Opening
Under siege by threats and secrets, Diana Bishop leaves Oxford for the de Clermont stronghold as her latent power surges beyond denial. At her side, Matthew Clairmont shifts from scholar to protector, pulling her into his family’s centuries-old world where politics, lineage, and forbidden love sharpen every choice.
What Happens
Chapter 16: Lazarus’s Coffin
After Diana collapses into sleep, Matthew sits in a cold fury, focused on Peter Knox and Gillian Chamberlain. An urgent call brings his son, Marcus Whitmore, with Diana’s DNA results. When Marcus arrives, he finds Matthew on the edge of violence, and the narrative flashes back to Marcus’s origin: in 1781, dying of fever during the American Revolution, he accepts Matthew’s offer of immortality. Matthew trains him to hunt, master thirst, and live by a strict moral code, transforming terror into loyalty.
In the present, the DNA results stun them both—Diana carries nearly every known marker for a witch, plus dozens unknown. Matthew reveals Knox’s threats and the photo of Diana’s murdered parents. Marcus recoils when Matthew vows to hunt Gillian and warns that attacking a Congregation member would endanger the entire de Clermont line. He also forces Matthew to acknowledge the covenant—an ancient law forbidding interspecies relationships—that Matthew hasn’t told Diana about. Matthew rejects the Congregation’s authority, his fixation narrowed to one goal: keep Diana safe.
Marcus recognizes Matthew’s attachment and agrees to help. Matthew has already marked Diana with his scent, signaling possession to other vampires. He orders Marcus to help construct a decoy at the Old Lodge with Miriam, while he spirits Diana to Sept-Tours, the family fortress in France. Marcus balks—Matthew’s mother, Ysabeau de Clermont, despises witches—but Matthew believes only home can shield Diana. Alone, overwhelmed by need, Matthew listens as sleeping Diana reaches for him mind-to-mind: “You’re not lost. I found you,” and, “I’m brave enough for both of us.”
Chapter 17: Sept-Tours
Diana wakes in panic, the memory of threats and the photograph crashing down. Fear detonates into witchwind, a roaring surge of air that rattles the room. Matthew steadies her and explains: her magic is elemental—tied to air—and flares when emotion and physicality override reason. Even her “white table” patterning is a form of unconscious magic. He asks her to come to his family home in France.
A call from Diana’s aunts interrupts. Sarah Bishop and Em bristle the instant they hear Knox’s name; Sarah says Diana’s father detested him. After learning about the photo, Sarah orders Diana home. Diana refuses and chooses France. Matthew offers scholarly cover: an uncatalogued fourteenth-century illustrated Aurora Consurgens in his family library. The lure of rare knowledge seals her decision. They depart Oxford on a private plane for Auvergne; Diana sleeps with her head in Matthew’s lap. They drive to Sept-Tours, a medieval fortress looming with history. At the door, Ysabeau waits—regal, glacial, and enraged that a witch crosses her threshold.
Chapter 18: The Old Tongue
Ysabeau greets them with icy grandeur and open contempt, calling Diana’s scent “repulsively green.” She and Matthew fight in Occitan, tension vibrating in the stone. Marthe, the ancient housekeeper, welcomes Diana gently and recognizes the power coiled within her. Matthew leads Diana up the winding stairs to his tower rooms—part sanctuary, part museum: a Vermeer, a broadsword, seventeenth-century microscopes, an ancient human skeleton. Marthe brings food; Diana rests.
Later, Matthew gives a tour of the château and reveals the Aurora Consurgens—an exquisitely illuminated manuscript Diana can study in his tower. In the stables, Diana instinctively connects with the horses, fearlessly calming a massive, ill-tempered stallion, Balthasar. Matthew quotes Giordano Bruno; he knew him firsthand and admits Bruno, a daemon, “crossed the madness-genius divide rather too frequently.” Exhausted, Diana sleeps and dreams: a huntress in a forest, bow in hand, pursued but unafraid, urging her horse to “Fly.”
Chapter 19: The DNA Report
At dawn Diana wants to ride. Matthew, unsettled by her nightmares, insists on proper gear—a helmet, vest—and gifts her custom riding boots. In the stable she soothes Balthasar with an apple and mounts Rakasa, an Andalusian mare. After Matthew tests her in the paddock, they gallop into the forest.
Diana asks why Ysabeau hates witches. Matthew says it roots in jealousy and grief: witches can see the future, bear children, and die—experiences Ysabeau lost when she was forcibly turned, compounded by the loss of her husband, Philippe. Matthew challenges Diana to a race. She leans forward, closes her eyes, and commands Rakasa to “Fly.” Horse and rider respond as one—no reins, no stirrups—bonded by a current of power that terrifies Matthew. He stops her and warns she is wielding forces she doesn’t understand.
He decides she must see the truth. He shows her the DNA report: markers for precognition, telekinesis, spell-casting, necromancy—an array of talents rarely combined. Most astonishing, she bears all four elements—earth, air, water, and the nearly mythical fire—long thought impossible in one witch. The data links her witchwind, her seamless communion with horses, and her uncanny pattern-sight to a vast, inherited reservoir she has never learned to control.
Chapter 20: Le Chatoiement
In Matthew’s study, Diana searches for a Bible and instead discovers his heavily annotated first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. His notes from 1859 obsess over Origins, Evolution, and Extinction, theorizing that creatures and humans descend from common parents, their differences shaped by habit, selection, and descent—a direct bridge to Magic vs. Science and Reason within Matthew’s mind.
That night softens. After dinner, Matthew invites Ysabeau to dance; their grace is centuries deep. He then insists Diana dance with him—eyes closed, mind quiet, body following his lead. As she surrenders to motion, she lifts several inches off the floor. Ysabeau names it: le chatoiement—“the shimmering.” The display forces clarity. Ysabeau tells Diana to grow up and accept who she is. Diana agrees: she will learn to control her magic.
Later, in the study’s quiet, emotion and attraction crest. Matthew and Diana share their first passionate kiss. He is enthralled by her fearlessness and the shimmer about her; she accepts him fully, vampire and all, and invites him to bed. He refuses gently—there is time—and walks her to her room. At her request, he sings an old Occitan love song Philippe composed for Ysabeau, layering their present tenderness over the family’s long, aching history.
Character Development
Diana’s journey pivots from denial to deliberate ownership of power, while Matthew’s shifts from curiosity to fierce, often perilous protectiveness. Around them, family history and law tighten the frame, complicating every choice.
- Diana Bishop: Moves from suppressing magic to committing to mastery. Witchwind, animal communion, and le chatoiement expose her as a uniquely powerful weaver of elemental forces. Emotionally, she crosses from wary alliance to romantic commitment.
- Matthew Clairmont: Protective instincts eclipse academic distance. His authority within the de Clermont family—and his grief over Philippe—surface alongside his scientist’s mind, evidenced by Darwin annotations and genetic analysis.
- Marcus Whitmore: His Revolutionary-era turning cements the father–son bond. In the present, he mediates reason and risk, challenging Matthew’s impulses and foregrounding the legal danger of the Congregation.
- Ysabeau de Clermont: Introduced as a formidable antagonist to witches, she reveals grief and jealousy beneath prejudice. Her command forces Diana toward acceptance, hinting at future, wary respect.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid identity with inheritance. Diana’s powers manifest before she claims them, forcing a move from fear to agency. Her acceptance is not triumphalist; it’s a sober vow to learn control, aligning identity with responsibility.
Matthew embodies the living argument between enchantment and empiricism. Genetics, lab reports, and Darwin’s margins interrogate the supernatural without flattening it, making science a language that translates wonder rather than denies it.
- Identity and Self-Acceptance: Diana’s witchwind, communion with horses, and floating transform abstract lineage into urgent self-knowledge; acceptance becomes a survival skill.
- Family, Lineage, and Belonging: Sept-Tours functions as a fortress of memory—loyalties, losses, and codes of conduct radiate from Philippe’s absence and Ysabeau’s authority.
- Forbidden Love and Inter-species Relationships: The covenant weaponizes prejudice into law; the kiss at Sept-Tours becomes private tenderness and public defiance.
- The Power of History and Memory: Matthew’s artifacts and Darwin volume turn rooms into archives; the Occitan song ties present desire to ancestral grief, giving love a historical dimension.
Symbols:
- Sept-Tours: A defensive stronghold and family reliquary—safety laced with sorrow.
- Aurora Consurgens: Illumination as inheritance; scholarly pursuit becomes a path into self.
- Horses (Balthasar, Rakasa): Mirrors for Diana’s elemental attunement and risk.
Key Quotes
“You’re not lost. I found you.”
Diana’s words pierce Matthew’s isolation and reveal nascent telepathy. The line reframes rescue: she isn’t only being protected—she’s also anchoring him.
“I’m brave enough for both of us.”
Spoken in sleep yet aimed at Matthew’s fear and reticence, the claim foreshadows her role as partner rather than ward, and her impending acceptance of power.
“Fly.”
Diana’s single command fuses rider and horse, exposing her unconscious magic and the intoxicating risks of untrained ability.
“Le chatoiement.”
Ysabeau’s naming of the shimmer converts wonder into category. Language—a family’s old tongue—claims Diana’s power as something knowable and, therefore, teachable.
“Close your eyes, stop thinking, and follow my lead.”
Matthew’s instruction models how Diana accesses magic: by suspending control. It also underscores their trust dynamic—reason yielding to embodied knowledge.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters mark the story’s hinge. The move from Oxford to Sept-Tours trades academic inquiry for ancestral power, pulling Diana into the de Clermont orbit where politics, covenant law, and blood memory define the stakes. The DNA report reframes the plot from a hunt for a manuscript to a revelation about what Diana is and must become. With the de Clermonts fully introduced, the world’s legal and social architecture sharpens, escalating danger around the central romance. Diana’s pledge to learn and the couple’s first kiss close the prologue of denial and open a shared journey toward mastery—and conflict—under the Congregation’s gaze.