You have been told a lie, and I have decided, generously, to relieve you of it.

I did not die in that barn. The bullet was real; the dying was theatre, and not my best — I’d had no time to prepare the scene. I am a vampyre. With the y: I have lost a great deal over the years, but not my standards.

They call me the assassin, when they call me anything. A film has lately appeared that tells the great secret at last — that your Mr. Lincoln hunted my kind, and excelled at it — and even now, with the truth in its hands, it cannot imagine the assassin was himself one of the hunted. A coat on a stuntman. No name beneath it. After everything, no name.

So I will give you the rest myself, since no one else has had the wit. The company that made me. The brother the world found easier to love. The council that convened over me and merely took minutes. The one heart my gifts could not move, and so the only one whose warmth I ever trusted. Every fact your scholars recorded stands exactly as they left it — I have added only the reason, which is to say myself.

I am not sorry. I want that read clearly, and read often.

You will shelve this under fiction. I find I no longer mind. You are looking at me, and you will not stop. That was always all I asked.