As we walked towards the laboratory, I stumbled upon a familiar place, it seemed like a farm. We both saw dead animals, and I realized it was the vampire's place I had killed, the same one who had tried to ambush a man, that day, while I was searching for Anastasia.
"He won't be able to have a barbecue it seems," Nacho said as he looked at the only remaining animal, a dead cow.
I entered the house and started to look through the photos and books it had. The last open book was "Dracula." Nacho had gone into the guy's room and acted as if he had found a treasure; it seemed like he had found something.
"Hahaha, man look! Our friend here went hard core with himself with all these magazines; he has a huge Playboy collection."
I realized that the guy was nothing more than a loner who lived with his mother. Apparently, there was no one else. I wondered how he had become a vampire. Then I stumbled upon several letters or sketches of drawings he had, in them, there was a girl, and the drawings were addressed to her.
"Hahahaha! Look, Gonza, I have an incredible revelation here!"
Nacho came out with something that looked like a watercolor, with the familiar face of Anastasia herself, this time portrayed naked in a rather, let's say, explicit and vulgar position.
"It's her cousin! Hahahaha! Again. The blonde shows up everywhere!" Then he exclaimed:
"You're taking this one, right?!"
He seemed to enjoy the incredible coincidence; I couldn't believe Anastasia would stoop to such a thing, the exaggerated proportions of her attributes, the pose and everything, made me think that he had imagined her, rather than her posing for the occasion.
After reading the guy's letters, I started to reflect. Nacho looked at me a little worried, thinking that maybe I had offended him and messed up unintentionally.
"Sorry, cousin, I shouldn't have shown you that, maybe..."
"His name was Ivan. He was a newborn vampire, turned by another newborn; his mother died in the attack, and he was left alone," I interrupted.
His letters revealed how he had tried to move forward alone, attempting to find a companion, and he seemed to have some kind of mental disability or disorder. Many human girls fell into his attempt to "court" them, and I discovered that Anastasia had offered him her friendship and guided him in a way that would make him stop what he was doing. She offered him her support; I had never seen that more empathetic side of her.
"I killed him, Nacho. I didn't even give him time to explain himself. He was the first to fall under my saber, before he had time to redeem himself," I said, looking at the lock of Anastasia's hair I had taken from him after putting an end to his life.
"Alright, Gonza, while I'm not the right person to give you advice, I can only say that I understand you, and we've all committed atrocities, especially vampires. Don't dwell on it anymore. Okay? Look, I have a proposition for you: let's burn this place down and get out of here."
"I hope God forgives me," I finally murmured, crossing myself and kissing my father's cross. Nacho prepared a Molotov cocktail and burned what was now an abandoned farm. I visited the place where I had buried his mother and improvised a cross next to her.
I returned to the place and saw Nacho watching the flames intently. I looked at his back pockets, and in one of them, he had a Playboy magazine, and in the other, the suggestive watercolor of Anastasia. I looked at him disapprovingly.
"Come on, cousin! She looks great! Can I keep it?" He looked at me jokingly, winking. I took the watercolor and threw it into the flames.
"At least let me keep the magazine! Have mercy!" He said laughing and making a mischievous gesture. I simply rolled my eyes and told him to continue.
After the experience, we continued the journey from Iran northward, reaching the ruins of what had been Dr. Petrov's laboratory and the sinister organization of the Bloody Moon.
"Uhhg, this place feels dense, cousin. I hope they don't have a monster like Frankenstein here, right?" Nacho asked.
"If you only knew, cousin, if you only knew..." I murmured as we advanced, heading to Dr. Petrov's secret office.
"Oh, don't mess with me! I saw a photo of a fetus; this place is like being in the Doom game!" He exclaimed.
We continued descending and using the ventilation, finally reaching the office, the same place where I had forged my weapons, and my saber.
"Oh shit!" Nacho looked with great admiration, letting out some whistles. "So this is Batman's cave, epic, man. Ha! Look, there are some plans for the dagger and your saber!"
Nacho was fascinated. He had worked as a mechanic for most of his human life and had always been interested in mechanical and electronic subjects, something we shared in common, and he used to join me when I assembled PCs during the times I went on vacation to Santa Maria to earn some coins.
I turned everything on, and it seemed like things were working. I put on gloves carefully removed the book, then assembled a small robot and a scanner to copy the pages and add everything to the database. Nacho and I took care of checking the devices and the damaged chips, while I searched for parts that could replace the damaged ones.
The tasers didn't seem to have problems repairing, but the chip of the saber and the dagger were damaged, especially the area where the Promethium battery was charged.
While Nacho checked the taser blueprints and tried to replace the damaged parts, he asked me.
"What are those things hanging all over the place?"
"Bombs to wipe out everything in case of assault," I said. "Nobody, nobody should have access to the content of what's here. There are experiments to synthesize blood, humans with potent sanguine potential, anti-vampire weapons, hybrids, even plans to bring werewolves back to life."
"They exist?" He said, amazed.
"According to the doc, they were exterminated by vampires," I replied, looking at the screen as the data filled up.
The revelation from the book was tremendous. The creator of the book was an ancient vampire named "Darius," who had been tirelessly searching for the origin of our species and its true nature. His book contained theories about possible locations where the first vampire might have been located, as well as mapping of all existing vampire covens worldwide up to that point.
There were medical documents on how to numb human victims before feeding on them, conversion procedures written in a kind of diary with scientific undertones, and how to select the right people to turn them into vampires. The book was written in Latin, so luckily it wasn't as difficult for me to translate as the cuneiform writings in the ruins, but there was nothing to suggest why this book was so important to Father Rafael.
"Look, I repaired your electric glove," Nacho said as he gave me a shock with a slap on my butt.
"Ah! Idiot! Can't you see I'm concentrating? And how did you turn it on?" I asked him.
"I put a switch on it, like when you did it with the dagger. By the way, what are we going to do with the dagger and the saber?"
"The battery is damaged, so we'll have to go somewhere else; I'm thinking about where," I said, but my eyes were fixed on the scans of the book.
"There has to be something else, there has to be..." I murmured as Nacho began to get impatient, reclining on the sofa and starting to tell me while flipping through the Playboy magazine he had taken from Ivan's house:
"You know, I'm still talking to Tomás, secretly."
"Um, yeah, I don't know..." I said, I was very focused on the ancient book.
"From what he's told me, it seems like the blonde has been changing a lot; he says she's made progress, and Tomás has asked me to come back. What do you think?"
As my finger tapped softly on the table, trying to find the last clues, while my other eye paid attention to the script's nearly finished loading, I replied.
"Nacho, you've always been a sociable guy, family has always been and will always be the most important thing for you. I'm really sorry about what happened, but Tomás and I are the only family you have left, and for your stability, it's better if you go to Africa and stay with him."
Nacho looked at me for a moment, and looking up at the ceiling, he asked.
"And you? When will you settle down? You know you can't fix the world, I mean, now we're on some kind of mission and we have to play adventure and all, but when all this is over, what will you do?"
Nacho had a point, I no longer felt like hunting vampires without reason, and while this kind of mission could lead me to something. What will I do if I manage to finish this? Where will I go? Settling down in one place somehow terrified me because I couldn't see myself in a place without a purpose.
The scan had completed, and I already had results.
The content that appeared really took me by surprise. They were instructions, or rather theoretical instructions about what seemed to be a cure; it had some alchemical tones, which made me a bit wary, but it seemed plausible.
"A cure? Will I become human again!" Nacho exclaimed.
"No, stop. I think this is more about the blood thirst, rather than actually turning us human again."
"How's that?" he wondered.
"Well, according to what I think it says here, you could, in quotation marks, heal the blood thirst, or at least diminish that uncontrolled thirst we vampires have for human blood," I explained.
"And what does that mean?" Nacho asked, this time, sitting on the couch.
"It means that if this is true, vampires will be free from the thirst, and they can choose to feed on both animals and humans, no more singers, no more wild newborns, we will stop being slaves to our impulses. We would truly be free!" I said, now a bit more enthusiastic.
"But why would the guy keep the message with so much secrecy and fanfare?" Nacho looked at me, puzzled.
I thought for a moment, and considered the situation. "This would create quite a controversy because it would put covens like the Volturi in a morally low position. Hunting humans for food would no longer be an excuse but an option, immoral."
"Uh, everything would go to hell," Nacho looked at me. "And now?"
I'll run tests with my potion, maybe yours too. According to this, we could reverse-engineer the potion and create some sort of counterbalance; I also have several papers from Dr. Petrov who has been working intensively on it, and it seems he was on the right track.
As I began to organize the data and gather documents, Nacho and I suddenly looked up, and looking at each other, we said.
"We got company."