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August 31 - September 10, 2025
“I’m a predator, Diana.” He said it with the seductiveness of a lover. The dark aroma of cloves made me dizzy. “I have to hunt and kill to survive.” He turned my face away from him with a savage twist, exposing my neck. His restless eyes raked over my throat.
I was nowhere, caught between the terrible ache of losing my parents and the certain knowledge that soon Matthew, too, would be gone.
I’ve loved you since I decided not to hit you with an oar on the City of Oxford’s dock.”
But nothing he said outweighed what I felt for him.
My beloved vampire, with a face that would make an angel envious, looked at me with sorrow. “You know how I feel about you.”
But he’d slipped into unexplored, empty places when I wasn’t looking. Now that he’d left, I was terribly aware of his absence.
It was now clear that Matthew’s past was not composed simply of homely elements of firelight, wine, and books.
“Why he had to make these stairs so twisting—and in two separate flights—is beyond my understanding.”
“Then he stuck this tower onto the back when he returned home and didn’t want to live so close to the family. I never liked it—it seemed a romantic trifle—but it was his wish, and I let him.” She shrugged. “Such a funny tower. It didn’t help defend the castle. He had already built far more towers here than we needed.”
It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.”
Ysabeau de Clermont was testing me.
Ysabeau’s changes in conversation were almost as dizzying as her son’s mood swings.
“His full name is Matthew Gabriel Philippe Bertrand Sébastien de Clermont. He was also a very good Sébastien, and a passable Gabriel. He hates Bertrand and will not answer to Philippe.”
“That sounds like Ysabeau,” he said with a hint of laughter. “What a relief to know that she hasn’t been irreversibly changed by sleeping under the same roof as a witch.”
“What are you drinking?” It was the only detail my imagination couldn’t supply. “Since when have you cared about wine?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Since I found out how much there was to know.” Since I found out that you cared about wine, you idiot. “Something Spanish tonight—Vega Sicilia.” “From when?” “Do you mean which vintage?” Matthew teased. “It’s 1964.” “A relative baby, then?” I teased back, relieved at the change in his mood. “An infant,” he agreed. I didn’t need a sixth sense to know that he was smiling.
Matthew had been accumulating secrets—large ones like the Knights of Lazarus and his son Lucas, small ones like his relationships with William Harvey and Charles Darwin—for well over a millennium. My life might be too brief to hear them all, never mind understand them.
The Knights of Lazarus roused me as a historian, and my witch’s instincts told me the brotherhood was important to understanding Matthew.
“No. I can’t make any progress there. There’s nothing left for me in Oxford. I want to be home, with you. I should be there in a few hours.” He sounded strange, his voice thick. “Am I dreaming?” “You’re not dreaming,” Matthew said. “And, Diana?” He hesitated. “I love you.” It was what I most wanted to hear. The forgotten chain inside me started to sing, quietly, in the dark. “Come here and tell me that,” I said softly, my eyes filling with tears of relief. “You haven’t changed your mind?” “Never,” I said fiercely.
For the first time in our relationship, Matthew didn’t beat me to the door. He was still straightening his long legs when my arms locked around his neck, my toes barely touching the ground. “Don’t do that again,” I whispered, my eyes shut against sudden tears. “Don’t ever do that again.” Matthew’s arms went around me, and he buried his face in my neck. We held each other without speaking.
“Dieu,” he whispered in wonder, “I was wrong.” “Wrong?” My voice was panicky. “I thought I knew how much I missed you. But I had no idea.” “Tell me.” I wanted to hear again the words he’d said on the phone last night. “I love you, Diana. God help me, I tried not to.” My face softened into his hands. “I love you, too, Matthew, with all my heart.”
“You are mine now.”
“She has no idea.” Ysabeau’s voice rang through the courtyard. Matthew stiffened, his arms circling me protectively. “With that kiss you have broken every rule that holds our world together and keeps us safe. Matthew, you have marked that witch as your own. And, Diana, you have offered your witch’s blood—your power—to a vampire. You have turned your back on your own kind and pledged yourself to a creature who is your enemy.” “It was a kiss,” I said, shaken. “It was an oath. And having made this promise to each other, you are outlaws. May the gods help you both.”
“You are my most beloved son,” she continued, her voice as strong as iron. “And Diana is now my daughter—my responsibility as well as yours. Your fight is my fight, your enemies are my enemies.”
“Enough of that nonsense. You are going to be hounded to the ends of the earth because of this love you share. We fight as a family.” Ysabeau turned to me. “As for you, daughter—you will fight, as you promised. You are reckless—the truly brave always are—but I cannot fault your courage. Still, you need him as much as you need the air you breathe, and he wants you as he’s wanted nothing and no one since I made him. So it is done, and we will make the best of it.”
“Well, they won’t find much. Not in my rooms.” When Matthew looked puzzled, I explained. “My mother insisted that I clean my hairbrush before leaving for school each morning. It’s an ingrained habit. She made me flush the hair down the toilet—my nail clippings, too.” Matthew now appeared stunned. Ysabeau didn’t look surprised at all. “Your mother sounds more and more like someone I would have been eager to know,” Ysabeau said quietly.
“I needed no encouragement to be with you. You say you’ve loved me since you resisted hitting me with an oar at the river.” His eyes were unguarded. “I’ve loved you longer than that—since the moment you used magic to take a book from its shelf at the Bodleian. You looked so relieved, and then so terribly guilty.”
“You already have me,” I said, holding on to him with my hands, my eyes, my mind, my heart. “There’s no need to hunt me. I’m yours.” “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “I’ll never possess you completely. I’ll always want more than you can give.”
“Since I’ve met you,” I said quietly, “you’ve shown me all the pleasant parts of being a vampire. You taste things I can’t even imagine. You remember events and people that I can only read about in books. You smell when I change my mind or want to kiss you. You’ve woken me to a world of sensory possibilities I never dreamed existed.” I paused for a moment, hoping I was making progress. I wasn’t. “At the same time, you’ve seen me throw up, set fire to your rug, and come completely unglued when I received something unexpected in the mail. You missed the waterworks, but they weren’t pretty. In
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How could you not have been loved before, when I love you so much?”
“You aren’t the only scary creature around, are you?” I waved my fiery hands between us until the vampire shook his head. “So stop being all heroic and let me share your life. I don’t want to be with Sir Lancelot. Be yourself—Matthew Clairmont. Complete with your sharp vampire teeth and your scary mother, your test tubes full of blood and your DNA, your infuriating bossiness and your maddening sense of smell.”
“If I come closer,” Matthew said conversationally, as though asking for the time or the temperature, “will you turn blue again, or is that it for now?” “I think I’m done for the time being.” “You think?” His eyebrow arched again.
“And you are going to give me gray hairs—long thought impossible among vampires, by the way—with your courage, your firecracker hands, and the impossible things you say.”
“I’m not a child, Diana, and my mother needn’t protect me from my own wife.” He kept turning his glass this way and that. The word “wife” echoed in the room for a few moments. “Did I miss something?” I finally asked. “When were we married?” Matthew’s eyes lifted. “The moment I came home and said I loved you. It wouldn’t stand up in court perhaps, but as far as vampires are concerned, we’re wed.”
The parts of him that hadn’t been visible to me were just as perfect as those that had. Seeing Matthew, naked and gleaming, was like witnessing a classical sculpture brought to life.
“I’ve never had sex with a vampire before.” Matthew looked genuinely shocked. “And you’re not going to tonight either.” The sheet forgotten, I raised myself on my elbows. “You come into my bath, watch me get out of it naked and dripping wet, let me undress you, and then tell me we are not going to make love tonight?” “I keep telling you we have no reason to rush. Modern creatures are always in such a hurry,” Matthew murmured, drawing the fallen sheet down to my waist. “Call me old-fashioned if you’d like, but I want to enjoy every moment of our courtship.”
We kissed each other, long and deep, while my legs opened like the covers of a book.
“It’s nothing, mon coeur. Just my vampire body, holding on to trauma.”
“My life now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything before was preamble. Now I have you. One day you will be gone, and my life will be over.”
“You do, husband?” I bit his ear gently as it moved past. “Don’t do that,” he said, with mock severity. “No biting in bed.” I did it again anyway.
do you intend to fulfill that promise?” He buried his face in my breasts as if he might find the answer there.
“You were born in August, yes? Under the sign of Leo?” He sounded entirely French, most of the Oxbridge accent gone. I nodded. “Then I will have to call you my lioness now, because only she could have fought as you did. But even la lionne needs her protectors.”
“Matthew?” I croaked, swiveling my head to the side to look for him. His face appeared. “Yes, my darling?”
Fallon and Hector were padding along at his side, their tongues hanging out. Ysabeau’s eyes narrowed. “Your dogs do not belong in my house.”
The idea of Ysabeau’s returning to the room was surprisingly comforting.
She put her cold hands on my shoulders. “Be brave, daughter, but listen to Matthew,” she instructed, giving me a kiss on each cheek.
Baldwin surveyed us, me in my wheelchair and his brother standing grimly behind. “You both look like hell,” he commented.
“I thought you were lost,” he murmured when we parted, resting his forehead against mine, “forever. Now I’m afraid you might shatter into a thousand pieces because of what Satu did. If something had happened to you, I’d have gone mad.”
“It’s you, inside me,” I said. “You ground me—an anchor at the end of a long, silvery chain. It’s why I’m so certain of you, I suppose.” My voice dropped. “Provided I could feel you—had this connection to you—there was nothing Satu could say or do that I couldn’t endure.”
“Thank you again for finding me,” I whispered when the house came into view. He knew this time I wasn’t talking about La Pierre. “I’d stopped looking long ago. But there you were in the Bodleian Library on Mabon. A historian. A witch, no less.” Matthew shook his head in disbelief.
“That last summer, before your mom and dad went to Africa, Rebecca asked me what made the most lasting impression on children. I told her it was the stories their parents read to them at night, and all the messages about hope and strength and love that were embedded in them.” Em’s eyes were spilling over now, and she dashed her tears away. “You were right,” I said softly.
