“What is it?” Matthew frowned.
“The Congregation already knows about the birth.”
“How?” Matthew demanded. Someone must be watching the house—either a vampire with very sharp eyes, or a witch with strong second sight.
“Who knows?” Baldwin said wearily. “They’re willing to hold in abeyance the charges against you and Diana in exchange for an opportunity to examine the babies.”
“Never.” Matthew’s anger caught light.
“The Congregation only wants to know what the twins are,” Baldwin said shortly.
“Mine. Philip and Rebecca are mine,” Matthew replied.
“No one seems to be disputing that—impossible though it supposedly is,” Baldwin said.
“This is Gerbert’s doing.” Every instinct told him that the vampire was a crucial link between Benjamin and the search for the Book of Life. He had been manipulating Congregation politics for years.
“Perhaps. Not every vampire in London is Hubbard’s creature,” Baldwin said. “Verin still intends to go to the Congregation on the sixth of December.”
“The babies’ birth doesn’t change anything,” Matthew said, though he knew that it did.
“Take care of my sister, Matthew,” Baldwin said quietly. Matthew thought he detected a note of real worry in his brother’s tone.
“Always,” Matthew replied.
The grandmothers were the babies’ first visitors. Sarah’s grin stretched from ear to ear, and Ysabeau’s face was shining with happiness. When we shared the babies’ first names, they both were touched at the thought that the legacy of the children’s absent grandparents would be carried into the future.
“Leave it to you two to have twins that aren’t even born on the same day,” Sarah said, swapping Rebecca for Philip, who had been staring at his grandmother with a fascinated frown. “See if you can get her to open her eyes, Ysabeau.”
Ysabeau blew gently on Rebecca’s face. Her eyes popped wide, and she began to scream, waving her mittened hands at her grandmother. “There. Now we can see you properly, my beauty.”
“They’re different signs of the zodiac, too,” Sarah said, swaying gently with Philip in her arms.
Unlike his sister, Philip was content to lie still and quietly observe his surroundings, his dark eyes wide.
“Who are?” I was feeling drowsy, and Sarah’s chatter was too complicated for me to follow.
“The babies. Rebecca is a Scorpio, and Philip is a Sagittarius. The serpent and the archer,” Sarah replied.
The de Clermonts and the Bishops. The tenth knot and the goddess. The arrow’s owl-feather fletches tickled my shoulder, and the firedrake’s tail tightened around my aching hips. A premonitory finger drew up my spine, leaving my nerves tingling.
Matthew frowned. “Something wrong, mon coeur?”
“No. Just a strange feeling.” The urge to protect that had taken root in the aftermath of the babies’ birth grew stronger. I didn’t want Rebecca and Philip tied to some larger weaving, the design of which could never be understood by someone as small and insignificant as their mother. They were my children—our children—and I would make sure that they were allowed to find their own path, not follow the one that destiny and fate handed them. “Hello, Father. Are you watching?”
Matthew stared at his computer screen, his phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear. This time Benjamin had called to deliver the message. He wanted to hear Matthew’s reactions to what he was seeing on the screen.
“I understand that congratulations are in order.” Benjamin’s voice was pinched with fatigue. The body of a dead witch lay on an operating table behind him, cut open in a vain attempt to save the child she’d been carrying. “A girl. A boy, too.”