Too busy reading so for dinner all I had was a bagel. There I was on my dining room table minding my own business reading and looking at the journal deep in thought when I was given a fright that had me drooping my bagel and sending it to the floor.

“How far did you get?” Ethan had appeared and asked me and my hand jumped up and had to grab my heart which was beating like I was running for my life from a lion in the jungle.

“Don’t do that!” I shouted at him gripping my chest and taking deep breaths wishing that I had one of those paper bags people breathe into on airplanes in television to calm down people who have panic attacks. I truly regretted what happened to my bagel.

“Sorry but seriously what have you learned?” he questioned me again sitting on my desk kicking his feet looking both solemn yet bored in a way that only a teenager can.

“Apparently Bryan turned towards sacrificial magic to become an immortal.” I told him but he had no idea what I was talking about given that he only recently learned about magic so he didn’t get the importance and the dangers of this.

I was right about the type of magic that was being used but I had not thought that he had gotten this deep into it. Sacrificial magic was a banned magical practice. It required power from sacrifice like the name implies but ironically given since you aren’t sacrificing anything you care about but the lives of other things. There was an altered version that was created when the council of magic altered the spells and rituals that the Witches and Wizards used because the world was changing.

Spell and rituals had to be changed so that we could blend in. The fact was the deaths and sacrifices of people were starting to be noticed more and more and eventually if we hadn’t changed we would have gone to war with the people who couldn’t use magic so disappearing into the shadows seemed like a better option.

For the current version the power is temporary and there is a limit to how much a person could have so it wasn’t worthwhile to kill dozens of living creatures. Bryan was using the older version and unfortunately the power was indeed permanent. His power was amplifying with each death like a guitar being plugged in a generator that was continually getting amped up.

The original was decreed forbidden when the world entered the age of enlightenment. The council had been created just a decade earlier and when they had agreed to let magic become a less obvious fact of the world the ways we did magic had to change so that we could hide better. Styles of magic were lost, destroyed, and banned. Places were created to store all that information and then they were sealed so that no one could use that type of magic ever again.

“Well how did he learn it then?” Ethan questioned me when I told him all this and I shrugged and turned him to the page that I was currently reading. it was a more recent passage in the journal.

“I finally found a way to become immortal, the answer is Sacrificial magic. With this I can finally have everything that I want and I will never have to die!” the passage was two months old and probably when he first began his murder spree.

The page before was littered with symbols that caused age suspension magic when placed on a person’s skin. So apparently his immortality was not linked with stopping age like a vampire’s was. So he had to resort to getting a tattoo on his back to stop aging.

“Why is he doing all of this?” Ethan asked I guess he was hoping that I had an idea of why he and all those other people had to die. He was correct. Given what I know now I am ninety percent sure why this was happening.

“According to this he was sick with something fatal. What it was I don’t know since he didn’t write about it but almost all modern diseases can be cured with magic.” I told him.

“If he was cured then why is he doing all of this.” Ethan asked

“He may have been cured but he did not forget what it felt like to be told you were going to die and how scared it made him. So someone as clearly smart as he was so clearly he went on to research how to become immortal but no one would share the instruction…” I began and watched as Ethan nodded along. Glad to see he was still paying attention I continued on.

“They wouldn’t because they were afraid of what would happen if their methods were learned.” Ethan supplied the answer and I nodded glad he was keeping up.

“So he found a new way one to give him immortality since no would help him.” I finished taking a deep breath. The motive was clear but we still had to find him and bring him to justice and get revenge for his victims.

“Are we too late to stop him?” Ethan questioned me and I shook my head. Assuming the journal was still accurate Bryan was still just improving his blade and he had still had yet to get his actual target. I told him as much.

“If we weren’t his true target who was?” he questioned me and I pulled out a picture from the journal. It was a man with light brown hair with dark shades covering his eyes.

“What’s so special about this guy that he was being targeted by our guy?” Ethan questioned me. It was understandable that he was confused he hadn’t read the journal so he didn’t know who this was.

“This is Geoffrey Keller and he is a vampire.” I told him and he nodded urging me to continue and ruining the dramatic mood that I was trying to set.

He would not get his wish because as I was only explaining this once to both him and Marcus and I was too tired to give a proper explanation so I simply pulled him back into the necklace conjured myself a pillow and with a grin I went to sleep and I didn’t plan to wake up until twelve hours at least past.

We were hunting a vampire and they were creatures of the night so to match his pattern of activity I would have to sleep the entire day. This was the first part of the case that I actually enjoyed.

I had no idea the danger I was putting myself in by hunting down Geoffrey Keller and how much pain I would be put through. Both before and after we had found him. I would have to wait for tomorrow night to explain though.