Dead in the Family

believe everything she’s told me, but I’ve heard confirmation of a few parts of it from others.” Judith wasn’t seeing me anymore; she was looking past me, down the years, I guess.
    “How old was she?” I said, just to keep the story rolling.
    “By the time Lorena met Bill she had been a vampire for many decades. She had been turned in 1788 by a man named Solomon Brunswick. He met her in a brothel in New Orleans.”
    “He met her in the obvious way?”
    “Not exactly. He was there to take blood from another whore, one who specialized in the odder desires of men. Compared to some of her other customers, a little bite wasn’t anything too remarkable.”
    “Had Solomon been a vampire a long time?” I was curious despite myself. Vampires as living history . . . Well, since they’d come out of the coffin, they’d added a lot to college courses. Bring a vampire to class to tell his or her story, and you got great attendance.
    “Solomon had been a vampire for twenty years by then. He became a vampire by accident. He was a sort of tinker. He sold pots and pans, and he mended broken ones. He had other goods that were hard to find in New England then: needles, thread, odds and ends like that. He took his horse and cart from town to town and farm to farm, all by himself. Solomon encountered one of us while he camped in the woods one night. He told me that he survived the first encounter, but the vampire followed him during the night to his next camp and attacked him again. This second attack was a critical one. Solomon was one of the unfortunates who get turned accidentally. Since the vampire who drank from him left him for dead, unaware of the change—or at least, I like to think so—Solomon was untrained and had to learn all by himself.”
    “Sounds really awful,” I said, and I meant that.
    She nodded. “It must have been. He worked his way down to New Orleans to avoid people who wondered why he hadn’t aged. Where he came upon Lorena. After he’d had his meal, he was leaving out the back when he spotted her in the dark courtyard. She was with a man. The customer tried to leave without paying, and in the blink of an eye Lorena seized him and cut his throat.”
    That sounded like the Lorena I’d known.
    “Solomon was impressed with her savagery and excited by the fresh blood. He grabbed the dying man and drained him, and when he threw the body into the yard of the next house, Lorena was impressed and fascinated. She wanted to be like he was.”
    “That sounds about right.”
    Judith smiled faintly. “She was illiterate but tenacious and a tremendous survivor. He was far more intelligent, but he had poor killing skills. By then, he had figured some things out, and so he was able to bring her over. They took blood from each other sometimes, and that gave them the courage to find others like us, to learn what they needed to learn to live well instead of merely surviving. The two of them practiced how to be successful vampires, tested the limits of their new natures, and made an excellent team.”
    “So Solomon was your grandfather, since he begat Lorena,” I said biblically. “What happened after that?”
    “Eventually, the bloom went off the rose,” Judith said. “Makers and their children stay together longer than a merely sexual couple but not forever. Lorena betrayed Solomon. She was caught with the half-drained body of a dead child, but she was able to play a human woman pretty convincingly. She told the men who grabbed her that Solomon was the one who’d killed the child, that he’d made her carry the body, so the blood was all over her. Solomon barely got out of the town alive—they were in Natchez, Mississippi. He never saw Lorena again. He’s never met Bill, either. Lorena found him after the War between the States.
    “As Bill later told me, one night Lorena was wandering through this area. It was much harder then to stay concealed, especially in rural areas. There weren’t as many people to hunt you down, true, and there was little or no communication. But strangers were conspicuous and with the thinner population, the choices of prey were less. An individual death was noticed more. A body had to be hidden very carefully, or the death meticulously staged. At least there wasn’t much organized law enforcement.”
    I reminded myself not to look disgusted. This knowledge was nothing new. That was how vampires had lived until a few years ago.
    “Lorena saw Bill and his family