A Discovery of Witches(198)

“Because she’s a chimera—and AB-negative as well—she may be less likely to reject a fetus that’s half vampire. She’s a universal blood recipient and has already absorbed foreign DNA into her body. Like the spadefoot toad, she might have been led to you by the pressures of survival.”

“That’s a hell of a lot of conjecture, Marcus.”

“Diana is different, Matthew. She’s not like other witches.” Marcus’s eyes flickered from Matthew to me. “You haven’t looked at her mtDNA report.”

Matthew shuffled the pages. His breath came out in a hiss.

The sheet was covered in brightly covered hoops. Miriam had written across the top in red ink “Unknown Clan,” accompanied by a symbol that looked like a backward E set at an angle with a long tail. Matthew’s eyes darted over the page, and the next.

“I knew you’d question the findings, so I brought comparatives,” Miriam said quietly.

“What’s a clan?” I watched Matthew carefully for a sign of what he was feeling.

“A genetic lineage. Through a witch’s mitochondrial DNA, we can trace descent back to one of four women who were the female ancestors of every witch we’ve studied.”

“Except you,” Marcus said to me. “You and Sarah aren’t descended from any of them.”

“What does this mean?” I touched the backward E.

“It’s an ancient glyph for heh, the Hebrew number five.” Matthew directed his next words to Miriam. “How old is it?”

Miriam considered her words carefully. “Clan Heh is old—no matter which mitochondrial-clock theory you adhere to.”

“Older than Clan Gimel?” Matthew asked, referring to the Hebrew word for the number three.

“Yes.” Miriam hesitated. “And to answer your next question, there are two possibilities. Clan Heh could just be another line of descent from mtLilith.”

Sarah opened her mouth to ask a question, and I quieted her with a shake of my head.

“Or Clan Heh could descend from a sister of mtLilith—which would make Diana’s ancestor a clan mother, but not the witches’ equivalent of mtEve. In either case it’s possible that without Diana’s issue Clan Heh will die out in this generation.”

I slid the brown envelope from my mother in Matthew’s direction. “Could you draw a picture?” No one in the room was going to understand this without visual assistance.

Matthew’s hand sped over the page, sketching out two sprawling diagrams. One looked like a snake, the other branched out like the brackets for a sports tournament. Matthew pointed to the snake. “These are the seven known daughters of mitochondrial Eve—mtEve for short. Scientists consider them to be the most recent common matrilineal ancestors of every human of Western European descent. Each woman appears in the DNA record at a different point in history and in a different region of the globe. They once shared a common female ancestor, though.”

“That would be mtEve,” I said.

“Yes.” He pointed at the tournament bracket. “This is what we’ve uncovered about the matrilineal descent of witches. There are four lines of descent, or clans. We numbered them in the order we found them, although the woman who was mother to Clan Aleph—the first clan we discovered—lived more recently than the others.”

“Define ‘recently,’ please,” Em requested.

“Aleph lived about seven thousand years ago.”

“Seven thousand years ago?” Sarah said incredulously. “But the Bishops can only trace our female ancestors back to 1617.”

“Gimel lived about forty thousand years ago,” Matthew said grimly. “So if Miriam is right, and Clan Heh is older, you’ll be well beyond that.”

“Damn,” Sarah breathed again. “Who’s Lilith?”

“The first witch.” I drew Matthew’s diagrams closer, remembering his cryptic response in Oxford to my asking if he was searching for the first vampire. “Or at least the first witch from whom present-day witches can claim matrilineal descent.”

“Marcus is fond of the Pre-Raphaelites, and Miriam knows a lot of mythology. They picked the name,” Matthew said by way of explanation.

“The Pre-Raphaelites loved Lilith. Dante Gabriel Rossetti described her as the witch Adam loved before Eve.” Marcus’s eyes turned dreamy. “‘So went / Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent / And round his heart one strangling golden hair.’”

“That’s the Song of Songs,” Matthew observed. “‘You have wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, you have wounded my heart with one of your eyes, and with one hair of your neck.’”

“The alchemists admired the same passage,” I murmured with a shake of my head. “It’s in the Aurora Consurgens, too.”

“Other accounts of Lilith are far less rapturous,” Miriam said in stern tones, drawing us back to the matter at hand. “In ancient stories she was a creature of the night, goddess of the wind and the moon, and the mate of Samael, the angel of death.”

“Did the goddess of the moon and the angel of death have children?” Sarah asked, looking at us sharply. Once more the similarities between old stories, alchemical texts, and my relationship with a vampire were uncanny.