A Discovery of Witches(43)
“Oh, yes, I forgot.” Hamish’s temper snapped. “Nobody cares what daemons do. But a vampire and a witch? That’s important. You’re the creatures who really matter in this world.”
“Hamish!” Matthew protested. “You know that’s not how I feel.”
“You have the characteristic vampire contempt for daemons, Matthew. Witches, too, I might add. Think long and hard how you feel about other creatures before you take this witch to bed.”
“I have no intention of taking Diana to bed,” Matthew said, his voice acid.
“Dinner is served, sir.” Jordan had been standing in the doorway, unobserved, for some time.
“Thank God,” Hamish said with relief, getting up from his chair. The vampire was easier to manage if he was dividing his attention between the conversation and something—anything—else.
Seated in the dining room at one end of a vast table designed to feed a house party’s worth of guests, Hamish tucked into the first of several courses while Matthew toyed with a soup spoon until his meal cooled. The vampire leaned over the bowl and sniffed.
“Mushrooms and sherry?” he asked.
“Yes. Jordan wanted to try something new, and since it didn’t contain anything you find objectionable, I let him.”
Matthew didn’t ordinarily require much in the way of supplemental sustenance at Cadzow Lodge, but Jordan was a wizard with soup, and Hamish didn’t like to eat alone any more than he liked drinking alone.
“I’m sorry, Hamish,” Matthew said, watching his friend eat.
“I accept your apology, Matt,” Hamish said, the soup spoon hovering near his mouth. “But you cannot imagine how difficult it is to accept being a daemon or a witch. With vampires it’s definite and incontrovertible. You’re not a vampire, and then you are. No question, no room for doubt. The rest of us have to wait, watch, and wonder. It makes your vampire superiority doubly hard to take.”
Matthew was twirling the spoon’s handle in his fingers like a baton. “Witches know they’re witches. They’re not like daemons at all,” he said with a frown.
Hamish put his spoon down with a clatter and topped off his wineglass. “You know full well that having a witch for a parent is no guarantee. You can turn out perfectly ordinary. Or you can set your crib on fire. There’s no telling if, when, or how your powers are going to manifest.” Unlike Matthew, Hamish had a friend who was a witch. Janine did his hair, which had never looked better, and made her own skin lotion, which was nothing short of miraculous. He suspected that witchcraft was involved.
“It’s not a total surprise, though,” Matthew persisted, scooping some soup into his spoon and waving it slightly to cool it further. “Diana has centuries of family history to rely upon. It’s nothing like what you went through as a teenager.”
“I had a breeze of a time,” Hamish said, recalling some of the daemonic coming-of-age stories he’d been privy to over the years.
When Hamish was twelve, his life had gone topsy-turvy in the space of one afternoon. He had come to realize, over the long Scottish autumn, that he was far smarter than his teachers. Most children who reach twelve suspect this, but Hamish knew it with deeply upsetting certainty. He responded by feigning sickness so he could skip school and, when that no longer worked, by doing his schoolwork as rapidly as he could and abandoning all pretense of normalcy. In desperation his schoolmaster sent for someone from the university mathematics department to evaluate Hamish’s troublesome ability to solve in minutes problems that occupied his school-mates for a week or more.
Jack Watson, a young daemon from the University of Glasgow with red hair and brilliant blue eyes, took one look at elfin Hamish Osborne and suspected that he, too, was a daemon. After going through the motions of a formal evaluation, which produced the expected documentary proof that Hamish was a mathematical prodigy whose mind did not fit within normal parameters, Watson invited him to attend lectures at the university. He also explained to the headmaster that the child could not be accommodated within a normal classroom without becoming a pyromaniac or something equally destructive.
After that, Watson made a visit to the Osbornes’ modest home and told an astonished family how the world worked and exactly what kinds of creatures were in it. Percy Osborne, who came from a staunch Presbyterian background, resisted the notion of multiple supernatural and preternatural creatures until his wife pointed out that he had been raised to believe in witches—why not daemons and vampires, too? Hamish wept with relief, no longer feeling utterly alone. His mother hugged him fiercely and told him that she had always known he was special.
While Watson was still sitting in front of their electric fire drinking tea with her husband and son, Jessica Osborne thought she might as well take the opportunity to broach other aspects of Hamish’s life that might make him feel different. She informed her son over chocolate biscuits that she also knew he was unlikely to marry the girl next door, who was infatuated with him. Instead Hamish was drawn to the girl’s elder brother, a strapping lad of fifteen who could kick a football farther than anyone else in the neighborhood. Neither Percy nor Jack seemed remotely surprised or distressed by the revelation.
“Still,” Matthew said now, after his first sip of tepid soup, “Diana’s whole family must have expected her to be a witch—and she is, whether she uses her magic or not.”