had had the political acumen to suspect that the children of such unions could, if they so desired, rise up and rule the world.
What was more difficult, not to mention more dangerous, was demonstrating that this fear had actually contributed to our decline: Vampires found it difficult to make new vampires, witches were less powerful, and daemons were increasingly prone to madness. To make this part of our case, the Bishop Clairmonts needed to expose both the blood rage and the weavers in our family. I wrote up a history of weavers using information from the Book of Life. I explained that the weavers’ creative power was difficult to control and made them vulnerable to the animosity of their fellow witches. Over time witches grew complacent and had less use for new spells and charms. The old ones worked fine, and the weavers went from being treasured members of their communities to hunted outcasts. Sarah and I sat down together and drew up an account of my parents’ lives in painful detail to drive this point home—my father’s desperate attempts to hide his talents, Knox’s efforts to discover them, and their terrible deaths.
Matthew and Ysabeau recorded a similarly difficult tale, one of madness and the destructive power of anger. Fernando and Gallowglass scoured Philippe’s private papers for evidence of how he had kept his mate safe from extermination and their joint decision to protect Matthew in spite of his showing signs of the illness. Both Philippe and Ysabeau believed that careful upbringing and hard-won control would be a counterweight to whatever illness was present in his blood—a classic example of nurture over nature. And Matthew confessed that his own failures with Benjamin demonstrated just how dangerous blood rage could be if left to develop on its own.
Janet arrived at Les Revenants with the Gowdie grimoire and a copy of her great-grandmother Isobel’s trial transcript. The trial records described her amorous relationship with the devil known as Nickie-Ben in great detail, including his nefarious bite. The grimoire proved that Isobel was a weaver of spells, as she proudly identified her unique magical creations and the prices that she’d demanded for sharing them with her sisters in the Highlands. Isobel also identified her lover as Benjamin Fox— Matthew’s son. Benjamin had actually signed his name into the family record found in the front of the book.
“It’s still not sufficient,” Matthew worried, looking over the papers. “We still can’t explain why
weavers and blood-rage vampires like you and I can conceive children.”
I could explain it. The Book of Life had shared that secret with me. But I didn’t want to say anything until Miriam and Chris delivered the scientific evidence. I was beginning to think I would have to make this case without their help when a car pulled in to the courtyard.
Matthew frowned. “Who could that be?” he asked, putting down his pen and going to the window.
“Miriam and Chris are here. Something must be wrong at the Yale lab.”
Once the pair were inside and Matthew had received assurances that the research team he’d left in New Haven was thriving, Chris handed me a thick envelope.
“You were right,” he said. “Nice work, Professor Bishop.”
I hugged the packet to my chest, unspeakably relieved. Then I handed it to Matthew.
He tore into the envelope, his eyes racing over the lines of text and the black-and-white ideograms that accompanied them. He looked up, his lips parted in astonishment.
“I was surprised, too,” Miriam admitted. “As long as we approached daemons, vampires, and witches as separate species distantly related to humans but distinct from one another, the truth was going to elude us.”
“Then Diana told us the Book of Life was about what joined us together, not what separated us,”
Chris continued. “She asked us to compare her genome to both the daemon genome and the genomes of other witches.”
“It was all there in the creature chromosome,” Miriam said, “hiding in plain sight.”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said, looking blank.
“Diana was able to conceive Matthew’s child because they both have daemon blood in them,”
Chris explained. “It’s too early to know for sure, but our hypothesis is that weavers are descended from ancient witch-daemon unions. Blood-rage vampires like Matthew are produced when a vampire with the blood-rage gene creates another vampire from a human with some daemon DNA.”
“We didn’t find much of a daemonic presence in Ysabeau’s genetic sample, or Marcus’s either,”
Miriam added. “That explains why they never manifested the disease like Matthew or Benjamin did.”