Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(188)

“We can’t leave the book. It’s—”

“I know what it is,” Matthew said grimly.

“Stop them!” Rudolf screamed.

But the guard with the broken arm had already tangled with one angry vampire tonight. He wasn’t going to tempt fate by interfering with Matthew. Instead his eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped to the floor in a faint.

Gallowglass threw my cloak over my shoulders as we pelted down the stairs. Two more guards—both unconscious—lay at the bottom.

“Go back and get the book!” I said to Gallowglass, breathless from my constrictive corset and the speed at which we were moving across the courtyard. “We can’t let Rudolf have it now that we know what it is.”

Matthew stopped, his fingers digging into my arm. “We won’t leave Prague without the manuscript. I’ll go back and get it, I promise. But first we are going home. You must have the children ready to leave the moment I get back.”

“We’ve burned our bridges, Auntie,” Gallowglass said grimly. “Pistorius is locked up in the White Tower. I killed one guard and injured three more. Rudolf touched you most improperly, and I have a strong desire to see him dead, too.”

“You don’t understand, Gallowglass. That book may be the answer to everything,” I managed to squeak out before Matthew had me in motion again.

“Oh, I understand more than you think I do.” Gallowglass’s voice floated in the breeze next to me. “I picked up the scent of it downstairs when I knocked out the guards. There are dead wearhs in that book. Witches and daemons, too, I warrant. Whoever could have imagined that the lost Book of Life would stink to high heaven of death?”





Chapter Thirty Two




"Who would make such a thing?” Twenty minutes later I was shivering by the fireplace in our main first-floor room, clutching a beaker of herbal tea. “It’s gruesome.”

Like most manuscripts, Ashmole 782 was made of vellum—specially prepared skin that had been soaked in lime to remove the hair, scraped to take away the subcutaneous layers of flesh and fat, then soaked again before being stretched on a frame and scraped some more.

The difference here was that the creatures used to make the vellum were not sheep, calves, or goats but daemons, vampires, and witches.

“It must have been kept as a record.” Matthew was still trying to come to terms with what we had seen.

“But it has hundreds of pages,” I said in disbelief. The thought of someone flaying so many daemons, vampires, and witches and making vellum from their skins was incomprehensible. I wasn’t sure I would ever sleep through the night again.

“Which means the book contains hundreds of distinct pieces of DNA.” Matthew had run his fingers through his hair so many times he was starting to resemble a porcupine.

“The threads twisting between us and Ashmole 782 looked like double helices,” I said. We’d had to explain modern genetics to Gallowglass, who, without the intervening four and a half centuries of biology and chemistry, was doing his best to follow it.

“So D-N-A is like a family tree, but its branches cover more than just one family?” Gallowglass sounded out “DNA” slowly, with a break between each letter.

“Yes,” Matthew said. “That’s about it.”

“Did you see the tree on the first page?” I asked Matthew. “The trunk was made of bodies, and the tree was flowering, fruiting, and leafing out just like the arbor Dian? we made in Mary’s laboratory.”

“No, but I saw the creature with its tail in its mouth,” Matthew said.

I tried feverishly to recall what I’d seen, but my photographic memory failed me when I needed it most. There was too much new information to absorb.

“The picture showed two creatures fighting—or embracing, I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t have a chance to count their legs. Their falling blood was generating hundreds of creatures. Although if one of them was not a four-legged dragon but a snake . . .”

“And one was a two-legged firedrake, then those alchemical dragons could symbolize you and me.” Matthew swore, briefly but with feeling.

Gallowglass listened patiently until we were through, then went back to his original topic. “And this D-N-A, it lives in our skin?”

“Not just your skin, but your blood, bones, hair, nails—it’s throughout your entire body,” Matthew explained.

“Huh.” Gallowglass rubbed his chin. “And what question is it you have in mind, exactly, when you say this book might have all the answers?”

“Why we’re different from the humans,” Matthew said simply. “And why a witch like Diana might carry a wearh’s child.”

Gallowglass gave us a radiant smile. “You mean your child, Matthew. I knew full well Auntie was capable of that back in London. She never smelled like anyone but herself—and you. Did Philippe know?”

“Few people knew,” I said quickly.

“Hancock did. So did Fran?oise and Pierre. My guess is Philippe was told all about it.” Gallowglass stood. “I’ll just go fetch Auntie’s book, then. If it has to do with de Clermont babes, we must have it.”

“Rudolf will have locked it up tight or tucked it into bed with him,” Matthew predicted. “It’s not going to be easy to get it out of the palace, especially not if they’ve found Pistorius and he’s out casting spells and making mischief.”