There was no surprise on Adrian's face when Emily said, "I'll take the second path.". He just nodded, as if this were the only answer.
"Very well," he said, dragging a heavy wooden case from under the counter and opening it, the inside of the lid reinforced with brass and engraved with the emblem of a two-headed snake.
Neatly stacked inside were weapons and props she'd never seen before. Silver daggers, glass bottles of viscous liquid, metal bracelets engraved with runes.
"What are these?"
"Here's your new toy." Adrian picked up a bottle of the pungent garlic-smelling liquid. "Holy water. Easy version. Better than nothing for low-level night walkers."
He picked up a strange-looking crossbow, made of some kind of black wood, and struck hard. "Silver-plated crossbow bolts can do physical damage to them. Remember, aim for the center of their torso, which is their energy core."
Like a cold drill sergeant, he explained everything so quickly that Emily didn't get a chance to ask any questions. His fingers were long and steady, and there was a palpitation of proficiency in handling the instruments of death.
"I don't need this," Emily interrupted, her voice weak from the adrenaline, but her eyes firm, "I need answers. What is the blood moon? What is Jonathan Looking For?"
Adrian stopped moving. He looked up, his gray eyes deep in the dim light. "Some answers are more dangerous than ignorance."
"I'm already in danger." Emily looked at him unflinchingly. "Ignorance will only kill me faster."
The two men faced each other in silence. The air in the shop seems to have solidified, only those ancient clocks in the silent record of the passage of time. Finally, Adrian looked away.
He went to the back of the shop and pushed open a small, unremarkable door. Behind the door was a stone staircase leading down, and the cold, damp air that greeted me smelled of earth and saltpeter.
"Come with me."
The basement was much larger than Emily had imagined, more like a private museum. The walls are covered with medieval armor and weapons, and glass cases display ancient books and parchment scrolls. In the middle of the basement was a huge stone table with a complicated astrolabe carved on the top.
"'Blood Moon' is a celestial phenomenon and a ritual." Adrian walked to the stone table and ran his finger across the cold indentations, "Every other century, when the moon is completely eclipsed by the Earth's shadow and turns blood red, the barrier between our world and 'the other side' becomes extremely weak. Some people believe that is the best time to achieve immortality."
"The other side?"
"You can think of it as a dimension of pure energy and primal desire. The Nightwalker is a failure that seeps through the cracks in that dimension."
Adrian picked up a heavy book bound in human skin on the table and opened one of its pages. There was a picture of a large, ornate door carved with a thousand writhing faces.
"This is the door," he said. "A gateway between the two dimensions. and the key to that door is the ring on your finger and... The blood of a carter."
Emily's face went white. It was as if the blood had been drained from her body, and her limbs were cold.
"Jonathan wants to stop this, doesn't he?" She quavered. "He wants to find the door and destroy it?"
"He was so naive." Adrian closed the book, and the sound as the pages closed was like a dull sigh, "He thinks he can fight a monster that's been around for a thousand years with his Carter blood and a couple of stupid notebooks."
"Who?"
"Silas Draco," Adrian said, and the whole basement candle flickered, "A direct descendant of the Night King, who presided over the Blood Moon ceremony, he had planned for centuries to open the door and bring his king back to life."
Emily felt Dizzy. It was too much, too crazy, too much for her to comprehend. Dracur? Isn't that a character from a novel? She felt as if she had fallen into an absurd nightmare.
"What... What role do you van Helsings Play?"
"Jailer." Adrian's answer was simple and cold, "We are responsible for cleaning up trash like Silas and keeping the two worlds in balance. But the bloodline of our family is waning and getting weaker. In my generation, it's just me."
He turned and looked at Emily. "Now, do you want to know more?"
Emily didn't answer. She walked over to a wall where a huge tapestry of ancient battles hung. In the corner of the tapestry she saw the heraldry of two families, the Van Helsings' two-headed serpent and the Carters' Griffin. In the heat of battle, they stood side by side.
It turned out that all this had been doomed from hundreds of years ago.
"What should I do?" Emily finally said, her voice free of fear, just a kind of cornered after the calm.
"First, learn to survive." Adrian took a dagger from the wall and threw it at her. "Your blood can activate contracts, but it can also make you a walking target. You have to learn how to use it before you can learn to control it."
The next few hours were a nightmare for Emily.
Adrian showed no mercy. He trained her in the most direct and brutal way. Dodges, parries, jabs. Over and over, he knocked Emily to the ground with a stick, and she was soon covered with bruises.
Her physical strength has long been overdrawn, every time the sword is pulling the muscles of the body issued a protest of pain. But she didn't beg. She didn't give up.
Every time she fell, she gritted her teeth, braced herself with her sword, and rose again. Sweat mingled with tears, but her eyes grew sharper. She didn't do it for some bullshit mission. She did it for Jonathan. She did it for herself.
She knows. Adrian's right. She had to survive before she could find Jonathan and uncover the truth.
When the self-timer in the basement struck three, Adrian finally stopped training.
"Get some rest." He tossed Emily a water bag and a loaf of dry bread. "We won't be so comfortable after dawn."
Emily sat on the ground, gulping water, her throat burning.
Instead of eating the bread at once, she first laid out the dagger, the water bag, and the bread that Adrian had thrown at her, neatly arranged on the floor beside her, equidistant and parallel.
As if only in this way, she could recover a sense of order from the chaotic and violent training.
She looked at the man standing like a statue in the shadow and suddenly asked, "Why are you helping me? Just because of the family mission?"
Adrian was silent for a long time.
"Your brother reminds me of an old friend," he whispered. "An equally naive and stubborn Carter. He believed that sacrificing himself would end it all. But he was wrong."
His eyes traveled through the darkness of the basement, to some distant place in time. "This time, I don't want to see another Carter die in vain."
Emily could hear in his words the weariness and sadness of an age out of touch with the silk. She realized that in front of this seemingly young man, has been carrying this heavy mission, alone through a very long and lonely years.
She asked no more. She ate her dry bread in silence, gathering strength.
At daybreak, they left the antique shop. The Morning Sun dispelled the London haze and for a while subdued what lurked in the shadows.
"Where are we going?" Emily asked.
"Go find an old friend," Adrian said, his expression still grim. "An intelligence trader. . . who might know where the door is."