It was high time for me to put some distance between myself and the scene of the crime. My hand was still bleeding and needed tending too. I couldn't do that while standing in the car park of a building that had just been broken into. Not to mention the gunfire. Another shot in the distance rang out, no doubt aimed at Flint.

By some miracle, I made it back to Flint's car without blacking out from blood loss and without coming across any other people. Now I just had to fix my hand.

“Lost 'em.” Flint appeared at the car, pulling his trousers back on. Looking at him, you would never know what he had just been. “They had a bunch of dummy vans and took shots at me. Lost track of which one had Absher.”

I was only really half listening. It had just occurred to me how to fix my hand. The faint weight of the IV bag in my coat suddenly felt much more obvious, and a gnawing in the pit of my stomach told me what to do with it.

My teeth passed right through the thin plastic and the taste of rusty metal flooded my mouth, a second later followed by a rush of electricity. I forced myself to swallow and my whole body shuddered like I had been wired up to the mains.

When you get stabbed in real life, as far as I know, there's no easy solution. It generally involves a lot of stitches and months of physiotherapy. In video games, when you use a 'health kit' the game just gives you a load of health points, rather than bothering with the lengthy recovery process getting stabbed usually involves.

Well necking an IV bag full of blood felt like using a video game health-kit. In a split instant, I was fine again, the gaping hole in my hand palm sealed shut with barely even sign of a scarring.

“You doing okay?” Flint asked, his face stone.

“Fine now.” I jumped my weight between each foot, trying to shake off the fizz of adrenaline. “Bastard Absher put a knife through my hand.”

“How?” Flint just raised an eyebrow.

“How should I know?” I pulled off my glove to show, and inspect, the extent of the damage. There was a perfectly straight line starting just below the knuckle between my index and ring fingers, about three inches in length. The flesh underneath had healed, but the scales hadn't. There was now a permanent slot clean on both sides of my left hand.

“Bloody hell.” Flint was in awe now, staring at my hand. “This is serious.”

“Noooo.” I glared at Flint.

“Yeah.” He didn't even register my sarcasm, just pointing for me to get back into the car, his shirt still hanging open. “C'mon. Let's get out of here before the cops show up.”

In the very same breath as starting up the car he craned back around and popped open the chiller box, fishing out a sausage roll and jamming it into the corner of his mouth.

As soon as we got back to the safehouse an emergency meeting was called and we all piled into the tiny meeting room around the single table.

The little meeting room was pretty much like any corporate office I had god-knows how many job interviews in. Just about big enough for the four of us around a table that leaned to one side with a whiteboard at one end.

Copper sat at one end with his back to the whiteboard and Sand standing symbolically to his right and Clay sitting to his left. Flint sat opposite Clay, more interested in his food than what was being said.

Clay was stunned into silence by the sight of the hole through my scales. He turned my hand over and over, making hasty, scribbled notes that were impossible to read.

According to what few full sentences could be encouraged out of Clay, this was a major step forward in the recovery of a lot of lost knowledge. And I mean lost as in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Not often getting stabbed through the hand sets a scientific precedent but here I was.

“Definitely Vampires.” Copper chimed in, dropping the crushed bullet on the table and taking a sip of his tea. “338. Lapua Magnum.” He looked at me like I should know what that meant. Sand looked like she did.

“AWP?” Sand asked, shifting her weight from foot to foot with anxious energy.

Copper nodded. “Army-issue sniper. Only Vamp connections could get you one of them.”

“So what do they want with Absher?” Sand asked aloud, arms folded over her chest and fingers drumming on her bicep. Flint said nothing, occupied with his pot noodle.

Copper set down his mug on the table and stood up from his chair. “Sand, Flint. See if you can get a read on Absher's location and his movements. Clay, help Mac fill out a full report.” Everybody nodded in unison and stood up from the table.

“A report?” I tilted my head.

“I'll need everything that happened in writing so we can make a plan going forward.”

I sputtered out half a protest. Copper and the others already left before I could get the words out. Leaving me alone with Clay.

Filling out a form wasn't the problem, I had filled police reports before thanks to my old job and Clay was on hand to help me translate the legal-speak for me.

No, the problem was the unshakable feeling in the back of my mind that I was wasting time.

The report got sent off and once again I was left to walk around the safe-house for days on end. It was no wonder the Vampires got to do pretty much whatever they wanted around the city if this was the kind of process that went into a single missing person.

Me and Clay at least managed to go through some of the stuff brought back from Absher's place. Out of all the illegible notes and scrawling only one thing really stood out of any interest. It was a yellowed sheet of paper that looked like it had been quickly pulled from a book, screwed into a ball, unscrewed, lost, found again and had curry spilt on it.

“This thing is old.” Clay observed, handling it like crystal glass. “Latin script with Egyptian addendums.”

“Any idea what it says?” The centre of the page was taken up by a huge diagram of a sword, surrounded by paragraphs attributed to various parts of the blade.

“Not really, time hasn't been kind to it. I can scan it and restore it digitally but in this state, it could take ages.” Clay's voice trailed off, he leaned in and started sounding out something that was written on the page. “No way...Ascalon.”

“Who's Ascalon?”

“Ascalon is Saint George's lance.”

I felt myself stare at him in disbelief. Now we were adding ancient magical relics to the mix?

“So, what? He knows where to find this thing?” That was the first thing my mind went to. An ancient sword discovered and some power that would rather it stayed buried.

“What? Of course he does.” Clay said that like it should be obvious. “It's in the Royal Armouries in Leeds.”

“Oh, clearly.”

“I'd better go and scan this in.” Clay muttered, now lost in his own little world again. “I'll be right back.”

He was not right back. A couple of hours passed with no sign of him, leaving me standing at a loss for what to do with myself.

That was, until, I found another ageing, yellowed sheet of paper in between the piles. This one had a more anatomical bent. There were four diagrams, all showing a man's shoulder from the back, with a large angular shape jutting from between the shoulder-blade and spine. It looked kind of like a wing. It was long and sharp, consisting of five or six flat surfaces with chamfered edges. I would have said that the drawing looked rushed, or drawn by somebody who had never seen a wing before. Except for two things, first that the wing-shape was drawn with the same care and attention you always saw in Renaissance-era medical journals, complete with proper light direction and shading. The second was the fact that in each of the four diagrams, the shape was not only consistent but different as well.

In one image the arm was out straight sideways with the hand flat, the wing-shape hung over the arm, with three downward strands that looked like a low-poly render of a bat's wing with no skin.

The second image had the arm twisted slightly with the fist clenched, as if it was winding back for a punch. Now the wing shape hung closer to the arm, almost in line with the fist, but now it was just one mass, wide, flat and thin with a sword-point just beyond the knuckle.

I like to think I know when I've found something important. Unfortunately, I don't speak a word of 15th century Italian so all I could really do was look at the pretty pictures. I chose to just leave the page on a clear space on the desk where Clay would find it. But not before taking a quick snap of it on my phone.

Now I was back to square one with nothing to do. Sand and Flint were out in the field, Copper was busy directing them and Clay was so deep in his work I doubted even setting off the fire alarm would get his attention.

So I was bored. No other way to slice it. I had no right to be bored, my entire life had been turned upside-down in the course of a weekend. But I was.

What didn't help was the constant feeling like there was stuff I needed to be doing but just wasn't. I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled out the key to Absher's storage locker, twirling it around my index finger. There had to be something worthwhile in there, considering all of Absher's actions up until now.

It took a few long, slow, boring days for me to make my decision. I was still technically under witness protection, being wanted for two murders. But my cabin fever combined with my now-burning need for answers forced me to get a move on.

It was actually incredibly easy to get out of the safe-house from right under everybody's noses. The place was very obviously designed to keep people out rather than in. I just had to walk right out the front door.It took a fair while to get back to the storage place. But the walk was pretty uneventful. The sun was low enough that I could walk pretty much all the way there, only having to stop once or twice to work out how to get around a few larger spots of sunlight.

The storage place had much more activity going on today. A man on a ladder worked on fitting a new camera, grumbling incoherently while another stood at the base sipping tea. Inside, the place had been cleaned up and a sullen, dead-eyed desk jockey sat at the computer with a suited security guard standing to one side of the door.

“Good evening.” The desk jockey grunted at first before forcing himself into the usual head -office-mandated-cheeriness that I knew from my old job.

“Hey. What happened outside?” I took the opportunity to try and squeeze the guy for some info.

“No idea.” The forced smile slipped. “All the cameras just blew up the other night. Set off the fire alarms so we had to close up.”

“Really? Woah.” I put on my best "concerned customer" act.

“Yeah, then when we opened again in the morning it looked like somebody had broken in and there was a load of blood on the floor upstairs.” The security guard was now staring daggers at the desk guy. Clearly, he was saying too much.

I blew out my cheeks, hoping the interest would get him to keep going. “Was anybody hurt?”

“Not that we know, police have already done their thing so-” The clerk suddenly realised he was being glared at. “So you can still go upstairs if your locker's up there.” He quickly clarified and turned his full attention to the computer. I just nodded, smiling at the guard who cleared his throat and went back to his former neutral expression. No doubt the poor guy would get a thick ear as soon as I was gone.

The corridor leading to Absher's storage locker had been cleaned spotless, you would never know there had been a fight there only a few days earlier. Unless you knew that already. To me, the sharp sting of cheap bleach didn't do much to hide the smell of dried blood. I wasn't sure if that meant the cleaning team hadn't done as good a job as they thought, or the memory had burned itself into my head.

At the very least that meant I was on the right track. I found Absher's locker quickly enough. The scrape marks from where he had tried to pry it open hadn't been cleaned up or painted over.

The locker was pretty big, about large enough to fit the average family car with room to spare, the two long walls taken up by the same cheap flat-pack aluminium shelving as Clay's workshop. But these were chock full of books. Modern plastic ring-binders arranged with equal care alongside Victorian-era hardbacks and ancient leather lexicons. I almost didn't believe that all of this belonged to Absher, considering the state his house was in. This place was almost OCD levels of clean.

What really got my attention, though, was the small desk that had been set out at the far end. Pages torn from a road atlas had been spread all over to create a huge map of Manchester and the surrounding countryside. On top of the map were carefully positioned plastic miniatures of Dragons, Wizards and Vampires, all meticulously painted to the tiniest details.

At either edge of town was a Vampire Lord, one was marked in red, the other in blue. The one in blue was lying on its side.

Towards the middle of town were a group of two Wizards (a man and a woman), a knight, and a massive flying monstrosity. Their position in the town made it obvious enough, the two Wizards were Sand and Clay, the knight was Copper, and the flying monster was Flint. My guess was either that Absher didn't like Flint or that was the closest model he could find.

To one side of that little group was a huge Dragon, marked in dark red. Flattery wasn't going to get him anywhere, but I appreciated the gesture.

Then there was a bunch of models off the edges of the map. Two more Dragons, one painted in deep purple, the other in a murky ocean green.

That wasn't so helpful. I could vaguely guess at the purple one being the assassin that killed Bishop. If only by guessing at the colours. The green one I wasn't so sure about. Something to ask Absher next time I talked to him.

Finally, there was a single Vampire off the edge of the map. Painted in black and neon pink. Easy, that was my dad.

This was a nice, clear picture of everything that Absher knew. But some things didn't add up. How did he know about the Dragon assassin that had killed Bishop? I was the only other person there. If he knew I was with the Society then why did he panic when I ran into him before?

Either way, I pulled out my phone and took a quick photo of the map. Copper would want to see this.

Time to check the rest of this place. There had to be something I was missing.