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“And if there wasn’t? Because there’s not,” Rainer demanded.

“I find the idea of harming children so distasteful that if I came across a shifter child and my books didn’t have answers, I’d find one of you to ask since you’re the only living people I know with knowledge of this kind of thing,” Solomon said.

Good answer. Solomon was a lot more serious than Saul, but he was decent. Rainer and I nodded, but didn’t say anything because that was the right thing to say.

And since we were being open and sharing, I did have some questions for them. I knew what Rainer and I did if we went on a job. Sometimes, we were hired if it involved ghosts. We advertised that, and it paid our bills, but a good bit of our jobs didn’t pay a cent.

I was pretty sure our methods drastically differed when we took a job, but I needed to know how much.

Iwanted to be nose deep in Logan’s books and Agnes’s diary, but this was good too. I knew our methods differed, but I had no idea how much. She wanted to know what happened after we heard about a job.

Logan and her uncle were getting increasingly frustrated as we explained how we got a call about something suspicious going on and would just show up to eliminate the threat. She upended a bag on our laps and I had no idea what I was looking.

It appeared to be fake IDs and badges. She had them for police, FBI, CDC, and various types of inspectors. Saul held up the Certified Titty Inspector card proudly and started waving it around like a psychopath.

“Is this one yours?” he asked Rainer.

“No, it’s mine,” she said, snatching it from Saul. “Get your own.”

She looked like she just blew Saul’s mind. Mine too, really. Why was that intriguing?

“Titty inspector aside, why did you want to show us your identity fraud?” Caleb asked.

“Because if we hear about a job, we don’t go in and start killing people. We aren’t psychopaths. I flash a badge and start asking questions. Sometimes, it looks like a shifter, werewolf, or witch and it ends up being your garden variety bad human. You can’t hear about killings in a town and automatically assume who's guilty. It might be a supernatural, but it might not be that supernatural.”

That made sense, but it wasn’t what we were taught. Caleb had been skimming the diary he was handed while Logan was talking. I wanted to read it, but I knew I’d get my chance.

“We were taught they were all evil. But this diary…he sounds like a regular person struggling with a new reality. He didn’t have any urges to kill anyone. What about vampires? This is the diary of a shifter. They have to have blood to survive.”

“We don’t kink shame here. Most of them have someone who wants them to feed from them. Their fangs have venom. It’s supposed to feel good. The ones that can’t use blood bags. It’s just the bad ones who keep blood slaves. You have to drain a lot of blood to kill a person and vampires only need to feed every few days.”

“What about blood lust?” I asked, accessing Agnes’s diary.

Might as well multitask.

“Rare. Usually drug induced. Either the vampire took something or they fed from someone on something. It’s why they prefer willing donors or blood bags. Some vampires are addicts, drugs and blood.”

I was willing to accept we’d gotten a lot of things very wrong. The Flame had been around much longer than we had. In hindsight, it was probably foolish that no one had this conversation sooner.

This diary was in a form of Old English that didn’t have a lot of surviving texts. I wasn’t as comfortable with it as I was other languages, but I could still translate it. I’d started last night before bed. There was also the problem that the author was quite mad and very flowery with her words.

“Any luck with that?” Logan asked.

“From what I’ve managed to translate so far, Agnes was the daughter of an Ealdorman, so practically royalty. She was set to marry the son of a different Ealdorman when her father found her distraught. She claims to have been visited by The Yellow King. Since she was a woman, she was placed under the guardianship of a male relative called a Mund. I can’t say for sure if she was raped yet or they just assumed she was.

“Since her Mund wasn’t there to chaperone, they couldn’t rule out anything sexual happened. The rumors would have been bad enough. Her family could have been fined, but it would have been seen as a great dishonor, even if she was claiming it was a demon. She was sent to a convent for the abbess to deal with her. That was as far as I got. Past this point, her journal starts veering into unhinged. Leading up to joining the abbey, her prose was flowery, but readable.”

“I can’t translate that because I don’t speak that language, but I am good at research. What’s the name of the convent she ended up at?” Logan asked.

“It was named after the city—Canterbury.”

“Wait a minute,” Saul said. “I remember hearing something about that. Canterbury Cathedral was built around that time. It’s still in use and it’s beautiful. My high school visited it my senior year. I remember them saying there was an abbey, a monastery, and a cathedral in the area that got destroyed during a Viking raid. But it was also around the time I was later taught that Venatio Daemonum started to form. What if it wasn’t Vikings that destroyed the buildings, but either followers of The Yellow King or the Yellow King himself because of Sister Agnes?”

Saul once came back from one of his walkabouts where we all knew he was getting high with some frankly blasphemous thoughts about saints and aliens. He liked to think the only reason he was chosen for Venatio Daemonum was his size, but people loved telling him things and he was pretty amazing at putting together puzzle pieces and coming up with theories. In his own way, Saul was doing what Logan said the Flame did with interviewing people.

And he wasn’t wrong. Canterbury was first founded in 597 AD. The story was that an archbishop started rebuilding in 1070 after a fire destroyed it and several other renovations to get to what you could visit now, but there was a much lesser known fire at that site when the Vatican and Anglo Saxons had a better working relationship.

Venatio Daemonum was officially sanctioned by the Pope in 635 AD. It started out as research into the existence of the supernatural since they already knew demons and witches were real and officially moved into wiping them out once they figured out how. The Esoteric texts were vast. Caleb had been doing this much longer than I had and even he hadn’t been able to read all of them. Some were hard to read and were basically just torture diaries as they figured out the methods we used today.