❝just ourselves and immortality.❞
Daisy Mercer has been told her whole life that vampires are the enemy. Witches are trustworthy. Daemons, well, daemons aren't even worth remarking on. And vampires would kill you without a second thought. But when...
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☾ ☽
THERE WAS AN ODD SORT OF FEELING for the remainder of the week, one that could only be described as hazy. It was as if the world moved around her, the hours passing her by without so much of a glance as she stood still in the center. All she did this week was wait—wait for a message from Sylvia to let her know Gillian had been discharged, wait for a final goodbye text from Gillian as she left Oxford for who knows where, wait for a knock on her door so she could finally know what those new developments were that Knox mentioned in the message he'd sent her a few nights ago.
What had he meant? Had Matthew Clairmont been brought before the Congregation, asked to answer for his crimes—his true attack against a witch, his alleged kidnapping (though she did not believe that was the real story) of another witch? Or had he slipped through their fingers again? And what of Diana Bishop? Had she been brought before the Congregation as well, to answer for her own slights against the rules of the Congregation? Was the Book of Life now in their hands, or was it still somewhere in the Bodleian Library, hidden until the right person called it up again? And what made Diana the right person? Why would it only show itself to her, and no other creature?
The photos from Gillian's break-in of Matthew's lab were open on her laptop early in the weekend, a cup of tea in her hands as she leaned against the arm of her sofa. Diana's book, her page now marked with one of those monogrammed brass bookmarks with the letter D in cursive, sat on the coffee table within arm's reach. With her free hand she tapped the arrow keys on the keyboard, looking at each photo individually, just as she had been for the past week.
She'd managed to clear them up a bit using a photo editing software, so they weren't too blurry and hard to see anymore like they had been in their original state. She had sharpened it and brightened the image and though she still wasn't able to quite make out the actual test results, she could make out the names of the people the results were about.
Quick internet searches had let her know (through recognizing the surnames from meeting witches with the same names) that at least two of the results were about witches, deceased ones that had left the earth centuries ago and were buried in old cemeteries nearby, which gave her the impression that Matthew Clairmont (and quite possibly his colleague Miriam Shephard as well) was something of a grave robber. The thought was a little amusing before it became disturbing. Of the third name she had been able to make it, he was (likely) a human who'd died far more recently than the two witches—not even a month ago, as a matter of fact—killed in a hit-and-run and the police were still looking for the person that had hit him. That was one of the odder things about it all, the fact that they were studying the DNA of a human when everything else suggested they were only studying witch DNA.
A knock sounded at her door. Daisy closed down the window with the photographs and shut her laptop, setting it on the coffee table and moving Diana's book to rest on top of it. She set her cup of tea beside it and went to look through the peephole. Exactly who she had expected it to be. She greeted him after opening the door, "Mr. Knox."
