Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches

My usual meal consisted of a twenty-minute break in the nearby bookstore’s second-floor café. I smiled at the thought of Miriam occupying herself during that time, trapped in Blackwell’s where the tourists congregated to look at postcards, smack between the Oxford guidebooks and the true-crime section.

I secured a sandwich and some tea and squeezed into the farthest corner of the crowded room between a vaguely familiar member of the history faculty who was reading the paper and an undergraduate dividing his attention between a music player, a mobile phone, and a computer.

After finishing my sandwich, I cupped the tea in my hands and glanced out the windows. I frowned. One of the unfamiliar daemons from Duke Humfrey’s was lounging against the library gates and looking up at Black-well’s windows.

Two nudges pressed against my cheekbones, as gentle and fleeting as a kiss. I looked up into the face of another daemon. She was beautiful, with arresting, contradictory features—her mouth too wide for her delicate face, her chocolate brown eyes too close together given their enormous size, her hair too fair for skin the color of honey.

“Dr. Bishop?” The woman’s Australian accent sent cold fingers moving around the base of my spine.

“Yes,” I whispered, glancing at the stairs. Miriam’s dark head failed to emerge from below. “I’m Diana Bishop.”

She smiled. “I’m Agatha Wilson. And your friend downstairs doesn’t know I’m here.”

It was an incongruously old-fashioned name for someone who was only about ten years older than I was, and far more stylish. Her name was familiar, though, and I dimly remembered seeing it in a fashion magazine.

“May I sit down?” she asked, gesturing at the seat just vacated by the historian.

“Of course,” I murmured.

On Monday I’d met a vampire. On Tuesday a witch tried to worm his way into my head. Wednesday, it would appear, was daemon day.

Even though they’d followed me around college, I knew even less about daemons than I did about vampires. Few seemed to understand the creatures, and Sarah had never been able to answer my questions about them. Based on her accounts, daemons constituted a criminal underclass. Their superabundance of cleverness and creativity led them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill, because they felt they could get away with it. Even more troublesome, as far as Sarah was concerned, were the conditions of their birth. There was no telling where or when a daemon would crop up, since they were typically born to human parents. To my aunt this only compounded their already marginal position in the hierarchy of beings. She valued a witch’s family traditions and bloodlines, and she didn’t approve of daemonic unpredictability.

Agatha Wilson was content to sit next to me quietly at first, watching me hold my tea. Then she started to talk in a bewildering swirl of words. Sarah always said that conversations with daemons were impossible, because they began in the middle.

“So much energy is bound to attract us,” she said matter-of-factly, as if I’d asked her a question. “The witches were in Oxford for Mabon, and chattering as if the world weren’t full of vampires who hear everything.” She fell silent. “We weren’t sure we’d ever see it again.”

“See what?” I said softly.

“The book,” she confided in a low voice.

“The book,” I repeated, my voice flat.

“Yes. After what the witches did to it, we didn’t think we’d catch a glimpse of it again.”

The daemon’s eyes were focused on a spot in the middle of the room. “Of course, you’re a witch, too. Perhaps it’s wrong to talk to you. I would have thought you of all witches would be able to figure out how they did it, though. And now there’s this,” she said sadly, picking up the abandoned newspaper and handing it to me.

The sensational headline immediately caught my attention: VAMPIRE ON THE LOOSE IN LONDON. I hurriedly read the story.

Metropolitan Police have no new leads in the puzzling murder of two men in Westminster. The bodies of Daniel Bennett, 22, and Jason Enright, 26, were found in an alley behind the White Hart pub on St Alban’s Street early Sunday morning by the pub’s owner, Reg Scott. Both men had severed carotid arteries and multiple lacerations on the neck, arms, and torso. Forensic tests revealed that massive loss of blood was the cause of death, although no blood evidence was found at the scene.

Authorities investigating the “vampire murders,” as they were dubbed by local residents, sought the advice of Peter Knox. The author of bestselling books on modern occultism, including Dark Matters: The Devil in Modern Times and Magic Rising: The Need for Mystery in the Age of Science, Knox has been consulted by agencies around the world in cases of suspected satanic and serial killings.

“There is no evidence that these are ritual murders,” Knox told reporters at a news conference. “Nor does it seem that this is the work of a serial killer,” he concluded, in spite of the similar murders of Christiana Nilsson in Copenhagen last summer and Sergei Morozov in St Petersburg in the fall of 2007. When pressed, Knox conceded that the London case may involve a copycat killer or killers.

Concerned residents have instituted a public watch, and local police have launched a door-to-door safety campaign to answer questions and provide support and guidance. Officials urge London residents to take extra precautions for their safety, especially at night.

“That’s just the work of a newspaper editor in search of a story,” I said, handing the paper back to the daemon. “The press is preying on human fears.”

“Are they?” she asked, glancing around the room. “I’m not so sure. I think it’s much more than that. One never knows with vampires. They’re only a step away from animals.” Agatha Wilson’s mouth drew tight in a sour expression. “And you think we’re the unstable ones. Still, it’s dangerous for any of us to catch human attention.”

This was too much talk of witches and vampires for a public place. The undergraduate still had his earphones in, however, and all the other patrons were deep into their own thoughts or had their heads close to their lunch companions’.

“I don’t know anything about the manuscript or what the witches did to it, Ms. Wilson. I don’t have it either,” I said hastily, in case she, too, thought I might have stolen it.

“You must call me Agatha.” She focused on the pattern of the carpet. “The library has it now. Did they tell you to send it back?”

Did she mean witches? Vampires? The librarians? I picked the likeliest culprits.

“Witches?” I whispered.

Agatha nodded, her eyes drifting around the room.

“No. When I was done with it, I simply returned it to the stacks.”

“Ah, the stacks,” Agatha said knowingly. “Everybody thinks the library is just a building, but it isn’t.”

Once again I remembered the eerie constriction I’d felt after Sean had put the manuscript on the conveyor belt.

“The library is whatever the witches want it to be,” she went on. “But the book doesn’t belong to you. Witches shouldn’t get to decide where it’s kept and who sees it.”

“What’s so special about this manuscript?”

“The book explains why we’re here,” she said, her voice betraying a hint of desperation. “It tells our story—beginning, middle, even the end. We daemons need to understand our place in the world. Our need is greater than that of the witches or vampires.” There was nothing addled about her now. She was like a camera that had been chronically out of focus until someone came by and twisted the lenses into alignment.

“You know your place in the world,” I began. “There are four kinds of creatures—humans, daemons, vampires, and witches.”