Isn't Shank a vampire as well?
Asmoth glanced up from the corpses she had been examining as the door behind her opened.
"Well?" she asked. The child smiled in a way that could have been innocent, if not for the blood around her lips.
"We got them all except the leader," Thikut said. "He's very vigilant."
"I suppose he would be. He seemed very well informed on the state of the fortress," the doctor sighed. "No matter, tell me what you think of this." She indicated the bodies in front of her. Asmoth nodded in approval as Thikut spent her time looking over them.
"A very clever vampire?" she eventually shrugged. "No marks that I can see, but it could have been fused with a sexual act or similar."
"No internal cuts either," Asmoth said, shaking her head.
"Poison, then?" Thikut frowned. "It can't be natural causes, this one looks about twenty."
"Worse. Magic," the doctor spat.
"What's so bad about that?" her daughter asked. "Isn't what you did magic?"
"Of course not! We use science. Science can be replicated, it gives us power over the world. Magic comes from somewhere else, and all it really does is give something else power over us. It always has a price, and that price is always more than you can afford to pay."
"So these people tried to use magic?" Thikut murmered, worried by her mother's sudden outburst.
"I think... Someone used them as payment. There was a presence here, and I think it either used these people to go somewhere else or for some other spell. Gods, I haven't seen such a mess since I had to clean up after that mechanical prosthetic experiment," Asmoth muttered.
"Did it work," the girl asked.
"The spell? I don't have much experience with magic unless the end result was someone getting dismembered."
"No, the prosthetics."
"Oh," Asmoth shrugged. "Providing that they were intending to have the new limbs go haywire and kill most of the test subjects, then yes."
"So what do we do now?" Thikut asked after a pause. Asmoth shrugged again.
"See who kills our leader first, I guess."