The Manor House was not difficult to find.

“The gates are open.” Gallowglass cracked his knuckles.

“What is your plan, Gallowglass? Running at the front door and battering it down with your bare hands?” I climbed out of Leonard’s car. “Come on, Phoebe. Let’s go ring the bell.”

Gallowglass was behind us as we walked straight through the open front gates and skirted the round stone planter that I suspected had been a fountain before it was filled in with soil. Standing in the middle were two box trees clipped to resemble dachshunds.

“How extraordinary,” Phoebe murmured, eyeing the green sculptures.

The door to the manor was set in the middle of a bank of low windows. There was no bell, but an iron knocker—also shaped like a dachshund—had been inexpertly affixed to the stout Elizabethan panels. Before Phoebe could give me a lecture about the preservation of old houses, I lifted the dog and rapped sharply.

Silence.

I rapped again, putting a bit more weight into it.

“We are standing in plain view of the road,” Gallowglass growled. “That’s the sorriest excuse for a wall I’ve ever seen. A child could step over it.”

“Not everybody can have a moat,” I said. “I hardly think Benjamin has ever heard of Chipping Weston, never mind followed us here.”

Gallowglass was unconvinced and continued to look around like an anxious owl.

I was about to rap again when the door was flung open. A man wearing goggles and carrying a parachute stood in the entrance. Dogs swarmed around his feet, wriggling and barking.

“Whenever have you been?” The stranger engulfed me in a hug while I tried to sort out what his strange question meant. The dogs leaped and frolicked, excited to meet me now that their master had signaled his approval. He let me go and lifted his goggles, his nudging stare feeling like a buss of welcome.

“You’re a daemon,” I said unnecessarily.

“And you’re a witch.” With one green eye and one blue, he studied Gallowglass. “And he’s a vampire. Not the same one you had with you before, but still big enough to replace the lightbulbs.”

“I don’t do lightbulbs,” Gallowglass said.

“Wait. I know you,” I said, sifting through the faces in my memory. This was one of the daemons I’d seen in the Bodleian last year when I’d first encountered Ashmole 782. He liked lattes and taking apart microfilm readers. He always wore earbuds, even when they weren’t attached to anything.

“Timothy?”

“The same.” Timothy turned his eyes to me and cocked his fingers and thumbs so they looked like six-shooters. He was, I noticed, still wearing mismatched cowboy boots, but this time one was green and the other blue—to match his eyes, one presumed. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Told you, babe: You’re the one.”

“Are you T. J. Weston?” Phoebe asked, trying to make her voice heard above the din of yelping, wriggling dogs.

Timothy stuffed his fingers in his ears and mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

“Oy!” Gallowglass shouted. “Shut your gobs, little yappers.”

The barking stopped instantly. The dogs sat, jaws open and tongues lolling, and looked at Gallowglass adoringly. Timothy removed a finger from one of his ears.

“Nice,” the daemon said with a low whistle of appreciation. The dogs immediately started barking again.

Gallowglass bundled us all inside, muttering darkly about sight lines and defensive positions and possible hearing damage to Apple and Bean. Peace was achieved once he got down on the floor in front of the fireplace and let the dogs scramble all over him, licking and burrowing as if their pack’s alpha had been returned to them after a long absence.

“What are their names?” Phoebe inquired, trying to count the number of tails in the squirming mound.

“Hansel and Gretel, obviously.” Timothy looked at Phoebe as though she were hopeless.

“And the other four?” Phoebe asked.

“Oscar. Molly. Rusty. And Puddles.” Timothy pointed to each dog in turn.

“He likes to play outside in the rain?”

“No,” Timothy replied. “She likes to piddle on the floor. Her name was Penelope, but everybody in the village calls her Puddles now.”

A graceful segue from this subject to was impossible, so I plunged forward. “Did you buy a page from an illuminated manuscript that has a tree on it?”

“Yep.” Timothy blinked.

“Would you be willing to sell it to me?” There was no point in being coy.

“Nope.”

“We’re prepared to pay handsomely for it.” Phoebe might not like the de Clermonts’ casual indifference to where pictures were hung, but she was beginning to see the benefits of their purchasing power.

“It’s not for sale.” Timothy ruffled the ears of one of the dogs who then returned to Gallowglass and began to gnaw on the toe of his boot.

“Can I see it?” Perhaps Timothy would let me borrow it, I thought.

“Sure.” Timothy divested himself of the parachute, which he had been wearing like a cape, and strode out of the room. We scrambled to keep up.

He led us through several rooms that had clearly been designed for different purposes from the ones they were now used for. A dining room had a battered drum kit set up in the center with DEREK AND

THE DERANGERS painted on the bass-drum head, and another room looked like an electronics graveyard except for the chintz sofas and beribboned wallpaper.

“It’s in there. Somewhere,” Timothy said, gesturing at the next room.

“Holy Mother of God,” Gallowglass said, astonished.

“There” was the old library. “Somewhere” covered a multitude of possible hiding places, including unopened shipping crates and mail, cardboard cartons full of sheet music going back to the 1920s, and stacks and stacks of old newspapers. There was a large collection of clock faces of all sizes, descriptions, and vintages, too.

And there were manuscripts. Thousands of manuscripts.

“I think it’s in a blue folder,” Timothy said, scratching his chin. He had obviously started shaving at some point earlier in the day but only partially completed the task, leaving two grizzled patches.

“How long have you been buying old books?” I asked, picking up the first one that came to hand. It was an eighteenth-century student science notebook, German, and of no particular value except to a scholar of Enlightenment education.

“Since I was thirteen. That’s when my gran died and left me this place. My mom left when I was five, and my dad, Derek, died of an accidental overdose when I turned nine, so it was just me and Gran after that.” Timothy looked around the room fondly. “I’ve been restoring it ever since. Do you want to see my paint chips for the gallery upstairs?”

“Maybe later,” I said.

“Okay.” His face fell.

“Why do manuscripts interest you?” When trying to get answers from daemons and

undergraduates, it was best to ask genuinely open-ended questions.

“They’re like the house—they remind me of something I shouldn’t forget,” Timothy said, as though that explained everything.

“With any luck one of them will remind him where he put the page from your book,” Gallowglass said under his breath. “If not, it’s going to take us weeks to go through all this rubbish.”

We didn’t have weeks. I wanted Ashmole 782 out of the Bodleian and stitched back together so that Matthew could come home. Without the Book of Life, we were vulnerable to the Congregation, Benjamin, and whatever private ambitions Knox harbored. Once it was safely in our possession, they would all have to deal with us on our terms—scion or no scion. I pushed up my sleeves.

“Would it be all right with you, Timothy, if I used magic in your library?” It seemed polite to ask.

“Will it be loud?” Timothy asked. “The dogs don’t like noise.”

“No,” I said, considering my options. “I think it will be completely silent.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay, then,” he said, relieved. He put his goggles back on for additional security.

“More magic, Auntie?” Gallowglass’s eyebrows lowered. “You’ve been using an awful lot of it lately.”

“Wait until tomorrow,” I murmured. If I got all three missing pages, I was going to the Bodleian.

Then it was gloves-off time.

A flurry of papers rose from the floor.

“You’ve started already?” Gallowglass said, alarmed.

“No,” I said.

“Then what’s causing the ruckus?” Gallowglass moved toward the agitated pile.

A tail wagged from between a leather-bound folio and a box of pens.

“Puddles!” Timothy said.

The dog emerged, tail first, pulling a blue folder.

“Good doggy,” Gallowglass crooned. He crouched down and held out his hand. “Bring it to me.”

Puddles stood with the missing page from Ashmole 782 gripped in her teeth, looking very pleased with herself. She did not, however, take it to Gallowglass.

“She wants you to chase her,” Timothy explained.

Gallowglass scowled. “I’m not chasing that dog.”

In the end we all chased her. Puddles was the fastest, cleverest dachshund who’d ever lived, darting under furniture and feinting left and then right before dashing away again. Gallowglass was speedy, but he was not small. Puddles slipped through his fingers again and again, her glee evident.

Finally Puddles’ need to pant meant that she had to drop the now slightly moist blue folder in front of her paws. Gallowglass took the opportunity to reach in and secure it.

“What a good girl!” Timothy picked up the squirming dog. “You’re going to win the Great Dachshund Games this summer. No question.” A slip of paper was attached to one of Puddles’ claws.

“Hey. There’s my council tax bill.”

Gallowglass handed me the folder.

“Phoebe should do the honors,” I said. “If not for her, we wouldn’t be here.” I passed the folder on to her.

Phoebe cracked it open. The image inside was so vivid that it might have been painted yesterday, and its striking colors and the details of trunk and leaf only increased the sense of vibrancy that came from the page. There was power in it. That much was unmistakable.

“It’s beautiful.” Phoebe lifted her eyes. “Is this the page you’ve been looking for?”

“Aye,” Gallowglass said. “That’s it, all right.”

Phoebe placed the page in my waiting hands. As soon as the parchment touched them, they brightened, shooting little sparks of color into the room. Filaments of power erupted from my fingertips, connecting to the parchment with an almost audible snap of electricity.

“There’s a lot of energy on that page. Not all of it good,” Timothy said, backing away. “It needs to go back into that book you discovered in the Bodleian.”

“I know you don’t want to sell the page,” I said, “but could I borrow it? Just for a day?” I could go straight to the Bodleian, recall Ashmole 782, and have the page back tomorrow afternoon—provided let me remove it again, once I’d returned it to the binding.

“Nope.” Timothy shook his head.

“You won’t let me buy it. You won’t let me borrow it,” I said, exasperation mounting. “Do you have some sentimental attachment to it?”

“Of course I do. I mean, he’s my ancestor, isn’t he?”

Every eye in the room went to the illustration of the tree in my hands. Even Puddles looked at it with renewed interest, sniffing the air with her long, delicate nose.

“How do you know that?” I whispered.

“I see things—microchips, crossword puzzles, you, the guy whose skin made that parchment. I knew who you were from the moment you walked into Duke Humfrey’s.” Timothy looked sad. “I told you as much. But you didn’t listen to me and left with the big vampire. You’re the one.”

“The one for what?” My throat closed. Daemon visions were bizarre and surreal, but they could be shockingly accurate.

“The one who will learn how it all began—the blood, the death, the fear. And the one who can put a stop to it, once and for all.” Timothy sighed. “You can’t buy my grandfather, and you can’t borrow him.

But if I give him to you, for safekeeping, you’ll make his death mean something?”

“I can’t promise you that, Timothy.” There was no way I could swear to something so enormous and imprecise. “We don’t know what the book will reveal. And I certainly can’t guarantee that anything will change.”

“Can you make sure his name won’t be forgotten, once you learn what it is?” Timothy asked.

“Names are important, you know.”

A sense of the uncanny washed over me. Ysabeau had told me the same thing shortly after I met her. I saw Edward Kelley in my mind’s eye. “You will find your name in it, too,” he had cried when Emperor Rudolf made him hand over the Book of Life. The hackles on my neck rose.

“I won’t forget his name,” I promised.

“Sometimes that’s enough,” Timothy said.

28

It was several hours past midnight, and any hope I had of sleep was gone. The fog had lifted slightly, and the brightness of the full moon pierced through the gray wisps that still clung to the trunks of trees and the low places in the park where the deer slept. One or two members of the herd were still out, picking over the grass in search of the last remaining fodder. A hard frost was coming; I could sense it. I was attuned to the rhythms of the earth and sky in ways that I had not been before I lived in a time when the day was organized around the height of the sun instead of the dial of a clock, and the season of the year determined everything from what you ate to the physic that you took.