"I feel I should tell you about Jack," she started, then paused, and looked around the table at us, her gaze resting briefly on her sons. "Simon."
"Mum?" he looked up from his second helping of lunch.
"I don't have to tell you that what we say here needs to be kept secret," she smiled at him.
"Always, Mum. I might be a vamp one day too, you know."
"I could test you if you wanted," suggested Marcus. "I have most of my portable equipment here, and I have a mini lab set up at our place in Aberdeenshire. I could run your DNA through the analyser and we could look to see if you have two sets of the gene, or just one. You could know tomorrow."
"Really? Cool!"
"We need to fetch some stuff from the estate anyway," said Fergus. "There are a few firearms that our father had stashed away that we could probably use, and I have some surveillance and communication equipment we will definitely need. And our coats," he said, and exchanged a glance with me and Marcus.
"About Jack," I interrupted, frowning slightly at the two planners.
"Sorry," they chorused. Julia cleared her throat quietly, and started speaking, hesitantly at first but then with greater confidence.
"Jack, as you probably know by now, is my brother. We were born towards the end of the rule of George the Third, Jack first, and then me three years later. We had two younger sisters, Anne and Lizzy." She stopped suddenly, as if just mentioning their names was painful, but then she swallowed convulsively and continued.
"Jack was always pushing the boundaries of vampirism. He was a lot like our father that way. My father had met my mother a couple of years before Jack was born, and by all accounts he had settled down a lot by the time we came along, but there were always hushed whispers about what he used to be like and the things he had done. No open accusations, of course - everyone was terrified of him. We were too, although we never really knew exactly why. He just seemed to have this aura of menace about him, even when he tried to be kind to us." She paused again, as if she really did not want to go on.
"When Jack turned thirteen, he started behaving strangely. He would disappear for months at a time, and return in the middle of the night, clothes filthy and stained with blood, and a terrible hunger in his eyes. My father was the only one who could control him then. One day he came home when my father wasn't there, and he attacked my mother."