT OF ORDER. TECHNICIAN CALLED. He remained there for the next several hours, glancing over his shoulder and then at the ceiling periodically as if trying to figure out where he was and how he’d gotten there.

I returned my attention to George Ripley, Clairmont’s eyes cold on the top of my head.

At 11:40, icy patches bloomed between my shoulder blades.

This was the last straw. Sarah always said that one in ten beings was a creature, but in Duke Humfrey’s this morning the creatures outnumbered humans five to one. Where had they all come from?

I stood abruptly and whirled around, frightening a cherubic, tonsured vampire with an armful of medieval missals just as he was lowering himself into a chair that was much too small for him. He let out a squeak at the sudden, unwanted attention. At the sight of Clairmont, he turned a whiter shade than I thought was possible, even for a vampire. With an apologetic bow, he scuttled off to the library’s dimmer recesses.

Over the course of the afternoon, a few humans and three more creatures entered the Selden End.

Two unfamiliar female vampires who appeared to be sisters glided past Clairmont and came to a stop among the local-history shelves under the window, picking up volumes about the early settlement of Bedfordshire and Dorset and writing notes back and forth on a single pad of paper. One of them whispered something, and Clairmont’s head swiveled so fast it would have snapped the neck of a lesser being. He made a soft hissing sound that ruffled the hair on my own neck. The two exchanged looks and departed as quietly as they had appeared.

The third creature was an elderly man who stood in a full beam of sunlight and stared raptly at the leaded windows before turning his eyes to me. He was dressed in familiar academic garb—brown tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, corduroy pants in a slightly jarring tone of green, and a cotton shirt with a button-down collar and ink stains on the pocket—and I was ready to dismiss him as just another Oxford scholar before my skin tingled to tell me that he was a witch. Still, he was a stranger, and I returned my attention to my manuscript.

A gentle sensation of pressure on the back of my skull made it impossible to keep reading, however. The pressure flitted to my ears, growing in intensity as it wrapped around my forehead, and my stomach clenched in panic. This was no longer a silent greeting, but a threat. Why, though, would he be threatening me?

The wizard strolled toward my desk with apparent casualness. As he approached, a voice whispered in my now-throbbing head. It was too faint to distinguish the words. I was sure it was coming from this male witch, but who on earth was he?

My breath became shallow. Get the hell out of my head, I said fiercely if silently, touching my forehead.

Clairmont moved so quickly I didn’t see him round the desks. In an instant he was standing with one hand on the back of my chair and the other resting on the surface in front of me. His broad shoulders were curved around me like the wings of a falcon shielding his prey.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I replied with a shaking voice, utterly confused as to why a vampire would need to protect me from another witch.