"We can get out onto the roof." He does that. "I saw -" face, face, face, face, face, face, face.

" - OK, that looks right. So the one in the spotlight had a symbol on his face? Or maybe it's just a weird-looking scar?"

He sends it again. Probably not just a weird-looking scar.

"...OK. They were... weirdly open about what they were doing, for vampires."

"Yeah. I guess vampires planning to kill everyone in there might be that reckless, but they shouldn't've been so sure. Pretty careless not to check for you, if they knew there was a slayer in town."

"Maybe they didn't? I haven't been doing that much looking for vampires since you showed up, and the ones I staked earlier were all alone."

"Well, if they haven't noticed let's keep it that way." What kind of condition is the one Karen's carrying in?

Her skull is looking just a liiittle bit smashed. She'll recover, of course, but it may actually take her a while to regain consciousness.

(It hasn't, actually, but Darla has decided that anyone who can curb-stomp the Order of Aurelius that quickly is probably fairly dangerous, and as a magically reanimated dead body she's actually very good at playing dead.)

"There's vampire-safe handcuffs in my car," he tells Karen, "let's head that way. We can leave her with Michael and then - I guess our best guess is the cemeteries?"

"I think we should ask Zeke if he's heard anything. Or, well, I should ask Zeke. Otherwise yeah."

"Sounds good." He gets vampire-safe handcuffs out of his car. "You go ask Zeke, I drop this on Michael until it wakes up?"

She nods seriously, hands over her captive, and heads for Zeke's crypt. 

He cuffs the vampire to the metal frame of the car and drives to Michael's. 

Michael has a cottage that looks humble on the outside and is fairly ridiculous on the inside, with an amphitheater and a room entirely consumed by a personal computer and an indoor swimming pool with a waterfall and four underground floors full of artwork. There's a live-in human servant with instructions to never let anyone in including at gunpoint, because Elves don't relevantly count as residents. There is one underground floor (the second of the four) where the servant doesn't live and which can be accessed via tunnel; Macalaurë protects himself by the simple expedient of not sleeping there and checking whether there are people there every time he goes in. It's their general strategy when they're operating in a city where they may have made some enemies.

Tyelcormo sleeps in the woods. It hasn't failed him yet.

He drags the prisoner into the unprotected underground floor.

"What's this?"

(They're speaking Quenya.)

"Weirdly bold vampires attacked at the Bronze tonight. They might have a living prisoner, and they almost definitely have a nest somewhere. Karen hit her pretty hard - good kid -"

"Yes, she is."

"We're exploring some other avenues but if they don't pan out we may need to ask her some questions. Do you have a cage here which can -"

"Nothing's broken out of the 4x00 series yet, right?"

"There was an incident last year in Cleveland. The demon in question stored the ingredients for a shapeshifting spell in their bodily cavities and then turned into a rat. We made the grate smaller and, uh, we check."

"Then I'm happy to keep an eye on her."

"Cool." They cage the prisoner. "I'm going to go worry until Karen surfaces, give me a call if this one wakes up."

"Is everything all right?"

"Yeah. Just - I hope you're right about humans when they die."

"Are you, though, it's not really an overwhelmingly optimistic picture."

"If they're not gone then someday somehow we can fix it."