“It’s still not sufficient,” Matthew worried, looking over the papers. “We still can’t explain why
weavers and blood-rage vampires like you and I can conceive children.”
I could explain it. The Book of Life had shared that secret with me. But I didn’t want to say anything until Miriam and Chris delivered the scientific evidence. I was beginning to think I would have to make this case without their help when a car pulled in to the courtyard.
Matthew frowned. “Who could that be?” he asked, putting down his pen and going to the window.
“Miriam and Chris are here. Something must be wrong at the Yale lab.”
Once the pair were inside and Matthew had received assurances that the research team he’d left in New Haven was thriving, Chris handed me a thick envelope.
“You were right,” he said. “Nice work, Professor Bishop.”
I hugged the packet to my chest, unspeakably relieved. Then I handed it to Matthew.
He tore into the envelope, his eyes racing over the lines of text and the black-and-white ideograms that accompanied them. He looked up, his lips parted in astonishment.
“I was surprised, too,” Miriam admitted. “As long as we approached daemons, vampires, and witches as separate species distantly related to humans but distinct from one another, the truth was going to elude us.”
“Then Diana told us the Book of Life was about what joined us together, not what separated us,”
Chris continued. “She asked us to compare her genome to both the daemon genome and the genomes of other witches.”
“It was all there in the creature chromosome,” Miriam said, “hiding in plain sight.”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said, looking blank.
“Diana was able to conceive Matthew’s child because they both have daemon blood in them,”
Chris explained. “It’s too early to know for sure, but our hypothesis is that weavers are descended from ancient witch-daemon unions. Blood-rage vampires like Matthew are produced when a vampire with the blood-rage gene creates another vampire from a human with some daemon DNA.”
“We didn’t find much of a daemonic presence in Ysabeau’s genetic sample, or Marcus’s either,”
Miriam added. “That explains why they never manifested the disease like Matthew or Benjamin did.”
“But Stephen Proctor’s mother was human,” Sarah said. “She was a total pain in the ass—sorry, Diana—but definitely not daemonic.”
“It doesn’t have to be an immediate relationship,” Miriam said. “There just has to be enough daemon DNA in the mix to trigger the weaver and blood-rage genes. It could have been one of Stephen’s distant ancestors. As Chris said, these findings are pretty raw. We’ll need decades to understand it completely.”
“One more thing: Baby Margaret is a weaver, too.” Chris pointed to the paper in Matthew’s hands.
“Page thirty. There’s no question about it.”
“I wonder if that’s why Em was so adamant that Margaret shouldn’t fall into Knox’s hands,” Sarah mused. “Maybe she discovered the truth somehow.”
“This will shake the Congregation to its foundations,” I said.
“It does more than that. The science makes the covenant completely irrelevant,” Matthew said.
“We’re not separate species.”
“So we’re just different races?” I asked. “That makes our miscegenation argument even stronger.”