Steven couldn't hold back and interrupted Jackson:
"–Jackson, don't be like that, I mean, possession? This is vampirism. Do you think our generation doesn't know about vampires? Sure, they don't exist, so…"
"–Okay! Let's say it was that. The point is they were destroying the town, and only silver bullets and piles of bonfire could solve the situation—and that's what we did. Carl was the one who encouraged everyone to arm themselves, and told families to shoot anything that looked human and tried to enter their houses at night. We adopted this protocol. Right after we found Will, Father Olsen said we should hunt him during the day and find out who had turned him into that… thing. From there, we'd have a good starting plan for our defenses.
We found Will in an abandoned house, on a farm south of here. He was inside a kind of wooden crate—ridiculous. We brought him, crate and all, to the church basement. There we bound him, with small silver stakes in his hands and ankles, and heavy chains as well. It wasn't hard to interrogate him, but he stank—horribly. He smelled like a crack addict, begging for blood. We promised to give him what he wanted if he talked, and after two hours of holy water, torture, and threats to leave him out in the sun, that bastard finally spoke."
Jackson paused again—this time, he served whiskey to everyone present, even to the priest. The priest tried to refuse, but Jackson insisted that only a drink or Christ's own blood would get him through what was coming.The priest thought it was a true sacrilege, but didn't complain. He knew that man wasn't one to sin falsely.
"Will Rudson was the son of the Hudsons, from Chicago, an aristocratic family that inherited a lot of money from Will's grandfather, who in turn inherited it from his own father—Will's great-grandfather. Will was well-educated, went to good schools, studied art in Paris, and traveled all over the old continent looking for inspiration. His travels were common—he'd spend months abroad, doing research and painting. Well, it seems his paintings weren't all that great—I don't really know about that, to be honest. The only paintings I've ever seen were the ones at the chapel I attend on Sundays. But from what I hear, he wasn't talented in the arts. That led him into a deep depression, so his parents sent him far away, hoping he'd heal and find inspiration. They thought he was just unmotivated because Red Hollow was a dead-end town.
Turns out it worked—he came back, held some exhibitions, and his paintings were praised by the public—at least according to the newspaper critics at the time. It seemed like someone else had painted them, they were so much better than his earlier work. The young Picasso traveled again, and again, always coming back with better and more inspired canvases.
But after some incidents in Chicago and New York, he returned to Red Hollow. Apparently, he had drug problems—or mental ones—or both. His parents, obviously, hid him away from everyone. His paintings started getting darker, and he brought back a friend—from Italy, I think—to stay at his parents' mansion. I don't know how long the friend stayed. The staff said he was strange—never left the guest house, only came out at night, and only with Will. I believe his parents didn't like the friend's influence and asked Will to send him away.
But one day, his mother, Tânia Rudson, found belongings of missing people among her son's things. Not just that—one night, a maid swore she heard a child's voice coming from his room.
The parents tried to cover it up—lots of money paid to corrupt cops and investigators. But even after the friend left, the strange things kept happening. And they got worse after Abraham and Tânia Rudson died in a car accident. What's interesting is, we learned the car's brakes had been cut. During Will's interrogation, he said he wasn't responsible—but something told me that was a lie."
"–And what did he say about the Italian friend??" Adam asked.
"–He said he met this friend during his travels, that this friend showed him the most beautiful and mystical things in the world. He said he saw real nymphs, with dazzling skin and hair, real angels over a hundred years old. And that he saw the beyond after his friend gave him a drop of his own blood. He said his third eye opened, and all that sort of thing, and that he began feeding on the blood of other people. This blessing made him strong, inspired—but it had a price: he couldn't go out during the day, sunlight was dangerous. And, of course, he discovered through experience that what satisfied him most was the blood of children. That turned my stomach—I hit him in the face with a candlestick. But he just laughed, said it was their innocence he needed. He'd been doing this for nearly two years. Like I said, he was only caught because he got careless.
The friend wasn't with him anymore, but he was in town, and he had made his own team of demonic mercenaries. He was creating more of those creatures—recruiting the worst of the worst in town, promising them money, near-immortality, and more. He was behind most of the crimes happening—crimes we couldn't solve because they were too fast, too strong, and too hungry. Even some cops had been corrupted by him—they were also creatures of the night.
I won't lie—I prayed a lot that day. I still didn't fully believe it all. But Will was accurate, and even though he seemed satisfied with his own crimes, at one point—after nearly an hour of silence and ten hours of interrogation—he told us how we could find his friend. His name was Vitron—at least that's what they called him. He also told us how to kill him. Then he revealed where the bodies of the children he had kidnapped and murdered were. And he begged us for mercy—asked us to kill him because he was tired of it all. He begged to die."
"–And what did you do after that?" Adam asked anxiously.
"–We did what needed to be done. We got a lot of ammo—all silver—and made a plan to find this Vitron. It wasn't easy—he had many henchmen, all very strong and bloodthirsty. We hunted them down all day, burned the places where they slept. They couldn't go out during the day, so those who tried were scorched by the sun."
Adam and Steven were stunned. The priest, although shaken, seemed to accept Jack's story better than the others.
"–We didn't find the bastard Vitron. I don't know how, but he managed to escape—or maybe he was never even there, I really don't know. Well, I investigated and found out there were similar occurrences in another city. I decided to go there. It was a very artsy town, if you know what I mean—very liberal.
We got to a place we were told about, and there we found a basement with two coffins—ridiculous, right? I opened both, but they were empty. I was about to give up when she appeared."
"–She?" Adam asked.
"–Gor! A sort of concubine or servant of Vitron. A young woman, curly black hair, medium height, green eyes—looked like a gypsy I once met. She was dazed, walking unsteadily. Volcis insisted we take her."
"–Volcis??" Steven asked.
"–I forgot to mention—the priest had called someone before this 'special' mission. Someone who was already a specialist in this kind of thing—or better yet, in this kind of hunt. We called him Volcis Stano."