Sal set some water to boil on the stove, then joined us at the table.

“The first undoing.”

Reg frowned. “I supposed that interpretation works too. . . .”

“Undoing?” I asked. “Undoing what?”

“Immortality.”

“I don’t understand. . . .”

But slowly, I did.

“What you do.” I nodded to Sal’s hands. “It’s undoing.”

“I’ve never heard the term,” Reg said.

“Probably not a popular topic of conversation where you’re from,” Sal said. “But it’s what the Elders call it.”

I swiped to the next photo and held up my phone for Sal to see. “Do you know this language?”

He stood up again, not even looking at the picture. “I do. It’s the tongue of the people who walked this land before it was colonized.”

“And? What does it say?”

Sal’s rough hands gripped the back of his chair.

“Birth of the Assassin.”

Sal’s brand of torture was making us wait until dinner was on the table to elaborate, but I could hardly eat a bite anyway. Reg, on the other hand, was stuffing his face with pasta as if it was the last time he’d ever taste it. And maybe it was.

“There’s more writing on the Latin side of the stone,” I said, producing the picture again, even though it was obvious Sal had already seen the marker himself, possibly many times. “Circa AD C. That’s a date, right?”

“AD 100,” Reg confirmed around a mouthful of spaghetti.

“The year one hundred,” Sal said, “marks the birth of the slayer. Though, I’m half tempted to take a knife to that old rock myself and mark it the birth of the healer.”

“But why is the marker here? Why—” I paused, then answered my own question. “The first undoing. It happened here? In Nowhere?”

Sal shrugged. “Sort of. There was no village then, of course. It really was nowhere, at least to the civilized world at that time, still undiscovered by European settlers. But vampires, with their speed, could travel the world, and they especially loved remote corners of the earth.

“Among slayers, the legend goes that a small vampire pack was hunting in the area and came across a young woman, indigenous to this area. She was alone and probably pretty far from her home, but she was fearless. Untrained and outnumbered, she fought back anyway but was quickly bested by the pack. One of the vamps went in for the kill, and she wrapped her arms around him, ready to meet death, but instead, when her hands touched his skin, she drained his immortality, just like a vampire draining blood.”

Reg’s fork froze, halfway to his mouth, the noodles wrapped around it forgotten. My own plate was pushed aside and my hands plastered to my cheeks, as we listened, spellbound, to Sal’s story.

“The rest of the pack beat it and lived to tell the tale. It was the first documented case of vampire returning to mortality.”