Chapter 2

January, 2031

Sir Integra Hellsing had once heard that Joseph Kennedy had first been told of the Soviet missile build-up in Cuba over breakfast one morning in the White House. She was developing an acute understanding of how he must have felt. Bad news at breakfast time tended to cast a pall over the whole day – and, potentially, a lot of days to follow.

She was sat at her desk, in the second-floor room that served as the office of the Director of the Royal Order of Protestant Knights – otherwise known as the Hellsing Agency. Previous holders of the title Director would, she knew, have been up in arms at her refusal to take breakfast in the sumptuous ground-floor dining room built and fitted for that very purpose. Her father, Arthur Hellsing, was legendary amongst the staff in his day for the size of the breakfast he was able to consume each morning. "No sense starting the day on empty," he would often say, as he demolished a second plate of fried eggs and bacon.

Integra, however, favoured a slightly more restrained approach to her morning, and was content with nothing more than a croissant and the great British institution that was a cup of tea. This was usually accompanied by a physical copy of the days Times newspaper, one of the few newspapers nowadays that still bothered to print an actual newspaper any more at all, instead of the more common daily news download favoured by other members of Fleet Street.

Today's copy of the Times was, however, not the source of her worries. Those came from her other piece of reading material. It was a post-mortem report from a London hospital, detailing the findings of the pathologist after examining the body of one Kevin Malone, age 28 years, after he had been found dead two nights ago in a back alley in Wapping. Stapled to that was the police report concerning the circumstances of the body's recovery. Stapled to that, in what was becoming a Matryoshka doll of bureaucracy, was a note from the Hellsing clerk who had handed her the reports half an hour ago, saying that Sir Feilding, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a fellow member of the Convention of Twelve, would be 'strongly discouraging' a public inquest into the man's death.

As well he might. Kevin Malone was, officially, a nondescript real estate agent originally from Bristol and now living in Denham Green, one of the sprawls of cheap housing in the west of London that had been hurriedly built three decades ago to try and house the survivors of the London attacks. Unofficially, though, Malone was a member of a very rare breed – a human field agent of Hellsing.

Integra took a sip of tea, and followed it with a bite of croissant. As she chewed, she wondered how to handle this. The manner of Malone's death made it very clear who – or what, depending on which pronoun you favoured – was responsible. Despite the fact that gang warfare and violent crime were still problems in London, there was only one group of people who were able to leave a man completely drained of his blood.

There really is only one option, she thought after a few minutes. We've been soft on these creatures for too long now, trying to keep things quiet. Maybe it's time to remind them of what Hellsing is really capable of.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small handheld, a cheap model that offered none of the prestige of a Google or Sony model but which had, as far as Integra was concerned, one great advantage over its more classy rivals – if you dropped it down of flight of stairs, it would still be working by the time it hit the bottom. Hellsing always preferred durability.

Her day was fully booked, mostly with a Convention of Twelve conference with the King at Krauney House, until 5pm.

She reached over and pressed two buttons on the intercom on her desk. "Alucard, Seras," she said, "I want to see both of you in my office at 6pm sharp."

Seras had never really been certain whether vampires needed to brush their teeth, but insisted upon doing so anyway. She knew Alucard probably held her in the deepest contempt for sticking to so human a gesture, but she felt that to give in completely to her vampiric side – even after thirty years as a fully fledged undead – would be somehow wrong. A step too far, perhaps, although some would say it was already far too late to worry about that.

Pushing these thoughts to the back of her mind, she finished up and glanced at her watch. 5:45pm. Judging from her tone earlier today, Sir Integra probably had an important job for her and her master, although she couldn't imagine what. From what she'd heard, everything had been pretty quiet these past few months, with a much lower incident rate – that's what all the official documents called it, the 'incident rate' – than was normal. Vampires, as she knew personally, loved the winter season, with its weak sun during the day and cold, long nights. The way the day ended so swiftly, the sun going down in under half an hour, was also a benefit to the undead. Many an unwary person would be caught out by the sudden retreat of the light, and then caught again by the things that lived in the shadows.

The thought of that reminded her of the first few years after London. In those dark times immediately after the capital's destruction, before the first Anglo-American reconstruction plans began to breathe life into the city and the country once more, the nation had been a mess. Hundreds of artificial vampires, Millennium sleeper agents, had wreaked havoc across England, with enormous death tolls. Sometimes, they would still be tracking down one vampire when news of another series of attacks landed on the director's desk, the words 'Most Urgent' splashed across the top of the report. Still, the situation was rumoured to be even worse on the continent, where the remains of Iscariot struggled desperately to contain the tide of vampirism that had swept in in the wake of Millennium's diversionary attacks.

Maybe it was just that, some Last Battalion newborn crawling out of the woodwork and going on a rampage, intoxicated with their new-found power and never once suspecting that the night might harbour nastier things than they. But if it was, then why now, after thirty years? And why the wait since morning?

As she got dressed, Seras decided not to worry too much about it. Sir Integra would explain when the time came. And besides, any excuse to work with her master again after thirty years was welcome.

With this thought in mind, Seras began walking up towards Sir Integra's office, finally emerging in complete silence through the wall facing the director's desk.

"Ah, Seras. You're right on time," said Sir Integra, without looking up from her paperwork. Over thirty years, it had become a long-standing joke between the two women – Sir Integra would never, ever be caught off-guard by a vampire, and certainly not by one she employed.

Integra motioned towards one of two empty chairs in front of her desk. "Have a seat. I hope you don't mind, but I'll wait until Alucard is here as well before I begin." She gave a small smirk. "If I didn't know better, I'd think he was keeping us waiting."

"Anything happening in the world today?" asked Seras, gesturing to Integra's copy of the Times that lay discarded in the recycling bin as she sat down.

"Oh, not a whole lot," the other woman replied. "The Chinese and the Americans are still shouting at each other over that carrier-sub the Yanks found sunk off California. USA says it was on an espionage run or something like that, Beijing insists it was a tragic navigational error. There's a scandal brewing in Parliament over MP's expenses, again. There was a small piece about the Victoria Overground line being opened next week, and some environmentalists in north Wales are complaining that a new set of electricity pylons is ruining their view. Beyond that, just the usual wails about the moral fabric of this once-great nation coming apart at the seams."

"I always thought it was the Daily Mail that went in for that," said Seras.

"Oh, the Times isn't afraid to do some hand-wringing if it'll shift papers." Integra gave a small sigh. "I remember when it used to be a good newspaper. Although I imagine only Alucard has a memory long enough to remember when any of the papers were actually worth reading."

"Speak of the devil, and he shall appear."

With a quiet rustle of displaced air, Alucard winked into existence in the chair next so Seras'. Seras gave a small start; she still wasn't quite used to her master's new abilities yet. Integra remained, as always, unperturbed.

"You remain as late as ever, servant," was all she said to the figure in the black suit and red coat.

Alucard gave a small smile. "I will accept the rebuke-"

"You'd better."

"-but it was not completely without reason. I was, in fact, trying to squeeze some more information out of my newest vassal."

They had been over this before. While the abilities and knowledge of any human Alucard consumed would be child's play for him to master and absorb, Warrant Officer Schrödinger was not human. No-one really knew what he was, other than an expression of quantum mechanics somehow made flesh. As such, his soul was far harder for Alucard to read, necessitating long times 'interrogating' the young boy on how to work his abilities. Integra had never asked just what 'interrogating' involved.

"Any luck?" asked Integra, wondering if she might get some good news for the first time today.

"Afraid not." Alucard grimaced. "I fear the thirty years in limbo has started to take its toll. It grows more erratic by the day."

Seras, and occasionally Integra, would usually refer to the trapped entity as 'he'. Alucard, on the other hand, never did, and it was on occasions like this that Seras would wonder what her master knew that she perhaps did not.

Or maybe he was just taking every opportunity to demean the thing that had put him in a featureless limbo for thirty long years. Considering Alucard, that was more than likely.

Sir Integra did her best to mask her disappointment. What she really hoped for was the day Alucard learned how to infiltrate mental realms, at which point he would become even more valuable to Hellsing than he was already. Unfortunately, it still wasn't certain that this was even a possibility. Schrödinger himself, Alucard reported, had only hinted at it.

"It's partly because of Iscariot that I've called this meeting," she said, bringing the conversation to the matter in hand. "Or rather, because of Iscariot's incompetence."

"The Vatican's executioners?" asked Alucard. "Let me guess – they've sent a paladin where they shouldn't have again?"

"They're not in much of a position to send paladins anywhere at the moment," replied Integra. "After the ninth crusade, Iscariot's power, both militarily and within the Vatican, collapsed. The Pope was horrified when he learned what Maxwell had done in London, and for a while it looked like Section Thirteen would be shut down entirely. Thankfully for Europe it didn't come to that, but Iscariot is still a much weaker power than it was three decades ago.

"The upshot of this is that, for vampires, Catholic Europe is seen as something of a safe haven. The Vatican no longer has the resources – or, it would seem, the will – to hunt down more than a small fraction of the total number. Certainly compared to the UK, where we've been largely successful in keeping our vampire numbers under control, Europe is a place where vampires may yet feel secure.

"About three years ago now, Iscariot contacted us about an upsurge in the numbers of vampires on the continent that seemed to be of British descent. They had the suspicion that Hellsing was, instead of killing vampires, merely boxing them up and shipping them across the Channel where we could be rid of them." Integra scowled at the memory. "Needless to say, I quickly convinced Cardinal M'quve that this was not the case."

Both Alucard and Seras smiled at that; Hellsing agents did not call Sir Integra the 'Iron Maiden' for nothing. Alucard could only imagine what Integra's reaction to the suggestion that Hellsing was slacking off had been. Seras, on the other hand, didn't need to – she'd been in the manor the day that call came through and, along with the rest of the staff in the north wing, had quite clearly heard the string of bellowed insults that came from the director's office. No-one had dared ask what all the trouble had been about, even years later.

"It quickly became clear that a lot of vampires were fleeing England for the continent and, even worse, someone was helping them. We began to get word of an underground network of safehouses and collaborators called the 'railroad' who would, for a fee, help any vampire fearing for its neck escape across the Channel. Naturally, Iscariot was very insistent that we shut this network down.

"We managed to locate one link in this chain, and sent in an agent of ours to investigate. Suffice to say we don't need to worry about his pension plan any more."

Alucard looked momentarily shocked. "You sent a human against a pack of vampires ready to fight for their lives?" he demanded angrily.

Integra glared at him. "Actually, we sent him to investigate one of the human collaborators. We hoped to learn something about the whole network first, and only then go in guns blazing. Unfortunately, we seem to have had our hand forced. Our agent was probably made to confess everything before they killed him."

"Are we sure of that?" asked Seras, a little uneasily.

"It's what I'd have done," Integra replied. "And they know who they're up against, so it would be foolish for them not to.

"Our agent was investigating a man called Jacob Page. He's a business magnate who owns a string of properties across London – stuff he bought up cheap after the Long Night, before turning them into business parks, nightclubs, retail units, that sort of thing. We're almost certain that he's a key player in the network – and we also know where he'll be tomorrow night. His penthouse apartment, in the Shard."

"And what are your orders regarding this man?"asked Alucard, his voice tinged with anticipation.

"I think it's time to send Britain's vampire community a message," replied Integra. "That Alucard has returned, that Hellsing is back up to full strength...and that we will show no mercy.

"Your orders are simple, my servants: search and destroy."

London was beautiful at night, especially if you were as far from its streets as it was possible to get.

Jacob Page was glad of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his apartment's living room, for he was confident that he would never tire of the view they offered. From the top floor of the Shard, the tallest building in Europe and the newest addition to the capital's skyline, London was a dazzling environment of light. There were rivers of headlights as cars, buses, lorries and trams picked their way through the sinuous roads of the capital. Gleaming spires jutted their way into the sky, each window a square of gold, advertisements shimmering red and green up their sides. There was the orange of the old sodium street lights, contrasting with the pale azure of the new LED installations. And draped around it all, weaving between skyscrapers and vaulting over new terraced housing districts like a web spun across the city, suspended on its giant stilts and hung from overhead gantries, was the new Overground network. With Page being a proud sponsor of its construction, the Overground had replaced the decrepit old Underground system of tunnels, the one part of old London that no-one had been able to save. The collapsed tunnels and crumpled stations had been left to rot, and the new overhead network had risen to take their place. Many considered it a fitting symbol for the city itself.

"You should have a look, sometime," he said, turning to address the figure curled up on his sofa. "Not many people get to see London like this. And you may never get a chance to see the city again, you know."

The figure nodded glumly, but said nothing. Page shrugged. "Suit yourself," he muttered, and turned back to the view. Looking westwards, he noticed the running lights of a police drone swooping through the skyline. It paused, hovering over one of the housing complexes that was home to London's poorest residents. The great sprawls of apartment towers and terraced housing, built just after the Long Night, were now full of gangs waging endless wars over territory. Page always found it amusing how some of the wealthiest men in Europe and the world – himself included – could live just 30 minutes away from such grinding poverty and violence. It was only the Metropolitan Police, which now resembled a small army with its combat drones, heavy-duty firearms and power-assist body armour, that kept the two worlds separate. The Thin Blue Line had never been thinner, although they could always count on 'charitable donations' from those who enjoyed the status quo.

As Page watched, there was a small flicker of light from one of the apartment buildings next to the drone. Small-arms fire, he guessed. The drone wheeled around and there was a corresponding flare of light from its nose, followed by a small puff of smoke from the building. The drone flew on, satisfied that whatever had attacked it was no longer a problem.

Page smiled to himself – my taxes at work, he thought – and walked back towards the centre of his living room. The person on the sofa hadn't moved much.

The figure was that of a young boy, about 14 years of age, although of course his parents had done their best not to tell Page anything about him other than his predicament. Very wise of them, too. Not so wise of Page, though – the railroad escape route was meant to be shut down after those fools in Wapping had decided to provoke Hellsing. Page himself had said that it was best to lie low for at least a month or two until the Royal Order forgot about them. But then this boy had turned up and, well, it had been a very, very large cheque his father had written.

They had come to him a week ago, the father looking grim and distant as if this was something that would all just go away if he refused to think about it too much. His wife was worse, though, constantly breaking down in tears, convinced that 'her little boy' was going to be summarily executed by a Hellsing agent. Page had decided not to tell her that she was right.

And then there was the boy himself, pale and sullen and constantly running his tongue over his teeth, sometimes exposing a set of canines that were sharper than they had any right to be.

Page had sat the two adults down, given them both a stiff drink and told them that their son would be in the safest hands and that he would fare far better in Europe. Iscariot, he explained, already had its hands full and wouldn't waste time over one child. He knew people who would look after the boy, and make sure he was kept fed and safe. It bothered him slightly that the parents were both fully aware of Hellsing and Iscariot, and had been able to find out about the railroad so quickly – that meant one of them was probably government, and government was only one step away from Hellsing itself – but he figured that they were genuine.

One last job, and the railroad closes for the year, he thought to himself.

The boy stirred, and spoke for the first time since his parents had left. "I don't want to leave," he said, petulantly.

Page frowned. "Well, you have to. Your parents want you out of the country before Hellsing catches up with you. They've paid a lot of money to keep you safe." Inwardly, he was groaning. He had never got on well with children, and how he had to take care of one until a boat could be found to take it to Calais.

"What if Hellsing catches up with me here?"

Page gave a small laugh at that. "They won't. We operate in total secrecy here, and I've got some very good guards in case anyone comes to ask some questions."

The guards hadn't posed much of a problem.

They lay sprawled across the lobby of the Shard, each one riddled with bullet holes. Blood covered the floor, was splashed up the walls and dotted the ceiling like the work of a visceral and demented Jackson Pollock. Alucard breathed in deeply, the scent of slaughter wafting enticingly up his nostrils. So much blood, and all of it wasted. He wished deeply that he could feed properly again, after thirty-one years of hunger. But to do so would be to dilute Schrödinger and have him fade back into nothingness, back into the cold pit of Limbo that he had spent three decades clawing his way out of again. It was medical blood from now on for Hellsing's tame demon. A small victory for the Major after all, perhaps.

Seras's voice jerked him out of his thoughts.

"Master? Are you all right?"

"Of course I am," he replied after the briefest hesitation. "Mr Page is going to need more than these mangy guard dogs to deter us."

Seras smiled, apparently satisfied with that. "I see you haven't lost your touch," she said, pointing to a row of guards who had all been felled by a neat shot to the forehead.

The guards had all been vampires. Stationed in a small room to one side of the lobby, they had come speeding out the moment they had seen Alucard and Seras walking into the lobby on the security monitors. They'd barely had time to raise their weapons before being cut down.

Alucard looked up at the ceiling of the lobby, his eyes narrowing slightly, as if he were peering through the metres of concrete. "I think Mr Page is indeed at home," he said after a second. "Time to show me what you've learned in the thirty years, draculina. You can do combat – but what about tactics?"

Another bloody test, mused Seras with a small inward sigh.

"I had a look at the blueprints for the Shard before we set off," she replied. "Someone in the records department owed me a favour. There's a small private lift from the penthouse to the underground car park – probably Page's escape route if anything goes wrong."

She slotted a new magazine into her rifle in one fluid, lighting-fast motion.

"And I don't think the pincer movement has gone out of fashion just yet."

If ever Hellsing needed evidence of his guilt, Page thought, they wouldn't need to comb through his tax forms or shadow him with secret agents. They'd just need to take one look inside his fridge.

Its contents were fairly normal – milk, vegetables, eggs, bread, cold meats, fruit juice – up until the top shelf, which contained several clear plastic bags full of a dark red liquid that could be mistaken for red wine for a second, if red wine was ever packaged in bags labelled 'AB positive'. Page believed in being a good host, especially for his paying customers.

He removed one of the bags from the fridge, and set it down on the coffee table in front of the boy. He hoped that if he gave it something to eat then he could be excused not bothering to make conversation – not that the boy was being very talkative anyway. Apart from saying that he would answer to the name Nicholas, he had only said about three sentences to Page in the thirty-six hours he'd been in his apartment.

Page walked over to his sideboard and decanted himself a glass of whiskey. The sideboard's surface sprang into life as he set the glass down, projecting lists of work that needed to be done – mergers to be negotiated, meetings and public appearances to attend, phone calls to make...The lists seemed to go on for ever.

He turned around, just in time to see a man appear next to the living room door.

Page prided himself on being caught off-guard by practically nothing, but this was too much. The man hadn't walked in – there had been no sound of the door opening or closing – and besides, he'd seen him appear. It was like someone had turned a hologram on.

That was his first thought: this cannot be real. Men do not appear out of thin air, this must be a joke, a trick to scare me...

And underneath that, his memory screamed at him that he should know who this man was.

The man took a step into the room, towards Page. At the sound of his footfall, Nicholas' head snapped round, the boy looking both fearful and furious.

The man reached inside his blood-red coat, gave a savage grin and pulled out one of the largest handguns Page had seen in his life. And then everything seemed to happen at once.

Nicholas gave a horrid, inhuman screech. Baring his teeth like a wild animal, he leapt off the sofa and dove at the man. Page was already turning to run, finally remembering just what memory the man was triggering. He sprinted down the corridor that lead to his private lift, and behind him a gunshot rang out, impossibly loud in the confines of the apartment, a gurgling, dying wail following it.

Oh God oh God please no not him not him

He remembered now the one the vampires spoke of, the one they truly feared. The no-life king, the lord of the dead who prowled the earth, turned against his own kind by some impossible magic. The one whose coat was rumoured to be dyed red with the blood of his victims, whose bullets always found their mark, who hunted and who could not be fled from.

Alucard.

If he could just get to the lift, Page might yet be safe, and by some miracle here it was, rising to meet him, the doors sweeping invitingly open-

-to reveal a rifle muzzle pointed squarely at his heart, wielded by a young blonde woman wearing a suit that bore the crest of Hellsing on its breast pocket. Her eyes blazed red like coals in a furnace.

The rifle's roar was even louder than that of Alucard's handgun. Page crumpled as his chest was blown out, and collapsed. His momentum carried him on, and his corpse slid to a stop at Seras' feet.

Seras picked her way carefully over his body as her eyes faded back to their more natural blue. She followed the corridor down to the living room where Alucard was helping himself to some blood from the dead man's fridge. She noticed splashes of blood here too, and saw another body splayed out over the back of a sofa. Although she couldn't see its face, she could tell from its size that it must have been a child's.

"Before you ask – and I know you were going to," called Alucard from the walk-in kitchen, "the child was a vampire." He snorted. "Pathetic – the first fight I get into after I get back is with some lazy guards and a clumsy child."

Seras was still staring in surprise at the small cadaver. "I've never seen a vampire that young," she said.

Alucard came back into the room, supping from a bag of blood. "Hardly surprising, Seras. After all, if you had the choice between the five litres of blood an adult offers you or the three that you'll find in a child, which would you choose? Someone must have been getting desperate," he said, nodding at the body. "Either that or they wanted an apprentice," he added.

There was a silence as they both considered that possibility, Alucard with glee at the prospect of another vampire to fight, and Seras with mounting concern for the exact same reason.

"Regardless, I think I'm done here. I'll see you back at the manor," Alucard said with faint emphasis on the I'm, and vanished. Seras scowled at the air where her master had been a second before. She pulled a phone out of one of her pockets and began to call Metropolitan police units that had been waiting for her all-clear.

At least he's permanently ditched 'police girl', she thought to herself as the call was connected.

Three and a half thousand miles away, two men sift through a pile of images. CCTV, timestamped at midnight two days previously. The images are not physical copies, but are projected onto the touchscreen surface of a desk.

"We managed to get these through a source in MI5," says one man.

The other just grunts, and motions for one of the pictures to zoom in. It shows a man in a dark red coat and wide-brimmed hat walking through the double-doors of a lobby. His face is largely concealed in shadow.

Another picture, guards pouring out of a room to the man's right. The man is pointing a gun at them.

Another. The first guard is falling,the back of his head erupting outwards.

Another. All the guards are dead. It has not yet been thirty seconds since the man and woman fist entered the lobby.

The man looking at the pictures frowns. The other man passes him another, this one a close-up of the shooting man's face, which is split open in an enormous grin. Jagged, jutting fangs are visible.

There is silence in the room, for a little while.

The man who spoke of the MI5 source speaks again: "It's him, sir. Couldn't be anyone else. Plus, we've been hearing his name in official traffic a lot more frequently these past few months."

"Alucard. He's back." It is a statement, not a question.

"Yes, sir. And, considering what we discussed..."

"All right, all right, we've been over that before. I'll get airtime with the council. But Orpheus is your project, and it's your job to sell it to them."

"Yes, sir. Don't worry. I promise you, they will not be disappointed."