They met at the fair in June 1900. Jesse was twenty-four, Claudine looked to be twenty or so but said she’d been born in 1727 or ’28 somewhere in France. She’d once carried a baptism certificate as a reminder but lost it on one of the many occasions she’d had to run for her life. “What does it matter now anyway?” she said. A birthdate was important to someone plotting a course across time, but since turning, she drifted in eternity, a sea without shores.

Johona blows a smoke ring, waiting for an answer.

“It’s been a long time since I last saw her,” Jesse says.

“Were you in love?”

“I’d say so.”

Every turning is a love story. Love for a woman, a man, a child, for life itself, for darkness and the things found only there. Jesse fell for Claudine the moment he saw her. She fell for him just as quickly. They made love that first night in a bed of tall grass on the bank of Booth’s Creek.

Jesse had been with other girls, but it was nothing like being with Claudine. She breathed fire into him that raced through his body, burning every dead tree and tumbledown shack, every briar patch and bog inside him. After he came white hot, he lay beside her gloriously empty, gloriously free, for the first time in his life.

Claudine hurried away before dawn that morning and the next and the next. He asked to see her during the day, but she refused. He knew she was hiding something, thought it might be a husband or a child. “Tell me,” he urged her again and again. “Tell me what’s wrong,” and on what was supposed to be their last night together—the fair moving on the next day—she finally revealed her secret.

They were down by the creek again, but she wouldn’t let him touch her this time. Many years earlier, she said, she’d made a choice. In exchange for eternal life and health, she’d infected herself with a sickness—an unholy, incurable sickness, the pain of which was dulled only by drinking the blood of other humans. She and others like her were called rovers. They lived like nomads, keeping constantly on the move in order to avoid detection and surreptitiously stalking victims in the night.

Jesse wonders still how she knew he wouldn’t raise an alarm or kill her himself after hearing her story, how she sensed the despair and loneliness plaguing him and his intense, near-violent desire to escape the drudgery and hopelessness of Monongah. He wasn’t frightened or repulsed when she finished her confession; he was buzzing with strange excitement.

“You’ve witched me somehow,” he said.

“Why?” Claudine replied.

“Because none of what you told me changes how I feel about you.”

“If I was a witch, I’d make you disappear,” Claudine said. “I’d fix it so I’d never met you.”