Disclaimer: I do not own Blade, and I wouldn't want to. Marvel or whoever does. And Marvel rules.
A/N: I didn't write this story because I like the movie Blade: Trinity, though I do like Hannibal King. I wrote this story because I couldn't put up an Anubis story in the universe that I wanted, though there's some clues as to his original universe scattered in his memories.
The sound of a man screaming was what first told them something was wrong. The second sign was when Juanita keeled over in a dead faint a moment later. At the same time there was an ear-popping crack and a slightly smoking naked man dropped to the floor out of id-air, finished screaming, and gave a couple of sobbing gasps before collapsing inside the chalk-drawn circle of protection. The others immediately rushed to Juanita's side. Carl was there to catch her before she hit the ground.
Inside the circle Andreas Silver was collecting himself, now that the pain was over, feeling the disparate parts slowly fitting back into him. A memory of water. Atlantis. A memory of graveyards. Necromancer. Nine millennia of fights, of friends, of wonder and laughter and pain and death that would have drowned him, if they had not belonged to him. Sorcerer. Dhampir. Yes, oh yes. There was a flickering blue screen. Hacker. At the last one he smiled. That had been a surprise.
Then he realized that the blue flickering wasn't entirely a memory. That he was hearing sounds again. There was the deep thrum of an electrical array, the wash of the ocean, (a bay?) and close at hand, several people talking animatedly.
Listening to them, he was surprised that he couldn't understand the words. Was it, he wondered, the bump on the head, the after-effects of inter-dimensional transit, or just that they seemed to be speaking Esperanto? He lay quietly as the last of the fire chased itself down his nerves and tried to figure out what had just happened.
There was, he decided, nothing for it. He opened his eyes, saw the legs of several pieces of furniture, desks or tables, but no people, Carefully, silently he looked the other way and saw them, some kneeling, others bending over a fallen young woman. As he saw them he got returns on the light telepathic probes he automatically sent out. All were human, but two were something of the Other, also. One of the men tasted faintly of vampire, but was neither that nor dhampir. The fallen girl was a witch, Andreas thought.
With the same stealth that had kept him alive while hunting the most dangerous prey, he stood, silently, and nobody noticed. Nobody, he realized, save one boy who peered, astonished, over the top of the nearest computer monitor. With a smile, Andreas held a finger to his lips for silence, and sent a wave of telepathic impulse, insuring it. The boy froze.
Andreas started to step forward but paused as he felt the remains of the protective circle the little witch had cast. There was actually some resistance left, in spite of her unconsciousness, which made him think. One, they had not been sure of either what they were casting for, or of his cooperation, and two, that his own outer layers of shields had been stripped by his forced passage through the Void Between Worlds.
He shook his head, and pushed forward. The circle popped like a soap bubble. Andreas felt against his skin, and he shouldn't have. He must have stripped all his sorcery, a scary thought. He didn't even have enough yet to waste even on a glamour. His internal power was beginning to build up again, his telepathy being the most obvious symptom, but it would take a while.
Meanwhile, for reasons known only to themselves, the young people had switched their conversation to English.
"Juanita, Juanita! Why won't she wake up?" said the young black man. Carl.
"Slap her!" suggested the tall boy who still smelled of vampire. Hannibal.
"Shut the fuck up, nobody's touchin' her." Carl again.
"Water?" asked the young girl, barely a teenager. Zoë.
"Come on, Juanita, you're starting to scare us." pleaded the older girl. Abbie.
"Juanita? Baby?" cried Carl again.
"I think you should just let her sleep." Andreas said from right behind them.
They jumped as a group and two of the young warriors pulled out a pair of guns each and had them pointed at Andreas within an admirably short time, for humans. The third warrior was still crouched protectively over the fallen girl. Zoë gasped and fled past him, possibly disturbed by the fact that Andreas was naked. It wasn't his fault; all his clothes had burned off.
"Who are you?" asked Hannibal.
"How'd you get out of the circle?" asked Abbie, putting up her guns after the alarm. She glanced at Hannibal and he did the same, reluctantly. Apparently they didn't want to kill him.
Andreas smiled at her sensible question. "It was depleted by our struggle." The smile was gone as he looked down at Juanita. "So was I, so was she. She nearly lost."
He crouched down to look at her more closely and Carl batted him away, dragging Juanita farther from him, "Hey man, you get the hell away from her! What'd you do to her?"
"I was fighting for my life, but she had the portal on her side," Andreas said softly, seeming to take no notice that his explanation made no sense to the others. He stood up again. "I can't say I'm sorry for it, but I do hope she recovers, she's probably my only way home."
At this point Zoë returned and thrust a towel in Andreas' direction, her face scarlet and carefully not looking at him. "Thank you, Zoë," Andreas said solemnly, wrapping the towel into a kilt around his waist in an easy motion so old it was nearly unconscious.
They all froze, staring at him. "Okay, whathefuck are you?" Hannibal demanded.
Andreas looked at him in disbelief. "You mean you let her," he pointed at Juanita, "summon something without knowing what would come through the portal?" He shook his head–he could have cried, it was such an amateur move that had caught him.
"She was summoning a Daywalker," Hannibal said. Andreas began to have the feeling that he was the fastest mouth in the group. "A half-breed, not someone, something that could read minds. The book we found–" he stopped abruptly. The others glared at him.
Andreas pinched his fingers on the bridge of his nose, trying to forestall an incipient headache. An amateur, untried sorceress, he thought, reads a spell–from a book, no less–and opens a portal to another dimension specifically aimed at a dhampir. And I just happen to be standing right next to a node. It shouldn't be possible, but Andreas didn't doubt that was what had happened. Nobody but a handful of geeks spoke Esperanto on the Earth he knew. "Okay," he said after a long moment during which nobody talked. "Let's skip to the end. Why did you bring me here?" Which cut past all the "who are you"'s and "where am I"'s.
Hannibal said something along the lines of, Notice he didn't answer the question. Why should we answer his? in Esperanto.
Abbie answered him in English. "He deserves our answer." She looked at Andreas. "We need your help." Of course. "We are losing the war against the vampires, and Blade, the Daywalker, is lost. The spell was supposed to find him, or someone like him." He concentrated hard while she spoke, looking for more from her mind than just from her words.
Her memory stabbed through his unprotected mind, stripped as it was of shields. He gave an incoherent cry and staggered backwards, his hand finding a chair that he sank into without seeing it. A world where "pure-blood" vampires were born into eternal darkness, where "turned" vampires spread like a plague, where vampires were easily made and nearly as easily killed. A world where this Blade had been the only dhampir. Ever.
If he'd had any doubt about being in an alternate dimension, they were gone. Where he was from, vampires, werewolves, and the other paranormal species were considered legal citizens by leading countries; they followed the laws and could be legally executed if they broke them. Andreas' mind felt blistered by it all. Do not, he said to himself, do that again.
"Hey, new guy," said Hannibal, and Andreas winced as the sound echoed across the raw spots in his mind, and threw up the strongest shield he could. One that a tyro might have managed, that shut everything out save the strongest emotions. "Daywalker or whatever you are," Hannibal continued, "You gonna pop? You need some serum?"
From behind his shield, Andreas couldn't tell what he was talking about, but shook his head. "I'll be fine. Steak?" he asked hopefully.
"I'll see what we have," Abby said after staring a moment more, with a significant look at Hannibal. Andreas glanced from one to another as she walked away, but only Hannibal looked back. Zoë blushed and looked away, and Carl seemed to be paying no attention to anyone but Juanita.
"Chamber?" Abbie's voice brought their attention back, and Andreas remembered the young hacker with a guilty start. He tried to reach for him mentally, to release him from his compulsion of silence, but there was nothing there. Andreas' magic was so weak that Chamber had barely been touched in the first place, and it had long since worn off. "Chamber?" Abbie asked again, shaking the boy's shoulder.
"I'm fine." Chamber was staring at Andreas with slightly watery eyes. He had been since Andreas arrival. If he'd been less secure Andreas might have started to feel unnerved. "I was tracking the energies when the spell started, it just went wild. What...what are you?"
"My name is Andreas Silver." Andreas was moved by Chamber's bewildered plea as he hadn't been by Hannibal's demand. Also there was the thought that he was probably going to be here a while. "I am, among other things, a dhampir and a sorcerer." He looked around at the group. "I'm farther from home than I think any of you realize, and if I'm going to get back, I need Juanita's help, so believe me when I say I'll do anything to help her recovery. In the meantime, if you need somebody who can kill vampires, I can do that." He paused. "After the steak."
Abbie nodded silently and left for the kitchen. Hannibal stared at him for a moment, then said, "Come on, I'll find you something better than that towel to wear." He glanced at Zoë as he said it, making her turn scarlet again. She mumbled something about it being the first thing she could find, and he flashed a grin as he passed. She ducked behind Chamber's desk, pretending to be interested in the monitor as Andreas followed Hannibal out of the room.