It is a great disappointment when they find that even at this late hour, Silas Phelder is holding down the fort in the police library. But true to his word, there’s a stack of books in a crate from Sacred Dark for the detectives to look through. It’s not everything they requested, but it seems to be enough. Tonight, Phelder props his feet on his desk and reads through a thin book bound in white leather.

Alton dives into the arcane tomes with her incomplete traditional elven magic education as a guide. Cook breaks open a religious text written in High Draconic to peruse for answers.

“So how did you end up learning Draconic anyway,” Alton asks her partner, only now realizing how odd it is that of the two he’s the one who speaks it fluently when she’s the one who actually attended elementary magic lessons.

“I’d be a pretty sorry researcher if I only spoke Common,” he admits, “but really, the only way to keep up with news about how the dragons interfere with modern politics is to read their own writing. I bought a primer and paid for some lessons from a kobold back in the F-teens. Eleana taught me Abyssal when we were dating.”

They continue to make small talk while digging through their stack of books. They learn more about the blood hunger than either had really wanted to know. Apparently theoretical applications for the release of Spawn are often written about, but seldom attempted.

“I almost think that our only hope for actually helping any Spawn we encounter is asking to borrow that wizard from Blackfeather.” Alton grumbles, slouching down over the vellum pages of a manual for distinguishing the difference between vampire criminal activity and regular Elven Families organized crime. Apparently thralls are prone to obsession and eating odd things at odd times. Maybe that will come in handy.

Phelder loudly flips a page in the thin book he’s reading. He’s been doing that throughout their time in the library, but neither detective has paid him any attention. But this, this is just plain annoying. Cook snaps a quick glare at the grumpy librarian, and catches instead a glance at the book’s cover.

Right in the center of the field of white leather is an emblem in inky black. It’s immediately recognizable: a feather in a circle.

“You little shit.” Cook is furious.

“What?” Phelder is oblivious.

“May I see that?” Cook holds out an impatient hand.

“Eh, what for?” Phelder dog-ears his page before passing over the text.

Alton cringes.

Cook flips open the recently published book to find its pages of creamy and unbleached parchment. The writing is not illuminated like so many of the arcane or divinely inspired religious texts they had so far been searching. The print is tidy blocky letters and the ink is a blue-tinged black. On the inside cover is a magic mark displaying this book as belonging to Sacred Dark University.

The title page reads, “On the Redirection, Redemption, and Recovery of Revenants, Vampires, and Vampire Spawn.” Its author is Filip Hampl the First Necromancer of Greygorge. It sounds to Cook an impressive title for a person to hold. The book’s title, however, sounds like the exact content they’ve been looking for all this time.

Cook flips through it cautiously hopeful. While the title and introduction are both written in Low Draconic, the Common language, it also contains diagrams with untranslated Elvish captions, and High Draconic runes. Working together with Alton’s native knowledge of Elvish, they pick out the sections that are relevant to their case.

This keeps both detectives busy through far too much of the night to give either time to go home to rest. They take turns catching shifts in the break room on the floor below, but spend the night gaining a greater understanding of what they need to know and do to identify and rescue any other victims of the master vampire, Adrien Bellemare.