A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [254]
After she’d gotten a look from Matthew that I hoped never to see again, Miriam’s face went from white to pearl gray. She hastily handed him the reports.
“You’ve brought the wrong results, Miriam. These belong to a male,” said Matthew, impatiently scanning the first two pages.
“The results do belong to Diana,” Marcus said. “She’s a chimera, Matthew.”
“What’s that?” Em asked. A chimera was a mythological beast that combined the body parts of a lioness, a dragon, and a goat. I looked down, half expecting to glimpse a tail between my legs.
“A person with cells that possess two or more different genetic profiles.” Matthew was staring in disbelief at the first page.
“That’s impossible.” My heart gave a loud thump. Matthew circled me with his arms, holding the test results on the table in front of us.
“It’s rare, but not impossible,” he said grimly, his eyes moving over the gray bars.
“My guess is VTS,” Miriam said, ignoring Marcus’s warning frown. “Those results came from her hair. There were strands of it on the quilt we took to the Old Lodge.”
“Vanishing twin syndrome,” Marcus explained, turning to Sarah. “Did Rebecca have problems early in her pregnancy? Any bleeding or concerns about miscarriage?”
Sarah shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. But they weren’t here—Stephen and Rebecca were in Africa. They didn’t come back to the States until the end of her first trimester.”
Nobody had ever told me I was conceived in Africa.
“Rebecca wouldn’t have known there was anything wrong.” Matthew shook his head, his mouth pressed into a hard, firm line. “VTS happens before most women know they’re pregnant.”
“So I was a twin, and Mom miscarried my sibling?”
“Your brother,” Matthew said, pointing to the test results with his free hand. “Your twin was male. In cases like yours, the viable fetus absorbs the blood and tissues of the other. It happens quite early, and in most cases there’s no evidence of the vanished twin. Does Diana’s hair indicate she might possess powers that didn’t show up in her other DNA results?”
“A few—timewalking, shape-shifting, divination,” his son replied. “Diana fully absorbed most of them.”
“My brother was supposed to be the timewalker, not me,” I said slowly.
A trail of phosphorescent smudges marked my grandmother’s progress as she drifted into the room, touched me lightly on the shoulder, and sat at the far end of the table.
“He would have had the genetic predisposition to control witchfire, too,” Marcus said, nodding. “We found only the fire marker in the hair sample—no other traces of elemental magic.”
“And you don’t think my mother knew about my brother?” I ran my fingertip along the bars of gray, black, and white.
“Oh, she knew.” Miriam sounded confident. “You were born on the goddess’s feast day. She named you Diana.”
“So?” I shivered, pushing aside the memory of riding through the forest in sandals and a tunic, along with the strange feeling of holding a bow and arrow that accompanied witchfire.
“The goddess of the moon had a twin—Apollo. ‘This Lion maketh the Sun so soon, / To be joined to his sister, the Moon.’” Miriam’s eyes gleamed as she recited the alchemical poem. She was up to something.
“You know ‘The Hunting of the Green Lion.’”
“I know the next verses, too: ‘By way of a wedding, a wondrous thing, / This Lion should cause them to beget a king.’”
“What is she talking about?” Sarah asked testily.
When Miriam tried to answer, Matthew shook his head. The vampire fell silent.
“The sun king and moon queen—philosophical sulfur and mercury—married and conceived a child,” I told Sarah. “In alchemical imagery the resulting child is a hermaphrodite, to symbolize a mixed chemical substance.”
“In other words, Matthew,” Miriam interjected tartly, “Ashmole 782 is not just about origins, nor is it just about evolution and extinction. It’s about reproduction.”
I scowled. “Nonsense.”
“You may think it’s nonsense, Diana, but it’s clear to me. Vampires and witches may be able to have children together after all. So might