Azalea is cooking dinner. Dinner is macaroni, which counts as cooking.

"Never too busy for my baby sister. What's up?"

"This weird lady grabbed me and tried to bite my neck, and I was totally gonna run, except I didn't, for some reason I punched her in the stomach and then sat on her, and her face was all weird like she was a cosplayer or something, and I was like 'what are you' and she was like 'don't you know' and I was like 'no, I don't!' and she ran away, which was weird but just a thing, and then this other guy came out and told me that the first lady was a vampire, which is like transparently insane, except then his face changed too and he said he was one too, and I don't know how to fake that effect in real life so I'm laying like 30% odds that he's for real? But they're probably aliens or something because aliens sound way more plausible than magic, and anyway we have to check the death statistics for this town, because he said they were abysmal and if he's right then something is up even if it's not vampires."

Azalea seems remarkably unperturbed by this. She's pretty good at being unperturbed by things.

"OK. Slow down. Say that again, but like, with spaces in between your words."

Karen explains the thing again, slower, letting Azalea ask clarifying questions. This time she remembers to explain that she's supposedly some kind of slayer who's supposed to fight vampires, and that she's been having nightmares about vampires and that this seems like a weird thing for random strangers to know, and that she still only 30% believes it but that the fangs thing was honestly pretty freaky.

"OK. So like, getting this out of the way, vampires aren't real. I know that you're a sensible person and you totally know that."

"Totally."

"OK. Good. But a lady with a creepy face jumped you, and a guy told you what you'd been dreaming about, and on the off-chance that something weird and ridiculous is happening, you wanna look into it and find the rational explanation, and in the mean time not invite strangers in after dark."

"Yeah!"

"Seems reasonable. No weirdos in the house until you've set your mind at ease. You OK about the whole thing, it wasn't like traumatic or anything?"

"I mean someone tried to KILL me, but other than that yeah I'm holding up OK so far."

Azalea hugs her sister and gives herself a metaphorical pat on the back for not having torpedoed this whole guardian thing yet.

They eat macaroni. Karen goes over various minute details that she forgot to mention the first two times. Azalea says something about carrying pepper spray and muses that they probably don't have enough information to go to the police. 

Karen goes back to the library the next day, about an hour after sunrise. She figures that gives her, like, twelve hours to research vampires before Ezekiel may or may not show up.

This library is decidedly lacking in straightforwardly findable information about Real (Un)Live Vampires Who Live In The Real World And Might Bite You. It's almost like vampires aren't real, or something.

She can find plenty of information about assorted vampire-related legends, folk tales, and famous works of fiction, though!

This is honestly to be expected, but it's not completely implausible that the legends originally came from somewhere. She'll grab the folk tales.

Vampires who can't cross running water, vampires who can't go out in sunlight, vampires who sleep in dirt-filled coffins, vampire ghosts, vampire aristocrats, vampire watermelons...

Can't really blame the ancients for not having thier stories straight, no matter how convenient it would be if they did. She writes down anything that seems like a testable strength or weakness. She takes a break in the middle of Slavic vampire traditions and looks up crime rates for Sunnydale, California.

An awful lot of people seem to die and/or go missing in this town! A wildly disproportionate number of the former list the cause of death as 'stabbed in the neck with barbecue fork'! Almost no one is ever successfully arrested for the stabbings in question!

She jots down whatever she can find in the way of numbers. That'll matter for estimating population; it matters whether she's up against a dozen or a hundred of these things. She jots down dates and publications for specific obviously weird incidents, for further investigation or future use as evidence. 

Aaand back to folklore. Apparently it used to be common practice in Bulgaria to drive iron rods through the hearts of the dead in order to prevent them from rising again; she should ask Zeke whether it's specifically wood that works, and also whether it works to stake an infected corpse before it rises. She's kind of torn on the killing people bit, there are still probably better ways of handling the situation, but if it turns out it's always entirely necessary, then preemptive staking sounds both safer and more merciful than most alternatives.

(If it's always entirely necessary, this sort of implies that it isn't safe to keep Zeke around, and that has implications. Ugh, why do magical destiny things pick teenage girls and not, like, retired FBI agents or something?)

Time passes. Most of the library patrons clear out before sundown.

A familiar face enters the library and finds a seat at her research table.

"Having fun?"

"Some! I like history. Do stakes have to be wooden to kill vampires, and do the vampires have to rise before they can be staked? There's a widespread Bulgarian tradition of driving iron rods through the hearts of the dead to prevent them from rising. Also some support for a tradition of posthumous beheading, which I'd naively assume is fairly reliable?"

...He blinks. "I actually have no idea if you can pre-stake a vampire. I've never, like, tried. Metal doesn't work, though, that one I've actually seen. And... I guess if you cut somebody's head off in the middle of turning they're not gonna wake up? Although now I'm imagining a headless vampire walking around and, wow, surprisingly creepy mental image."

"If they did wake up I guess they'd be even harder to kill, though maybe the lack of vision would make up for it. Ohh, nothing on that, but what kind of healing do vampires have, is it possible to permanently disable one? I don't want to blind anyone really but it seems like a good thing to know - "

"I actually don't know that either. I'm pretty sure we'll get better from anything that doesn't kill us if you give us, like, a hundred years, but if somebody lost a hand or an eye maybe not?"

"Yeah, doesn't sound like something you'd wanna test. The best-recorded incidents are in Serbia and involve vampires harassing and killing family members and neighbors, but this book doesn't say what happened after - I'm gonna see if inter-library loan can get me the contemporary physicians reports, since supposedly they were published. Plus there's this book by a French monk, Antoine Augustine Capet, A Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al. - I don't know if it's at all accurate and I don't know if there's an English translation, but it seems good to gather primary and secondary sources - oh, you mentioned vampires and demons, is there other stuff I should know about, when books talk about Icelandic draugar is that definitely them misinterpreting vampires, or could draugar potentially be a different thing - "

"Man, I dunno, I've never been to Iceland. What's a draugar?"