Smoke filtered around in the air and along the cliff side to the heavens as the fire of the pyre died down from the blaze it once was. Carl, the friar often mistake for a monk, ended the prayers to the late gypsy princess and closed his Bible. Turning away from the burning ashes he faced Van Helsing.
Van Helsing was facing away from the friar and the ashes of Anna Valerious and towards the sea, looking up to the sky as if he was trying to catch a glimpse of the gate of heaven and the angles within. He felt Carl's eye on his back, watching him. He sighed and faced the short blond man.
"Well?" He asked. The friar who had been still and silent slowly turned back into his fidgety self while trying to come up with an answer.
"Well? Umm, I guess we should start heading back to the Vatican to report to the Knight of the Holy Order. I mean someone has to tell them Dracula is dead. Besides we locked up the Valerious's castle. There really isn't much left here now, is there?" Carl muttered in return.
Van Helsing did not reply. Instead he turned and headed back down the path that they took to reach the cliff side. He followed Van Helsing to an inn that kept horses for travelers. The next thing Carl knew was that they had ridden out of Transylvania and Romania and where on their way to Italy.
Since Van Helsing was brooding and not making the best traveling partner, Carl replayed the past events in his head like a movie so he would not forget a single moment. He kept telling himself that when they got back to the Vatican that he was going to write everything down because the friar believed this was a journey that should not be forgotten.
A couple seconds later his head snapped up almost as if a light bulb had turned on inside his head. There was an unanswered question left over from the mission. He remembered running into Dracula's castle, trying to catch up to Anne and the syringe that would turn Van Helsing back into a man, and hearing the echoes of the vampire's voice referring to Van Helsing as Gabriel the Left Hand of God. But why? Why would Dracula call Van Helsing the Left Hand of God?
"Van Helsing," Carl spoke after taking a few minutes to gather the courage, "why did Dracula call you the Left Hand of God?"
"I do not know Carl. I do not know," he replied with a tried voice while shaking his head.
Days later, once arriving at the Vatican, Carl created his little memoirs of the defeat of Dracula. And Carl being Carl, instead of working on his inventions, lived day and night in the Vatican library researching the Left Hand of God. The Friar eventually came to the conclusion that Gabriel Van Helsing was knocked out of heaven and had to prove himself to God to be let back in. It had also seemed that the vanquish of Dracula was not enough. Van Helsing would become immortal until he finished his task if Carl's theory was correct.
And it appeared that Carl was correct because Van Helsing did not seem to age within the next could of years that everyone else would. The Friar finally told Van Helsing and the Knights of the Holy Order his finds. It came to be that Van Helsing would be a worker for the Holy Order until is ascension back into heaven. So the people around him grew old and new ones arrived, to Van Helsing it was becoming a very slow but never ending cycle.
There was one thing Van Helsing could not predict and that was the fact a couple decades later a certain gypsy family would choose to be reborn for a second and hopefully better chance at life. And nearly a hundred years after her death, a little girl would be born just off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine and be given that name she once had, Anna Valerious.