Hunger comes. Alucard finds this unfair. As a dhampir, he is protected from all things but this, the emptiness, the black mouth flexing on an appetite that belongs to the void. It cannot be filled with bread or sterile meat so he crawls down the mountainside in the dark in the midwinter in a single smooth motion of a thousand interconnected joints that must extend beyond his body because his body is finite and his hunger is not. The mountain is a cursed monument. It supports his father's castle like a table leg ending in clawed feet that clutch the forest and the dying light. Though he feels unable to venture far from it, Alucard has never set foot in that castle. If fate has mercy, he never will. Dracula does not know of him; or, if he knows, he does not mind the minor inconvenience of a roaming dhampir on his lands. Perhaps he is capable of feeling fondness for his own offspring. Alucard never intends to ask him.

Upon reaching the open land below the cliffs, there is a scent of cooling firewood, which Alucard follows to a little knot of wooden houses making up a human village. There are dozens of these hidden away in the countryside. Alucard has thought of gorging himself on all of them more than once, killing every inhabitant so that his father might starve as he has starved; but Dracula would find him and gut him and leave him bound in the catacombs beneath his castle for five thousand years with only the hunger for company.

And what does that matter? Dracula's rule means nothing to him. Dracula's punishment would be praise. He could call it an act of defiance to hunt humans and suffer for it. Rebellion is his only potent weapon. He would do it, except long ago his mother said: please, no. So he does not do it. She is dead and she said: please, no. He will never harm a human, not even to spite his father. Not even for that.

When the hunger comes, he goes to the first village he can find; and, only in his mind's eye, he slips past the noses of tethered dogs, and he climbs beastly through doors and windows, and he tears the heads off of children and burns his lips on their blood. He drowns himself in it. He feels a wretched frustration for more even before he is finished. And when all the children are dry as parchment in his mind, he tells himself that he is full, but he is never full. That is for the moon alone, never for him.