Nico didn't sleep well these days. It wasn't because he'd been yanked into a a town where fictional characters roamed and the mayor was a skeleton - in any other circumstance, he'd actually be thrilled about that. But the journey he'd taken through Tartarus and all the horrors he had seen, along with the trials of being shut up in a giant urn with no food and no air for days, had left him too on edge to relax into sleep.
He'd found that getting up and walking around the house a little helped. Unfortunately, the other residents at the mansion had their own quirks that often left them awake at all hours of the night as well, and Nico didn't want to run into them. So he headed up to the attic, and ended up finding another housemate anyway.
The remains of one, anyway.
He read over the note a few times - dyslexia never made it easy for him to read written communication - and finally figured out what it was saying. He sighed. Sweeping up the ashes would be easy, but where was he going to find a vial of blood?
That was, perhaps, what the journals were useful for. He sent out a message and received the help, and when he finally got that vial, he carefully broke the vial over the pile of ashes.
Whoever this Black Ribboner was, Nico hoped it wasn't fussy about the type of blood.