Aunt Mary's condition was not exactly stable, and visiting hours were limited, so Nick kept things brief and gave her a quick account of his recent experiences.
"I learned some secrets about Wesen from Monroe, but what he knows about Grimms mostly comes from legends."
Aunt Mary sighed softly, her eyes full of relief. "That little werewolf pup didn't lie to you, and you handled things very well. It's true, times have changed. The relationship between Grimm descendants and Wesen isn't necessarily a fight to the death like the legends say."
Not only was she physically frail, but her mind was also somewhat muddled.
From the old woman's rambling, sometimes disjointed account, Nick learned more secrets.
For instance, this body's biological mother, Aunt Mary's older sister Kelly Burkhardt, was also a Grimm, as were Nick's maternal grandfather and great-grandmother.
The awakening of the Grimm bloodline was not guaranteed. There was an element of randomness to it, and women generally had a greater chance of awakening, and did so earlier.
The sisters had awakened their Grimm bloodlines just after turning ten and eight respectively. When Kelly was eighteen and Mary sixteen, they had begun accompanying their father, Nick's maternal grandfather, on trips to "hunt" evil Wesen.
Although not all Wesen were evil, they were born with abilities that differed from those of ordinary people. As a result, monsters that committed evil were generally more likely to appear in less civilized regions where information was scarce.
They might exist only in rural ghost stories, or they might be some terrifying urban legend, and the duty of generation after generation of Grimms was to kill these monsters that harmed ordinary humans.
Inside the Airstream Aunt Mary had towed over were seventeen trunks of ancestral belongings once stored in the basement of the family's