The person or person-shaped monster inside wakes up.

He starts to climb out of it, sweeping the room with a furious glare.

Oh man this is bad this is bad this is bad.

She aims her crossbow and fires. She's usually good at this, so her basic form is correct, but her hands shake so badly now that she isn't really surprised when she very obviously misses the heart.

"Ow! Fuck!"

Now there is a person or person-shaped monster with a crossbow bolt through his shoulder. His face still looks human, so he's probably not a vampire. She may have just shot some random guy who was locked in a box.

This is differently bad!!

She should probably flee the scene or something.

"...are you OK?"

"What the hell is going on?"

Maybe the council is trying to frame her for murder. Is it actually just murder if you shoot someone with a crossbow and they die. Is it still murder if you were told buy your guardians that the person was a vampire. Probably it is.

Also though the guy could totally be a vampire and just be really good at not looking monstrous - she's seen some that didn't let their human faces down every time they were in pain - in which case this is a distraction and he's still about to murder her.

She edges left, because the stairs are that way, and it looks like all of the windows on this level are boarded up but maybe that's not true of the ones on the second floor.

" - it's not immediately clear," she says, because talking seems like it might possibly distract him long enough for her to get to the stairs.

"Can you at least explain the part where you shot me with a crossbow? I feel like that's the sort of thing people should be able to explain."

He inspects his shoulder, prods the embedded bolt, and makes a face. Not a vampire face, just a regular human with a piece of wood through their shoulder face.

"I was told there was a vampire."

Probably not human, humans are usually not this coherent when impaled, but some people have really high pain tolerances - why are the stairs so far away -

He snorts. "Oh, that's funny. By who?"

"By people who hunt vampires."

He glances up from his shoulder and gives her a concerned look. "Are you okay? You seem, uh... you seem like you might not be okay."

"Oh, yeah, I'm - "

And she runs for the stairs instead of finishing that sentence.

He sighs. He doesn't chase her or anything.

He does climb out of the box.

That's good.

All of the windows on the second floor also seem to be boarded up. This is less good. She slams into one, to no avail, and then gets to work reloading her crossbow.

The stranger who may or may not be a vampire investigates the ground floor in search of possible exits.

No exits! Or, well, there are things that might once have been exits, but they've been boarded up, and any attempt to smash through them will suggest that they've been bricked up behind the boards. There's also the front door, but that's pretty solid wood and seems to have been securely locked.

Nah, he's not smashing anything right now. Though he does knock on the boards and listen to the sound. It sounds suspiciously like a board with something very solid behind it.

He goes over to stand by the stairs, internally debating whether to go up or wait for her to come down or try to have a conversation via inter-floor yelling.

Chola finishes reloading her crossbow - it's kind of an involved process - and attempts to cut through the boarded-up window that proved resistant to smashing earlier. It's not going so well. She can't immediately tell whether this is because something is behind the boards or because she's just really, really bad at doing things right now.

Inter-floor yelling wins the day.

"Hey," he calls up the stairs, "I'm pretty sure they bricked up the windows."

Well that's awful. She should have brought torches, why did she not bring torches.

She sheathes her knife. She doesn't want to wreck the edge, just in case it becomes very important to slit her own throat.

(Is it safe to call down, is that going to give him a better sense of where she is and therefore a strategic advantage - does it matter, she can't win like this, not unless she happens to hit the heart next time - )

"Seems that way," she calls down.

"Is there something I can do to prove I'm not a soulless fiend so we can have an actual conversation?"

...this is not what vampires usually say.

She pulls the St. Benedict cross from around her neck and ties it securely to one of the stake-crosses. St. Benedict burns even more things than normal crosses do, but it's a small cross and she's going to look really stupid if she throws it at him and misses and then he can't even find it.

"Catch," she says, and throws it - really badly, whoops, he's probably not gonna catch that.

He catches it. Somewhat awkwardly, because he's still trying not to move the shoulder with a crossbow bolt through it.

"All right?" he asks, holding the entangled crosses in his good hand.

She catches her breath. Not a vampire; not possessed by any demon. So this is the kind of bad where she's been locked in a house with a strange man for unclear reasons and has responded to this by immediately shooting him. It's probably going to get infected and kill him or something. It will definitely not do this fast enough to prevent him from killing her back.

Thinking on it, now, she's not sure why she assumed that a murder attempt had to be carried out by a vampire - she has no reason to assume that she is on the side of God or goodness. The loss of her divine powers would seem to confirm that she isn't. It could be that council politics have betrayed her, or it could be that she has betrayed God somehow, gotten all mixed up and had her powers revoked, like Samson. Perhaps the Council is responding to this evidence in the only way that seems appropriate.

"I'm sorry," she says. "About your shoulder."

"Apology accepted. If you were expecting a vampire it was a pretty reasonable thing to do."