Grace Faulkner

Grace Faulkner was born in 1994 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lives there today, working the pastry station of her father's restaurant in the Marigny and, since 2014, serving as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger and of the House of Delacroix. The family book knows her as The Low Flame, a name for the small steady light that is left burning in a window all night, and classes her as a Thief, a hunter who works by entering quietly, taking what a creature keeps and leaving before the house knows it has been visited. Her craft is Candle Warding, the setting of lit candles in a ring, a line or a cross that a creature of the old sort will neither cross nor leave, and her gear is a silver-edged knife and a bag of tapers. She is the only child of the slayer Monica Delacroix, The Gentle Seal, who was also her teacher, and of the restaurateur Daniel Faulkner, who keeps the Red Ledger. Through her father's line she descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and she is the last name written, so far, at the foot of one of the longest family trees in the Slayerverse.

She was born in the spring of 1994, at home, in a rented house on the edge of the Marigny, with a midwife, a pot of coffee and her grandmother Victorine Delacroix sitting on the porch step with her ledger open on her knee. She was baptised that summer in the church on the bayou where her parents had been married two years before, and her mother, who was told that the child had slept through the water and woken for the cake, said that it was the first sign of a sensible temperament. She was a quiet, round-faced, watchful baby, and then a quiet, round-faced, watchful girl, with her father's red hair and her mother's way of standing so still that a room forgot her. She learned to walk in the back of the diner on Magazine Street, between the booths, while her mother carried the plates, and the cook, Leonard Washington, who had known Monica since 1978, taught her to crack an egg with one hand at the age of five.

Victorine died in 1998, when Grace was four. She remembers almost nothing of her, only a smell of lamp oil and peppermint, a large blue hat and a voice that asked, over a kitchen table, where the water was going. She was told the rest later. The tin box with the twenty-eight stones of Victorine's count is in the drawer of her mother's bedside table, and on her ninth birthday her mother took her into the bedroom, showed her the box and said that when she was old enough there would be a conversation. Grace, who was nine and had been waiting, asked whether it was the conversation about the candles. Her mother said that it was a little early for that, and then, after a long moment, that she supposed it was not.

She was eleven when Katrina came. The family left on the Saturday, in a borrowed car, for her father's cousins in Baton Rouge, and she sat in the back seat with a bag of candles on her lap that her mother had told her to keep dry. When they came home in October the dining room of her father's restaurant had been under four feet of water, and the Marigny smelled of mud and bleach. The cousins rebuilt it in four months. She carried plaster in a bucket, scrubbed the walls with a brush and learned, that winter, that a family is a set of people who turn up with ladders, and her father, who was not a hunter and who kept a hundred years of the Faulkner records in a restaurant safe, took her into the back room at the end of the rebuilding and showed her that every page had survived. He had put them in a freezer bag on the highest shelf. He said that the ledger was the only thing in the building that he had not been willing to leave to chance.

Her grandmother Marguerite Faulkner, who had been a schoolteacher who hunted after class, died in 2011, when Grace was seventeen, and left the Red Ledger to Daniel and the stakes and the drill-book to his sister Ada. Grace sat with her in the last month and read to her from the ledger, in the evenings, in a flat clear voice, the old entries in their old hands, and her grandmother corrected her pronunciation of a good many names. It was in those evenings, she says, that she understood what the book was for. It was not a record of the dead. It was a promise to the next person who would have to read it, and she was the next person.

She was called in the autumn of 2014, at twenty, in a courtyard in the Marigny, during a blackout. A storm had taken the lights out across the quarter, and she had gone, after closing, to carry candles round to an elderly neighbour on Dauphine Street, as her mother had taught her to do in any outage, and as she crossed a shared courtyard behind the restaurant she found a man standing under the fig tree in a pale coat, quite dry, looking up at the window of the old woman's kitchen. He did not turn when she spoke. He did not move when she set down the first candle. She set a second, and a third, in a half-ring across the flagstones, and lit them from the one in her hand, and he stood on the far side of the line with the light on his dry shoulders and looked at the flames the way a man looks at a locked door. She did not know what he was. She knew that he would not cross. She stood there for two hours, in the dark, with eleven candles guttering round her, and at about four her mother came over the wall with a knife.

Monica, who had been waiting twenty years to see whether her daughter would be called, said afterwards that she had never been so frightened or so pleased. They took the man in the pale coat at dawn, in the ring that Grace had set, and the first count that Grace entered, in a small blue notebook, in her mother's hand, was the one that she had held at bay for two hours by candlelight alone. Her mother said that it was the only apprenticeship she had ever seen in which the apprentice had done the lesson before the teacher had said a word. The notebook is in her apron, in a plastic bag.

Candle Warding, in her practice, is slower and wider than her mother's. Monica works a ring in a minute and will leave a creature in it until dawn. Grace, who has the patience of the pastry cook, works in layers, a line and then a second line behind it and then a cross at the door, and she has found that a creature that is held by three small things will stay held longer than one that is held by one large thing. She has also learned, from her father, a good deal about heat, and she can tell by the colour of a flame when a candle is about to give. She keeps a cabinet of wicks in the pantry of the restaurant, labelled in the same way as the spices.

She is thirty-two, and works the early shift on the pastry station, beginning at five, so that by one in the afternoon she is free to walk the Marigny and the Bywater with her bag, and in the evenings she works beside her mother on the older cases, from the quarter and the cuts and the river. She lives in a shotgun house on Spain Street, with a cat called Roux, and she says that she has no plans to marry yet and a great many plans to learn. Her father, who watches her work from the pass, once said that she had her mother's tact and his own stubbornness, and that it was an alarming combination in a girl with a pastry knife.

Grace Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Low Flame, the pastry cook who set eleven candles in a courtyard and held a man in a pale coat at the line until the morning. In the Slayerverse she stands for the youngest hunters of the Red Ledger, the daughters and sons who inherit a long book and a small light, and who prove that the line from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor is not a record of the past but a work that is still being done, quietly, by a woman with a bag of candles in a New Orleans kitchen.

Grace Faulkner was born in 1994 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lives there today, working the pastry station of her father's restaurant in the Marigny and, since 2014, serving as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger and of the House of Delacroix. The family book knows her as The Low Flame, a name for the small steady light that is left burning in a window all night, and classes her as a Thief, a hunter who works by entering quietly, taking what a creature keeps and leaving before the house knows it has been visited. Her craft is Candle Warding, the setting of lit candles in a ring, a line or a cross that a creature of the old sort will neither cross nor leave, and her gear is a silver-edged knife and a bag of tapers. She is the only child of the slayer Monica Delacroix, The Gentle Seal, who was also her teacher, and of the restaurateur Daniel Faulkner, who keeps the Red Ledger. Through her father's line she descends from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who were married in January 1486, and she is the last name written, so far, at the foot of one of the longest family trees in the Slayerverse.

She was born in the spring of 1994, at home, in a rented house on the edge of the Marigny, with a midwife, a pot of coffee and her grandmother Victorine Delacroix sitting on the porch step with her ledger open on her knee. She was baptised that summer in the church on the bayou where her parents had been married two years before, and her mother, who was told that the child had slept through the water and woken for the cake, said that it was the first sign of a sensible temperament. She was a quiet, round-faced, watchful baby, and then a quiet, round-faced, watchful girl, with her father's red hair and her mother's way of standing so still that a room forgot her. She learned to walk in the back of the diner on Magazine Street, between the booths, while her mother carried the plates, and the cook, Leonard Washington, who had known Monica since 1978, taught her to crack an egg with one hand at the age of five.

Victorine died in 1998, when Grace was four. She remembers almost nothing of her, only a smell of lamp oil and peppermint, a large blue hat and a voice that asked, over a kitchen table, where the water was going. She was told the rest later. The tin box with the twenty-eight stones of Victorine's count is in the drawer of her mother's bedside table, and on her ninth birthday her mother took her into the bedroom, showed her the box and said that when she was old enough there would be a conversation. Grace, who was nine and had been waiting, asked whether it was the conversation about the candles. Her mother said that it was a little early for that, and then, after a long moment, that she supposed it was not.

She was eleven when Katrina came. The family left on the Saturday, in a borrowed car, for her father's cousins in Baton Rouge, and she sat in the back seat with a bag of candles on her lap that her mother had told her to keep dry. When they came home in October the dining room of her father's restaurant had been under four feet of water, and the Marigny smelled of mud and bleach. The cousins rebuilt it in four months. She carried plaster in a bucket, scrubbed the walls with a brush and learned, that winter, that a family is a set of people who turn up with ladders, and her father, who was not a hunter and who kept a hundred years of the Faulkner records in a restaurant safe, took her into the back room at the end of the rebuilding and showed her that every page had survived. He had put them in a freezer bag on the highest shelf. He said that the ledger was the only thing in the building that he had not been willing to leave to chance.

Her grandmother Marguerite Faulkner, who had been a schoolteacher who hunted after class, died in 2011, when Grace was seventeen, and left the Red Ledger to Daniel and the stakes and the drill-book to his sister Ada. Grace sat with her in the last month and read to her from the ledger, in the evenings, in a flat clear voice, the old entries in their old hands, and her grandmother corrected her pronunciation of a good many names. It was in those evenings, she says, that she understood what the book was for. It was not a record of the dead. It was a promise to the next person who would have to read it, and she was the next person.

She was called in the autumn of 2014, at twenty, in a courtyard in the Marigny, during a blackout. A storm had taken the lights out across the quarter, and she had gone, after closing, to carry candles round to an elderly neighbour on Dauphine Street, as her mother had taught her to do in any outage, and as she crossed a shared courtyard behind the restaurant she found a man standing under the fig tree in a pale coat, quite dry, looking up at the window of the old woman's kitchen. He did not turn when she spoke. He did not move when she set down the first candle. She set a second, and a third, in a half-ring across the flagstones, and lit them from the one in her hand, and he stood on the far side of the line with the light on his dry shoulders and looked at the flames the way a man looks at a locked door. She did not know what he was. She knew that he would not cross. She stood there for two hours, in the dark, with eleven candles guttering round her, and at about four her mother came over the wall with a knife.

Monica, who had been waiting twenty years to see whether her daughter would be called, said afterwards that she had never been so frightened or so pleased. They took the man in the pale coat at dawn, in the ring that Grace had set, and the first count that Grace entered, in a small blue notebook, in her mother's hand, was the one that she had held at bay for two hours by candlelight alone. Her mother said that it was the only apprenticeship she had ever seen in which the apprentice had done the lesson before the teacher had said a word. The notebook is in her apron, in a plastic bag.

Candle Warding, in her practice, is slower and wider than her mother's. Monica works a ring in a minute and will leave a creature in it until dawn. Grace, who has the patience of the pastry cook, works in layers, a line and then a second line behind it and then a cross at the door, and she has found that a creature that is held by three small things will stay held longer than one that is held by one large thing. She has also learned, from her father, a good deal about heat, and she can tell by the colour of a flame when a candle is about to give. She keeps a cabinet of wicks in the pantry of the restaurant, labelled in the same way as the spices.

She is thirty-two, and works the early shift on the pastry station, beginning at five, so that by one in the afternoon she is free to walk the Marigny and the Bywater with her bag, and in the evenings she works beside her mother on the older cases, from the quarter and the cuts and the river. She lives in a shotgun house on Spain Street, with a cat called Roux, and she says that she has no plans to marry yet and a great many plans to learn. Her father, who watches her work from the pass, once said that she had her mother's tact and his own stubbornness, and that it was an alarming combination in a girl with a pastry knife.

Grace Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as The Low Flame, the pastry cook who set eleven candles in a courtyard and held a man in a pale coat at the line until the morning. In the Slayerverse she stands for the youngest hunters of the Red Ledger, the daughters and sons who inherit a long book and a small light, and who prove that the line from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor is not a record of the past but a work that is still being done, quietly, by a woman with a bag of candles in a New Orleans kitchen.