Alucard stood under the trees and watched the leaves pattern a mosaic across the full moon. Some nights the long centuries ran together until he felt as though he'd lived half a millennium seeing nothing but that bright cutout in the sky – a life of endless full moons.
Despite five hundred years' worth of accumulated boredom, the vampire was anything but bored. It had been a century since he'd last made the decision he had that night.
He could feel her – his new daughter, his young bride, his heir, his burden, and his treasure – as she tried to get a handle on what had just happened to her. No hysterics from this one, no tears. The girl was confused, but she was strong.
Of course she was. He knew what she'd been through in her short life. He knew she had hidden depths and strength. She reminded him of another young woman with bright blue eyes and straw-colored hair. Lucy had hidden behind the docile façade of a young woman of her time, all the while looking out from behind her mask of respectability with the avid eyes of a small predator – cunning rather than powerful.
Seras Victoria was a young woman of a different era. She was allowed to fight publicly –punished for it, but not ostracized from society the way Lucy would have been in her time. She fought her way into a position on the police force at an age when many young women of this time were still trying to decide what to do with their lives.
She had decided long years before when she had picked up a fork and done what she could to exact some justice for her parents' murder and worse.
Was she Lucy perfected? No. This police girl was someone else. She had an advantage over Lucy – she already knew from personal experience that there were monsters masquerading as men walking the earth.
Maybe he would have let her go…
Maybe he would have let her go if he hadn't observed her reaction to the false priest's threats of rape. The memories he gleaned from her racing thoughts caught him – an angry girl, her father's death, her mother's violation, and a rage that she'd nurtured through loss and loneliness.
It was a whim, he admitted. The blue eyes, the banked rage, and the hunger the clear night had made rise in him all contributed to the choice he made to test the girl one last time, already knowing she would pass.
He closed his eyes, savoring the memory for a moment – her virginal blood hot on his lips, warming him even as she shivered with the chill and incipient shock. It had been so long since the last time he had been able to take this pleasure.
He would watch her. It was always sink or swim. But this one he would keep closer to him than he had with Lucy.