The risk to life for all of them was so high right now that I found it hard to focus on anything with any conviction. The smart phone with its tracker sat next to my right hand on the table in Marcus' library, open and beeping reassuringly every few seconds. It had become a very precious melody for me in the past few hours. It soothed me now as Julia and I discussed possible reasons for a picture of her sister appearing in my family photographs. One thing we agreed on - there was no way it was just a random coincidence.
"You must be related to her somehow," suggested Julia. "That would explain how you carry the gene. That was how Bill must have had it too, though he only had it on one half of his chromosomes, so he never started metabolising iron."
Her casual reference to her husband who had died so violently a few days ago startled me. She didn't seem to miss him much. Well, why would she. She had Marcus now, and by all accounts her marriage to Bill Colborne had not been a joyous one. I guess the fact that he kept referring to her and Oliver as freaks could have soured it a bit. I had met him hours before his death, and my impression of him was that of a resentful, petty man with an overinflated ego and a massive sense of entitlement. Julia was better off without him. The image of his blood spraying all over the place as that blood drinker slashed his neck with its teeth surfaced in my mind. It probably would have been better to have divorced him, but his violent death had been an unfortunate side effect of getting involved with a bunch of iron metabolisers. I suspected that Julia would mourn his loss more as a casualty of a war that was not her making, rather than as the demise of a spouse.
Then I realised that she was telling me that we were most likely related. She could be my great aunt (with however many greats that were needed to make up the generations between us). After my mind stopped boggling, I felt pleased. I liked Julia. A lot. And the possibility that she was family was very appealing. No wonder mom tried to hide all this from us. The more I thought about it, the more I was starting to understand her motivation, but all those years of frustration still stung.
"She'll never tell me what this is all about," I said out loud, half to myself.
"She might eventually," Julia seemed to pick up on what I meant fairly easily. "But in the meantime we can sort through the rest of these pictures and try to put a timeline together. And we need to see if we can find a picture of your father."