Diana calls home to talk to her aunt Sarah.  Oh, no, that’s not right.  First we get her entire morning routine, then Diana calls home to talk to Sarah.  Because when have we ever bothered to skip even a moment of the fascinating life of Diana Bishop?

Sarah and Em grill her about her activities and then yell at her for hanging out with vampires and daemons.  They say it’s dangerous, but even though this line has been bandied about quite a bit…um, what happens when witches and daemons and vampires hang out?  Anything?  Do they create a vortex of magic, or do the break out in brawls, or do the sparkle?  Is this something that really happens, or some racist assumption?  We’ve been told again and again that it’s dangerous, but never told why.  At best, we’ve been told that humans would notice it, but that doesn’t really affect yoga class.  We also don’t know what would happen if humans noticed.  Would humans brush it off?  Start a riot?  Convince themselves it was something else?

Has there really never been a breach of security in this world?  What happens when humans find out about witches and vampires?

Diana tells her aunts about the magic book she found, and Sarah berates her for sending a magical book into (as far as she knew) a mundane library stack.  Yeah, that’s a good point, Sarah.  Doesn’t seem very safe at all to just blithely send that back to the stacks when she thought that no one but normal humans were around back there. 

Then she yells at her aunts because Matthew is protecting her, and they just don’t understand what a special snowflake he is.

You know, for someone who apparently thinks that ‘anything could have happened’ without Matthew and who has a ‘supposed’ anxiety disorder, she’s been very calm and collected this whole time.  I had no idea she was in any kind of danger, because she’ll flip-flop between being nervous about sharing a room with daemons and not giving a flying shit about anything that’s going on.  I have absolutely no idea what will happen if Matthew stops protecting or what she thinks will happen, because the book completely forgot that it needs to tell us that.

And then Diana refuses to leave Oxford just because there’s a “rude witch” in town.  So…um, are the rest of the creatures not dangerous?  Is she overly reliant on Matthew’s protection?  It’s practically impossible to tell from Diana’s reactions, because her reactions are all over the place.

Her aunts think Diana should go home for a little while, and Diana refuses to ‘run away.’

“Diana, that vampire isn’t protecting you out of the goodness of his heart,” Em said. “You represent something he wants. You have to figure out what it is.”

He wants the book.  Why is this hard to figure out?

“I never thought I’d see the day when a Bishop relied on a vampire for protection, rather than her own power,” she said.

Yes, book, please do point out for us how ridiculous it is that Diana is overpowered and yet still relies on a man.

You’ve got a mess on your hands, and it’s all because you thought you could ignore your heritage.

Although, this I don’t get.  She got the book by accident.  If she’d followed Sarah’s advice and kept the book…well, she’d still have the book, and still have a mess.  So how would admitting she’s a witch have prevented all this mess?  Maybe because she wouldn’t have been in Oxford (since in this book apparently real-fantasy-magic and scholarship can’t exist in the same space…somehow)?  Or maybe because she wouldn’t be spending so much time with a vampire and would take care of herself?

After talking to her aunts, Diana does some mental “imagine your problem as puzzle pieces” trick to try and make sense of the plot, then when her ‘puzzle pieces’ start doing things on their own she realizes she’s doing magic and didn’t keep it very far out of her scholarship after all.  And…wow, look at that, magic and studying, going hand in hand.  It’s almost as if all her excuses for avoiding magic have been pure bullshit and nonsense.

The next day she goes to the library, but Matthew isn’t there (due to being in Scotland) and she talks to Mirriam instead.  Miriam tells her to stop being such a limp fish, protect her own damn self, and stop putting Matthew is such a difficult situation.

How dare Miriam speak to me like that?

Jeeze, who are you, the Queen of Sheba?  Miriam is a fucking adult who’s concerned about her friend and colleague.  She wasn’t even particularly rude.  Diana, do you think that vampires are just some lesser beings who shouldn’t offend your delicate ears with their petty concerns of safety?

Miriam and Diana head out to lunch (since she’s supposed to follow Diana) and downstairs they see a whole bunch of creatures.  A table full of daemons and a table full of vampires, all of them sitting stock still and just…doing nothing.  Not even pretending to read.

“No wonder we’re not supposed to mix. No human could ignore this,” Miriam observed.

What the hell?  This doesn’t seem to be a product of mixing, unless being in mixed company causes your brain to malfunction.  Perhaps instead of not mixing, you should…not act so fucking weird.

And what the hell are they all doing, anyway?  They want the manuscript, I get that.  Do they have a plan?  Are any of them trying to get the book?  Are they just going to sit there until the book magically appears, without any sort of attempt on their own parts?  If they don’t have the right magic to call up the book, why doesn’t one of them talk to Diana, or one of the other witches, and see if someone can go get the damn thing?

This all seems very counter-productive, and I’d really like to know what the hell all those creatures think is going to happen. 

Diana decides to talk to the wizard/witch, having randomly decided that he’s in charge.  Really…randomly.  I wasn’t even aware that they’d organized at all.  Anyway, the guy’s name is Peter.

Despite Peter saying he’s in charge, he can’t get rid of all the watchers, and neither can the vampire she talks to, or the daemon.  Seems everyone is going to sit right there and do nothing.  They know Diana doesn’t have the book because she tells them, they hint at the fact that no one else can call it up for some reason, and they know she has no interest in recalling the book on her own.

So what the fuck do they think is going to happen?  And why doesn’t one of them just say “call up the book and we’ll leave”?  I mean, even if it wouldn’t work, at least make the effort.  This just sitting around, it makes them feel less like actual characters and more like set pieces that the author added in to drum up some ‘dangerous atmosphere.’  But they end up having all the danger of cardboard cut-outs.

They get even less dangerous the next day, when most are missing, despite everyone she talked to saying ‘no dice.’

I really don’t care.  Really.  I just want her to call up the damn book and give it to someone so they can…blow up the world or something, whatever.  At least that would be interesting to read about.

Gillian, the other witch, comes in to talk to her, and the subject quickly goes around to her Bishop family.

“Bridget Bishop was found guilty of witchcraft and executed.

[less than a paragraph later]

“[Bridget Bishop] was found innocent of practicing witchcraft,” I retorted, bristling.

What…just…what is wrong with you, book?

Oh, and least we forget

“Bridget Bishop drew human attention, first with those poppets of hers and then with her provocative clothes and immorality.

So now we’re simultaneously implying that 1) dressing wrong is worthy of being murdered and 2) the things people were accused of in the Salem trials were actually accurate.  Awesome, book, continue shitting on the memory of innocent murder victims. 

Stay classy, book.  Stay classy.

They then talk about her parent’s death, and we find out they were murdered.  Diana claims humans did it, and Gillian says it wasn’t humans at all, and her parents were keeping secrets from other witches.

“Think about what happened to Bridget Bishop and your parents the next time you turn down an invitation to a coven gathering,”

The only coven gathering we’ve seen so far is a Mabon celebration, and that’s a distinctly religious thing.

So, basically, join our religion or we’ll kill you.

Discovery of Witches: now insulting every religion!

After being freaked out by death threats, Diana goes home and finds an invitation from the warden of the college to come by for drinks.  This is sufficient to calm her down.  Because it’s not like she’s got “adrenaline poisoning” or anything ridiculous like that which might make dealing with threats in any way difficult.

At this drinks with the warden thing, he introduces her to Peter again, and she realizes that she read his name in the paper in relation to the murder story.  He talked to the paper about occult stuff, even though the police don’t think there’s an occult connection the murders.  The warden leaves them alone, and they start talking about the magic book.

When creatures refused to use proper names, it was a way of denying that those who were not like you were your equals.

Um…this book has a really annoying habit of saying ‘the witch’ and ‘the vampire’ when it’s in the 3rd-person narration chapters.  So….

Heck, Diana even calls Peter ‘the wizard’ in this section, despite knowing his name.

Peter wants to make sure that Matthew doesn’t get the book, and I can’t figure out why he’s telling Diana.  She doesn’t have the book or want to call it back.

Finally we get some new information.  Peter thinks that her breaking the spell that was on the book was a fluke, as it might have been the 150th anniversary of when the spell was laid.  He thinks that the book was spelled to keep Matthew away from it, and Matthew’s been trying to get it ever sense. 

But the book’s spell was reset when Diana sent it back, and it’s no longer the anniversary, so get to the fucking point, Peter.  Why are you bothering Diana with all this if we’re right back to where we were before she called the book the first time?

Ah, Peter doesn’t have a point.  We still don’t know what Diana has to do with anything, what they want from her, or why they’re watching her.  I guess it’s just because she’s that fucking special.

She flees, then calls Matthew and leaves him a message, because apparently being told that he’s been chasing this book for 150 years makes her…trust him?  I mean, sure, the witches were both ubercreepy, but that hardly means that Matthew is good.  Maybe they’re just all ubercreepy, ever think of that, Diana?