Dampyr #172 (2014) pages 34-35: Into the crypt

Harlan and Kurjak retrace the path to the crypt in which Professor Palmieri awoke a vampire:

“They died because of me, and no one knows what happened to them. But how do you think the police would have reacted if I had said that they were killed by a corpse that came out of a grave?”

“Do you have a copy of your notes?”

“Here, I had my assistant put together all the material from my research. It's on this CD. I can't do anything more from here. But I trust you, and I know that you will make good use of it.”

“You can leave it to us, professor.”

That same afternoon…

“Palmieri's instructions were precise to the millimeter.”

“And here is what remains of his two assistants. It was an undead. There is no doubt about it! She brought the two bodies back to the crypt and finished feeding.”

“Is her Master of the Night also there somewhere?”

“He wasn't here. Otherwise I would have sensed it, with my Dampyr sixth sense. If Olimpia Maidalchini was vampirized, this happened centuries ago, and not in here. Unfortunately, Palmieri and his assistants accidentally freed her. Bad luck.”

“And a big mess for us to fix.”

A "Master of the Night" is a vampire overlord from the Dark Dimension. They are much tougher than regular vampires, and they are the only ones who can make new vampires. As a half-Master by descent, Harlan shares the Masters' capacity to sense whether a Master has been here in the past.

The final panel is a paste-up replacement; you can see the original shining through a little from underneath. Panels two and four were also replaced, and Palmieri's head in the first panel was retouched.