Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
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.
Armand Fontenot descended from House Beaumont through his sire’s sire. Beaumont had led the tribunal vote against the compact. They had positioned themselves as defenders of tradition, had marshaled opposition to the Marchande-Levesque proposals. In Étienne’s letters, they appeared as the primary architects of the alliance that would eventually become a death squad.
Solange Vidal’s connection ran through her grandmother’s bloodline—human, not vampire, but significant, nonetheless. The Vidals had served House Beaumont as daylight agents for three generations. They had handled the logistics vampire politics required: property transactions, legal filings, the mundane bureaucracy that kept undead wealth invisible to mortal scrutiny.
Thierry Arceneaux came from House Chardon. Chardon had allied with Marchande-Levesque during the territorial disputes of the early nineteenth century—had been their friends, their political partners, their supporters. Then they had renounced that alliance when the tribunal’s mood turned hostile. They had stood witness as the family that trusted them was hunted and destroyed.
Marguerite Deschamps descended from House Lavigne. Margot Lavigne, who Étienne had trusted. Margot Lavigne, who had delivered the formal charges triggering the purge. The defection that had surprised him, that had turned political opposition into legal accusation.
Adelaide Renier traced her lineage through the Fontenot family—another Beaumont connection, another thread leading back to the houses that had voted for destruction.
The killer was not targeting descendants of tribunal attendees.
The killer was targeting descendants of those who had betrayed the Marchande-Levesque family.
The distinction mattered.
Bastien spread fresh paper across his desk and began mapping connections. Not the genealogical links he had already traced, but the political ones. Who had voted for the compact. Who had voted against. Who had switched sides, who had abstained, who had participated in the purge itself versus those who had merely witnessed it.
The 1847 tribunal had included thirty-seven vampires. Twelve bloodlines represented, votes recorded in the manifest he had obtained decades ago. The compact had failed nine to three, with House Marchande-Levesque and two minor allies voting in favor.
The three allies had been destroyed alongside the Marchande-Levesque family in 1891. Their bloodlines had ended that night, erased so thoroughly that Bastien had difficulty finding records of their existence.
The nine houses that had voted against the compact survived. Prospered, even. They had divided the Marchande-Levesque territories among themselves, absorbed their wealth, claimed their feeding grounds. The purge had not just eliminated a threat—it had enriched those who carried it out.
Five of those nine houses had produced the current victims.
Beaumont. Chardon. Lavigne. The connections ran through official sire registries and unofficial bloodline charts, through transformations recorded in parish records and relationships documented in private correspondence. Each victim descended from families that had participated in—or profited from—the 1891 destruction.
The remaining four houses had also voted against the compact. But their descendants had not yet appeared among the dead.
Yet.
Bastien pulled his city map from the drawer and marked the murder locations again, this time with new notation. Dumaine Street: Beaumont territory in 1891. Algiers Point: claimed by Chardon after the purge. North Claiborne Avenue: disputed ground that Lavigne had absorbed. St. Claude Avenue: originally Marchande-Levesque feeding territory, divided among three houses after their destruction. St. Bernard Avenue: another piece of the fractured estate.
The murders were not just targeting bloodlines. They were reclaiming territory.
Each killing occurred on ground that had once belonged to the Marchande-Levesque family—land taken after the purge, divided among the victors. The killer placed bodies on stolen soil, marked them with the symbol of the destroyed house, left them intact as the purge victims had been left intact.
A mirror. A message. A declaration that the old crime had not been forgotten and would not remain unavenged.
The mark flared against his forearm.
The sensation arrived without warning—not the baseline warmth, but a sharp pulse spreading from the mark to his elbow before subsiding. Recognition of something, though he could not immediately identify what.