For some reason Joan decided to cook that day. She bought the ingredients at a market nearby. She probably wanted to do something to kill time because she woke up a bit too early that day. She woke up at six on the dot and since she had not planned to do anything in particular, she took a nice, soothing shower, put on casual clothes and headed over to a market she was directed to by the innkeeper. She was told that it was not the biggest market in town, but it would be enough. She was not going to prepare a feast for anyone, just for herself anyway. Even though going into the woods and grabbing food that way would suffice, she was feeling like cooking. After becoming a vampyre, she rarely cooked, so maybe if she did not want to lose her cooking skills, she needed to keep cooking. It was not to satisfy her hunger, because obviously any proportion of human food can not satisfy her craving for blood. At the market, she found all the ingredients she needed to make what she was thinking of making. She had not really decided, but since she was going to be here in Dahlia for a while, she bought enough for like three days. Her inn room was quite big. She had a fridge, and a space for cooking, a nice view of the town (even though the town was not very nice), and even a living room kind of area with a television set and a couch in front of it.

She was dressed like a normal person, not in her leather jacket or the complicated outfit she loved to wear. Which was why people at the market did not give her much attention. She looked like just another girl in town doing some shopping. Sometimes it was nice to have people minding their own business. Normally she would get a lot of stares, but she was dressed normally with her hair tied up into a ponytail and everything about her looked normal that day. You could not really blame the people for staring, because usually she would be dressed like a sophisticated gyspy girl or something like that. Today, it was different. After purchasing the last of the ingredients she had listed on a piece of paper, she rolled it up into a ball and threw it into a nearby trash can, then headed back to her inn. It was about a five minute walk from the market back to her inn, so that was convenient. She knew where she could buy more food if she stayed longer than planned. She carried the bags of ingredients up the stairs. Since her room was on the third floor, she did not need to use the lift or anything, and the bags were not so heavy. One of the hotel staff came to help her carry them, but she declined their help since it was not necessary right now.

Upon arriving in front of her door, she fumbled with her keys to open the door and almost stepped on something white on the rug in front of her door as soon as she got in. She shut the door behind her while staring at the white thing and then picked it up. It was an envelope and inside was a letter from her client. She put down the things she had bought from the market on the table beside the door and bent over to pick up the letter. The material that the envelope was made out of was too smooth that it slipped out of her hand. Grunting out of annoyance, she bent over again and snatched the envelope off the floor and tore it open and tossed the envelope away, unfolding the letter within it. Since she just spent some money at the market, she was not going to pass up an opportunity like this. It was another letter from ‘Adarian’, inviting her to meet him somewhere. She had been reading his name wrong this entire time. It was Adarian since the beginning and here she was, thinking it was ‘Aadrian’ instead. She always thought that was such a weird name. Adarian sounded much better, in her opinion. She looked at his name several times to make sure that she got it right this time. After a while, she got used to the correct way his name was supposed to be spelled all this time. Thank god she had not addressed him using his name.

Joan heaved a sigh before placing the letter on the table where she had her bags placed. She took the bags into the cooking space. The job could wait. She was going to cook today and nothing was going to stop her. She estimated that she would take about two hours at most to finish cooking and eating as well. So she began to make a dish she had been meaning to make for quite some time now. She saw it on a cooking show once and had the recipe memorised, as well as the ingredients and everything that she needed to know to make the dish. She washed her hands and rolled up her sleeves, then began to work on preparing the ingredients. The ingredients were ready to be used in like thirty minutes. She did try to speed up the process since she had a job to do and she could not stop thinking about it, even though she decided that she was going to finish cooking before doing the job. She should not have read the letter. She should have just kept it on the rug and went on to do her cooking, and then read the letter. Now it was stuck in her head and she could not focus. If her dish did not turn out the way it was supposed to, she was going to burn the letter out of frustration. For now, she tried to focus.

She finished making the meal in about an hour, and once she was done, she put her masterpiece in a bowl and placed it on the dining table, checking the clock to see what time it was. She realised that she actually finished making it in an hour. She cleaned up the mess she made when she was cooking, then washed her hands and came over to the dining table. It was time to eat the delicious thing she made. She hoped it was delicious. She almost burned her tongue since she was trying to rush it. The dish turned out to be really good and she finished it in like fifteen minutes. Now that she finished eating, she had to wash the dishes and everything. She did not like to leave a mess anywhere. If you looked at the inn room she was staying in, you would have thought she moved in like five seconds ago because even without having to call for housekeeping, she kept everything clean and neat and tidy. Everything was in place, because she was a neat freak like that. She went to get dressed into her usual work attire and took a look at the letter one more time to make sure what she was doing because after eating all she could think of was making that dish again. She should have made more, to be honest. Even though she was a vampyre and craved blood, she still enjoyed good human food. She was a good cook before she became a vampyre.

Adarian had given her directions to an address that she had never been to. It was probably one of the Red Hades Cult’s hideouts or something, she assumed. Since it was not too far and because of the fact that it was a hideout, she decided to walk there. If she hired a carriage then the carriage driver would know of that place, and it was not far enough for her to do what she did with the Cold Colliers’ hideout. Plus this town was a place she was even less familiar with compared to Baska. And even then, she was not all too familiar with Baska Town. But thanks to the directions that Adarian had written for her in the letter, that was from the town center, she knew how to get there. The job was one thing on her mind. The other thing on her mind now was Adelaide. Well it was food on her mind for a bit but after thinking about good food, she was back to reality, thinking about the only two things that prevailed in her mind at this point. It was funny now that she realised that Adelaide and Adarian had the same first two letters in their names. Although she was not aware that Adelaide was a name that she only knew that vampyre by, because she liked to introduce herself with different names to different people, while her name remained unknown to most.

The distance between her inn and the address she was supposed to be at was covered in about fifteen minutes. Joan walked fast since it was something important. Once she arrived at the place, she saw Adarian and his cult friends. She made an awkward wave and Adarian gestured for her to enter. It was an old house that seemed to have been abandoned. They really liked to use these kinds of places. They were a cult after all, so they had to do cult-y things like this, like using an old abandoned house as a hideout or meeting spot. What Adarian wanted Joan to do this time was to get him some items, three to be exact, to use in a ritual he was going to perform to bring the dead to life. He gave her a piece of paper that had the names of the items she was supposed to get. Of course, he was going to have to explain them first so that she knew what they all were. And so he began to talk about each item on the list one by one. The first thing was called a phylactery and Joan had no fucking clue what that was. It was probably written all over her face, because then Adarian continued to explain what it was and what it was supposed to look like, and where she could get it. The vampyress nodded and so Adarian told her that he wanted her to return to him before she got the other items.

So the vampyress set out to find the empty ‘phylactery’ or whatever it was called. She was not interested in what it was. She just needed to go and get it and bring it back to Adarian so that she could get the other items. It would have been easier if he just told her all the items she was supposed to get so she could get them all in one go and would not have to waste energy coming back to the house and then going out again. But since that was what her client wanted, she was not going to complain. She had all the energy since she had been feeding regularly these days. Sometimes it was hard to find prey in Dahlia because all the humans were afraid and they normally did not go out after dark. But lucky for her, she found a great place to feed and that was in the alley near the street of bars. People would leave late at night from the bars and end up getting sneaked into an alley and becoming vampyre food. Some of them were too weak and died there, but some would live to remember it and be even more scared. Since this was not her town, she did not care. She did what she needed to survive so she did not worry about scaring them. If worse came to worst, she would find other ways to get what she wanted.

Joan was told that she could get the first item from a shop that was close to the abandoned house. With directions she was able to get to that shop. Once she was there, she saw that the thing was nowhere to be found, so she went and asked the owner of the shop, who showed it to her. He had it placed over his fireplace and Joan immediately told him that she wanted it. He did not seem to know what the hell it even was, just like Joan, but he asked for her to pay for it anyway. The vampyress groaned and stared into his eyes. The look on her face could be interpreted as ‘really?’ because she was not going to pay for that shit. She clearly was not given any jewels to buy it so she was not going to go out of her way and buy it with her jewels. The shopkeeper started to look spooked and tried to say something in an uneasy manner. It was clear that she was not going to pay for it, but he tried very hard to keep it together and negotiate the price with her. She made it clear to him that she was not paying for it, and even asked him if he was going to do this the easy way or the hard way. Since she was given no response (probably because he was spooked to death at this point), she grabbed his neck and bit into one side of it.

Since the shopkeeper was knocked out now, she took the thing and wiped her mouth before leaving the shop. It was way too early to be doing this, but she did not want to waste time since she had to go back to Adarian to deliver the thing before he would tell her to get the next item. Back at the old abandoned house, she handed the first item to Adarian and he seemed pleased. He checked if it was the right thing first, of course, and then began to talk about the next item. Apparently for the next item Adarian wanted a severed animal’s head from a restaurant that was on the other fucking side of town. Joan tried her best not to roll her eyes or something. She simply nodded and left the house again. She really did not understand why he was making her go back and forth between the places to get the items and the meeting spot. At this point she could not care to ask and just headed out. After walking a bit, she hired a carriage. She was not going to walk all the way to the other side of town. After getting what she needed, she would hire a carriage again, because fuck it. Even though Adarian did not provide any transport fees, she was going to use her own money for this. The carriage took her to the restaurant quite fast, probably because she looked pissed.

Upon arriving at the restaurant, she looked for an animal and found that there was a dog that probably belonged to the owner of the restaurant. Taking the opportunity she was given, she found a nice sharp object and chopped off the animal’s head with it. Now that she had the second item, she was ready to go back and present it to Adarian. She found some pieces of cloth to cover the head so that the carriage driver or anyone she met along the way got suspicious because without the cloth pieces she would have had to carry the dog’s severed head on its on and that was not a pretty sight. She got another carriage that would take her from the restaurant back to the house. The driver did not even question what was in the bag, or dared to look her in the eye, which was good. She sat on the seat with the head on her lap, nicely wrapped up in cloth pieces even though there was blood oozing out. The dog did not even have a change to fight back or make a noise before she cut its head off, so she did not catch anyone’s attention. Nobody from the restaurant knew what she had just done. Even if they did, they did not try to stop her, so she just assumed they had no idea what just happened. She told the driver to stop at a spot that was close to the abandoned house so that he did not know where she was headed to with a severed head wrapped in cloth.

Back in the abandoned house, Adarian accepted the second item with much pleasure and gave her details about the final item. This was probably the most difficult one to obtain, he said. Apparently that was because she was supposed to get it from Bishop Santos. She did not think that was hard at all, although it was weird because she was also working for Bishop Santos, even though Adarian did not know about that. No one knew about that except Bishop Santos himself. The last item was a book that was supposed to be in Bishop Santos wardrobe, so Joan would have to be sneaky and enter Bishop Santos’ house to get it. That was no issue. She also already knew where he lived. So she left the house again and this time she walked because Bishop Santos did not live on the other side of town. Because she was a vampyre, being sneaky was her area of expertise. When she got to Bishop Santos’ place, she saw that he was just leaving. Perfect. So she snuck into his house and into his room where she saw his wardrobe. She found the book that she was looking for so she left the house immediately. She did not want anyone else to catch her sneaking into Bishop Santos’ house. She returned to Adarian with the book and accepted her reward for the job.