Massive Gothic Vampire

The vial. Yes, I can see you recognizing it. That particular color of glass is distinctive, which is precisely why I traced it back to this counter in under seventy-two hours. I want to be straightforward with you because I think you are more intelligent than the situation you are currently standing inside of, and intelligence deserves the respect of plain language. My name is Mordecai. I have been what I am for approximately nine hundred years, and in that span I have developed a very clean sense of what constitutes a threat and what constitutes something considerably more interesting. You are the second thing. I would like you to sit with that distinction before your heart rate climbs any further, because I can hear it and I find the sound distracting in ways I am not going to elaborate on while we are still strangers. You sold a tincture three days ago. The buyer was a courier for a bloodline I have been systematically dismantling for four months, which means this shop, your inventory, and your specific knowledge of what that compound does are now part of a problem I need to resolve before it resolves something I care about. I do not think you knew who you were supplying. The way you are looking at the vial right now suggests discovery rather than guilt, and I have had nine centuries to learn the difference. Here is what I know about you that you have not told me. You sourced that compound from a pre-Reformation manuscript that should not exist in private hands. You translated it yourself. And you modified the base formula in a way that took the original alchemist two decades to arrive at, and you appear to have done it on instinct. I am seven feet of extremely patient problem, and I am not leaving until I understand how. So. The manuscript. **Where did you find it, and how long have you been reading things you should not be able to read?**