It was an even older photograph. This project, this case, it was really starting to rack up artifacts. Fragile, precious things, time travelers in a different sense. Without need of food, or air, or water, they moved from the past into the future complicitly. Or perhaps they were evidence of the past clinging to the future. A past that refused to be forgotten and the more Ethan learned about it, the more he thought these fragments of the past were right to demand safe passage into the future.
The image was brown. Two little girls stood in the center in school uniforms, a woman sat between them staring dead-eyed directly into the camera.
The children looked cautious. Uneasy. Their guardian’s apathy of little comfort.
“This is Lucy,” Jefferson pointed out the child on the left. A little taller than the other girl and presumably older.
Now Jefferson’s finger tapped on the other child. “And this is Jane. Not their birth names, obviously. The names they received at boarding school.”
With the illness of vampire blood and the time-traveling thing and Gene’s quarter-life crisis and everything it had taken Ethan a while to go through the information Jefferson had turned up on John Wilson. It became clear very quickly that there wasn’t much to know or find about John Wilson at any point in time.
“He was born in 1944 and probably turned in 1976“
“That’s it?” Ethan said. “That’s all you know?”
“For now.”
“What about military records? He wasn’t registered for the draft?”
“Not that I have been able to find yet.”
Ethan leaned back in his chair. His hands moved over the scattered documents, spreading them apart. Photocopies of handwritten and typed pages—Jefferson wasn’t as tackless as to take originals. Even the photographs were reproductions, hastily taken on Jefferson’s phone and printed out again.
“It’s like he was born to die,” Ethan murmured as he picked up the images of the two girls: John Wilson’s mother and aunt.
“Maybe he was.”
Half-moon-shaped pockets hung under Jefferson’s eyes. Lines cut deep into his cheeks. He kept his hair short, not quite shaved but short enough for the scalp to be visible.
He had been happy to go back to work involving vampires, but by the look of him it didn’t seem particularly low stress.
“Hm?”
“Lucy Wilson,” Jefferson tapped the child in the photograph. Ethan imagined her flinching and speaking up for herself, telling them things they did not know about her story that maybe the living, breathing woman had too much discretion to reveal.
“Lucy Wilson was sent to a boarding school for native children in 1929. She met John’s father at some point after she got out. His grandfather was a contract holder.”
Ethan was worried it was going to be something like this. While it wasn’t unheard of for Lola to turn a human outside her families, it was unlike her. She was extraordinarily discreet, even for a vampire. She did not flash her fangs or drink opportunistically. If she turned outside the family there would have been a good reason.
Jefferson probably knew that too. That was why he had started looking into Lucy Wilson. To find John Wilson by figuring out who John Wilson was and what had brought him into his immortality.
Blood families were more than just the living descendants of immortals. They represented the most pragmatic trade: blood for protection. In exchange for feeding the vampire the family received the grace and favor of said vampire. Being immortal and nearly indestructible had many benefits. Generation after generation, the human families became wealthy and powerful and the vampires maintained a stable source of blood and a nice roof over their heads.
But the problem with the conflicting time scales between mortal humans and immortal vampires was that as the generations who started the pact died out, the human family members became less and less able to see a beloved ancestor in the monster that showed up to feed. For that reason, every hundred years or so, the vampire would give immortality to a family member to renew the alliance and strengthen the bonds. And so they were interwoven, mortal and immortal sharing the same biological kin.
These were the families Guy had to make sure Gene was not an unknowing member of. Lucy Wilson had married into one.
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