“What was that? What did the words you wrote mean?” Detective Lee asked as he was carefully turning around and looking at the silver markings around the kitchen: “And what are these marks?”

“The sentences were a Chinese phrase, ‘Gui Ying Mi Zong, Jing Hua Shui Yue, Wu Ling Wei Fa Jin Po Zhi’. Which basically means ‘Illusions and Shadows, I will break you with my power’. It was a revelation spell.” Jason’s eyes glowed in silver when he looked around: “It’s mostly for me, combined with my ‘True Sight’ spell it allows me to observe the composition and special characteristics of the energy signature residue.”

“Okay, I’d like to learn that some day.” Aimee knelt down and started examining a long silver marking that looked like a scratch mark from leather boots: “But since it is a revelation spell, you must have sensed something you based it on right? What was it that you picked up?”

“I just based it on the smell, and some kind of very dark energy that’s still lingering in the air.” Jason took a look at the broken cupboard, where a lot of silver markings were present and scattered all over. After observing for a while, Jason scratched one small marking using his right index finger. Before long he was able to pick up a thin piece of silver material from the cupboard, from which he saw some very tiny hairs of dark red linings and some barely visible dark red dots.

Beside what Jason picked up, when Detective Lee and Aimee examined the silver markings in the kitchen, they also found that they were like very thin layers of dried paint spilled all over and in different patterns. Some of them looked like hand marks, some of them looked like scratches from shoes and fingernails, and some of them looked like droplets of blood. Having visited and looked at this apartment and especially this kitchen himself, Detective Lee could easily tell that some of the silver markings were in the same place and the same shapes and sizes as some of the blood patterns they found in the scene, thus could not help but get more impressed.

“What is it?” Aimee and Detective Lee both came up to Jason from behind.

“Very small traces of blood, and with the same dark energy from within. I would need to ask for a second opinion but I think this matches what I know about vampires.” Jason answered with a frown: “Like you mentioned, there was some kind of struggle here, did you find blood from the perpetrator?”

“No.” Detective Lee frowed and said: “There were indeed splashes of blood in the scene, not a lot and not in the cupboard. And we tested all of them, all of them matched the DNA of the victim.”

“And the victim’s body, there was nothing weird about it?” Aimee asked: “No strange smoke coming from it, no weird glow, no abnormal physiology?”

“Besides almost all of the blood being drained? No not really.”

“So this is the blood of the perp then.” Aimee nodded: “This - I actually don’t know if we can use this as evidence, since it could easily be called tampered. But at least we know that the perp was injured.”

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“Yes, but how?” Jason asked: “No offence to anyone, but I don’t think a normal human, much less a young girl could even dream of injuring a vampire through normal means.”

“What about guns?” Aimee and Detective Lee asked at the same time.

“It depends, I think.” Jason shrugged: “But it’s not that easy to withstand bullets without getting injured somehow.”

“There were no records of the victim acquiring a gun through legal means. But this neighborhood does suffer from illegal gun trafficking.” Detective Lee said: “The victim also works night shifts in a bar, and she could have bought one from the street dealers and brought it with her. It’s not that rare to be honest.”

Just this moment, the elevator dinged, and two footsteps came out of the elevator door. A suspicious feeling hit Jason, and he immediately waved his hand at the kitchen, removing almost all of the silver markings left by her spell, and then he swung his silver pen at a corner and created a thin silver wall: “Someone’s coming, hide behind this wall!”

Detective Lee and Aimee were confused, but they did not question Jason at all and rushed behind the thin silver wall. When Jason went behind the wall, he knocked on the silver wall with his silver pen. The wall became transparent from their side like a wall of clean high grade glass, while on the other side, it just displayed the visuals of the corner and showed no signs that there were three individuals hiding behind it.

Two men busted into the apartment through the already open door, one wearing a leather jacket and a pair of jeans, and the other in a grey T-shirt and a pair of grey blue jogger pants. Both of these men were carrying guns with them, and they came into the room with guns pointing in front of them, as if they were expecting to encounter hostiles.

Jason made a “shh” gesture, then waved his left index finger in the air, and a message made of silver letters appeared in the air: “Not soundproof, quiet.”

Aimee and Detective Lee nodded, while both had their guns drawn and were ready to fight.

“Kitchen clear.” the man in a grey T-shirt and jogging pants came into the kitchen and scanned the space in quite a professional manner. But he did not see the three hiding behind the thin silver wall at all.

“Bedroom and bathroom clear.” the man in a leather jacket came into the kitchen: “Whoever came here must have escaped.”

“Should we check the neighbors?” the man in a grey T-shirt asked: “Whoever it is, they couldn’t have gone far.”

“Doesn’t matter, we’re not here to track people down.” the man in a leather jacket said: “Let’s hurry up, before anyone above our pay grade comes.”

“Hope it’s still fresh.” the man in a grey T-shirt took out a rusty bronze device, which looked like an antique compass or a clock with only one hand, and placed it on the ground.

The two men each took out a small scroll, and started chanting a spell in unison.

The needle in the compass started spinning, initially quite slowly, and gradually accelerating. When it reached a speed at which it was spinning three to four cycles per second, it stopped accelerating and was in a steady state.

A vague and blurry shadow of a young woman appeared near the kitchen sink, she was cutting some food, with her purse next to her. Then, she was startled by something coming from behind. She immediately took out a gun from her purse and pointed at something or someone that was behind her. She yelled something, then opened fire two times. The shots did not stop her attacker, the gun was knocked away from her hand and she was grabbed by her neck and banged against the cupboard. Her head hit the cupboard, leaving it what it looked like today, she bled from her head, then she was thrown onto the ground. She tried to crawl away, but was pulled back from her legs.

The young woman’s shadow started out vague and blurry, but when its reenactment of the young woman’s death became closer and closer to her final moment, it gradually became clearer. And when she was pinned to the ground with two giant needles shoved into the both sides of her neck, Jason, Aimee and Detective Lee felt like they were watching a 3D movie.

“We’ve got it.” the man in a leather jacket said, as he pulled out another scroll with an array that was empty at the center on it and opened it at the young woman’s shadow. Some kind of special suction force appeared, and the young woman’s shadow was sucked into the scroll. The shadow became the pattern of a crying face at the center of the array on the scroll.

“Not the freshest grudge. But not too bad either. Next time we could be more aggressive and come before the cops found them.”