and any hope I had of sleep was gone. The fog had lifted slightly, and the brightness of the full moon pierced through the gray wisps that still clung to the trunks of trees and the low places in the park where the deer slept. One or two members of the herd were still out, picking over the grass in search of the last remaining fodder. A hard frost was coming; I could sense it. I was attuned to the rhythms of the earth and sky in ways that I had not been before I lived in a time when the day was organized around the height of the sun instead of the dial of a clock, and the season of the year determined everything from what you ate to the physic that you took.
I was in our bedchamber again, the one where Matthew and I had spent our first night in the sixteenth century. Only a few things had changed: the electricity that powered the lamps, the Victorian bellpull that hung by the fire to call the servants to tend the fire or bring tea (though why this was necessary in a vampire household, I could not fathom), the closet that had been carved out of an adjoining room.
Our return to the Old Lodge after meeting Timothy Weston had been unexpectedly tense.
Gallowglass had flatly refused to take me to Oxford after we located the final page of the Book of Life, though it was not yet the supper hour and Duke Humfrey’s was open until seven o’clock during term time. When Leonard offered to drive, Gallowglass threatened to kill him in disturbingly detailed and graphic terms. Fernando and Gallowglass had departed, ostensibly to talk, and Gallowglass had returned with a rapidly healing split lip, a slightly bruised eye, and a mumbled apology to Leonard.
“You aren’t going,” Fernando said when I headed for the door. “I’ll take you tomorrow, but not tonight. Gallowglass is right: You look like death.”
“Stop coddling me,” I said through gritted teeth, my hands still shooting out intermittent sparks.
“I’ll coddle you until your mate returns,” Fernando said. “The only person on this earth who could make me take you to Oxford is Matthew. Feel free to call him.” He held out his phone.
That had been the end of the discussion. I’d accepted Fernando’s ultimatum with poor grace, though my head was pounding and I’d worked more magic in the past week than I had my whole life previous.
“So long as you have these three pages, no other creature can possess the book,” Amira said, trying to comfort me. But it seemed like a poor consolation when the book was so close.
Not even the sight of the three pages, lined up on the long table in the great hall, had improved my mood. I’d been anticipating and dreading this moment since we left Madison, but now that it was here, it felt strangely anticlimactic.
Phoebe had arranged the images carefully, making sure they didn’t touch. We’d learned the hard way that they seemed to have a magnetic affinity. When I’d arrived home and bundled them together in preparation for going to the Bodleian, a soft keening had come from the pages, followed by a chattering that everybody heard—even Phoebe.
“You can’t just march into the Bodleian with these three pages and stuff them back into an enchanted book,” Sarah said. “It’s crazy. There are bound to be witches in the room. They’ll come running.”
“And who knows how the Book of Life will respond?” Ysabeau poked at the illustration of the tree with her finger. “What if it shrieks? Ghosts might be released. Or Diana might set off a rain of fire.”
After her experiences in London, Ysabeau had been doing some reading. She was now prepared to discuss a wide variety of topics, including spectral apparitions and the number of occult phenomena that had been observed in the British Isles over the past two years.
“You’re going to have to steal it,” Sarah said.
“I’m a tenured professor at Yale, Sarah! I can’t! My life as a scholar—”
“Is probably over,” Sarah said, finishing my sentence.
“Come now, Sarah,” Fernando chided. “That is a bit extreme, even for you. Surely there is a way for Diana to check out Ashmole 782 and return it at some future date.”
I tried to explain that you didn’t borrow books from the Bodleian, but to no avail. With Ysabeau and Sarah in charge of logistics and Fernando and Gallowglass in charge of security, I was relegated to a