“The council is disturbed by the number of humans who took tonight’s events in stride. They’re worried a migration will fail if the necessary memory work involved does not hold. It could present a serious risk of exposure for our kind.” She sipped her coffee and smiled. “I may have helped them to this wise conclusion.”

“No migration?” I asked, my heart lifting. “They won’t try again?”

“Not until they figure out why the fade isn’t working as it should here.”

“I’ll tell you why.” Sal dropped a fist onto the table with a thump. “Too much monkeying with their minds! Over and over again. At some point, the system breaks down. Like a screw stripped of its grooves, the brain zaps just aren’t holding anymore.”

“Interesting hypothesis,” Reg said. “Perhaps the people of Nowhere are building up an immunity to vampire venom.”

No, that wasn’t quite it. I doubted Dex and Poe or even all the adults had endured multiple memory fades. A few, maybe, but not all.

Lina set her mug down and spoke almost as if to herself, alone. “It could be their lineage.”

“Like, what? Their DNA?” I didn’t follow.

She looked up, and I noticed a spark of curious excitement in her eyes. I guess when you’d lived long enough to see it all, anything remotely new was interesting.

“This town is full of mortals with immortal history.”

Reg and I responded with blank stares.

“Nowhere isn’t a place people move to,” she said. “It’s not the kind of town that grows from outsiders coming in; it’s the kind of town that grows generation after generation.”

The kitchen fell silent as she let that sink in.

I was the first to speak, in a hush. “The people of Nowhere are the descendants of vampires turned human.”

“It makes sense,” Reg said. “I hadn’t thought of it, but of course newly turned mortals would just settle here in town, lacking anywhere else to go.”

Sal said, “Most of them move right along nowadays, but it would have been different back then.”

“I’m sure there are exceptions,” Lina said. “But most of the population could tie their family tree back to a vampire house, if they knew of such things.”

“None of them know their own history?” I asked.

“I suspect the first former immortals to inhabit Nowhere did not pass down their stories out of fear that their human families’ minds would be manipulated. They likely kept our vampire secrets, not to protect us but to protect their mortal children. And after a few generations, the memories were lost the natural way . . . because there was no one left who remembered.”

“And that’s why the memory fades work differently on them?” Reg asked.

“It’s only a theory.” Lina refilled her coffee.