The problem for me was where to start.
Typing in ‘researching family history’ led me to a ton of sites that touted being able to do the search for you. The problem was that I was starting at the top of the tree and trying to work my way down. Most of these sites worked the opposite way.
Thomas had lost track of his descendants back in the early days of the city when it was first being settled in the 1800’s. It looked like he’d tracked them for over a hundred years prior to that. All the way back to before they’d left Europe for this country. From what I could make out in the chicken scratch handwriting on the notes, a Thomas Bennet and his wife, Martha Bennet, bought five lots in what was now the west side of Columbus. From a small painting included in the file, this Thomas Bennet was not my sire, though he looked enough like him that I could tell they were related. I wondered how old my sire was. Older than two hundred, that was for sure.
It looked like the Bennet family had a run of bad luck in that century with many of them dying under suspicious circumstances. Two of their children died before hitting their double digits. The cause of death in the obituaries was listed as unknown.
The oldest son married but was murdered shortly after the wedding. Lucky for him he left a widow behind who bore him a son six months later. None of the other children married or left behind children.
After hours spent researching, I sat back. It almost felt like this family was targeted from the get go. Like someone was systematically wiping them out of existence. Nearly every member was murdered or died under suspicious circumstances, the exceptions being those who married into the family.
I traced their history all the way to 1913 when the family and its descendants disappeared. A quick search found that was theyear of the great flood. Pretty much all of Columbus and Ohio, and parts of Indiana, were underwater. I remembered reading about that in a history class in high school. It looked like the flood claimed over four hundred lives with ninety six of them in Columbus alone.
I saw a couple of Thomas and Martha’s grandchildren’s names listed as deceased, but that didn’t mean anything. Records were notoriously bad back then. If his descendants suspected they were being hunted, they might have taken the confusion as an opportunity to disappear while letting the folks back home think they perished.
I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. If I was a vampire and had placed a hex on my competition and knew that only a descendant could break that hex, I would have made damn sure there were no little rug rats left to ruin my plans.
But why take so long to systematically murder all of the direct line? Why not just do it in one go? Pay someone to burn their house down.
Maybe they needed to make their movements undetectable. Hide what they were doing until the hex was firmly in place so their victim couldn’t figure out a way to reverse it. My limited knowledge of hexes said they took time to set. That for a brief window its victim could reverse the hex if they found a skilled enough practitioner.
That might explain things a little more. It would definitely explain why this hunt took place over decades rather than months. A vampire, or something similarly long lived, would have had that kind of time and patience to pull this off.
This made my task more difficult. If that family figured out something was hunting them, they wouldn’t have made it easy to be found again. They probably covered their tracks and covered them well to avoid their hunter.
It would probably be easier figuring out the witch or spook who had performed the hex. It would also make me feel less guilty should this go sideways and a descendant was found because of something I did. Thomas seemed desperate to me. If trying to turn one of them would break the hex, he’d probably turn them and not care one bit if it upended their entire world. Or worse, he tried to turn them and ended up killing them by accident as it seemed he’d done to others he turned. I didn’t want to be responsible for that.
Either way, this was as far as I could go at the moment with this line of research. Time to switch over to the spooks.
Finding information on the spooks was surprisingly easy. Especially any of the ones who tried to integrate into the normal world. Seemed even witches had a use for social media.
It took no time at all to cross off three names since the owners were dead. I found mention of them using a simple search that uncovered their obituaries. Now, they could have laid the hex but that wouldn’t help us at all. We needed a live witch or spook to fix what got broke, which meant I was going under the assumption that person was still alive.
One of the names had since moved out west and another had moved to Russia according to their activity on social media. I moved both of those to a lower priority. I didn’t think I had enough time to go all the way to Russia to question a witch.
Four of the names had no ties to the witch community, which I assumed meant they were some type of spook incapable of masquerading as human. I’d have to reach out to Dahlia or one of my other contacts to see if they knew where I could find those four.
I was betting the rest of the names belonged to one of the covens in town. Unfortunately I had no way of knowing which.
That might be a sticking point. I’d had a bit of a run in last fall with a couple of the witches and had no idea if we’d left things on a good footing. Not to mention I was pretty sure I couldn’t trust anybody Miriam called friend as far as I could throw them.
It was too late to go on a wild goose chase across the city, but now that I had a plan of attack I felt more comfortable with this job.
I’d take the rest of the night to relax before the craziness that was sure to follow.
I set the computer on the end table and turned my music on very low before grabbing a beer and opening my front door. It was rare that I got to totally relax, and I was going to take advantage.
I sat on the top step, just enjoying being outside, sipping my summer ale. It was one of those perfect nights, not too hot and without the bitter chill of winter. A breeze rustled the trees out front.
My eyes closed as I let myself just exist.
I’ve always liked nighttime. There’s something magical about that brief period when most of the world slumbers. Where one day ends and the next begins. There are so many endless possibilities.
As a vampire, tied to the sunrise and sunset, I experienced a lot of these but rarely do I get to stop and put myself fully in the moment.
A scrape of movement. Faint, like the sound of a shoe against pavement, drew my attention to the base of the stairs. My neighbor stood partially in shadow.
I started to look away when his eyes caught the light oddly and a green sheen washed over them.
