chapter 18

The real problem was that damn cat. Tabitha was Sarah's baby and picked up any tension within the family with uncanny precision. "I'm fine. I had an unexpected encounter in the library tonight, that's al ."

A click told me that Em had picked up the extension.

"Why aren't you celebrating Mabon?" she asked.

Emily Mather had been a fixture in my life for as long as I could remember. She and Rebecca Bishop had met as high-school students working in the summer at Plimoth Plantation, where they dug holes and pushed wheel- barrows for the archaeologists. They became best friends, then devoted pen pals when Emily went to Vassar and my mother to Harvard. Later the two reconnected in Cambridge when Em became a children's librarian. After my parents' death, Em's long weekends in Madison soon led to a new job in the local elementary school. She and Sarah became inseparable partners, even though Em had maintained her own apartment in town and the two of them had made a big deal of never being seen heading into a bedroom together while I was growing up. This didn't fool me, the neighbors, or anyone else living in town. Everybody treated them like the couple they were, regardless of where they slept. When I moved out of the Bishop house, Em moved in and had been there ever since. Like my mother and my aunt, Em came from a long line of witches.

"I was invited to the coven's party but worked instead."

"Did the witch from Bryn Mawr ask you to go?" Em was interested in the classicist, mostly (it had turned out over a fair amount of wine one summer night) because she'd once dated Gil ian's mother. "It was the sixties," was al Em would say.

"Yes." I sounded harassed. The two of them were convinced I was going to see the light and begin taking my magic seriously now that I was safely tenured. Nothing cast any doubt on this wishful prognostication, and they were always thril ed when I had any contact with a witch. "But I spent the evening with Elias Ashmole instead.""Who's he?" Em asked Sarah.

"You know, that dead guy who col ected alchemy books,"

was Sarah's muffled reply.

"Stil here, you two," I cal ed into the phone.

"So who rattled your cage?" Sarah asked.

Given that both were witches, there was no point in trying to hide anything. "I met a vampire in the library. One I've never seen before, named Matthew Clairmont."

There was silence on Em's end as she flipped through her mental card file of notable creatures. Sarah was quiet for a moment, too, deciding whether or not to explode.

"I hope he's easier to get rid of than the daemons you have a habit of attracting," she said sharply.

"Daemons haven't bothered me since I stopped acting."

"No, there was that daemon who fol owed you into the Beinecke Library when you first started working at Yale, too," Em corrected me. "He was just wandering down the street and came looking for you."

"He was mental y unstable," I protested. Like using witchcraft on the washing machine, the fact that I'd somehow caught the attention of a single, curious