"Those are the terms," Helen held out her hand. Kavanaugh took it, shaking firmly. He agreed to follow them and soon after, they returned to the lab where Henry and Will were busy running the blood samples Helen had collected from the creature earlier.

"Definitely human," Henry pointed at a chart on the wall. "Granted, it's a nasty, under-evolved pain in the arse with sharp claws and a hangover..."

Joe noted that the room smelt of disinfectant and blood. On the bench running along the back wall were the scattered remains of surgical equipment, no doubt from some hurried patch job. Helen, at the very least, had a white bandage around her neck with lines of read seeping through in a distinctly claw-like manner. Injures from the creature downstairs, he presumed.

He didn't say anything, instead Joe chose to slink back and observe. It was something he was used to, hiding in the shadows and letting the truth surface during its natural course.

"They're not, under-evolved Henry," snapped Helen irritably, as she nudged his scruffy form away from the computer screen displaying the results of the blood-work. "Far from it. Look at the telomeres..." she zoomed in on one of the sub-screens. It quickly filled with sets of stunted tubes that looked a bit like hacked earthworms after an early morning feeding session – except that they had been stained blue. These were the creature's chromosomes, and the white segments on each end, the telomeres. "They've hardly degraded at all and they are exceptionally long compared to modern humans."

"I don't understand," Henry leant on the table beside her, examining the screen.

"Telomeres," she explained, "are believed to be responsible for the ageing process. They are, for lack of a better term, 'disposable buffers' at the ends of chromosomes. When DNA replicates itself, it is not a perfect process. Bits are lost of the ends of the complex strands – the telomeres cap the chromosomes taking the brunt of this process. If not for them, the body loses information and thus, begins –"

"Aging?" Henry cut in.

"Exactly. This limiting factor is like a ticking clock for life forms."

"If cells could replicate perfectly, there'd be no limit on their age?"

She shook her head at Will. "Sadly, that condition is called, 'cancer'. These samples suggest an organism that has found a trade off between the two extremes which allows it a greater maximum lifespan. The People of the Sand will age and die like anything else, but it will take them a while. A long while."

"What about you?"

"Different again, I'm afraid. These things possess a unique abnormality – it you could call it that. More likely they're a rare species that bottlenecked into this isolated group living in Egypt."

"Didn't exactly get a good look," said Will, throwing another file on the desk, "but I'd say that they have extensive chromatophore organs, allowing them to shift the colours of their skin like a squid. Nifty adaptation," he added, "common in water dwelling creatures although there are examples of it throughout all branches of the animal kingdom."

"So, how old is this thing?" Henry looked worried.

Helen was quiet for a while, running a stray hand through her hair up into where the black strands vanished into a clip. "It'd be a guess, but I'd say the sunny side of six millennia give or take a decade."

Henry and Will stared at each other. That couldn't possibly be good news.

Joe, who had kept quiet at the back of the room, finally spoke.

"Why don't you tell them what it really is," his voice rolled over the air, low and calm. It was directed at Helen. The detective returned a bleached jaw bone to its place as a paper weight and raised his eyebrows expectantly at her.

Will took exception to Kavanaugh's tone.

"You don't think that Magnus would tell us if she-" Will was interrupted by Helen's hand on his shoulder. She nodded her head gently at him until he stepped aside.

"I merely have suspicions," she replied quietly. "I would have to cross check them and even then –"

"Helen?" Will searched her eyes, but they were difficult to catch as they glanced to the ceiling, searching for something that wasn't there.

"These are vampires," Helen said finally. "Pure blood vampires." She looked back at the screen where the test results glared back at her. It had been so long, she'd almost forgotten how much it meant to her to see vampire blood smeared between glass slides.

"You better be sure," said Will, breaking the silence that had settled.

Helen agreed. "I'll run the checks at once. If we've got a vampire, then we've undoubtedly got problems."

*~*~*

Ashley had learnt more about her house from ten minutes inside its walls than in her twenty-odd years traipsing about the corridors. Passageways tracked all over the place down here – some were old and decrepit while others had been maintained. The banisters she used to cross the last set of electric cables had been put in recently. She could tell by steel nails – still shining proudly, clearly believing themselves to be platinum or some precious jewel.

Yes, thought Ashley, there was definitely something worth finding buried in the walls.

She ducked under an established spider web. The resident was busy folding silvery threads around a distressed bug and did not flinch as one of Ashley's hairs caught on a sticky strand, sending shivers through the delicate structure.

Descending many levels of ladders, Ashley reached what she presumed to be the ground floor – maybe even just below it. The innards of the building were on display. Pipes and cords were tacked onto the walls, snaking their way in all directions. One of them was dripping, somewhere off in the darkness to her left. The hum of the cooling fans droned over her footsteps and every now and then, the lifts screeched into life, showing the area with sparks which zipped brightly through the air before flickering out.

In front of her was a maintenance door. She quickly scanned it with her torch and then pushed the handle down. It clicked but Ashley had to force it open, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness within.

Her pupils shrank to tiny points as she blinked furiously, trying to accustom herself to the harsh lighting coming from several large fluorescent strips. On the far side of the room was a metal shelf divided into dozens of narrow segments. Each one was packed with files – many of which looked 'well-loved'. Holding most of the attention though, was a heavy wooden desk in the centre of the room. It was a beautiful desk with inlaid leather and deep red-brown hues where its lacquer had aged.

This was her grandfather's desk.

She approached the slab of wood slowly, unsettled by its presence.

The back of her throat went dry. It was as if he was there, peering at her from the other side with striking grey eyes made cloudy by too many years of despair. He had been dead for more than a century but she had only killed him hours ago. Her breath caught as she stood there for a moment with hot tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

Deciding to avoid the desk, Ashley turned her attention to a slender bench top at the other end of the room.

Open on the stainless steel surface was a folder with Nikola Tesla's photo unclipped and lying loose over a set of typed pages. Her mother's writing was scrawled in the margin of the top page and then again on the back of the photo.

'Apologies,' said the script on the reverse of the photo.

Also in the folder was a letter dated in 1889 and signed by Tesla. The barely legible writing scrawled to the edges of the page. It was smudged along an old fold-line and washed out at the edge. Still, Ashley could still make out some parts-

'Not quite what we expected. That said, the outcome has intriguing application which I need not instruct your mind to speculate on. This changes everything ... yours always, Tesla.'

Ashley shook her head and roamed over to rack of glass vials. She didn't have to be a student of science to recognise the substance congealing in their bases. For each vial there was also a corresponding file stacked beside most notable of all however, was a file without a vial.

'Subject Unknown – Pure Sample 0049'

Frowning, Ashley reached into her pocket and retrieved the set of vials that she had taken from her grandfather's lab. Each one had a slender label wrapped under its lip. 0030 – 0009 – 0162 and 0049.

"Back slowly away from there and-Ashley?" Helen lowered her weapon, stepping into the room.

Ashley slipped the vials back into her jacket before turning around to find her mother in shock.

"Ashley!" Helen tucked the gun into her waistband and jogged across the room to scoop her daughter into a vigorous hug. "I thought – I don't know what I thought," she whispered, rocking Ashley gently.

*~*~*

"I was going to show you this place, it just – we never found the right time." Helen pulled a couple of chairs up to the old desk in the centre of the room. Her daughter sat opposite but was strangely distant as Helen took her place on her father's side of the imposing wooden object.

"How about now?" said Ashley sharply, flicking through several folders presented to her.

Helen, though composed, was wavering on the edge of her painful memories. This room was her soul – a reminder of everything that she had lost and why it was gone, those who had betrayed her and even worse, the many she had deceived. There were parts of herself that she had not intended to share with her daughter and they were all in here, scattered over the shelves.

"There are things I would undo if given the chance again," Helen had Tesla's file in front of her. She glanced down at his photo but not into his dark eyes. "I'm not proud of what we did all those years ago. We were impatient for progress and I was angry," she had briefly touched on the experiments her and her colleagues had run on themselves, "– anyway, each of us has paid for the mistake. Some of us have fared worse. It's killing– "

Ashley's eyes flicked up as her mother caught her sentence with a sharp intake of breath. It didn't matter. Ashley knew how it ended. 'It's killing your father."

"And you came down here to run a blood sample from one of those creatures?" Ashley deposited the files onto the table, flinching as she felt two of the vials in her pocket knock together softly.

"I have to be sure," Helen folded her arms. "I keep this place a secret because even a rumour of what I do down here could tear the world apart. Organisations like the Kabal and motivated individuals would do anything to run their filthy hands over this information. Nobody but you knows of its existence. Nobody-" Helen eyed her daughters seriously, "Nobody but you knows of it."

Ashley nodded. "Run the samples," she instructed, rising from her seat and turning to wipe a tear before her mother caught sight of it.

*~*~*

Helen Magnus hunts vampires. She hunts them all of the time, in the back of her mind – stalking them while she sleeps. It possesses her and has done since the death of her father. They were his private passion, a species of human so biologically inexplicable as to tempt him into their lairs for a drop of heavy blood.

Vampire blood: it is a substance promising drinkers mythical powers. Helen has seen a whole vial of the mysterious red syrup. One night, along with four of her closest friends, she injected it into her veins and slipped into a horrible nightmare.

The stories got it wrong. Vampires are hunted for their blood, stalked in the day they are forced to roam by night, scurrying away from the moonlight in case it betray them to a human waiting in the shadows.