A Discovery of Witches - Deborah Harkness [64]
The next day I arrived in the library’s cloakroom at my normal time, went up the stairs, rounded the corner near the collection desk, and braced myself to see him.
Clairmont wasn’t there.
“Do you need something?” Miriam said in an irritable voice, scraping her chair against the floor as she stood.
“Where is Professor Clairmont?”
“He’s hunting,” Miriam said, eyes snapping with dislike, “in Scotland.”
Hunting. I swallowed hard. “Oh. When will he be back?”
“I honestly don’t know, Dr. Bishop.” Miriam crossed her arms and put out a tiny foot.
“I was hoping he’d take me to yoga at the Old Lodge tonight,” I said faintly, trying to come up with a reasonable excuse for stopping.
Miriam turned and picked up a ball of black fluff. She tossed it at me, and I grabbed it as it flew by my hip. “You left that in his car on Friday.”
“Thank you.” My sweater smelled of carnations and cinnamon.
“You should be more careful with your things,” Miriam muttered. “You’re a witch, Dr. Bishop. Take care of yourself and stop putting Matthew in this impossible situation.”
I turned on my heel without comment and went to pick up my manuscripts from Sean.
“Everything all right?” he asked, eyeing Miriam with a frown.
“Perfectly.” I gave him my usual seat number and, when he still looked concerned, a warm smile.
How dare Miriam speak to me like that? I fumed while settling into my workspace.
My fingers itched as if hundreds of insects were crawling under the skin. Tiny sparks of blue-green were arcing between my fingertips, leaving traces of energy as they erupted from the edges of my body. I clenched my hands and quickly sat on top of them.
This was not good. Like all members of the university, I’d sworn an oath not to bring fire or flame into Bodley’s Library. The last time my fingers had behaved like this, I was thirteen and the fire department had to be called to extinguish the blaze in the kitchen.
When the burning sensation abated, I looked around carefully and sighed with relief. I was alone in the Selden End. No one had witnessed my fireworks display. Pulling my hands from underneath my thighs, I scrutinized them for further signs of supernatural activity. The blue was already diminishing to a silvery gray as the power retreated from my fingertips.
I opened the first box only after ascertaining I wouldn’t set fire to it and pretended that nothing unusual had happened. Still, I hesitated to touch my computer for fear that my fingers would fuse to the plastic keys.
Not surprisingly, it was difficult to concentrate, and that same manuscript was still before me at lunchtime. Maybe some tea would calm me down.
At the beginning of term, one would expect to see a handful of human readers in Duke Humfrey’s medieval wing. Today there was only one: an elderly human woman examining an illuminated manuscript with a magnifying glass. She was squashed between an unfamiliar daemon and one of the female vampires from last week. Gillian Chamberlain was there, too, glowering at me along with four other witches as if I’d let down our entire species.
Hurrying past, I stopped at Miriam’s desk. “I presume you have instructions to follow me to lunch. Are you coming?”
She put down her pencil with exaggerated care. “After you.”
Miriam was in front of me by the time I reached the back staircase. She pointed to the steps on the other side. “Go down that way.”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged.
One flight down I glanced through the small window stuck into the swinging door that led to the Upper Reading Room, and I gasped.
The room was full to bursting with creatures. They had segregated themselves. One long table held nothing but daemons, conspicuous because not a single book—open or closed—sat in front of them. Vampires sat at another table, their