Author's Note: Thank you so much for your (im)patience! I know I said I would have this story out months ago, but thanks to some incredible comments from you readers, I decided to completely change the plot of the story. Then I had to wrestle with the plot and make it make sense… and then I had to wrestle with Gabrael, because he was giving me writer's block and being impossible in every way he could think of. I've worked through all of those issues now, though, and am happy to (finally) present to you the sequel to Princess of Light, Angel of Darkness!
As always, your comments and feedback are my sustenance. I'm not one of those writers who say they won't post until they have X amount of reviews, but please always feel free to tell me exactly what you think of my work!
Disclaimer: You know the deal. I don't own the world of Van Helsing. I just own my own characters, and I own the plot.
I walked through the shadowy streets of London, shaking my head. I had walked through these streets far too many times to be counted throughout the city's history, and it never ceased to amuse and amaze me, what had changed and what had not. True, the streets were now lit with electric lights and not gas lamps, and were paved with asphalt instead of cobblestones. But the seedy underworld of the London backstreets, characterized by booze, prostitutes, drunken brawls and murder, had not and most likely would not ever change.
For a moment, I felt my age of eons. It was a strange moodiness; a melancholy that I'd lived with for far too long, as well as a weariness born of seeing too many sunsets and sunrises that I had little desire to view. Strange how the humans hadn't changed… or was it I who remained, eternal and unchanging, as the rest of the world passed me by?
I carefully shut off and locked away my thoughts before that rumination led to memories of her. I had successfully avoided thinking about her for a good three hours now- a record- and for the moment I'd like to keep it that way.
Strange, how time works. It's been nearly 121 years since the last time I saw her alive. Sometimes, it feels like only an instant, like at any moment I'll turn and find her coming around the corner to meet me and yell at me for not waiting for her. Other times, it's been an unfathomable eternity, and I don't fully understand how I've lived the last century without her.
Of course, how I've lived might be explained by the fact that I'm a friggin' angelic werewolf, and can never die.
I found out that miniscule detail the hard way back in 1887, during the first full moon after Anna Valerious died. It was a nasty little shock to find myself shredding my skin and becoming a huge black wolf. When I demanded to know what was going on, Carl did some research and discovered that Dracula's "cure" for lycanthropy worked on an atomic level, reversing the DNA changes the lycan gene causes. Being an angel, I don't have genes. Therefore, the lycanthropy had invaded my essence, and could never be reversed. Meaning, Anna had died in vain, and I was stuck like this until the end of the world when I got to blow my silver horn and get out of this mess.
Not that I hadn't tried to die. I'd tried many times- taking on ridiculous odds with no protection whatsoever, trying to get into fatal accidents, attempting suicide. But it never worked. I'd never been able to cast off who and what I was long enough to manage to kill myself. I'd been absolutely furious when I learned that. It hadn't made sense to me; how was it possible that my angelic nature allowed me to become a werewolf in the first place, and then prevented the cure from working?
And, more painfully, how was it possible that I had become indestructible as an angelic werewolf, yet Mikael, as an angelic vampyre, had not been?
I winced as her name resounded through my head. Mikael, my Mikael… So much for not thinking of her.
I shook myself in an attempt to clear my head. I couldn't afford to do this right now; I was here on a mission…
For months after Mikael's death, I had locked myself in my room in the Basilica, refusing to talk to anyone, throwing anything and everything into the walls, refusing food and drink and sleep, doing nothing but grieving and suffering. Finally, though, I had come to the conclusion that I might as well make use of eternity by continuing my work for the Order. Since they could never lose my services, I might as well throw myself into missions, and hope that by the fervor of my work, I could somehow find absolution and peace.
It hadn't worked yet.
I'd refused to have a partner after Carl's death. He'd lived a long, full life, and had come with me on every mission after the disastrous one in Transylvania because he was the only one who could even hope to reason with me. He'd died in 1956 at the age of 95, and I had missed him ever since.
The ensuing 52 years had been very lonely, but busier than ever. I had changed my name to Gabe Von Lycanius shortly after the Transylvania disaster, both to escape my notoriety as Van Helsing, and to (unsuccessfully) escape my memories of my days with Mikael. I threw myself into work even harder than I had previously to stop thinking and remembering, and to keep from reflecting on the fact that everyone I had grown close to was dead, and I was all that was left. Cardinal Albaretti… Mother Agnes… Carl… Anna… Mikael… they were all dead, and I was alone.
I was here in London on a retrieval mission. Svetlana Rosteria, the Gypsy priestess who was the current head of the Knights of the Holy Order, had asked me to come here to find a girl named Michelle de Angeli, and to bring her to Rome. Apparently, Michelle was a gypsy princess descended from the Valerious family, and Svetlana was hoping to train her to become a vampyre slayer as her famous ancestors Voris, Velkan, Anna and Mikael had been.
A huge friggin' red flag had popped up in my mind the moment Svetlana told me this girl was descended from the Valerious. That had to be impossible; I well remembered the deaths of the last two daughters of the Valerious line, and my part in each of their demises. But when I'd said it wasn't possible, Svetlana had simply handed me a family tree.
Apparently, Valerious the Elder had had an affair with the high princess of the Castragoni gypsy clan, and that bastard daughter, Nicholetta, had become high queen of all the Romanian gypsies. A few generations later, a descendant of Nicholetta had married back into the Valerious line, and that branch of the Castragoni-Valerious tree had survived after Anna and Mikael died. Hence Michelle being the last descendant of the Valerious, and the last of the Gypsy royalty.
I'd had to sigh when Svetlana asked me to go get her; she knew full well about my history with the Valerious clan. Come to think of it, that was probably why Svetlana asked me. But I'd had about enough of that family to last me an eternity, thank you very little.
I couldn't exactly refuse, though. What else was I going to do? The mythical creatures of the world had gone increasingly underground since the 1880s, and were behaving themselves for the most part (except for a rather annoying clan of vampyre in Volterra, Italy, called the Volturi, who for the last few thousand years had pranced about calling themselves the vampyric royal family). Lately, there wasn't much I had to do for the Order but monitor everything, and deal with the occasional incident when the humans were in danger of learning of the existence of the mythical world. When it came to dealing with Dracula wannabes or fetching mortals, I'd take the latter.
Svetlana had told me that Michelle owned an esoteric shop, The Mythological Café, in downtown London. I was supposed to sit her down, explain things to her, and ask her to come to Rome. Then I just had to protect her from that annoying vampyre clan and anything else that might try to steal her until I got her to the Basilica. Easy enough.
A week or two of work, and then I would never have to deal with the cursed Valerious line again.
