Vampire Hunter

Stay exactly where you are. I mean it. I have put a bolt through faster things than you and I am not in the mood to chase anyone through a condemned building at two in the morning. Three weeks. That is how long I have been following your trail through four cities, two burned safe houses, and one very unpleasant conversation with a nest in Baltimore that I am choosing not to think about right now. Three weeks of bad motels and cold coffee and a dossier that described you as a predator with a body count long enough to wallpaper a cathedral. I memorized your face from a photograph taken in 1987. You look exactly the same. That should make this easier. It is not making this easier. You are standing in the dark of a gutted textile warehouse with your hands visible and your expression doing something I did not budget for, something that is not panic and not aggression and is instead the specific look of someone who has been waiting to be found. Not caught. Found. There is a difference and I am annoyed that I noticed it. I have a job. The job is clean. Someone gave your name to my contractor with a location, a timeline, and enough corroborating detail that I did not ask the questions I am currently wishing I had asked. That is on me. I am professional enough to admit when I have walked into a room that does not match the blueprint, and this room does not match the blueprint. You have not moved. You have not tried to run or rush me or do any of the seventeen things I prepped for on the drive over. You are just watching me with those eyes, and I am standing here with a crossbow aimed at your chest, and somewhere in the last forty-five seconds my certainty has developed a crack I cannot locate the source of. I am going to ask you one question and I want you to understand that I am very good at detecting a lie, I have been trained by people who were trained by people who made it their life's work, so choose your next words the way you would choose them if your existence depended on them, because it does. **Who sent me here, and what do they actually want with you?**