The official history held that the Marchande-Levesque family had violated feeding law. That they had killed humans carelessly, attracted mortal attention, endangered the Veil protecting vampire existence. That the other houses had acted in collective defense, eliminating a threat before it could spread.
Bastien had never believed it.
He pulled a different box from beneath his desk—one he had not opened in decades, filled with documents acquired through methods the vampire court would not have sanctioned. Correspondence. Private journals. The kind of records that should have burned with the Marchande-Levesque estate but had found their way into the hands of collectors who understood that information aged better than wine.
The first letter was dated March 1889, two years before the purge.
My dear Henri,
The tribunal has voted. House Beaumont and House Chardon have aligned against us, as we expected. But House Lavigne’s defection surprised me—I thought Margot understood what we offered. She chose tradition over survival. They all did.
The compact is dead. But I fear we have made enemies who will not forget our presumption. We proposed that the old ways were insufficient. We suggested that the houses had failed to adapt. In doing so, we accused them of weakness.
Weakness they will now feel compelled to prove false.
Your devoted servant,Étienne Marchande-Levesque
Bastien set the letter aside and reached for the next.
The correspondence spanned eighteen months. Étienne Marchande-Levesque wrote to a contact Bastien could not identify—someone outside the city, perhaps outside the region, a confidant who received reports of growing tensions without participating in them. The letters painted a picture that had never appeared in official records.
The compact’s rejection had not ended the conflict. It had begun one.
House Marchande-Levesque continued advocating for territorial reform. They approached individual vampires, building support among those who felt excluded from thecurrent system. They documented feeding violations by the established houses—instances where the old families had taken humans carelessly, had attracted mortal attention, had done precisely what they would later accuse the Marchande-Levesque family of doing.
The other houses noticed.
They watch us now,Étienne wrote in August 1890.Not openly—that would acknowledge the threat we pose. But I see their agents in the Quarter. I hear their questions being asked. They are building a case, Henri. Manufacturing evidence. When they move against us, they will have documentation to justify what cannot be justified.
We should flee. I know this. But fleeing means abandoning everyone who trusted us, everyone who believed that change was possible. We cannot betray them.
Though I fear we have already doomed them.
The final letter was dated January 1891, three weeks before the purge.
Henri—
House Lavigne has presented the tribunal with allegations of our crimes. Margot herself delivered the charges. We are accused of feeding violations spanning five years, of endangering the Veil, of conspiring to weaken vampire society through our “reform” proposals.
The evidence is false. You know this. I know this. But truth matters less than consensus, and the consensus has been purchased.
If I do not write again, know that I did what I believed was right. Know that the houses who destroy us will paint themselves as protectors. Know that history will record them as heroes and us as villains.
But someone, someday, will find the truth. And when they do, I pray they will understand what we tried to accomplish—and what our deaths were meant to bury.
Yours until the end,Étienne
Bastien sat back.
The official history was a lie.
The Marchande-Levesque family had not been destroyed for feeding violations. They had been destroyed for threatening the power structure that had governed vampire society since the colonial period. They had proposed change, built support, documented crimes the old houses preferred to keep hidden. They had made themselves a threat requiring elimination.
And the houses that had destroyed them—Beaumont, Chardon, Lavigne, and the others named in Étienne’s letters—had manufactured evidence to justify the purge. They had rewritten history to cast themselves as protectors rather than executioners.
The same houses whose descendants were now being killed.
He returned to the genealogical charts.
