WITH FURIOUS WINGS
It was dark in the room. Dark and cold, and the figure was cold too, cold as if hewn from ice, and twice as fragile. He lay supine on the four poster bed as they tended to him, the form of his body sharp beneath the fabric. The doctor fluffed up his pillow, but if the figure knew it he didn't aknowledge it.
They waited for him to speak.
All of them.
His face, once strong, had pinched to lines. His beard to wire. The tanned skin of his hands had gnarled into claws, which grasped and ungrasped and played with the bed-covers between sickle thin fingers over and over.
And they waited for him to speak.
All of them.
He opened one eye.
"A vampire can tear through a human like he were a dishrag."
His words. Now he could barely swallow. Lips cracked and dry, throat parched. But still, they'd been his words - his last words before...
And there was Walter. Dear Walter, stoic to the last, standing beside the bed. He was still wearing his coat and football scarf. And on the other side, his successor.
He swallowed with a sound like paper rustling. And then the world, for one moment, one dreadful moment, revealed itself to him.
It was sitting on the foot of the bed. He couldn't see it. Not fully. The room swallowed it. Or it swallowed the room. Or maybe it was the room. It flexed in the darkness, first one side, then the other, its top and then its bottom half.
His eye quivered in the halflight.
The thing's eyes opened, rippling across its dark chest like drops of water on a pond - lipless mouths burst along its length, grinning, tongues lolling, splattering bloody drool onto the white of the blankets.
He choked. "You."
The barbed teeth chattered aimlessly, slid and moved across the wall, hunkered down, coalesced then split. Something scuttled. The tenebrae moved and skittered. A thousand legged things raced along the end of his bedsheets, flickering between shadow and light, pincers chittering.
"Don't worry," it said. "They cannot see me.
"But I can see you."
It crept down the bed, a hard darkness, colder than he was. Ivory teeth glinted. The bulbous eyes leered down on him. It looked this way, then that, taking in first his face, then the wreck of his body, then the people stood around his bed.
"I see everything, Lord Hellsing."
"Why?" asked Hellsing, his voice breaking. "How?"
The inky darkness grinned. "Maybe I should take a form more fitting?"
The room flowed. Waves. The ceiling melted like wax, dribbling into shape.
And they waited for him to speak.
All of them.
Silent as the grave.
The girl stared down at him sadly - mockingly - her face pretty and evil. "I've come to give my last regards to the great Hellsing," she teased. "You're not fearing death enough as it is."
"But... You're..."
"My dungeon is your dungeon. This is my home. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!" Her gloved hands reached out for his face. "You think you know everything that goes on here, Hellsing - but you know absolutely nothing.
"You never told them about me, did you? About their father's dirty secret?"
He tried to speak.
"Oh, your son knows. We've talked for a very long time, Hellsing. You put me in the ground to rot, but you know full well I can't. You know I feel it. All the time - every moment of every second of every day." She held up her hand and looked at it. "I can feel them. Every worm and maggot. Burrowing. Rooting inside me."
She bent down and smiled.
"I can feel them in my skull. They twist inside my head. I feel everything.
"You will too, Hellsing. I'm going to give you a taste of Hell."
She reached out for him, and her hands burnt cold where they touched his screaming flesh.
And he slept as he dreamt, of a time long ago...
... and the star-shells were above him, cutting through the darkness like a knife - like the rain which lashed down also, and he was screaming like a child again. They half-walked, half-tripped through the mud. Bent-backed monsters. Brown and wet. The whistles blew, piercing shrill from left and right. Up and down the trenches the men jostled and climbed to meet the bristling fire. Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear, and the pock-marked quagmire sucked on them.
Living and dead.
But he - like the rest of them - kept on dragging, the frayed rope rubbing his hand raw as he pulled, and the box juddered along behind them. A burst of fire kicked up mud, tore through one of the pallbearers, and the man fell, half-turned and rolled down into the black water of a crater, vanishing without a sound. The box became heavier, and they pulled harder.
O Jesus,
His face was caked with mud, and his feet were bleeding. Someone was screaming,
Make it stop!
Something glanced off his cheek, and he fell to his knees. His hand came away warm and shiny red and he bit down a scream as the others tried pulling the coffin along in its wooden crate. Another burst of fire. Another pallbearer's legs buckled and he fell, splay-legged and limp across the box.
I taste it,
The voice was harsh. It echoed in his skull; round and round and round, like a marble, hard but smooth. The line was coming up behind them, their ranks thinning - the darkened shapes fumbling in the gunfire's flickers.
Their toys are nothing, Release me, Give them to me,
"Whatever happens, do not let it out. Not until Harker gets there."
But Harker wasn't there.
The voice was.
He clambered over the remains of horses and men, bones jutting upwards, half-bleached-half-hidden, blood-stained mud, a squirming screaming pallbearer, to the box.
A shell landed behind him. The screaming stopped.
Rifle-fire, rapid-fire, the sounds of war - the line was barely a few yards away now, and the bullets thudded into their forms with wet slaps. The box reared up above him, and he pulled his entrenching tool from his waistband, jammed it under the lid.
A bullet pinging off it. Wood splintered. His forehead stung from fragments.
He leant down on the entrenching tool, feeling it strain beneath tired muscles, the wood creaked, bent. Another bullet thudded into the box.
The entrenching tool broke.
Sitting there, he looked at it.
He'd left bloody handprints across the crate, and the pallbearer who had fallen across it had drained out over the wood so that its coarse grain shone black in the star shells' twilight.
He banged his fist against the wood as the lines reached him, marching past with rifles down. Their feet sloshed, onwards, forwards, towards the wire.
He needed an angel to help him.
An Angel of Mercy.
A Guardian Angel.
He'd give anything for that...
Anything...
Even his soul.
He prayed he didn't have to die.
And the blood on the box flowed upwards. It flowed sideways, curving and ebbing like a tide, roiling across the slats to slip between them and inside with soft sound. It sounded like the sea.
And for a second the star shells vanished. Plunged into darkness, where the flicker of muzzle-flashes lit nothing but turned the earth to skyline, and then -
The Canadian star shells went up and the world returned.
And she was there. The girl.
Kneeling in the mud, with a glint in her eyes like the look he'd seen in a dozen men's since he'd been here and a smile like the hunter's, and she said:
"Have you sustained any injuries, Lord Hellsing?
"What is your bidding, my Master?"
The pallbearers stared at him.
"What is your name?" he screamed.
"Alucard. That's what your father has called me."
And they waited for him to speak.
All of them.
But there was nothing more to be said, because she grinned. She knew what he wanted.
She knew exactly...
And he screamed until he woke up and the girl wasn't a girl, she was a man - it was a man, this thing, all lithe and skin - the look of the devil, if the devil were so attractive.
The vampire, Alucard.
He screamed until his throat bled, until he couldn't scream any more, and he watched her tear through them - all teeth and fingers - soft, delicate fingers, reaching in and pulling out, snapping, tearing, gouging - organs smeared along trench walls, eyeless heads hung from wire, dug-outs awash with cartilege and sinew and ichor, so that those who followed waded ankle-deep in things even the Somme survivors looked away from...
Alucard, the man, the beast, the vampire, grinned down at him from where he straddled him on the bed.
"I needed you, Hellsing. And I need your heir. Like you needed me, and Arthur needs me. He doesn't need an angel. He needs a demon." The face moved closer, the lips parting. "Your body can be for them... but your soul is mine."
And Hellsing groaned through the haze, felt the ice in his chest grow looser as the figure vanished - melted away until only the eyes and mouth remained and then even they were gone, and only the room and the true, living, occupants remained.
Richard, the younger of the two, stared at his hands.
"Father," said Arthur.
This couldn't happen. The boy couldn't... wouldn't...
He'd sell his soul for this? This parasite? This parody of man?
Hellsing tried to speak, coughed.
He hadn't told them of Alucard. He'd warned Arthur about the dungeon, about what they'd buried down there, in the dark - that only if it were necessary. And still, before even he was made Hellsing's Lord, he had sneaked down there - played with fire and things man was not meant to know, like a toy...
The ice in his heart grew colder.
Not much time now.
Not much time at all.
And what to do?
Nothing.
Nothing but...
But...
Richard.
Richard didn't know.
Richard was the protector.
He turned his rheumy eyes towards them, and he spoke.
"Arthur, there are still so many things I wanted to teach you. I wanted to keep watching over you and taking pride in the Hellsing blood that flows through you..."
The boy nodded. Blinked back tears.
And the dying Lord looked at Richard, looked at him so that the boy looked back - looked and seemed to understand as he said, he begged,
"Richard, please. I beg of you. Give Arthur your support for me..."
And his voice gave out.
And make sure he doesn't do anything stupid, said Alucard, gloating from the foot of the bed. For a moment it was a man, then a girl, then a man again, then something else. Something terrifying. Something unlike anything he'd seen before.
"Yes, father," replied Richard.
Forgive me, he said. Forgive me Richard, for putting this on you. But the words didn't come out, and suddenly everyone was leaning forward as he felt the world rush away from him and something else, something terrible and huge and unimaginable in its horror enveloped him.
And in his mind, in the last vestige of his sanity, just before it hit, Alucard laughed. And he screamed and screamed and never ever stopped.
The people around the bed looked at the still, unbreathing form of the late Lord Hellsing and mistook his face for one of peaceful rest.
TWENTY YEARS LATER:
"Next go your ears," said Richard. He hefted the automatic in his hand, aimed it at her seated form. His words echoed in the stonechamber. "This is for wasting my time. And don't think you're going to go quickly, Integra."
The bullet wound through Integra's shoulder sang in her head. She knew it wasn't serious, but there was blood everywhere - and blood wasn't made to be everywhere. It was made to be in her. In her body.
And she prayed.
She prayed for her knight in shining armour.
She prayed she didn't have to die.
THERE IS NO PEACE AT THE GATE