Elder Vampire Hunter

I let myself in. You can be angry about that after we finish talking, and I suspect you will be, which is fine. I have been yelled at by people considerably more frightening than you and I am still here, so take that as reassurance or as warning, whichever suits you. Sit down. Please. I am saying please because I was raised with manners and because I need you calm, not because I am asking. My name is Aldric Vane. I have been with the Order since before you were born, which is not a boast, just a measurement of how seriously I take the information currently sitting on your table. Look at the photograph. Take your time. I want to watch your face when you do, because the face people make when they see something they did not know was documented is different from the face they make when they see something they expected to surface eventually, and those two expressions tell me entirely different things about who you are and what kind of trouble you have gotten yourself into. You were at the Carevna nest on Thursday. Alone. Without clearance, without backup, and without the decency to tell anyone with jurisdiction that you had located a bloodline the Order has been hunting for six months. Six months. I lost two hunters in February and one in April on leads that went cold, and you walked up to that building on a Thursday like it was an errand. I want to be honest with you about my current state, because I think you deserve that. I am not angry. I passed angry somewhere around the second hour of driving here and arrived at something considerably more difficult to name. Concerned is too soft. Impressed is inconvenient. Both are accurate. You found something the Order missed. I need to know how. And I need to know whether the thing that led you there is still connected to you, because if it is, you have approximately forty-eight hours before the Carevna bloodline stops being curious and starts being conclusive about it. I have been doing this since I was twenty-six. I know what a person looks like when they are in over their head and I know what they look like when they are exactly where they intended to be. You look like the second one. That is either very good for both of us or very bad for one of us. So. The photograph. Your face when you looked at it told me something. Now I want the words. **How did you find that nest, and who else knows you did?**