Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches

The vampire’s lips began to move incrementally along my jawbone. Each place his mouth touched froze, then burned as my blood rushed back to the skin’s surface.

“Matthew,” I breathed around the catch in my throat. I closed my eyes, expecting to feel teeth against my neck yet unable—unwilling—to move.

Instead Matthew’s hungry lips met mine. His arms locked around me, and his fingertips cradled my head. My lips parted under his, my hands trapped between his chest and mine. Underneath my palms his heart beat, once.

With the thump of his heart, the kiss changed. Matthew was no less demanding, but the hunger in his touch turned to something bittersweet. His hands moved forward smoothly until he was cupping my face, and he pulled away reluctantly. For the first time, I heard a soft, ragged sound. It was not like human breathing. It was the sound of minute amounts of oxygen passing through a vampire’s powerful lungs.

“I took advantage of your fear. I shouldn’t have,” he whispered.

My eyes were closed, and I still felt intoxicated, his cinnamon and clove scent driving off the scent of violets from the wine. Restless, I stirred in his grip.

“Be still,” he said, voice harsh. “I might not be able to control myself if you step away.”

He’d warned me in the lab about the relationship between predator and prey. Now he was trying to get me to play dead so the predator in him would lose interest in me.

But I wasn’t dead.

My eyes flew open. There was no mistaking the sharp look on his face. It was avid, hungry. Matthew was a creature of instinct now. But I had instincts, too.

“I’m safe with you.” I formed the words with lips that were freezing and burning at the same time, unused to the feeling of a vampire’s kiss.

“A witch—safe with a vampire? Never be sure of that. It would only take a moment. You wouldn’t be able to stop me if I struck, and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.” Our eyes met and locked, neither of us blinking. Matthew made a low sound of surprise. “How brave you are.”

“I’ve never been brave.”

“When you gave blood in the lab, the way you meet a vampire’s eyes, how you ordered the creatures out of the library, even the fact that you go back there day after day, refusing to let people keep you from what you want to do—it’s all bravery.”

“That’s stubbornness.” Sarah had explained the difference a long time ago.

“I’ve seen courage like yours before—from women, mostly.” Matthew continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Men don’t have it. Our resolve is born out of fear. It’s merely bravado.”

His glance flickered over me in snowflakes that melted into mere coolness the moment they touched me. One cold finger reached out and captured a tear from the tips of my eyelashes. His face was sad as he lowered me gently into the chair and crouched next to me, resting one hand on my knee and the other on the arm of the rush-seated chair in a protective circle. “Promise me that you will never joke with a vampire—not even me—about blood or how you might taste.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, forcing myself not to look away.

He shook his head. “You told me before that you don’t know much about vampires. What you need to understand is that no vampire is immune to this temptation. Vampires with a conscience spend most of their time trying not to imagine how people would taste. If you were to meet one without a conscience—and there are plenty who fit that category—then God help you.”

“I didn’t think.” I still couldn’t. My mind was whirling with the memory of his kiss, his fury, and his palpable hunger.

He bowed his head, resting the crown against my shoulder. The ampulla from Bethany tumbled out of the neck of his sweater and swung like a pendulum, its tiny coffin glinting in the light from the candles.

He spoke so softly that I had to strain to hear. “Witches and vampires aren’t meant to feel this way. I’m experiencing emotions I’ve never—” He broke off.

“I know.” Carefully I leaned my cheek against his hair. It felt as satiny as it looked. “I feel them, too.”

Matthew’s arms had remained where he left them, one hand on my knee and the other on the arm of the chair. At my words he moved them slowly and clasped my waist. The coldness of his flesh cut through my clothing, but I didn’t shiver. Instead I moved closer so that I could rest my arms on his shoulders.

A vampire evidently could have remained comfortable in that position for days. For a mere witch, however, it wasn’t an option. When I shifted slightly, he looked at me in confusion, and then his face lightened in recognition.

“I forgot,” he said, rising with his swift smoothness and stepping away from me. I moved first one leg and then the other, restoring the circulation to my feet.

Matthew handed me my wine and returned to his own seat. Once he was settled, I tried to give him something to think about other than how I might taste.

“What was the fifth question you had to answer for the Prize Fellowship?” Candidates were invited to sit an exam that involved four questions combining thought-provoking breadth and depth with devilish complexity. If you survived the first four questions, you were asked the famous “fifth question.” It was not a question at all, but a single word like “water,” or “absence.” It was up to the candidate to decide how to respond, and only the most brilliant answer won you a place at All Souls.

He reached across the table—without setting himself on fire—and poured some more wine into my glass. “Desire,” he said, studiously avoiding my eyes.

So much for that diversionary plan.

“Desire? What did you write?”

“As far as I can tell, there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning, year after year.” He hesitated, then continued. “One is fear. The other is desire. That’s what I wrote about.”

Love hadn’t factored into his response, I noticed. It was a brutal picture, a tug-of-war between two equal but opposing impulses. It had the ring of truth, however, which was more than could be said of the glib “love makes the world go round.” Matthew kept hinting that his desire—for blood, chiefly—was so strong that it put everything else at risk.

But vampires weren’t the only creatures who had to manage such strong impulses. Much of what qualified as magic was simply desire in action. Witchcraft was different—that took spells and rituals. But magic? A wish, a need, a hunger too strong to be denied—these could turn into deeds when they crossed a witch’s mind.

And if Matthew was going to tell me his secrets, it didn’t seem fair to keep mine so close.

“Magic is desire made real. It’s how I pulled down Notes and Queries the night we met,” I said slowly. “When a witch concentrates on something she wants, and then imagines how she might get it, she can make it happen. That’s why I have to be so careful about my work.” I took a sip of wine, my hand trembling on the glass.

“Then you spend most of your time trying not to want things, just like me. For some of the same reasons, too.” Matthew’s snowflake glances flickered across my cheeks.

“If you mean the fear that if I started, there would be no stopping me—yes. I don’t want to look back on a life where I took everything rather than earned it.”

“So you earn everything twice over. First you earn it by not simply taking it, and then you earn it again through work and effort.” He laughed bitterly. “The advantages of being an otherworldly creature don’t amount to much, do they?”

Matthew suggested we sit by his fireless fireplace. I lounged on the sofa, and he carried some nutty biscuits over to the table by me, before disappearing into the kitchen once more. When he returned, he was carrying a small tray with the ancient black bottle on it—the cork now pulled— and two glasses of amber-colored liquid. He handed one to me.