Zee blew her nose and cleared her throat, carrying on only a little bit huskily, "Well, so that was one of the big reasons. Another thing was the whole Constantine curse business. Dad used to talk about it like the family literally had bad blood, and John would sometimes say things that made it sound like he believed it, too. I figured it was a load of bunk, just an excuse for not getting too close. But later I did some serious looking into it and found out there might be something to it after all."
She flipped past several pages of relatively unimportant material until she came to a page with a hand-drawn family tree spanning more than five hundred years, filled out in various shades of ink, but with certain names scattered throughout the page highlighted in red. Excepting a few of the oldest, for whom tracking down the relevant information had proved impossible, all of them (including John's, near the bottom of the page) shared one other distinction: either a second name or a blank space next to the one emphasized, with the same birthdate and an identical date of decease.
"These are what I call the infamous Constantines," she said with a slight, wry twist of her mouth. "The whole family seems to have a penchant for trouble, as far back as I could find records, but every generation or two there's one of these guys--and gals, a few of 'em--" her fingers brushed the name Johanna, "--who really made names for themselves. All practitioners, or at least major weirdness magnets." Her lips compressed into a thin line. "If my sources are correct, by the way, an awful lot of Constantines have wound up in your old neighborhood...it took me a while and a lot of graveyard tromping to be sure, but they've got one other thing in common, too: they all had stillborn twins. Just like John. I don't know what it means, but it's definitely real."
She stopped for a moment, wondering whether a demon would judge her the way a human might, and whether she should care if he did. "Anyway, the reason I've told you all of this is because there was one other thing John and I always disagreed about. It didn't really factor into the breakup, but..."
Turning past a number of pages filled with photographs, all following the same subject over many years, she stopped at a recent 8" x 10" portrait of a young man with dark hair, canny brown eyes and a very familiar, sardonic smirk. "He has always been adamant, I mean absolutely vehement, that he didn't want kids."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-01-10 05:24 am (UTC)She flipped past several pages of relatively unimportant material until she came to a page with a hand-drawn family tree spanning more than five hundred years, filled out in various shades of ink, but with certain names scattered throughout the page highlighted in red. Excepting a few of the oldest, for whom tracking down the relevant information had proved impossible, all of them (including John's, near the bottom of the page) shared one other distinction: either a second name or a blank space next to the one emphasized, with the same birthdate and an identical date of decease.
"These are what I call the infamous Constantines," she said with a slight, wry twist of her mouth. "The whole family seems to have a penchant for trouble, as far back as I could find records, but every generation or two there's one of these guys--and gals, a few of 'em--" her fingers brushed the name Johanna, "--who really made names for themselves. All practitioners, or at least major weirdness magnets." Her lips compressed into a thin line. "If my sources are correct, by the way, an awful lot of Constantines have wound up in your old neighborhood...it took me a while and a lot of graveyard tromping to be sure, but they've got one other thing in common, too: they all had stillborn twins. Just like John. I don't know what it means, but it's definitely real."
She stopped for a moment, wondering whether a demon would judge her the way a human might, and whether she should care if he did. "Anyway, the reason I've told you all of this is because there was one other thing John and I always disagreed about. It didn't really factor into the breakup, but..."
Turning past a number of pages filled with photographs, all following the same subject over many years, she stopped at a recent 8" x 10" portrait of a young man with dark hair, canny brown eyes and a very familiar, sardonic smirk. "He has always been adamant, I mean absolutely vehement, that he didn't want kids."