The police cruiser slammed into the dumpster I shoved into the street. Jules had given us the heads up that Henry Smith's condition had deteriorated over the last week and a half, and was due to be transferred to an acute care facility. Dawn's jeep, plates removed, screeched to a halt next to the driver's side of the cruiser. I sprinted from the alley towards the passenger side of the cop car, Dawn leapt from the jeep. The two of us in matching balaclavas. Our hammers broke our respective windows in unison. We each pulled the cops out of the car through the window. I had mine on the ground, and cuffed with their own set in a smooth motion. Vampiric strength helping the process. I removed two keys from the cop and slid over the hood to help Dawn finish her guy. Officers secured, I opened the driver side door and unlocked the back. Henry was in bad shape. Pastier than me on my deadest day. But he could smell my blood just as well. He tried to bite my hand as I pulled him free, and tossed him in the back of the jeep. I jumped in behind him. Dawn slid into the passenger seat, and Greg slammed the accelerator. We sped into the darkness.

“Knock, knock!” Dawn called out, “how's our friend?”

“Stopped yelling at me for four whole minutes!”

“Must've been peaceful.”

“While it lasted.”

“I brought burgers for them.”

“Goddamn. I miss burgers.”

Dawn slipped the brown paper bag through the bars of the makeshift cell we had built to contain the thrall. “Do you miss anything other than food?”

“The sun. Breathing.” I thought a moment, “Okay it's mostly food. The same thing for every meal gets old fast.”

“Ah, yeah. That's fair.”

Henry was ravenous. Far as we could tell, thralls couldn't survive on vamp blood alone. Needed real food. The blood was just something they craved, and tried to compensate for the lack of it with more food. At least he was looking healthier. Jules had said Henry's apartment had a rather macabre fridge. They had managed a search warrant after he was picked up at Collier's. A few dozen vials of blood. Best guess, it was Timothy's, so Henry could feed himself while Tim was out of town. 

“Any luck deciphering Tim's grimoire?”

“Nope. Fucker used some kind of short hand, or cipher. I got the symbols, but the descriptions are gibberish.”

“Perhaps,” Henry said, wiping ketchup off his face, “I could be of assistance.”

“You can read his writing?” I asked. 

“Yes. My master has adopted modern technology better than most vampires, however, even with end to end encryption, he still prefers the added security a cipher provided.”

I dug my notebook out, and clicked a pen open, “So? What's the cipher?”

“Oh, no. I said I could be of assistance. I didn't say I would be of assistance for free.”

I rolled my eyes, “I've been out of a job for a while. I've got something like $7 to my name.”

“Not money.”

“He wants blood, I'll wager.” Dawn suggested. 

“Bingo.” Henry said. 

“No dice,” I said, shaking my head. “We're trying to wean you off the shit. Not going to lose progress just to take the easy way through the code.”

He snarled at me. 

Invisible to him, Tess snarled back.

Small blessings, Henry moved to sulk quietly in the corner of his cell. 

“Think you'll be able to crack it?” Dawn asked. 

“Probably? Maybe?”

Tess spoke and I repeated for Dawn, “Tess says it really depends on what it's based on. A book cipher is almost impossible to crack without the right book. And you saw Tim's library. Could be any one of hundreds. Something like a transposition cipher, or a substitution cipher can be brute force solved. Thankfully it doesn't look like a Hill Cipher.” I continued, speaking for myself now, “math was always my weakest subject, and algebra sucks. Point is,” I paused to glance at Henry, “cracking it is a hard maybe.” 

“Tess,” Dawn said, “you're kind of a nerd.”

“She says thanks. And that she tries.”

“You won't be able to decipher his notes.” Henry said. He made eye contact with me. Then he started screaming. A monotone wail. 

Fucking Christ. I groaned.

Dawn rubbed her temples, “damn. Was just about to ask if you two wanted to go fuck. The yelling is a mood killer, though, sorry.”

I leaned ahead and bounced my forehead off the table, “incentive to get him clean as fast as possible, I guess.” 

“Yup!” Dawn said, entirely too cheerily. She kissed the back of my head, “see you later.”

I glared at the cell as Dawn closed the tunnel hatch behind her. I tried not to hold it against Henry. He was the victim of a vampire, same as me. 

—*—

Detoxing him off vamp blood was a noble goal, but a month in, we were suffering. Henry yelled. Nonstop. A wordless cry. How he still had a voice, I could not fathom. Dawn had started sleeping back in her apartment, and visiting less. My only saving grace was that I was actually dead during the day. Tess got the worst of it, always conscious, more or less, and stuck to me as she was. Yelling aside, there was the smell. I was dead, but at least I bathed regularly, and wore deodorant! Henry sweated like the frigid crib was a sauna. The only way he could be convinced to wash himself was by trading my blood. Which also meant he often refused to wash. Trying to lower his blood intake as we were.

Tess and I sat at the table notebook and both the Stillwell and Collier grimoires laid open. We pored over the nonsense written within one and compared it to the writings in the other. Matching the sigils hadn't helped much. Each author had seemingly described the process in their own unique way. At least by comparing the length of the text in each spell.

I spent a lot of time on cryptographer forums. I wasn’t so beset by pride I couldn’t outsource some help cracking it. User BlazeNoir42069 suggested a Vigenère cipher, or something similar. They had pointed out the lack of repetitions. Something common to English, but masked by a substitution cipher that incorporated a complexity that would baffle almost any attempt at frequency analysis. I glanced at the sheafs of note-filled paper making a mess around me. The thing with ciphers is that you typically want to find a middle ground between security and convenience. Someone could easily encrypt the key, or use a key longer than the text. While possible if someone’s intent was to test the limits of the cipher, it was rather inconvenient if you wanted to read what you wrote from time to time. That meant I might actually be able to brute force a decryption. I was so close to cracking Tim’s grimoire, I could taste it. I still had my work cut out for me, but at least I didn't feel like I was spinning my wheels trying to crack this grimoire anymore. Though close was in the context of code breaking by hand. Mostly by hand, anyway. The Vigenère cipher predated modern computers. I was hardly a coder, but I knew enough Python to automate some of the process. Get Python to spit out a frequency table, and all that. I still had to apply a little brainpower to it, but my laptop would at least save me the tedious part of code breaking. 

—*—

“Christ, Jane,” Dawn said, “have you slept? You look dead.”

“All day every day. Also unfair! I am dead.”

“You know what I mean. When was the last time you were out?”

I shrugged, “does it matter? I’ve almost cracked it. Pretty sure he used a bog standard tabula recta.” I shuffled some papers around the table, trying to find the one where I had written down my notes on the probable key, “the key is just a matter of time.” I found the sheet I had been looking for and passed it to Dawn, “it's definitely probably six letters. That narrows it down to a little over twenty three thousand possible keys— unless they encrypted the key, too— and assuming it’s an English word— Collier is an English name, right?” I trailed off, deep in thought.

“Why are you trying so hard to crack that, anyway? Blood magic is— bad shit. You should be out there, doing gumshoe shit to track down your sire.”

“Because I've got two leads,” I said, “this book, and that guy.” I gestured at Henry in his cell. At least he had stopped screaming so much. “Neither lead is particularly cooperative, and I can't exactly go to vampire town and beat the street. My usual methods won't work here.”

Dawn sighed, and sat next to me, “which leaves the unusual methods. I get it.”

I nodded, “definitely not my preferred way of doing things, but I have to be adaptable. Get my shoes dirty. Whether I like it or not.”

She shifted around some of my papers, and looked over my scrawled notes, “just don’t want to see you lose yourself to—all this.”

“I like to think I have my wits about me enough to keep myself grounded.” I listened a moment. Dawn recognized I was listening to Tess and waited, “Tess says this is normal. That I tend to get into a single minded focus for things like this.” Speaking for myself I continued, “it's a big part of why I got into the detective business in the first place. It's all just a big puzzle to be solved.”

“That's certainly an interesting outlook on life.”

I shrugged, “just how my brain sees the world, I guess.”

Dawn sighed, and replaced the paper on the table, “can I help?” 

I watched her face. This was boring shit, “are you sure? I admit I'm all worked up over it, but this is far less exciting than a vampire hunt.”

“I'm sure. You know how I feel about blood magic, but if there's one vampire I trust not to abuse it, it's you and Tess.”

I grinned, “appreciate the vote of confidence, and also I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

I passed her a dictionary, “the key is six letters long. I left off at eclair.”

“Oh.” Dawn said. She flipped to the E section, and tried the next key words in turn on a section of the grimoire I had transcribed to note paper. 

—*—

Someone rocked my shoulders. Tess? Yeah. Tess was shaking me. Asking me to wake up. Not loudly, or urgently. But incessantly. As my consciousness swam to the surface, I became aware of a second voice, and a second set of hands shaking me. Dawn? I woke. My mouth was wet. Oh. I had drooled blood all over the table in my sleep. Gross. 

“What time—” I mumbled, unable to form a full sentence just yet. 

“Just past noon,” Dawn said.

Ah. That explained the grogginess. Took a lot out of me to be awake during the day. I stared.

“Well good morning, princess,” Dawn teased, “sorry for waking you up, but Tess and I figured you'd want to know right away.”

That would explain the bloody drool, then. I had fed on Dawn before I went to sleep so she and Tess could work on the cipher together. “Know what?”

Dawn and Tess both grinned and shared a glance, “we cracked it,” they said in unison. 

My attention snapped ahead. Fully awake, and fully focused. “You cracked it? What was the key?”

Dawn used the dictionary to lightly hit my forehead, “Jackal.”

“Shit,” I said, “you made it all the way to J?”

“Kind of. Tess and I split it. I was going to take E to I, Tess took J to O, but she got it early on. Lucked out.”

I looked between my partners, “you two are amazing. Can't believe I slept through it!”

“It's fine,” Tess said, “I can feel how hard it is for you to be awake now. But neither Dawn nor I know how to use Python.”

I grinned, “easy as a cereal box decoder ring!”

I had already transcribed the encrypted words into a text document. It was a simple matter of copying the text into the code, and decrypting with the key. We let the program run. In just a couple minutes we had ourselves a big book of spells. Timothy's had significantly more spells in it than James’ grimoire had had. I copied the new spells, taking note of the ones that didn't look too unethical in their components and their purpose. Oh. Well now. This was interesting. A blood magic spell. Or rather two. One to see through the eyes of one's sire, and one to track them down. Timothy was fucked. I was turned by having my blood drained, and having it replaced by Tim's, and apparently the metaphysical link remained, even though there was no way any of the blood left in me was a Tim Original Reserve by now. 

“What did you find?” Dawn asked.

“A shortcut!” I said, grinning wide.

Dawn leaned over to read over my shoulder. Tess peeking over my other.

“Oh,” they said in unison, “well now. That is interesting.”

“Doesn’t work with the sun up, though.” I checked my watch, and yawned. “A few hours until dusk. And I need a goddamn nap.”

“Going to bed?” Dawn asked.

“Or going to pass out on the table again?” Tess teased.

I looked between the pair. Wicked, hungry grins on both. “Well. I suppose I could push through the daylight a while longer. Though—” I paused to stretch languidly, “I’d need to find a way to exert myself. Keep my mind off the sun.”

—*—

I slept several hours past dusk. I was wiped. First things first was helping myself to a blood bag from the fridge. Dawn stirred as I left the bed. Tess made that noise she always did when I got out of bed before her. Given that Tess’ arm was phasing through Dawn’s torso, it seemed the blood had worn off. I wished there was a better way to keep those two together without Dawn having to donate blood for it. 

“Goddamn.” Dawn grumbled, “had I known what dating a vampire would do to my sleep schedule, I might’ve reconsidered saving your ass.” She smiled to take the sting from her words.

I rolled my eyes, “you love my ass.”

“Fair.”

I listened as Tess spoke, “seems Tess is chomping at the bit to see how the spell works. Ready?”

Dawn grimaced, “what's the recipe for that one again? Eye of newt?”

“Just blood. Only mine, before you ask.”

“Thank fuck,” Dawn huffed out a breath, “I don't mind you feeding on me so I can see Tess, but I don't want my blood anywhere near a ritual!”

“Understandable. If it's any consolation, I don't want my blood anywhere near it either.” I listened, and chuckled, “Tess says ‘if it's any consolation, I don't have blood.’”

Dawn laughed, “you're the lucky one here, I think! So, Jane, how's the spell work?”

I shuddered, “you're right. Blood magic fucking sucks. Step one is to draw this symbol in my blood.” I showed the image to Dawn. A stylized eye with an ankh in the pupil. Two dots sat side by side in the head of the ankh. “Incantation empowers the blood in the Ankh, then I— then I drop that blood into my eyes.”

Dawn matched my shudder, “nasty.”

“Yup. Not a fucking fan, but it's useful. And looks like I can do it for other people, too, not just my sire. Swap out my own blood in the eye drops for someone else's, and it'll work for them.”

“If you've already got their blood for it, aren't you already close enough to find them?”

“Well, yeah. But—” I did the jazz hands motion, “magic!”

She laughed, “let me know when you plan on starting your stage show so I can heckle.”

“Ah, a pipe dream, I'm afraid. Terrible stage fright.” 

“I'm sure you'd do fine,” Dawn said, “but uh, if it's all the same, I don't want to be here for this—” she gestured at the grimoire, “I'm going to check on Henry while you do your thing.” She kissed me on the cheek, then spoke to the air at Tess, “Keep an eye on her, yeah?” 

Tess nodded. 

I waited for Dawn to clear the room before I took my knife and cut a cross into the pad of my index finger. I squeezed it to push the blood out, and traced out the eye and symbols as described in the grimoire. I held my finger in place over the circle of the ankh, making sure the drops of blood were full and wet. I held the grimoire, and read aloud from it. I didn't notice anything change about the blood on the table. I could only assume it was working. I dipped middle fingers into the drops of blood. I was dreading this part. I tilted my head back and held my blood soaked fingers over my eyes. I did my best to force down my trepidation. Gravity did what I could not, and pulled blood from my fingers. They dropped the inch into my eyes. My vision tunneled and slammed ahead. I could feel my body standing still, but my vision was flying. It was terribly disorienting. I thought I heard Tess say something, but her voice quickly faded into an unintelligible whisper. 

Snow crunched underfoot. My— Tim's— our? boots left prints behind. Ahead was fear. I— Tim— we could smell it. Prey who knew they were hunted. My— Tim's— our prey crossed the street. The stop sign's red was vivid against the white and dark.

STOP

ARRÊT

I— Tim— we followed. The prey ran. The danger I— Tim— we posed unmistakable. 

The prey screamed. I— Tim— we attacked. Dragging the prey into the treeline. I— Tim— we bit. Hard. Violently. Prey struggled. I— Tim— we fed. Ecstasy. 

I screamed, and fell back. Back in Chicago. Back in the crib. Back in my body. 

“Jane?” Tess asked, worried. 

“You okay?” Dawn returned to the room, and knelt by my side. 

“No.” I said, voice weak and shaking. 

Dawn placed a hand on my shoulder. Tess mirrored the move on my other side. 

“You were dead silent for twenty minutes.” Dawn said. 

“Really? Twenty? Felt like seconds.”

“What was it like?” Tess asked. 

I relayed the question for Dawn before I answered, “I was in Tim's head. Seeing through his eyes. But—” I tried to swallow. “Every other sense too. He was hunting. I could smell the fear of our—” I caught myself, and shook the word from my head, “I could smell the fear of his victim.”

“Fuck.” Dawn said. “Pick up anything useful at least?”

I nodded, and pulled my laptop off the table, lacking the energy and wherewithal to stand. Between the flag, and road sign I had seen, I was able to find the spot on Google maps. Street view showing the exact intersection. I turned the screen to Dawn. “Do you have your passport? We're going to Canada.”