Not, as it turned out, a warehouse in the traditional sense.

Rather, it was the Schloss Holzberg, a manor home built in the 19th century by an industrialist that built the place in the German style, with turrets and rounded staircases, and much wrought iron. In 1907, tragedy struck the Holzberg family and ownership, through the will, reverted to a foundation that tried to do good works with the properties it inherited -- there was the name Holzberg on a library in Dorset, there was a symphony hall downtown with the same. Try as the Foundation might, however, the house itself was unattractive to buyers. The house was built of good stone and mortar and resembled more a castle than a city home. The house had occupants, renters, once in a while, but they did not stay very long. There was always a bad reputation attached to the place that clung to it like old ivy. The Foundation tried to turn it into a residential treatment facility, but the high rate of patient abuse and suicides and overall poor performance by the facility caused the city to shut it down; it was a scandal. As a result, the place lay abandoned for a decade and a half.

Lying on the outskirts of the city, it was part of Holzberg Park, which shared less of the reputation for terrible things than the abandoned manor, but the reality was that Holzberg Park was a place where particularly sadistic vampires did their hunting, as it seemed to pick up more than its fair share of people with mental illness, living homeless, particularly after cuts were made in the 1980's to mental health institutions. The park itself had a leering, too-dark aspect to it, as the branches of trees along the bike and jogging paths seemed to hang down menacingly; by day, it was a muse for local artists, for night it was a place for hookers and drug dealers to ply their wares, and for drunk people with pre-existing illnesses to howl at the demons in their head.

That was what the group was walking into; a place of wrought iron fences tipped with spearpoints on top, gargoyles that leered down, stout wooden doors and narrow windows set into towers.