chapter 16

"That's too bad," he murmured, a touch of a smile on his lips. "Another time, perhaps. You are in Oxford for the year, aren't you?"

Being around a vampire was always unnerving, and Clairmont's clove scent brought back the strange smel of Ashmole 782. Unable to think straight, I resorted to nodding. It was safer.

"I thought so," said Clairmont. "I'm sure our paths wil cross again. Oxford is such a smal town."

"Very smal ," I agreed, wishing I had taken leave in London instead.

"Until then, Dr. Bishop. It has been a pleasure." Clairmont extended his hand. With the exception of their brief excursion to my col ar, his eyes had not drifted once from mine. I didn't think he had blinked either. I steeled myself not to be the first to look away.

My hand went forward, hesitating for a moment before clasping his. There was a fleeting pressure before he withdrew. He stepped backward, smiled, then disappeared into the darkness of the oldest part of the library.

I stood stil until my chil ed hands could move freely again, then walked back to my desk and switched off my computer. Notes and Queries asked me accusingly why I had bothered to go and get it if I wasn't even going to look at it; my to-do list was equal y ful of reproach. I ripped it off the top of the pad, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the wicker basket under the desk.

"'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,'" I muttered under my breath.

The reading room's night proctor glanced down at his watch when I returned my manuscripts. "Leaving early, Dr.

Bishop?"

I nodded, my lips closed tightly to keep myself from asking whether he knew there had been a vampire in the paleography reference section.

He picked up the stack of gray cardboard boxes that held the manuscripts. "Wil you need these tomorrow?"

"Yes," I whispered. "Tomorrow."

Having observed the last scholarly propriety of exiting the library, I was free. My feet clattered against the linoleum floors and echoed against the stone wal s as I sped through the reading room's lattice gate, past the books guarded with velvet ropes to keep them from curious fingers, down the worn wooden stairs, and into the enclosed quadrangle on the ground floor. I leaned against the iron railings surrounding the bronze statue of Wil iam Herbert and sucked the chil y air into my lungs, struggling to get the vestiges of clove and cinnamon out of my nostrils.There were always things that went bump in the night in Oxford, I told myself sternly. So there was one more vampire in town.

No matter what I told myself in the quadrangle, my walk home was faster than usual. The gloom of New Col ege Lane was a spooky proposition at the best of times. I ran my card through the reader at New Col ege's back gate and felt some of the tension leave my body when the gate clicked shut behind me, as if every door and wal I put between me and the library somehow kept me safe.