In front of me, I saw both the dark road through the windshield and also a different night, a different landscape—one of barren, rocky hills and a star-filled sky. Switching between the two visions was like shifting focus from something close to something far.

“This memory is not mine,” Lina said. “It is one that has been passed to me by others, to ensure it was not lost when the Elder Seat decided to bury the story.”

She went quiet then, and the volume in her memory seemed to turn up. I heard wind sweeping over the hills and a scrape of loose rock as feet climbed the hill. A woman came into view, her hair long and black, her body wrapped in furs. She carried a wooden spear in one hand and a bag fashioned out of some kind of animal pelt in the other. One moment she was alone, and the next, she was surrounded.

Six vampires circled, not attacking right away but toying with her, terrifying her.

“What poor form,” Reg criticized from the back seat.

Finally, one of the vampires lunged, his movements almost too quick to see, and a second later, he was gone, the end of the woman’s spear and a circle of smoke where his chest had been. The woman’s face lit up in alarm, but she did not stop moving, driving her spear through another vampire, then another, turning them each to smoke.

Exhausted by her efforts, she dropped her spear and collapsed to her knees, ready to succumb to the remaining three vampires. When the first vampire approached, she actually hugged him—just as Sal had described. But as her arms folded around him, he collapsed, his strength and speed gone. He rolled to the side, clutching his chest, and I knew exactly what he was feeling, that first pounding of a newly beating heart. Color appeared in his cheeks, and he breathed heavily in and out. The last two vampires watched in horror as their companion turned human, and the woman stared at her hands, knowing she had done it without knowing how.

The awe in her expression shifted quickly to a ferocious determination, and she stood, all exhaustion seemingly gone. She had only to reach for the two remaining vampires, and they were running away in fear.

The image faded, but the memory stayed, now belonging to me and Reg, just as it belonged to Lina, even though none of us had seen it with our own eyes.

“It was self-defense,” I observed. “That’s how her slayer powers emerged.”

Lina’s smile was grim. “Imagine if immortals knew the true origin of slayers. It makes them look like victims-turned-heroes, instead of the villainous vampire killers our kind make them out to be.”

“True,” I said. “But covering it up seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to keep vampires from going soft on slayers.”

“It’s politics,” Reg said, and Lina nodded.