“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 through the windows of their house.” Judith looked away. “She fell in love. For several nights, she listened to the family. During the day she would dig a hole in the woods and bury herself. At night, she’d watch.

“Finally, she decided to act. She realized—even Lorena realized—Bill would never forgive her if she killed his children, so she waited until he came out in the middle of the night to find out why the dog wouldn’t stop barking. When Bill came out with his rifle, she crept up behind him and took him.”

I thought of Lorena, so close to my own family, right through the woods. . . . She could have come to my great-great-grandparents’ place just as easily, and my whole family history would have been different.

“She turned him that night, buried him, and helped him resurrect three nights later.”

I couldn’t imagine how shattered Bill must have been. Everything gone in the blink of an eye: his whole life taken and altered and given back to him in a terrible form.

“I guess she took him away from here,” I said.