Weeks went by and Anna continued her investigation, step by step, beaten up vampire by beaten up vampire. Most of them stayed silent and didn't tell her anything: they were afraid. The few who talked would only tell her the same thing: they were offered a job by an older, maybe Russian man or by a teenager-looking redhead girl and they will be killed if they say anything else. The job, as that one vampire told her on the evening of Claire Penn's Duel game, was to turn people into vampires. The SRU got him but he was released only a few days later in the absence of any lead or proof. He was dead by the very evening, stabbed several times. The news sites haven't said how many times, but knowing the self-healing abilities of vampires Anna thought it must have been a lot.

So Anna kept going into clubs and pubs where vampires were supposed to be spending their time, got hit on a few times and was attacked almost as many times. Now she was looking for a Russian man or a redhead girl, and it was surprising how little that helped. A lot of girls that visited those places were very young, and red hair was trendy again amongst them.

Russians were a little more marked in that part of the city, but it turned out most people couldn't tell the difference between a Russian or any other Eastern-European accents.

The biggest help shaped up to be the mysterious compass. Anna wasn't sure whether she should trust in a magical object or not, and she also didn't know who she could ask about it. The Seer was old and wise and had seen almost everything London could offer, but he didn't have much knowledge about magic. Some of the other vigilantes were sorcerers, but Anna had the feeling that this compass wasn't an everyday item they might have learned about in school. At least she couldn't find any mention of it when she spent days looking for an explanation or a manual.

Without any of those, she had to figure out how the thing worked by herself. If she asked a yes or no type of question, the answer was pretty straight forward: a yes or a no. Things got complicated when they came to questions like "who is…?" or "who did…?". As far as Anna could tell, the compass tried to show something that can be, metaphorically read, kind of the answer. Same as it did when it pointed to her helmet the time she asked who she was. The only problem was that the compass had its own way of thinking, and Anna had to follow it somehow. Until she learned how to do that or found someone to teach her, she decided to handle with doubt everything the little compass tells her.

'I think you got it all backwards, lil' Ghost,' the big man said.

It was three in the morning, the darkest hour. They just fought and won, not against vampires this time, but regular people who were trying to hurt one. It happened all the time: drunks realised the girl one of them picked up wasn't entirely human or just noted that someone at the bar was a little too pale and cold for their taste. Poor vampires might have been stronger than a human, but most of them led a normal everyday life and they didn't know how to fight. Unlike the bullies: those were fighting their whole lives.

The worst was when those bullies turned out to be also sorcerers. For some reason, they always demanded respect and special treatment, but Anna was sure that the treatment those particular sorcerers just got from them wasn't exactly special the way they would have liked it. Of course, they will be alright, Anna was sure about that too. In like six to eight days. Maybe less, if someone was going to heal them with magic.

'What do you mean "backwards"?' Anna asked now.

They both were sitting on the edge of a flat roof, legs over the abyss. The man was huge, a little over two metres and heavily muscled with broad shoulders and arms thicker than Anna's tights. They called him The Gentleman, because he always wore brown suit-pants, white shirt and a brown waistcoat. The general impression was slightly ruined by the boxers he had on both of his hands. They were carved with magical Runes.

He was also bald and black and probably well into his forties, but it was hard to tell because he wore a white scarf wrapped around his head that covered his face up until his black eyes.

'Someone's going around offering money to those in need and you are looking for them in top-notch pubs where you can't have a pint under eight quid. Those who need money so badly that they would take on a sketchy job like that won't be drinking in posh places, so the guys you are looking for won't be there either.'

That made sense. Anna frowned, even if the man couldn't see that. She never took off her helmet, not even in the company of other vigilantes. None of them ever did: the first rule about this business was not to show your face. There were people who thought it's an outdated idea and they could do much better if they were stepping out of the shadows, but those people were dead by now and most of them took their families with them, too.

'You are right, I guess,' Anna said, looking down the street under her feet. 'But what do I do then?'

The Gentleman shook his big head.

'Easy. You just let one of them do the job they were hired for and follow him back when he goes to get his money.'

'But that means some poor bystander will get bitten,' objected Anna. 'I cannot let that happen.'

'You can't save everyone,' the man said. 'But if you let one of them get hurt, you might be able to save a dozen of others or even more. In this job you need to do the math all the time, lil' Ghost.'

Ghost was Anna's nickname. It sounded badass but she only got it because of her coat which made her hard to be noticed, as if she was a ghost.

'What else you got?' Anna asked. She risked her life almost every night because she believed that she can save everyone, and refused to think otherwise.

'I know a man… He sells information. He used to be a copper but he was dirty and got fired. He might know something about your mysterious people, but he won't tell you for free.'

'I have some money,' shrugged Anna. Down there on the street a lonely figure hurried away, his steps echoed between the buildings on the two sides of the road. 'Not like I was planning a pricey holiday anytime soon.'

'As if,' sighed the man. 'No, he won't take your money. He will ask for a favour. Just to do something for him once in the future.'

'Let me guess,' the girl looked at him with a sour face. 'The favour would be highly illegal. Probably to collect some money someone owes him by force or something like that.'

The Gentleman laughed, but there was no happiness in that laugh.

'You would be lucky if he'd only ask for that much.'

That did not sound good. Anna tried to read in the big man's eyes, but it was hard without the expression of the face around it. Did he do something bad for the order of this info-selling guy? The Gentleman's methods were much more brutal than Anna was ever willing to use, but he was a good man fighting the good fight. It was hard to imagine he did something really wrong on purpose.

'So why did you even mention him? You clearly don't want me to owe him ' asked Anna confused.

'Because I know you won't stop, lil' Ghost. You never do. You will get yourself killed if you keep going and asking as you did, someone will notice you sooner or later. And being in the debt of a bad man is still better than being dead.'

That was true but Anna still didn't like the idea. There was a significant segment of the storytelling arts explained in details why one should never accept a deal like that. There were books and movies and TV series and even songs about people who sold their soul at the crossroad, and it never ended well for them.

'What did he make you do?' she asked.

'You don't want to know that,' answered the man in a sad voice. 'Listen, if I were you, I would drop the whole thing. There are more experienced guys in our profession to deal with things like this, or there is the police, too. You just need to get a contact who you can share your information with, and they will do the hard part. They have the resources and everything.

Anna scoffed.

'If they were capable of keeping the city safe, it wouldn't need us in the first place. Besides, the Commissioner made very clear how he feels about us.

'That's one man. Not all the coppers are the same,' he pointed out. 'Sometimes they help us, and sometimes we help them. Nobody talks about it but it's been like this forever. Most of them know that we are on the same side.'

Anna never worked with the police before and she had no idea how to start now. Plus she had some serious trusting issues about the armed forces in general, especially about the ones were led by people who committed war crimes and a kind of genocide before.

On the other hand, her options were limited. She could find a trustworthy detective to herself, or she could make a deal with someone cosplaying the devil. Either way, she wouldn't be working alone anymore, not by her own rules, and that was something she wanted to avoid at any cost.

'I can give you some numbers if you want, but I really think that you should bail out as long as you can.'

'What do you know about a sorcerer called "The Priest"?' asked Anna instead of an answer.

He groaned.

'I know much more about him than I'd ever wanted to, and it gives me nightmares. Nightmares, do you understand? And I'm not exactly a fragile little flower, as you can see.'

'And I am one?' she asked back angrily.

'That's not what I meant and you know that. Don't try to guilt-trip me into telling you about him.'

Anna got up. She put her hands into her pocket and started to pace up and down on the edge of the roof. She never had a problem with height and now she barely noticed what she was doing. The Gentleman's eyes were full of worries: he was more of a grounded type of vigilante. He avoided rooftops because most of them couldn't support his weight but it also meant that he never got the chance to get used to them.

'Sit down, okay? You make me nervous,' he said.

Anna leapt down from the edge onto the roof itself behind it, then leaned forward to look down. She put her arms on the edge now.

'It's just… I'm in this whole patrolling the city, saving people business more than two years now, and you guys are still acting like I was a child. I'm 28 years old, you know that?'

The man sighed and scratched his face under the scarf. He must have had a beard judging by the sound of it.

'The Priest is probably the most dangerous man alive. I know you met him and I can see that you are still alive, but believe me, it's a miracle. Do you think you could beat me?'

He used metal and wasn't a particularly powerful sorcerer, but he had at least a decade of experience more than Anna. She shook her head.

'Okay. Now, do you know how long it would take for that man to scatter my ashes in the wind? About ten seconds. And that is if I'm lucky because there are people he doesn't let die. Ever. They will slowly lose their mind, their soul, whatever they were before, while they had to serve a man who already killed them once before. So believe me, you do not want to meet that man again, and you really, seriously don't want to know more about him.'

Anna wasn't convinced at all, but she knew that The Gentleman won't say anything else about it, so she let the whole thing go. For now, at least. It was time to go home anyway, she could still sleep an hour or so before she had to get up and get ready for work.