He blinks. She knows about the Hellmouth? This night just keeps getting weirder.

"Yeah, that's... That's why I'm here, actually."

"Guess that makes sense. Kinda the place to be, if you're hunting things."

"It is," he says, a little grimly. He looks up and down the alleyway. There's no sign of anyone else.

"Speaking of," he says, turning back to her. "Do you have anything else you're tracking? This"—he kicks the pile of dust on the ground—"was my only lead for tonight." He feels weird asking this young girl where to find vampires, but she doesn't seem like it would phase her.

"Not currently. Just out looking for things that go bump in the night, mostly. Sometimes they'll take live victims back to their nests, and then you can take out multiple vampires at a time without watching anybody die, but I haven't had a ton of luck clearing the place out yet." Turns out getting leads is a lot harder, when you're working alone.

He thinks for a moment, before reaching into another pocket and pulling out a map. It looks like it's made for tourist, but none of the circles or marks on it are anything of interest to visitors to Cleveland.

"I don't know if you have somewhere else you need to be, but the information I had on this guy seemed to suggest his lair was somewhere around here," he says, pointing to a block on the map not far away from where they're standing, in the middle of a ring of red dots. "You seem like you know how to handle yourself, and I could use some backup if you'd like to help me investigate."

"Um... sure. I guess I don't have anything else to do tonight. Be better to go in more heavily armed, though, I don't have my bow on me right now." (She does not, in fact, have a bow at all anymore.) "Do you have any idea how many vampires he's got there?"

He lets out a little laugh. "I... I don't actually have mine either." It's true; his is still still on its way from Rome.

The smile disappears from his face as quickly as it appeared. "I don't know, actually. It could be empty, it could be a half dozen or more." He thinks for a moment. "Other than a bow, is there anything in particular you'd be glad to have?"

"Uh, gosh." Her dog, her mindreader, her - no use thinking about it. "Not really. Maybe a decent pair of binoculars, or something? If we could get a good angle on them. Better to know what we're heading into before we give up the element of surprise."

"Binoculars," he says with a nod. He reaches into one of his pockets...

...and pulls out a small notebook and pen. He writes down her suggestion. "Those would make things easier. Unfortunately..." It is clear he does not have binoculars with him.

"I do have these, if you think they could be useful?" He pulls several small glass bottles from somewhere on his belt and hands them to her. They each have a cross on them. "Holy water. Careful, they shatter easily. Useful when thrown. I'd give you a stake, but you seem set in that department.

She frowns at the bottles, but she takes them.

"Are we sure we want to go in tonight, if we can think of several things we'd be better off having? I guess we can at least try to find the place."

"At the very least we can scope it out. It may be empty for all we know." He looks at his map. "This way," he says, pointing down the alley and starting off.

After three long strides he stops suddenly. He turns back toward her, angling a mirror until he can see her reflection. "Sorry. I just realized I never formally checked."

"All good."

She kind of doesn't feel the need to check. But she can pretty much hear Alex glaring at her in her head, so when he turns his back to her again she angles her gameboy until she can confirm that he is, in fact, not a vampire.

She vaguely wishes that Alex were actually here to glare at her. He's not, though.

She follows the new guy.

He quickly and quietly makes his way through the city, sticking to side streets and alleyways as much as he can. Every few moments he checks to make sure Emily is following him. He also keeps an eye out for vampires and other things that go bump in the night.

Finally, after almost half an hour of walking, he stops. When she catches up to him he points to the building across the street. It appears to be an empty warehouse on the riverfront. "There. That seems to be more or less the..." he pauses, as though searching for a word "...epicenter of the attacks from the past three weeks, as near as I can tell."

"Mmm. How sure are you that it's that specific building?"

"Very little." He doesn't see any point in lying to her, especially if she's risking her life to help him. "But of the seven attacks I traced to the vamp we dusted earlier, all are spread out around here, and two more nearby. And this seems to be the most likely candidate," he says, scanning up and down the street. It seems empty.

"Thoughts?"

Honestly she's mostly thinking that this is way harder without super hearing.

"Well... if there are other vamps in the nest, it's pretty costly to leave them there too long; they might kill again tomorrow night, and if their leader's gone, they might move to an area that they expect to be safer, at which point we won't be very easily able to find them again.

"On the other hand, if there might be more than one or two, we don't want to just charge in. Better to check whether we can get more information on who's inside. Of course we have to do it quietly, or they'll hear us."

He nods in agreement. "Quietly," he says, softly, almost to himself. He scans the building to see if there are any obvious ways to scout it out before looking back down at the girl next to him frowning. He can't in good conscience make her go first, even if she seems to know how to handle herself.

"Alright.You stay here and keep an eye out. I'll check it out and see if there are any windows or unlocked doors that I can take a look through as quietly as I can. If I'm not back in ten minutes, get yourself somewhere safe." He takes a deep breath, scans the street again, crosses himself, and draws the sword from under his coat before silently crossing the street to try and find a way to look inside.

- yeah that seems like a bad idea? She's gonna try to stop him before he heads out alone.

"Do you - actually know how to handle yourself in a fight against a vampire? Because I don't want you to, like, die, and no offense, but most people can't."

He's surprised. It's obvious she knows how to handle herself with a vamp, but she's clearly younger and smaller than him. He raises an eyebrow, trying to fight off his sense of annoyance.

"Yeah? I mean, I'm not a grizzled veteran or anything, but I've fought several and I'm still in one piece, more or less."

He's trying to sound more confident than he is. It's true that he's fought vampires before, but that doesn't mean he's cocky about it.

"All it takes is one."

He grimaces and grips his sword tighter. "I try not to overthink it," he says.

Before she can say anything else, he crosses himself again and heads toward the building, quietly checking for windows or an unlocked door.

She's gonna be so mad at herself if he dies, but she doesn't follow. It's possible he knows what he's doing. She doesn't really buy it, but - well, it's not like she has any right to stop him from risking his life. She keeps watch, silently straining to hear anything suspicious.

The building's doors all appear to be locked. There are some dust-covered windows, though. Something person-shaped is moving inside, though it's too dark to see very much of them.

It occurs to him that it will be pretty embarrassing if he dies now, but shakes the thought off. He can tell there are people inside. Or, at least, people shaped creatures. There are at least... two, three? inside, and no obvious way in. He really wishes he had his crossbow. After a few moments, he creeps back to Emily.

"It looks like two or three vampires. Doors are locked. If there was a good way to take them by surprise I'd say we go for it, but as it stands..." He trails off. He's not sure if they can take three vamps between them, but doesn't want to seem afraid in front of this girl.

Hmm.

The annoying thing is, she's like, ninety percent sure she can take three vampires, especially if the boss is dead. But Alex would be really upset if he knew she was making a habit of doing things with a one-in-ten chance of getting her killed. She does one in twenty, maybe, sometimes, because she doesn't really care enough about dying, but - if it does get back to him that she's dead, she kind of wants to have only given him reason to be sad, and not also reason to be disappointed.

She was really kind of a dumbass for leaving Sunnydale without her bow.

"I'm no good at picking locks. I guess - if we wait until day then they'll probably be pinned, right, and then we can come back before sunset and see if we get lucky and they go out hunting one by one. And if we're not lucky, at least we won't be fighting them in an environment that they know much better than we do."

He nods. It's clear that she faced this sort of dilemma before and has thought this through. He's a bit less experienced in that regard. But she makes a good point about waiting.

"That's what I was thinking." He puts away his sword and looks around. He finds a spot against the wall with a good view of the main entrance and sits down. He stretches for a moment and then looks at her. "Have you eaten recently?" he asks. "It's been hours for me. I wonder if there's some sort of twenty-four hour market around here. You wouldn't know of any, would you?"