“Professor Clairmont.” I squeaked it out before the words caught in the back of my throat, and I quieted the urge to run screaming toward the exit.
“We’ve not met,” he continued in an oddly accented voice. It was mostly Oxbridge but had a touch of softness that I couldn’t place. His eyes, which never left my face, were not actually dark at all, I discovered, but dominated by dilated pupils bordered with a gray-green sliver of iris. Their pull was insistent, and I found myself unable to look away.
The vampire’s mouth was moving again. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”
My eyes widened. It was not impossible that a professor of biochemistry would be interested in seventeenth-century alchemy, but it seemed highly unlikely. I picked at the collar of my white shirt and scanned the room. We were the only two in it. There was no one at the old oak card file or at the nearby banks of computers. Whoever was at the collection desk was too far away to come to my aid.
“I found your article on the color symbolism of alchemical transformation fascinating, and your work on Robert Boyle’s approach to the problems of expansion and contraction was quite persuasive,” Clairmont continued smoothly, as if he were used to being the only active participant in a conversation. “I’ve not yet finished your latest book on alchemical apprenticeship and education, but I’m enjoying it a great deal.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. His gaze shifted from my eyes to my throat.
I stopped picking at the buttons around my neck.
His unnatural eyes floated back to mine. “You have a marvelous way of evoking the past for your readers.” I took that as a compliment, since a vampire would know if it was wrong. Clairmont paused for a moment. “Might I buy you dinner?”
My mouth dropped open. Dinner? I might not be able to escape from him in the library, but there was no reason to linger over a meal—especially one he would not be sharing, given his dietary preferences.
“I have plans,” I said abruptly, unable to formulate a reasonable explanation of what those plans might involve. Matthew Clairmont must know I was a witch, and I was clearly not celebrating Mabon.
“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 smell of Ashmole 782. Unable to think straight, I resorted to nodding. It was safer.
“I thought so,” said Clairmont. “I’m sure our paths will cross again. Oxford is such a small town.”
“Very small,” 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 collar, 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 still until my chilled 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 equally full 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. “Will 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 walls 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 William Herbert and sucked the chilly 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.