The doorbell rang at a quarter to eight that morning. Norman paused with the carafe of orange juice tilted halfway to his glass, eyeing the front door in the same way a man watches an approaching rattlesnake. When the doorbell rang a second and third time, and the spreading pool of orange juice had begun to lick around his fingers on the countertop, he attempted to put the carafe on the empty air beside him, recovered, and set it on the counter with a soft 'clink.'
       "You should answer the door, Daddy," Echo informed him seriously from over her cocoa puffs.
       "Yes." Norman stared at the elbow clad in red pinstripes just visible through the glass window flanking the door. "Finish your cereal, honey."
       He opened the door to a sharp-shouldered man with a distinctive silver flower worked through the buttonhole of his suit. The man scowled down at him with mismatched eyes, one compound and one ordinary, his teeth clicking behind one swollen cheek.
       "You Norman?" he asked.
       "He can't need me again already," Norman said in lieu of an answer. "We just finalized the treaty yesterday."
       "Not a good enough treaty. There's bodies." The man's lips peeled back, baring rows of gray pincer-teeth that gnashed independently of each other. Norman didn't bat an eye at the display. A lot of odd folk lived in this town. Whenever a mage population was as creative as it was short-tempered, it naturally followed that their neighbors would get stuck in a lot of unusual shapes.
       "Echo, go get your school things," Norman called over his shoulder.
       "'Kay," the little girl called, sliding off her kitchen stool. Norman waited until she had left earshot before turning back around.
       "What do you mean, 'bodies'?"
       "Crystal District, three of them. Dry as prunes. Elder Nightmare wants you to have a look, figure out which band of bloodsuckers we need to go torch." The man's smile somehow grew even more unpleasant with barely a twitch of muscle.
       Norman swallowed, his gaze falling to his own paling reflection in the petals of the man's boutonniere. Not only was the Crystal District deep in the heart of Elder Nightmare's territory, but all the wealthiest and most powerful mages in the city lived there. Whatever creature was hunting in that neighborhood had to have a death wish.
       "Must be a rogue or a newborn," he said, even though he knew better.
       The man shrugged. "That's your job to figure out," he said. "Better cancel your plans for today."
       Norman left the man at the door while he went to call first his work, then his wife, to give his excuses. Both parties were used to this routine by now. His boss listened patiently while Norman pretended, badly, to sound sick, and told him to rest in a weary monotone. It had to be Elder Nightmare's doing that Norman hadn't been fired after 'catching the flu' three times in three weeks.
       "Could drop the brat off for you. School's on the way," the man said when Norman came back with his daughter in tow.
       Norman looked down at his daughter, noting her wide-eyed stare and white-knuckled grip on her backpack straps.
       "Echo, do you think you can walk to the bus stop today?"
       "Yes," she replied quickly.
       "Alright. The bus comes in five minutes, so don't dawdle."
       Nightmare's man snorted as the little girl scooted past him and darted off down the driveway.
       "A guy tries to be nice," he muttered as Norman locked the door. "Come on." He led Norman to a black car parked at the end of the street. Norman let himself into the backseat, as far from the driver as possible, and settled in for the ride.
       The first five minutes passed in uneasy silence as they wound through suburban streets with the wild disregard for speed limits that Norman was beginning to expect from Nightmare's drivers. The man eyed him through the rearview mirror occasionally but didn't say anything until they had passed Echo's school.
       "You don't look so tough. Not what I was expecting from our vampire handler."
       "I get that a lot," Norman said. Between the thinning hair and the glasses, he knew he looked much more like an accountant than anything. This was fine, as he was an accountant whenever he wasn't being hauled around on Nightmare's string. Like most people under Elder Nightmare's informal employment, he had come to work for the man out of desperation and hadn't been allowed to leave because he was too useful.
       "How'd a stick like you get a job like this?"
       "I'm inedible," Norman replied. "Old family curse. My blood comes out as beetles."
       "Beetles," the man repeated, meeting Norman's eyes in the mirror. "Who did you piss off to get that curse?"
       "I think my great, great grandmother refused to date the wrong sorcerer."
       "Mages, am I right?" The man picked a bit of something red from between his pincers. "Think they can walk all over everyone." They drove for another minute in silence; then, the driver choked down a laugh. "Any bloodsucker ever try to bite you?"
       "Never more than once," Norman said, almost managing a smile.
       The driver let out a full belly laugh and slapped his open palm on the steering wheel. "Wish I'd been there to see their faces."
       The Crystal District had a certain aura about it that even the most magically inert could feel on the best days, but today as the car drove over the border, the feeling of magic dragged across his skin like the flat of a blade, cold and unyielding. Norman shuddered, huddling in on himself with his arms crossed over his chest.
       "It's been like this lately," the driver said. "Must be a weird turn of the moon or something."
       "How does anyone stand it?"
       "Give it a minute; it eases off."
       It didn't ease off, but by the time they pulled up in front of a little white townhouse with glowing flower boxes, Norman had gotten used to it. The perimeter of the house was draped in police tape, the police themselves nowhere in sight. Only Nightmare's men, several of whom Norman knew by face but not name, lingered in shadowy corners and kept a lazy eye on the street.
       One man with unruly gray hair and two silver hoops glittering in his left earlobe made a beeline for him the moment he stepped from the car.
       "Just the man we've been waiting for," he said, beckoning Norman to follow.
       "Hello, Cyrus," Norman gave the man a stiff nod. Cyrus was one of Nightmare's magic experts, and they had worked together several times before. Like himself, Cyrus was missing the typical Nightmare uniform of a sharp suit and mirrored flower.
       "Boss thought I ought to tag along in case we find something nasty in the victim's house," Cyrus explained as they walked. "Needn't have bothered. The dame was a diviner, about as dangerous as a butterfly." The victim had also been a great fan of glass toads if the décor was anything to go by. "She's in the office over there."
       "Does she have a name?" Norman asked, bracing himself in the doorway. The part he hated most was fast approaching. No matter how many times he did it, he never got used to looking at dead bodies.
       "Probably, but heck if I know what it is." Cyrus leaned around Norman and poked his head inside the office. "Looks like she could be a Rachel. Let's go with that." He yanked a pair of gloves out of his pocket and pressed them into Norman's chest. "Police have already been over the scene, but they left the body for you to examine. Just don't leave any evidence on it."
       Norman nodded, already pulling the gloves on. He entered the office.
       The woman was slumped over her desk as if she had fallen asleep while at work, her long hair spilling over scattered papers. She had an opened letter clutched in one shriveled hand. Norman knelt beside the chair and carefully checked the obvious places first: neck, wrists, shoulders. When he found no marks of any kind on her exposed skin, he searched her clothing for tears or bloodstains. He found nothing.
       "There aren't any bite marks," he said, puzzled. "No wounds at all." Even if it wasn't the work of a vampire, the blood had to have left her body somehow. It couldn't just evaporate through skin.
       "Is there a breed of vampire that can feed without biting?"
       "Not one that feeds on blood," Norman replied.
       "Right, right, should have guessed. Nothing can break the sanctity of the dermal threshold."
       "The what?"
       "How do I put this. Your skin's a freaking fortress, okay? It protects you from a lot more than just germs."
       Norman nodded absently. He was checking the hands over again, more closely this time, and he noticed a faint line of white along the pad of one finger. "Wait, here's something."
       Cyrus bent over his shoulder to look. "That paper cut? No way anyone could get a whole body's worth of blood out of that, even if they had a vacuum for a mouth."
       Norman grimaced. "Maybe you're right. There's nothing else, though." He stood, dusting off his knees. "Not even a scar."
       "It's a puzzle, ain't it," Cyrus said. "How do you get blood out without breaking skin?"
       They threw ideas back and forth for the better part of half an hour while they searched the area for any other signs of vampire presence. In the end, they left the house empty-handed and just as clueless as they had entered. The other two victims offered little more. The second death was an older man who had keeled over while tending his rose bushes, the third a young man who had been in the middle of slicing tomatoes. The bodies had all been completely drained of blood, yet not a single one had been bitten.
       Norman examined the scenes as well as he could, but he was a negotiator, not a detective. Neither he nor Cyrus could think of any explanation, magical or mundane. When Nightmare's men finally decided he had wasted enough of his time, his driver brought him home.

       The moment the sun went down that day, Norman pulled out his little red book and began making calls to all the usual suspects. This was the area where he really shone. After years under Nightmare's employ, he had built relationships with every prominent vampire in the entire city. His thick little book of undead phone numbers (something his wife called quaintly old-fashioned) was so full he had to use post-it notes for extra pages.
       He asked slanted questions about obscure breeds of vampire and the mechanics of blood-drinking, careful not to mention the murders or even the Crystal District. His contacts gave him cryptic answers and droned on at length about whatever artist or musician they were into this week. It was all very typical, and he was starting to get a headache by 9 o'clock.
       When his inquiries turned up nothing, he resorted to the limited occult library he kept in his study, a collection of moldy old books he had inherited from Nightmare's previous vampire handler. There were a lot of rusty brown stains on the pages that he didn't like to think about. He had not yet drummed up the courage to ask anyone what had happened to the books' previous owner.
       A small shriek from the kitchen wrenched his attention from a paragraph about ancient Malaysian vampires. As he hurried out from his study, he glimpsed a small blur, no doubt Echo, bolting up the stairs. In the kitchen window hung a face. It was a gaunt face, pocketed with deep pools of shadow, eyes glinting beneath heavy brows. The skin was like white glass, opalescent shimmers of red and purple pulsing beneath the translucent flesh. A face like that could only belong to a corpse.
       Norman cracked the window open. "Hello, Sonya."
       "I must speak with you," Sonya said, her claws digging small holes into the windowsill. "I heard what happened in the Crystal District. You're looking for the murderer, aren't you?"
       "Uh. Who told you that?" Norman asked. He thought he had been cleverly discreet in his inquiries and found it a little disheartening that they knew what he was after all along.
       "Well, who else would Nightmare get to investigate?" Sonya asked, and Norman had to concede the point. "You must know it wasn't any of us. Tell me you know that."
       "The lack of fang marks is pretty compelling," Norman said. "But blood doesn't just run off. Well. It does, but not when there's a lot of skin around it still."
       "I thought so. You're a good man, Norman, even if you do work for Nightmare--and I know you don't do that willingly. That's why I want to tell you this. Elder Leech didn't think it was a good idea, but I know we can trust you." Sonya pulled back from the window, searching furtively left and right for eavesdroppers. "You don't have any ears on you, do you?"
       Norman patted his coat, feeling for unexpected lumps. "Not that I know of," he said.
       "Good. Well. A few days ago, I. . ." Sonya cleared her throat, ". . .fed on someone in the Crystal District. Or, tried to. It was not a resident! I had been tracking this scoundrel all night, and I wasn't going to let my opportunity slip by just because he happened to enter Nightmare's territory."
       "I won't report it," Norman assured her.
       "I know. So I sank my fangs into his neck, and the blood never touched my tongue. The next thing I knew, I had a shriveled corpse in my hands. Just about scared me to life. You must believe me; I had no intentions of killing this man. I considered putting him in a coma, after the things I'd seen him do that night, but never would I kill! At first, I thought he must have had some curse, like you. Then this morning, I heard about the other murders. . ."
       "I see." Norman crossed his arms, considering the matting of wet food chunks in the cup of the sink drain. A creature that could steal blood right out from under the fangs of a vampire was unheard of. Assuming, of course, he chose to believe Sonya's tale. "Could there be a blood drinker out there who preys from a distance?"
       "Elder Leech has been looking into it without any luck. If such a beast exists, we've never seen it before. Listen, you have to convince Nightmare that we're not the ones responsible. We can't afford any more raids!"
       "I-I'll try, but you know what he's like. If we can't find the real culprit, he'll blame you anyway just to save face."
       "Why do you think I'm taking the risk of telling you this? So you can hunt down the real predator. And you must."
       "I'll do everything I can. I promise."
       Sonya checked left and right one more time for witnesses. "Sorry if I scared your little girl," she said, looking unusually sheepish.
       Norman blinked, then stifled a sigh at the reminder. It was going to be difficult getting Echo to go near the kitchen ever again. "Just try to knock on the door next time."
       She nodded before shrinking down into a bat and fluttering away. That was a vampire's way of saying goodbye, he supposed. Norman wandered back to his study with slow steps and a heavy frown, so lost in thought he barely registered the soft tones of his wife comforting Echo upstairs.
       By the time he reached his chair, an idea had begun to form. He pushed all of his vampire books aside and reached for his wife's book of medical charms.

       Nightmare's man came again the next morning, unsmiling and sporting a new black eye.
       "Ten and counting," the man said. "Police are sweeping the neighborhood for more bodies."
       "No vampire could eat that much in one night," Norman said, swaying a little on his feet.
       The man shrugged.
       "I have--not a lead, uh, exactly, but there is something I want to test," Norman said. "Before we go, you don't have broken skin anywhere, do you?"
       The man jerked his gloves off and checked his knuckles. "Nah," he said. "Why?"
       "Just in case. Alright, let's go."
       The air in the Crystal District was no more pleasant than the previous day. It seemed more humid than his own neighborhood's, with a light tang of iron. A storm front must have been blowing in from the north. Norman directed the driver to take them near the house of one of the latest victims. He had no intention of going inside or looking at any more dead bodies this week, only a hope that their culprit would still be nearby.
       Just up the street, a fleet of policemen in their somber green uniforms drifted from door to door, checking in on the residents. No one cast a second glance in their direction as Norman and his driver got out of the black car and alighted on the sidewalk. Norman fished a little glass jar out of his pocket and held it up into the sunlight. Inside, a common brown beetle scrambled over a scrap of paper towel.
       "Is that. . .?"
       "My daughter's," Norman said with a nod. "She scraped up her knee at a soccer match yesterday, so I got a drop from it. I think this predator can somehow drink blood from a distance. So, all we have to do is find the spot where the blood--" he unscrewed the lid as he spoke, and the moment the beetle was exposed to the air, it disintegrated. "Um."
       "It's near?" The driver casually flicked his gaze around the area, one hand shifting his suit coat back to expose a holstered stake.
       "Or it has a much longer range than I thought." Norman dropped the jar and pulled a map out of his coat pocket. "I put a tracing spell inside it, so hopefully, it will lead us to whatever just drank that blood." He spread the map out over the hood of the car. As they watched, a puddle of red ink appeared on the line of Caleb Street, where they stood, and crept out slowly until it engulfed the whole of the Crystal District. The lines of the map were barely visible through the cloud of red.
       "That can't be right," Norman said. "It's all around us?"
       "Mist form, spread real thin?" the driver suggested.
       "They can't feed in mist form. Call Cyrus."
       The driver plucked the mirror flower from his buttonhole and held it to his lips, muttering a word in a language Norman didn't recognize. The petals rippled, their reflection of the man's fingers rippling into a kaleidoscope of wide blue eyes.
       "Caleb and 3rd. Get down here right now," the man said.
       "You guys still don't use cell phones?" Norman asked as the man re-secured the flower.
       "It's tradition." The man sneered. "And phones can be traced."
       Cyrus came bounding out from a house down the street and ran all the way to meet them. Norman really envied his energy some days.
       "You got something?" Cyrus asked, a little out of breath.
       "I put a tracing spell in some blood the culprit just ate," Norman tapped the map.
       "Ooh, good idea." Cyrus bent down to look at the map, then frowned. "What the heck am I looking at?"
       "The location of our blood-drinker, I guess," Norman replied.
       "That doesn't make any sense." Cyrus craned his neck up and looked around as if he thought he could see the creature around them if he squinted hard enough.
       "I know. I don't think I messed up the tracing spell. Have you got any ideas?"
       For a minute of tense silence, the three of them stood clustered together, all studying the map. The policemen down the way must have thought they were the most intensely lost trio ever seen.
       "The spot's thinner around the edges," the driver noted.
       "Yeah. And the epicenter seems to be right. . ." Cyrus planted his forefinger down on one isolated little cul-de-sac near the center of the neighborhood. "Here. Old Morrisey's place."
       "You can tell that from a map?" Norman asked.
       "Not a lot of people like to live near old Morrisey."
       "It's worth checking out, I suppose," Norman said.
       "Anyone else suddenly got a creeping feeling your skin is too thin?" Cyrus threw out conversationally as they all piled into the car.

       Old Morrisey's house stood alone on its block, a foreboding Victorian-style manor with all the classic accouterments of a reclusive sorcerer dotted about the front yard. Nightmare's man easily wrenched open the lock on the front gate with a twist of his arm, allowing the trio to enter. They passed by a well-manicured lawn littered with animal statues and spinning, humming contraptions of unknown purpose.
       No answer came when Norman rang the doorbell. Cyrus pounded on the door with a fist, calling Morrisey's name, and still they had no response.
       "Car's still here," the driver pointed out.
       "He must be home. You don't think he's. . ." Norman let the question trail off.
       "Can't be," Cyrus said. "Not Morrisey. That old coot's lived through a feud with Elder Leech himself; no upstart blood-drinker could get the jump on him."
       The driver must have gotten bored of the three of them just staring at the door, for he reached out and twisted the knob over Cyrus's protests.
       "Not locked," he said, pushing the door open.
       They left Cyrus stammering on the doorstep behind them. On his own, Norman would not have risked calling down the wrath of a grumpy, powerful sorcerer, but between the two, he feared Nightmare a great deal more.
       "Do you think it's here?" the driver asked, his hand planted on the stake holstered at his belt.
       Norman shook his head. "I don't know."
       The two men began a careful sweep of the first floor. Every creak of the house settling made Norman jump. For the first time, the imposing stature and effortless strength of Nightmare's man was comforting instead of intimidating. Cyrus finally joined them in the kitchen, where they stood contemplating the cold, moldy remains of half a stack of pancakes.
       "Someone stopped breakfast in a hurry," Norman said.
       "Two options. One, he ran off on a family emergency or something. Two, he had a brainstorm and went to work some magic," Cyrus said.
       "Three, he got eaten," the driver said to Cyrus's grimace.
       "The door to his working room was open. I'll bet you anything he's in there," Cyrus said.
       "Where's the working room?" Norman asked.
       "Basement. It's the big metal door with the giant seal on it; you can't miss it."
       They headed straight that way.
       Cyrus hesitated again at the foot of the stairs.
       "If he's in the middle of something, and we interrupt him--"
       The driver grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him down the stairs, ignoring squawks of protest. Norman's hands trembled faintly on the banister as they descended. He could already smell the death-stench wafting up from below.
       The stairs were narrow, enclosed by plaster on three sides. Unlit candles lined the descent, each set in a decorative hollow in the wall. Atmosphere was important for some mages, especially in workings that required great concentration. He tried to focus on the patterns in the wax as they passed instead of the stench that worsened with every step.
       The stairs led out into a square room with wood paneling and finished floors. More candles were clustered in a circle at the center, set on stands of all shapes and heights. Most had burned away to stubs, but a few were still lit, flickering warm light over the circle. A crumpled body lay in the center, flowing robes obscuring all but two withered arms. In one hand, it clutched a small kitchen knife.
       "That's Morrisey, alright," Cyrus said, squinting at the body from the other side of the circle. He made no move to approach the body. "Looks like he was in the middle of a pretty heavy-duty spell. A blood-fed one, it looks like. Eesh. Bad idea with our super vamp around."
       "So he died just like all the others," Norman said.
       The driver gave the body one disinterested glance and then began to prowl around the room, searching the corners and shadows.
       "No one else here," he proclaimed after a minute.
       Along the far wall, a tidy desk stood surrounded by shelves of odds and ends. It held ingredients and tools for magic spells, no doubt. A single notebook lay open on the desk, alongside a calculator and a protractor. Out of curiosity, Norman read over the page. Half of it was runic gibberish he couldn't understand, punctuated by complicated math equations and diagrams.
       "Are these spell calculations?" he asked.
       Cyrus popped over to look.
       "Yeah, looks like it." He whistled, flipping through a few pages. "Real heavy-duty, alright. Five pages for one spell. I wonder what he was trying to do?"
       "You can't tell?"
       Cyrus hummed to himself and didn't answer. "Let's see. This here's where he worked out the shape of the energies--that's how you figure out where to put the candles and the stones. He used a Vonnet quad-circle, so it must be a positive-force spell. Those always need more oomph than curses--"
       Norman's eyes quickly glazed over as Cyrus droned on, so lost in his own world he forgot to translate himself for non-experts. A soft chime sounded behind them, followed by the driver calling out, "Hello?"
       ". . .and this gaggle of calculus over here is where he worked out how much blood he'd need to sacrifice. See, you need to take the movement of positive-force and then subtract out all the aligned background energies but add on the cross-aligned background energies and any interference. . ."
       "Boss wants to talk to you," the driver interjected, thrusting the mirror flower under Norman's nose. The silvery petals reflected a broad, generous mouth with white teeth. It wasn't Norman's mouth. Cyrus cut himself off and sidled away quietly as Norman took the flower.
       "Norman, my boy," came Elder Nightmare's voice. "I was just wondering where you were. We have fifteen dead bodies now, you know, and my men tell me you're not with any of them."
       "I'm inside Sorcerer Morrisey's house, sir. He's been killed as well."
       "Has he? What a shame. How did you find him?"
       Norman haltingly explained how he had traced the blood, only half-concentrating on the conversation. His finger was tracing along the calculations Cyrus had last pointed out, a small furrow denting his brows. He was not and never would be a magic expert, nor even a magic amateur. What he was was an accountant, and he knew math. Numbers were his living. A well-honed work instinct told him that the result of the calculations just didn't look right. His finger halted halfway down the formula.
       "Oh, you moron," he said.
       "Excuse me?" Elder Nightmare said.
       "N-not you, sir!" Norman said quickly. "Morrisey. He made a mistake in his calculations. He thought he needed to sacrifice 10 milliliters of blood for this spell to work, but actually. . ." Norman slid the calculator over and quickly worked the corrected number through the rest of the operations. ". . .it needs 1,000 liters. That's what this is. There is no vampire. The spell is trying to complete itself, taking blood wherever it can."
       "Are you serious?" Cyrus came galloping back over and planted his hands on the table, framing the notebook. Norman showed him the relevant error. "Crap, you're right. I can't believe he made such an amateur mistake."
       "If that is the case, then why isn't the entire district already dead?" Nightmare asked.
       "Dermal threshold?" Norman guessed.
       "Yeah," Cyrus replied. "The skin's like a natural magic circle. It's built to deflect magical energies. But just like a magic circle, if anything breaks it, then those energies can come right on in."
       "The first victim had a paper cut on her finger," Norman blinked, the pieces coming together. "The second had scratches from his rose bush. The third probably cut himself while cooking. I didn't look at the ten that died today--"
       "Fifteen," Nightmare corrected.
       "I'll bet they've all got broken skin somewhere."
       "Can the spell be dismantled?" Nightmare asked.
       "Not at this stage," Cyrus answered. "You can reverse a finished spell and misdirect one being cast at you. A spell in progress, though? It's like a chemical reaction. The energies are too volatile to respond to will. You'd have more luck stopping the sun from burning."
       A brief silence followed as Nightmare considered his options. When he spoke again, his voice was slightly muffled, as if he was speaking away from the receiver.
       "James, how much blood is in the average adult?"
       "About five liters," came the quiet reply.
       "Sir?" Norman said, a cold dread settling over his stomach.
       "We should get people to evacuate, right?" Cyrus said.
       "We are in the business of solving problems, gentlemen," Nightmare said. "It is the mayor himself who wants us to solve this particular problem, and he does not want yet another district emptied and sealed during his watch. Very bad for a reputation. Elections are coming up, you know. This area must be normalized, and I will not tolerate failure. You tell me the spell can't be deconstructed or reversed? Then we shall have to see that it gets what it needs." Nightmare chuckled. "I suggest you compile a list of people you don't like. This thing could come in handy, don't you think?"

       It was late afternoon by the time he arrived home, too late once again for him to make it to work. His wife wasn't home yet. Norman locked himself in his study and pulled the bottle of whiskey out of the secret drawer. Red Snap whiskey could eat a man from the inside out if he drank too much of it. Norman only touched the stuff after finishing a 'side job.' He poured himself a generous glass and stared morosely into it while the sizzling quieted down.
       Tomorrow, he would go back to work just like normal. He would ignore all the newspapers and gossiping neighbors, sharing whatever rumors Nightmare decided to spread in place of the truth. Somewhere in the week, an anonymous deposit would make its way into his bank account with a curt note about a 'job well done,' and he would write out a check for the same amount to the usual charity and send it off. He would warn his family to never, ever set foot inside the Crystal District again, and then he'd shove the whole incident out of his head with as many applications of hard liquor as necessary.
       Nothing unusual. Nothing out of routine. Except this time, he had the weight of two-hundred people's lives on his conscience. He had set out to stop a killing spree, for once something unquestioningly good, and all he had done was give Nightmare the power to choose who would die.
       "But what can I do?" he asked the dull reflection of himself in the amber liquid. "I have a family to think of."
       He wasn't a lawman, or a detective, or a fighter. He wasn't even a mage. He didn't have the power, much less the courage to stand against the man who really ran the city. All he could do was crunch numbers and talk to people.
       Talk to people.
       Norman nearly upended the glass in his haste to dig the little book out from his top drawer. He tracked down Sonya's number and dialed it.
       "Do you know what time it is? Some decent folk are still in bed at this hour!"
       "I'm sorry, I didn't think about that," Norman said. He cast a guilty look at the sunset outside his office window. "This is urgent. I need 1,000 liters of magically reactive blood sent into the Crystal District by morning."
       "What are you asking me for? A thousand liters, that's. . ."
       "Two hundred people."
       "Two hundred people! What am I supposed to do, hunt down an army of convicts for you?"
       "I'm talking stored blood. Meals are set aside for when it's not safe for you to go out. Your clan has something like that, doesn't it?"
       "Blood can't be preserved for vampires; everyone knows that. The bits we need spoil within hours."
       He did know that. The metaphysical components of blood always decayed first, and no ordinary fridge could preserve them. This was why vampires had no interest in blood banks. However, he also knew that Leech's clan had managed to hide deep in their caves for several months during the last round of raids, with none of its members starving to death. Anything that could feed a vampire could also feed a spell. Vampires were practically spell-constructs themselves, a blood magic working that needed constant feeding and had been anchored to a human corpse. His old blood-stained book had told him so.
       "But you found a way, didn't you? Listen, I wouldn't be talking about this if it wasn't a crisis. A lot of people are going to die if we don't get that blood, and Nightmare is more than happy to blame it on you. I don't need to tell you what will happen to the Leech clan then, do I?" He waited a moment for her hissing to subside. "Please, Sonya."
       "I'll talk to the elder."

       For the sake of his accomplice, Norman waited until night had fallen fully before kicking off the operation. Sonya went with him. They entered the Crystal District about an hour after midnight, using a nondescript van Elder Leech had loaned them.
       He drove until the air gnawed at him and grew wet. Blood in the air. Sonya crossed her arms and huddled into a tight ball, her pupils wide.
       "I can smell it," she said. "I can almost taste it."
       Norman parked the van a block down from Old Morrisey's place. On a balmy moonlit night like this, the neighborhood should have been bustling with folk working their night rituals. Instead, the residents cowered behind their doors, clueless that the danger could reach them through any barrier.
       Norman hopped out of the van, Sonya a staggering shadow behind him. He opened the back doors, letting the moonlight in to glisten on the rune-encrusted tank inside.
       "You could feed the entire clan for half a year on that," Sonya groaned. She turned away and covered her eyes. "You do it. I can't bear it."
       Norman crept up to the tank and knelt beside it, making no sudden movements. Most of Elder Leech's explanations had sailed over his head, but he had caught the words 'time loop' and 'trap wards.' One wrong move around magic like that, and you could be spending the rest of eternity replaying the same fifteen minutes over and over.
       He flipped and twisted the various mechanisms all over the tank in careful order, mumbling the steps to himself as he did them. The runes on the lid rotated and swapped segments, unraveling by degrees from letters into interconnected circles. The last ward came undone with a click and a sizzle. The box sprang open.
       The blood inside began to drain as soon as it hit air, dissolving into a light mist that just as quickly dispersed. Norman felt as if he had been shot with a spray bottle. In seconds, the whole unit was empty of all but a small puddle.
       Sonya's arm brushed his shoulder. She had climbed in beside him and was staring down into the empty tank with morose hunger.
       "Such a waste," she said. "What was that old mage even trying to do?"
       "Who knows?" Norman replied.
       The awful gnawing pressure had finally eased off his skin, and the air dried out. Whatever that spell had been, it was finished now. The danger was gone, and that was all that mattered.
       At least, that was Norman's line of thought up until he heard the explosion. They scrambled out of the van to find Old Morrisey's house lit up like a ghoulish rave, silver light streaming through every window, fire eating at the seams of the doors. The roof popped off in a cloud of smoke and noise, and a small whirlwind of silver fire launched up through the new opening.
       The whirlwind unfurled. A firebird stretched its silvery wings to the moon and let loose a single, pure, high note that struck at Norman's bones like a hammer. Then it swooped down the yard, over the street, and away into the night. A splatter from its passing tail lit one of the neighbor's hedges on fire.
       Norman and Sonya stood shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, staring after the shrinking dot of bright silver as it rocketed off to become someone else's problem, hopefully very far away. The neighbor's door opened, someone cursed from inside, and a stream of water shot out of the doorway to extinguish the hedge.
       "Freaking mages," Sonya said with feeling.
       Norman nodded.