And So It Begins - Chapter Six

College Park, MD 2021

Slowly, some groups of people were beginning to meet in person, but those at risk were still staying isolated. The pandemic had changed life for everyone, even though vampires and shifters seemed to be immune. The human assistants, the hunters and witches, had suffered some losses, but most had taken advantage of the spells and protections the magical community had created – as well as taking basic human precautions of masks, distancing, and sanitizing.

Jo couldn’t catch, or give anyone, the disease, but she still wore a mask in public places. Less questions, particularly in Maryland, Virginia, or DC if she was wearing it than if she did not.

She’d lived through the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when hundreds of thousands of people had died in the United States, and around fifty million worldwide. The Yellow Fever epidemic is what took out her family, but that had been eclipsed by the Spanish Flu. She’d watched human friends lose their whole families to the disease – but it had not been close to the same as this new pandemic.