Blake acted out of sheer instinct before his brain was properly awake. Fortunately, he knew Sarah so well that even in the darkness, he somehow managed to recognise her silhouette. He lowered the wand he produced from under his pillow then flicked it. The Rune of Light sparked up and the spotlights on the ceiling came to life.

'Jesus!' he groaned when he got to properly look at Sarah.

She looked as if she just stepped out of a particularly gory horror movie. Her clothes, at least what remained of them, were soaked in blood. She had a horrible, seemingly torn injury on her side, so wide and deep that Blake could actually see into her. Her left shoulder was all messed up with barely any flesh staying on the showing bones. One of her ears was missing too, making her jet-black hair a bloodied tangle.

Her face wasn't in much better shape: the right eye was puff and purple, while the left was missing altogether, leaving a blood-filled, empty socket behind. Above, on her forehead started long claw marks, through the eye, down on her cheek. Her lips were torn too, and from the corner of them blood leaked. She limped forward, stumbled and fell. Blake jumped out of the bed and caught her before she hit the floor.

'It's okay, I've got you,' he said. He pointed his wand to the door and cast several complicated spells on it in case the thing roughed up Sarah was still after her. Then he aimed for the minibar and flashed the Rune of Movement. A glass levitated into his outreached palm.

Every living creature needed energy for their cells to work. That energy came from eating and drinking things. Vampires, even though they weren't actually alive in the same manner than human beings, weren't an exception either. Most people thought vampires could only get their energy from blood, but that wasn't true: they could have eaten their donors as they were, and the result would have been the same, or even better. They decided to go with the blood, a long time ago, from mere practicality: blood was renewable and a tad less disgusting.

A vampire was hard to kill. Their regenerating abilities were able to heal several life-threatening injuries at the same time even from their first day's as a vampire, and it only got more efficient as they were getting older. A vampire in Sarah's age could survive a dozen gunshots, a serious car crash, or a fall from somewhere pretty high then walking happily the next day. But like everything else, those healing abilities needed the fuel to work, and now they had quite a lot to do.

Blake put a pillow under Sarah's head and made sure she laid safely and as comfortable as it was possible. Then he set the glass on the floor. He took a deep breath, put the tip of his wand on his own forearm and made the Runes Body and Breakage shine.

He aimed well and most of the blood went into the glass. It filled up in a minute.

'Here, Sadie. Drink this,' he said, putting the glass to the woman's lips. Her nostrils widened as she felt the smell of blood. The woman was too weak to hold the glass on her own, but she must have understood what was going on because she gulped eagerly.

Once the glass was empty, Sarah sighed and let her head fall back on the pillow. Her face started to heal, the smaller cuts already had closed themselves.

Blake refilled the glass, but before he helped Sarah to drink, he closed the wound on his arm. If only healing a vampire would have been this easy, he thought, but just as undead couldn't do magic, magic was exceptionally hard to use on them, too. Healing Sarah's injuries would have required a highly trained team of medical sorcerers.

Blake looked at the glass. It must have been around 300 millilitres, and he filled it twice. That meant 600 ml of blood, as opposed to the advised 350, the amount that people called one unit. That was the amount of blood a person could safely donate at one go.

'Whatever,' murmured Blake and helped Sarah to her second portion. When the glass was empty, the woman opened her one eye and looked at him.

'Thank you,' she said weakly.

'What happened?' the man asked. He felt a little light-headed and dizzy because of the sudden blood loss. But he knew that he will need to do it at least one more time before the night would end.

'I found… The killer,' she said.

'Believe it or not, I figured out that much,' Blake shook his head, and Sarah laughed which turned into coughing. Blood poured out of her mouth, dark and thick. Must have been her own.

'It's okay, rest now. Try to sleep.'

Blake didn't want to move her at least until the most serious wound started to heal, so he just pulled off the sheet from the bed and laid it over her. Then he went to the minibar and opened a small bottle of red wine. He seemed to remember that red wine was supposed to help blood-making, and even if it didn't, he needed something for his nerves.

Blake sat down on the floor crossed-legged, next to Sarah. He chose a position from where he could see the door and the window too, wand in one hand, wine in the other. Sarah stayed quiet; she was either sleeping, passed out or just too weak to talk, Blake didn't know which one. He gave half a glass of blood to her sometimes around four in the morning. Her ear started to grow back already, same as her missing eye.

The hours went by heavily. Once there was some movement outside his door, making him tense, but it must have been only the cleaning staff. The hotel hosted MAGE agents every now and then, they knew better than asking questions. Blake didn't move, just sat where he was, waiting.

The night slowly faded away. Somewhere down on the street the first commuters started their days and the noise of the traffic hardened. A bell said it was seven o'clock. The deep ringing woke Sarah and she tried to sit up. She cursed in three different languages but managed the task with minimal help. She looked much better in the grey morning light that was sneaking in between the two wings of the shades. Instead of a walking nightmare, she now was resembling someone who had a decent beat-up recently. She pulled up her once white shirt to check out her side: the horroristic wound was mostly closed, but still hard to look at.

The claw marks on Sarah's face were only reddish lines by now above and below her eye. The eye itself wasn't fully grown yet, and it seemed opaque and blind. Sitting down exhausted the woman so she leaned her back against the bed.

'So I found the murderer,' she said with a pale smile almost as if they never dropped the conversation. 'More precisely, he found me.'

'He?' Blake lifted his eyebrow.

'Hard to tell, it was two and a half metres tall with giant bat wings. The locals think it's a gargoyle. At least at night. At daytime just a man like anyone.'

'Gargoyle? As in, stone monsters sitting on churches, supposedly driving away bad spirits and demons?'

'More or less,' nodded Sarah then made a painful grimace. 'It wasn't made out of stone, that much is sure. I can break stone easily. It does hunt dark creatures, though. Sinners. The core of its nature is revenge, making wrongs right.'

'Wrongs, like a wife-beating alcoholic or someone who slid away from justice several times?'

Blake summed what he found out in a few words and Sarah said that those were exactly the kind of things the monster was looking for, according to the local lore.

'And you said it's a he because you think it's…'

'Zelezny, obviously,' nodded Sarah again. 'Who else?'