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Gohen: Redemption

Beta: Ilye, Fimbrethiel

Note: The historical notes David offers are, in fact, real. I did a lot of research into the history of this world so that there was a little more of that prod that this is our world. So, all the war bits, the place bits -- all of that exists/existed or did transpire. :)

chapter eight

"I am the sixth generation of my family to watch you," David began later that morning. He paused to sip at the Irish coffee Erestor had prepared, licking the cream from his upper lip. The combination of the caffeine and alcohol helped to clear his head some, as he hoped it was doing for the two vampires. So many questions he had to ask, but they had insisted he answer theirs first.

"It started with my great-great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Selman. He was a newspaper reporter in New York. Early one evening, he was walking through the streets, hoping to find a story. The lamplighters were just starting their nightly duties, and most respectable members of society were in their homes, trapped in that limbo between the evening meal and the night's activities. He wrote in his journal that it was then that the most interesting stories played themselves out.

"He turned a corner and glanced down an alleyway between two buildings. He saw a couple locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace. He would have kept walking, he wrote later that night, but he noted that the woman's dress marked her as high society. That a woman of that class would be in an alley so far away from the bastions of... propriety and..." David thought for a moment, searching for the proper word. "And etiquette," he said finally "To see her with a man in such a situation smacked of scandal to my progenitor. He lurked in the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman's face and, with luck, the man's as well.

"The woman moaned in the embrace and seemed to swoon, slipping from her lover's arms. Jonathan leaned in and was horrified. Instead of the flushed cheeks of a secret tryst, the woman's face was deathly pale and her eyes stared, glassily, at nothing. He looked up at the man then, and saw bloodstained lips and sharpened fangs. Then a rush of wind knocked him back into the wall as the creature sped past with unthinkable speed."

Erestor glared at Maglor. "That was foolish of you."

"Me? What makes you so sure that it had to have been me?" the elder Noldo bristled.

"Because I have never taken killing as lightly as you, and I would never have left a body in an alleyway."

"On the contrary, Vincent," Maglor replied, careful not to use their true names. "I consider death to be a very serious subject and never trivialize it. As it happens--"

Erestor held up a hand. "Another time and place, Marcus," he said curtly. "David, please continue."

David watched the ease with which the vampires discussed killing. There was something surreal about the exchange, something so unconsciously absurd about a lovers' quarrel over the importance of the death of innocents. He was so engrossed that he almost did not hear Vincent's entreaty for him to continue his tale. He shook his head quickly and forced his attention back to the moment.

"My great-great-great-grandfather had grown up in a small town near Gloucestershire, England," he continued. "He was raised on the Christian Bible and English folklore, so he learned how to be both God-fearing and superstitious. In other words, he knew a vampire when he saw one. He also knew that no respectable newspaper would print such a story, and how dangerous it would be for him should he sell it to the disreputable ones. Instead, he recounted the story in his personal journal only.

"In the weeks and months that followed, he used his journalism credentials to make discreet inquiries about the man he had seen. He identified the man as Mitchell Devereaux, and includes a sketch that, I'm sorry, Marcus, looks just like you."

Maglor shrugged. "I never denied that it was me that your thrice-great-grandfather saw. I was merely trying to point out that the young woman's death was not as trivial to me as my dear Vincent would like to have you believe. I take it that this journal contains no information on the fate of her remains?"

David cleared his throat nervously. "It does say that she was never identified and no missing person reported to the police that matched her description. Her body was never claimed, so she was interred in a mass grave, and the matter was forgotten."

"So it should have been. The poor woman had lost her husband and children in a fire some years earlier and was reduced to selling her body in the street just to earn enough for a rat-infested room and one meager meal a day. Her eyes begged for release, and I granted her wish. I bought her that beautiful dress, treated her to an enormous feast and a night at the theatre. I made her last night a wonderful experience, so that she might die with that simple happiness as her last memory."

David listened with morbid fascination. The gothic tragedy of the story spoke to him of an almost erotic sensuality for life and only intensified his curiosity for these unnatural creatures. He was aware of the way his lips had parted and his breathing had sped while Marcus recounted the tale. He knew the plain facts of the incident from his ancestor's journal, but to hear the particulars explained in such detail and with such fondness was an enthralling experience.

"If we could move along?" Erestor asked.

"By all means," Maglor replied sardonically. He knew how uncomfortable the subject of death was to Erestor, but could not help indulging in the memories from time to time.

David finished the last of his coffee with a grimace, as the liquid had grown cold. "Jonathan continued to keep a careful record of anything relating to Mitchell Devereaux or his mysterious and reclusive friend Virgil. He had several theories regarding where you two might have come from. By far, though, his favorite was that the two of you had been soldiers in the Union army, and shared what he called 'a carnal friendship of Sodom's ilk'. He decided that you both must have been killed in battle and that you were condemned to live soulless existences as a result of your sins."

"Actually, only Vincent was in the Union army," Maglor interjected. "I fought for the Confederacy."

"And I took great pleasure in saying 'I told you so' for the next seventy years," Erestor replied with the first trace of a real grin.

Maglor rolled his eyes. "Suffice it to say, dear David, that you have since learned that we predate that little skirmish by several orders of magnitude. Please continue."

"The turn of the century came, and with it, the birth of my great-great-grandfather, Jacob," the Man continued. "The last journal entry that my great-great-great-grandfather ever wrote was that Mitchell and Virgil boarded a ship bound for Europe in 1902. He hid the journal away in his attic, probably intending to retrieve it should you two ever return. He died in 1908, though, and the journal was simply forgotten.

"It wasn't until the house burned down in 1924 that it was discovered. My great-great-grandfather, already a father himself, was picking through the ashes and happened to find the journal lying in the ruins, a little singed on the edge, but otherwise completely unharmed. After reading through it, he became convinced that God had spared the book and led him to it because he was to continue his father's work. He believed God was charging him with the task of keeping watch over these two demons and ultimately destroying them if they threatened decent society.

"It took him years to track you down, because you were obviously using different names by then. He was certain that you must have come back to America, because he believed his father's Civil War theory and felt that you would always be drawn to return here as a result. He spent a lot of time visiting old battle sites and graveyards, his wife and child in tow, thinking that you might be living nearby. The strain of all the moving was too much on my great-great-grandmother, and she caught pneumonia one winter and died before the next spring. Jacob saw her death as a test from God to see if he would abandon the quest. Instead, he redoubled his efforts to find you, moving more easily and under rougher conditions now that he did not have the 'delicate sensibilities' of a woman slowing him down.

"All the same, it must have been pure luck that you two had settled near Richmond in the late 30's and that he happened to spot you, still identical to the sketches his father left in the journal. Once he found you, though, it was easy to keep watch over you, especially with a fifteen-year-old son to help. My great-grandfather was raised on that journal, always knowing of the creatures that prowled the darkness and his family's holy quest to keep vigil over them. He got a job as a newsie, selling newspapers on the street corner near where you two lived."

Erestor interrupted suddenly. "I remember that young man! We must have bought papers from him a thousand times! Damn! And I tipped him well!"

"I told you that you should have killed him. I never trusted him after he called out that headline 'Blood-Sucking Monsters on the Loose' and it turned out to be a story about the abnormally high mosquito levels that season," Maglor added with a grimace.

"You were just sore because he suckered you with that bet about your shoes."

David cocked his head. "This wasn't in the journal. What bet?"

Maglor started to speak, but Erestor cut him off. "I wouldn't expect it to be written down. It's an old gag. Your great-grandfather, William Selman -- the other boys called him Billy the Sell-Man -- was selling a paper to Marcus one day and said to him, 'I bet you a dollar that I know where you got them shoes.' Marcus shrugged and agreed. Billy looked down and studied the shoes for a moment, then announced proudly, 'You got the right shoe on the right foot and the left shoe on the left foot. Gimme a dollar, chump!'"

David burst into laughter, quickly covering his mouth with his hand when Maglor shot him a glance that could have melted steel. "He cheated," the ancient Noldo said sharply.

"No, you just didn't listen," Erestor scolded. "And it's not as though you couldn't spare the dollar."

"A dollar was a lot of money back then!"

"And we should know because we had so many of them!" Erestor turned back to David and explained in an offhand manner, "We collected the rather hefty life insurance policies on ourselves following our deaths on the Titanic. We never trusted the stock market or banks, so all of our funds stayed in hard currency, untouched by the Depression."

Maglor nodded. "Then the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, and we converted the bulk of it into War Bonds and returned to military service. With our considerable mental influence, we were able to contrive a past of some note and secure ourselves officer postings fairly quickly."

"Yes," David added, "the journals did talk about how you two left for the war. My great-grandfather had just turned eighteen, and he enlisted as well -- partly from a sense of duty, but mostly under pressure from his father to follow the two of you. Of course, he had to go the long way through the enlistment process, and from his correspondence, he never managed to catch up to the two of you again."

Maglor visibly winced. "That's not entirely true. We did see William Selman once more. Early November 1942, General Patton led the Western Task Force in the North African invasion. They called it Operation Torch; the hope was for the Allied forces to gain a foothold in Africa and form a second front from which to attack Hitler. Most of the assault force, including your great-grandfather, were fresh out of training, untried in combat. The expectation was that the French forces in Casablanca would not fight, so the resistance would be minimal."

"The expectations were wrong," Erestor said with a sigh. "At least initially. At Port Lyautey, the French put up a hell of a fight, and there were a lot of casualties on both sides. Billy was shot in the back while he crouched between two buildings. The bullet pierced his spine, and he was left paralyzed and bleeding to death. By the time we found him the next day, he was already dead."

There was a solemn pause, and then David continued. "William married his sweetheart before he left, a fellow newsie named Lillian Birch. They had almost a week together until he was shipped off to boot camp, and Lillian turned up pregnant shortly thereafter. His son was born in September 1942, and William insisted on naming him Abraham, after Abraham van Helsing. After William's death, Lillian collected the death benefits from the Army, and promptly married William's father, Jacob. The two of them raised Abraham as their own, teaching him about his family history and the 'Holy Quest' that was his birthright.

"While you were in Europe, Jacob spent the time researching vampiric lore from any source he could find, and drew several diagrams in the journals detailing how he thought you could be killed. He always suspected that the two of you had killed William when you found him following you. When the official cause of William's death was listed as exsanguination, Jacob became convinced and decided, quest or no quest, that you had to be destroyed.

"Of course, he never got the chance to try. He died of a heart attack in 1961, two years after the birth of Abraham's son -- my father -- Graham, and three weeks before the birth of my uncle Terry. When the journals passed to Abraham, he learned for the first time that Jacob was not his father, but his grandfather. The shock of learning about his true father was enough to cool the burning hatred that Jacob had instilled in him, and Abraham rededicated himself to pure observation. He and his sons spent years researching and tracking down the smallest reference that could be linked back to the two of you, trying to put together a coherent picture of your travels and your lives.

"It was to that project that I eventually added my talents as I grew up. I majored in History, and even went to graduate school to better understand the intricate threads of events and how the two of you were woven into it. You showed up in America again in the '70's, and by then, information gathering had reached a point where it was much easier to track you down. Well, that and your stubborn and inexplicable adherence to keeping the same initials through every name change.

"When my grandfather died eight years ago, the responsibility of keeping up with what was by now a library filled with newspaper clippings, old photographs, every book on vampiric lore ever written, and those original journals, passed to my father and uncle, and would have been given to me until I stormed out and turned my backs on them."

The three sat in silence for a long moment, as Erestor and Maglor thought on the extensive story and the covert observation that had existed right under their noses for so long.

"You broke the rules," Erestor stated simply. "Why?"

David shrugged. "I told you. I wanted more than simple observation. I was the one who compiled the full picture of your history, and I knew that you were not what everyone thought you were. I could feel the story behind the facts, even if I didn't know all the details. I think it helped that I discovered my homosexuality in college. I think it helped me to understand you better, or at least, more than everyone else in my family. I hoped that if I could meet you and get to know you, that I could learn enough to prove that you were not monsters and that this whole silly idea of a quest had to end."

Maglor seemed to growl low in the back of his throat. "I know a way to end it."

Erestor put a hand on Maglor's arm. "Down, boy. I want to know more about this library first, and about what you truly think you know about us."

"No way," David said, shaking his head. "We had a deal, remember? It's your turn now to be the storyteller."

Maglor glared, but Erestor smiled, surprised yet again by this Man's tenacity. "Very well, David. What would you like to know?"

David reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellowed parchment. He unfolded it and showed the old Wanted poster to the two vampires. "I want to know about Victor Logan and his 'unspeakable crimes.'"

Maglor burst out laughing. "It's your poster, so it's your story," the elder Noldo chided.

Erestor's face fell.


	Navigation multi-story arcs previous next Gohen: Redemption Beta: Ilye, Fimbrethiel Note: The historical notes David offers are, in fact, real. I did a lot of research into the history of this world so that there was a little more of that prod that this is our world. So, all the war bits, the place bits -- all of that exists/existed or did transpire. :) chapter eight "I am the sixth generation of my family to watch you," David began later that morning. He paused to sip at the Irish coffee Erestor had prepared, licking the cream from his upper lip. The combination of the caffeine and alcohol helped to clear his head some, as he hoped it was doing for the two vampires. So many questions he had to ask, but they had insisted he answer theirs first. "It started with my great-great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Selman. He was a newspaper reporter in New York. Early one evening, he was walking through the streets, hoping to find a story. The lamplighters were just starting their nightly duties, and most respectable members of society were in their homes, trapped in that limbo between the evening meal and the night's activities. He wrote in his journal that it was then that the most interesting stories played themselves out. "He turned a corner and glanced down an alleyway between two buildings. He saw a couple locked in what appeared to be a passionate embrace. He would have kept walking, he wrote later that night, but he noted that the woman's dress marked her as high society. That a woman of that class would be in an alley so far away from the bastions of... propriety and..." David thought for a moment, searching for the proper word. "And etiquette," he said finally "To see her with a man in such a situation smacked of scandal to my progenitor. He lurked in the shadows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman's face and, with luck, the man's as well. "The woman moaned in the embrace and seemed to swoon, slipping from her lover's arms. Jonathan leaned in and was horrified. Instead of the flushed cheeks of a secret tryst, the woman's face was deathly pale and her eyes stared, glassily, at nothing. He looked up at the man then, and saw bloodstained lips and sharpened fangs. Then a rush of wind knocked him back into the wall as the creature sped past with unthinkable speed." Erestor glared at Maglor. "That was foolish of you." "Me? What makes you so sure that it had to have been me?" the elder Noldo bristled. "Because I have never taken killing as lightly as you, and I would never have left a body in an alleyway." "On the contrary, Vincent," Maglor replied, careful not to use their true names. "I consider death to be a very serious subject and never trivialize it. As it happens--" Erestor held up a hand. "Another time and place, Marcus," he said curtly. "David, please continue." David watched the ease with which the vampires discussed killing. There was something surreal about the exchange, something so unconsciously absurd about a lovers' quarrel over the importance of the death of innocents. He was so engrossed that he almost did not hear Vincent's entreaty for him to continue his tale. He shook his head quickly and forced his attention back to the moment. "My great-great-great-grandfather had grown up in a small town near Gloucestershire, England," he continued. "He was raised on the Christian Bible and English folklore, so he learned how to be both God-fearing and superstitious. In other words, he knew a vampire when he saw one. He also knew that no respectable newspaper would print such a story, and how dangerous it would be for him should he sell it to the disreputable ones. Instead, he recounted the story in his personal journal only. "In the weeks and months that followed, he used his journalism credentials to make discreet inquiries about the man he had seen. He identified the man as Mitchell Devereaux, and includes a sketch that, I'm sorry, Marcus, looks just like you." Maglor shrugged. "I never denied that it was me that your thrice-great-grandfather saw. I was merely trying to point out that the young woman's death was not as trivial to me as my dear Vincent would like to have you believe. I take it that this journal contains no information on the fate of her remains?" David cleared his throat nervously. "It does say that she was never identified and no missing person reported to the police that matched her description. Her body was never claimed, so she was interred in a mass grave, and the matter was forgotten." "So it should have been. The poor woman had lost her husband and children in a fire some years earlier and was reduced to selling her body in the street just to earn enough for a rat-infested room and one meager meal a day. Her eyes begged for release, and I granted her wish. I bought her that beautiful dress, treated her to an enormous feast and a night at the theatre. I made her last night a wonderful experience, so that she might die with that simple happiness as her last memory." David listened with morbid fascination. The gothic tragedy of the story spoke to him of an almost erotic sensuality for life and only intensified his curiosity for these unnatural creatures. He was aware of the way his lips had parted and his breathing had sped while Marcus recounted the tale. He knew the plain facts of the incident from his ancestor's journal, but to hear the particulars explained in such detail and with such fondness was an enthralling experience. "If we could move along?" Erestor asked. "By all means," Maglor replied sardonically. He knew how uncomfortable the subject of death was to Erestor, but could not help indulging in the memories from time to time. David finished the last of his coffee with a grimace, as the liquid had grown cold. "Jonathan continued to keep a careful record of anything relating to Mitchell Devereaux or his mysterious and reclusive friend Virgil. He had several theories regarding where you two might have come from. By far, though, his favorite was that the two of you had been soldiers in the Union army, and shared what he called 'a carnal friendship of Sodom's ilk'. He decided that you both must have been killed in battle and that you were condemned to live soulless existences as a result of your sins." "Actually, only Vincent was in the Union army," Maglor interjected. "I fought for the Confederacy." "And I took great pleasure in saying 'I told you so' for the next seventy years," Erestor replied with the first trace of a real grin. Maglor rolled his eyes. "Suffice it to say, dear David, that you have since learned that we predate that little skirmish by several orders of magnitude. Please continue." "The turn of the century came, and with it, the birth of my great-great-grandfather, Jacob," the Man continued. "The last journal entry that my great-great-great-grandfather ever wrote was that Mitchell and Virgil boarded a ship bound for Europe in 1902. He hid the journal away in his attic, probably intending to retrieve it should you two ever return. He died in 1908, though, and the journal was simply forgotten. "It wasn't until the house burned down in 1924 that it was discovered. My great-great-grandfather, already a father himself, was picking through the ashes and happened to find the journal lying in the ruins, a little singed on the edge, but otherwise completely unharmed. After reading through it, he became convinced that God had spared the book and led him to it because he was to continue his father's work. He believed God was charging him with the task of keeping watch over these two demons and ultimately destroying them if they threatened decent society. "It took him years to track you down, because you were obviously using different names by then. He was certain that you must have come back to America, because he believed his father's Civil War theory and felt that you would always be drawn to return here as a result. He spent a lot of time visiting old battle sites and graveyards, his wife and child in tow, thinking that you might be living nearby. The strain of all the moving was too much on my great-great-grandmother, and she caught pneumonia one winter and died before the next spring. Jacob saw her death as a test from God to see if he would abandon the quest. Instead, he redoubled his efforts to find you, moving more easily and under rougher conditions now that he did not have the 'delicate sensibilities' of a woman slowing him down. "All the same, it must have been pure luck that you two had settled near Richmond in the late 30's and that he happened to spot you, still identical to the sketches his father left in the journal. Once he found you, though, it was easy to keep watch over you, especially with a fifteen-year-old son to help. My great-grandfather was raised on that journal, always knowing of the creatures that prowled the darkness and his family's holy quest to keep vigil over them. He got a job as a newsie, selling newspapers on the street corner near where you two lived." Erestor interrupted suddenly. "I remember that young man! We must have bought papers from him a thousand times! Damn! And I tipped him well!" "I told you that you should have killed him. I never trusted him after he called out that headline 'Blood-Sucking Monsters on the Loose' and it turned out to be a story about the abnormally high mosquito levels that season," Maglor added with a grimace. "You were just sore because he suckered you with that bet about your shoes." David cocked his head. "This wasn't in the journal. What bet?" Maglor started to speak, but Erestor cut him off. "I wouldn't expect it to be written down. It's an old gag. Your great-grandfather, William Selman -- the other boys called him Billy the Sell-Man -- was selling a paper to Marcus one day and said to him, 'I bet you a dollar that I know where you got them shoes.' Marcus shrugged and agreed. Billy looked down and studied the shoes for a moment, then announced proudly, 'You got the right shoe on the right foot and the left shoe on the left foot. Gimme a dollar, chump!'" David burst into laughter, quickly covering his mouth with his hand when Maglor shot him a glance that could have melted steel. "He cheated," the ancient Noldo said sharply. "No, you just didn't listen," Erestor scolded. "And it's not as though you couldn't spare the dollar." "A dollar was a lot of money back then!" "And we should know because we had so many of them!" Erestor turned back to David and explained in an offhand manner, "We collected the rather hefty life insurance policies on ourselves following our deaths on the Titanic. We never trusted the stock market or banks, so all of our funds stayed in hard currency, untouched by the Depression." Maglor nodded. "Then the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, and we converted the bulk of it into War Bonds and returned to military service. With our considerable mental influence, we were able to contrive a past of some note and secure ourselves officer postings fairly quickly." "Yes," David added, "the journals did talk about how you two left for the war. My great-grandfather had just turned eighteen, and he enlisted as well -- partly from a sense of duty, but mostly under pressure from his father to follow the two of you. Of course, he had to go the long way through the enlistment process, and from his correspondence, he never managed to catch up to the two of you again." Maglor visibly winced. "That's not entirely true. We did see William Selman once more. Early November 1942, General Patton led the Western Task Force in the North African invasion. They called it Operation Torch; the hope was for the Allied forces to gain a foothold in Africa and form a second front from which to attack Hitler. Most of the assault force, including your great-grandfather, were fresh out of training, untried in combat. The expectation was that the French forces in Casablanca would not fight, so the resistance would be minimal." "The expectations were wrong," Erestor said with a sigh. "At least initially. At Port Lyautey, the French put up a hell of a fight, and there were a lot of casualties on both sides. Billy was shot in the back while he crouched between two buildings. The bullet pierced his spine, and he was left paralyzed and bleeding to death. By the time we found him the next day, he was already dead." There was a solemn pause, and then David continued. "William married his sweetheart before he left, a fellow newsie named Lillian Birch. They had almost a week together until he was shipped off to boot camp, and Lillian turned up pregnant shortly thereafter. His son was born in September 1942, and William insisted on naming him Abraham, after Abraham van Helsing. After William's death, Lillian collected the death benefits from the Army, and promptly married William's father, Jacob. The two of them raised Abraham as their own, teaching him about his family history and the 'Holy Quest' that was his birthright. "While you were in Europe, Jacob spent the time researching vampiric lore from any source he could find, and drew several diagrams in the journals detailing how he thought you could be killed. He always suspected that the two of you had killed William when you found him following you. When the official cause of William's death was listed as exsanguination, Jacob became convinced and decided, quest or no quest, that you had to be destroyed. "Of course, he never got the chance to try. He died of a heart attack in 1961, two years after the birth of Abraham's son -- my father -- Graham, and three weeks before the birth of my uncle Terry. When the journals passed to Abraham, he learned for the first time that Jacob was not his father, but his grandfather. The shock of learning about his true father was enough to cool the burning hatred that Jacob had instilled in him, and Abraham rededicated himself to pure observation. He and his sons spent years researching and tracking down the smallest reference that could be linked back to the two of you, trying to put together a coherent picture of your travels and your lives. "It was to that project that I eventually added my talents as I grew up. I majored in History, and even went to graduate school to better understand the intricate threads of events and how the two of you were woven into it. You showed up in America again in the '70's, and by then, information gathering had reached a point where it was much easier to track you down. Well, that and your stubborn and inexplicable adherence to keeping the same initials through every name change. "When my grandfather died eight years ago, the responsibility of keeping up with what was by now a library filled with newspaper clippings, old photographs, every book on vampiric lore ever written, and those original journals, passed to my father and uncle, and would have been given to me until I stormed out and turned my backs on them." The three sat in silence for a long moment, as Erestor and Maglor thought on the extensive story and the covert observation that had existed right under their noses for so long. "You broke the rules," Erestor stated simply. "Why?" David shrugged. "I told you. I wanted more than simple observation. I was the one who compiled the full picture of your history, and I knew that you were not what everyone thought you were. I could feel the story behind the facts, even if I didn't know all the details. I think it helped that I discovered my homosexuality in college. I think it helped me to understand you better, or at least, more than everyone else in my family. I hoped that if I could meet you and get to know you, that I could learn enough to prove that you were not monsters and that this whole silly idea of a quest had to end." Maglor seemed to growl low in the back of his throat. "I know a way to end it." Erestor put a hand on Maglor's arm. "Down, boy. I want to know more about this library first, and about what you truly think you know about us." "No way," David said, shaking his head. "We had a deal, remember? It's your turn now to be the storyteller." Maglor glared, but Erestor smiled, surprised yet again by this Man's tenacity. "Very well, David. What would you like to know?" David reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of yellowed parchment. He unfolded it and showed the old Wanted poster to the two vampires. "I want to know about Victor Logan and his 'unspeakable crimes.'" Maglor burst out laughing. "It's your poster, so it's your story," the elder Noldo chided. Erestor's face fell.