He had staggered to his feet before his mind had even registered being awake. Danger, something inside him screamed. Wake up. Danger.
Slowly, his surroundings swam into focus. Stone walls, dark and cool. The iron door, heavily bolted from the inside. There, the trunk that held what few possessions he valued enough to keep near him. The plain black coffin, lined with soil packed hard by his weight.
He was alone.
He inhaled deeply, taking in the scents around him. Dust. Earth. He sniffed again. A hint of rust. And the sour tang of his own sweat. Nothing more.
He strained his ears, listening for hoof beats, a shriek, a rasp of breath, the steady drum-beat of a heart. Absurdly, a cricket chirped outside his door, startling him.
Alone. Yet still, his nerves jangled: Danger. Run. Fight. Danger.
Alucard clenched his teeth and sighed out a breath. He sat down heavily on the edge of his coffin, shoving his mass of white hair out of his face. After a moment, he swept his hair over one shoulder and measured its length. It was an inch longer than when he'd last looked at it, maybe two. He'd been asleep scarcely half a year.
He hadn't anticipated waking until Castlevania rose again, and yet here he was, sitting up and listening to the cricket chirp ever louder. He felt… tense. Anxious to stand, to move, to fight. And something deep inside was insisting that there was something out there to fight. Not some run-of-the-mill zombie or rampaging werewolf. Let the Belmonts handle things like that. He felt something powerful, terrible, dark. Familiar.
Dracula.
No. He knew too well the way the air writhed, the panic in his blood when Dracula rose. This was different: a slow, creeping dread, a nameless fear, like lying in bed as a child and imagining monsters lurking outside the bedroom door.
He cast a longing look at his coffin. It beckoned to him. How sweet it would be to just lay down and stop again. To enjoy several hundred years of blissful, dreamless nothing while the world spun away unheeded above him. To give himself to that gentle soil and sleep, deeper and deeper, body slowing, unraveling, until he was just bones and white hair and…
Danger. Get up, wake up, act.
Alucard got to his feet with a groan, crossing to his trunk and kicking it open. His sword lay sheathed inside, laying on top of his much-abused coat. As he buckled on his sword belt and shrugged into his coat—pausing to pull his hair out of the collar and resolving for the hundredth time to chop the lot of it off—he began to feel less disoriented, more himself. His danger-sense still rang like a Sunday full of church bells, but it was no longer as jarring. He gave his clothes a cursory brush-off, then stepped to the door, unbolted it, and pulled it open on squealing hinges.
Panic washed over him in a wave, nearly sending him to his knees. Whatever had woken him could be felt much more strongly outside the safety of his tomb. He took the stone stairs to the surface two at a time, senses sharpening with each step. Not Dracula, no, thank heaven. But something somewhere was very, very, wrong.
He could sense it sharply, as clearly as if there were a ribbon of light stretching off into the distance, leading him onward. He leapt out of the stairwell into the moonlight, snarling, and fell into his wolf form almost without realizing it. He surged forward, reveling in the feel of the cool air on his fur, the sharp scents of night in his nose, and raced after his prey.