Chapter XI

This really was turning out to be like a Bond film. Alex had thought that the day his life turned into a spy movie would be the best of his life. Now as he made his way back across the polished entrance hall of Phoenix's main office building he wished that he was anywhere but. Sitting on the couch at home, watching all this on the TV for example. Instead he was back here where he never wanted to be again, with the eerie glow of the fish tank the only light filling the room - storm clouds hid the moon's rays tonight.

In the echoing silence it was easy to hear three pairs of footsteps on the marble floor. One a confident stride, another short and light and the third scuffed and muffled as Alex was half dragged into the room. He had given up being cooperative a while ago and was now doing everything within his capability to make his captors life difficult. Not that Vivienne really needed her life to be anymore difficult. He could hear her sniff or whimper into a handkerchief occasionally, the sounds amplified by the large room.

"Vivienne," Vergil said finally turning to the woman who was desperately trying to stop her eye make-up from running and failing miserably. Alex was dragged round by the scruff of his neck – where Vergil was currently holding his shirt in a death grip; he'd tried to run three times already.

"Mhmm," she nodded and dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief.

"Casualties are inevitable in this business," Vergil continued his eyes cold, detached; there was no emotion in them, not even a flicker of remorse for this woman he apparently loved. For once this didn't even cross Alex's mind; he had wanted Castor dead, although he had yet to know how and why he hoped the man suffered. "We have to move on with things now; it is not the time for distractions."

Vivienne nodded again and attempted a smile. "Sorry," she whispered and took a few steps to catch up. She was still wearing an elaborate dress and high heels – Alex wondered if she simply didn't have any normal clothes – she looked like she was dressed for a party, even the same diamond earrings shook in her ears like icicles shivering in a strong wind. She was pretty, Alex had to admit, probably the same age as his mother or younger; she was far more naïve than his mother anyway.

She looped an arm through Vergil's and hugged his own towards her, completely missing the man's look of revulsion or the fact that he was half-suffocating Alex as he dragged the boy towards the elevator. Maybe she just didn't want to see it. Vivienne was happy planning her perfect life out even if the real world was crumbling around her.

When the lift doors slid open with a friendly ping Vergil shoved Alex inside and detached himself from Vivienne long enough to access a new panel on the opposite side of the lift which Alex hadn't noticed before. Maybe it was because he had been too afraid or because it simply hadn't been there the first time. They were taking a different elevator; it could be that this one had a secret panel whilst the others didn't.

As the doors slid shut Alex felt claustrophobia setting in. He'd never shown any symptoms of it before, but there was something about being here in this place… it made him shiver and awoke phantom feelings of fear inside him. He had every right to be afraid now, but strangely he wasn't. Something told him that he wasn't in danger, that his father was going to save him and that it'd be alright again. He couldn't help the memories flooding into his mind though, of blood and death, of monsters and a shadow which was and wasn't his father at the same time.

He leant against one of the cool metal walls as the lift began to drop after a second ping. It moved down floor after floor until Alex began to think that they'd emerge in China. The silence was wearing; Vergil was an ominous presence in one corner, Vivienne, still trying to control her emotions, stood between Alex and he. It was strange how after a few days of chaos one almost came accustomed to it. In truth he wasn't scared anymore. He wasn't sure why, maybe it was because he knew that for now he was safe. They would have killed him earlier if they wanted him dead and for now he had Vivienne to protect him from Vergil and his father would be here soon. He had to hang on to that thought desperately because it was the only hope he had now.

"Trish should be back by now," Dante said before Lady could ask him what the matter was. He had stopped mid step and looked up at the door as though expecting her to wander in at the sound of her name.

Lady opened her mouth and shut it again; she didn't know where Trish had gone in the first place so she couldn't think of an appropriate way to rationalize the situation. Saying that she was 'certain she'd be back in a moment' didn't really sound sincere. Instead she opted to change the subject, both to distract Dante and to quell her own curiosity.

"If Castor's dead…" her eyes travelled to the bloody stain on the floor then back to Dante. "You killed him right?"

Dante nodded and scuffed his foot against a stain on the floor at his foot. He never normally felt bad about things like this, but there was something niggling at the back of his mind bothering him. "Yeah he's dead."

"Then…" her brows furrowed. "I'm confused I thought you said Castor had Alex, if he's dead…?" She stared straight at the back of his head as though she could force the answer out of him with her glare. "What aren't you telling me?"

He paused and turned away, he couldn't quite get over it himself. Castor had to be lying. There was no way in hell that Vergil could still be alive, it was impossible, he'd seen him die twice – well more or less. If it was true then he doubted he would recognize him anymore. He'd been in hell more times than he would have liked himself and regardless of whether it was their father's home or not no human could survive there. Vergil had died the day he stepped off that cliff into hell, he'd known his brother was lost to him for years now, but the idea that he was here, that he was living awakened a small spark of hope in him.

"Vergil," Dante let his brother's name escape his lips in a sigh. "Castor told me Vergil's still alive."

"And he has Alex?" Lady asked because she couldn't think of anything else to say. She had met Vergil only briefly and the moment blurred with the chaos of that night on Temin-Ni-Gru in her memory. Dante hadn't said much about any of it either, she had known he was sad after loosing him, maybe even in mourning, but he hadn't let it show because that just wasn't how he worked.

"Apparently," Dante swiped some of the hair out of his eyes and continued pacing. He was impatient by nature and waiting like this was killing him. He bit his lip turned and made his way back across the room. "I guess he's holding a grudge," he said more to himself than her. He didn't want to think about it, didn't want to believe that Vergil could be so… evil… Even as sworn enemies there had always been some form of moral conduct in their battles. This was far too underhanded for it to be Vergil, but then again hell changed people…

"If you'd have known he was alive you'd have gone anyway, whether he had Alex or not," Lady said, it wasn't a question because she could see it written on his face.

"It was enough to make me go chasing after him before," Dante replied and let out a laugh, it was empty and despairing and directed right at his own stupidity. He made his way back over to his desk and sat down. "Geez I thought life was gonna get easier as I got older you know?"

"Children are a nightmare," Lady smiled knowingly, though she was glad her own children were safe at home. She'd made a reputation for herself in the demon hunting business, but she didn't have nearly the whole demon realm baying for her blood.

"How was Evey?" Dante asked fiddling with a pen on his desk and trying to hide the concern in his voice.

"I think she was upset," Lady replied softly. It had been hard trying to comfort the girl when she had barely known her five minutes. Even harder because you couldn't simply offer up the default phrases one would for normal accounts of distress. They both heard the gunshot, and Evey had buried her head in the pillows of the bed Lady assumed Dante used when he couldn't get up the energy to drive home. Though knowing him he probably simply fell asleep at his desk.

Dante sighed and rested his head in his hands, elbows on the table top. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"You're her father, she'll still love you," Lady offered though the words sounded lame to her own ears.

"Like you still loved your father you mean?" Dante asked sarcastically raising his head to look her in the eye.

It took Lady a short moment to find her tongue. "That was different, he was a-"

"A murderer?" Dante quirked an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitched sardonically. "A demon?"

Lady's hand slammed down on the desk. "It was different and you know it!" Her voice softened and she picked at the edge of her shorts, it was frayed where she'd torn them once and sewed them together clumsily. "You have a heart Dante, my father, he was cold… you've just been doing your best for Evey all along, you just want to protect her and she'll understand that eventually."

"Get the hell out of my kitchen!" Trish yelled and landed a round-house kick to a demon next to her sending it flying towards the back door. Not that there was much left of a back door. She hadn't really expected to encounter any problems on this little trip, especially those of the demonic kind. There were, from what she could gauge, roughly ten of them, maybe closer to fifteen and they'd burst in through windows and doors just as she was about to leave. She'd taken care of a couple in Alex's room and then in the hall making her way methodically back down stairs. She'd never seen this kind of demon before; they were strangely humanoid, awkward but effective and could move faster than she did if she wasn't prepared which was in itself a rare feat.

She flung herself to the side to dodge a flailing arm and squeezed out a clip of eclectically charged bullets. Fighting was second nature to her even when she was out of practice. Trish rolled into a crouch, inched backwards as the table splintered before her and pumped an oncoming demon's skull full of lead. It dropped like a sack of grain onto the broken remains of the kitchen table, there was the faint sucking sound as it tried to draw in air and then it went limp.

Trish nudged it with her foot disgust clearly written across her face. Blood… the whole room; the whole house in fact, was painted with putrid sanguine. She'd just make Dante buy a new house after this was over. It was, after all, his fault that there were demons wrecking her home in the first place and now they had a bit of cash floating around…

Her thoughts were scattered by a popping, hissing sound at her feet. She raised a gun, but soon lowered it again. The demons skin was fizzing, melting away as though acid had eaten into its flesh. She wrinkled her nose and was about to turn away, leave before police arrived, when a distinctly human face appeared amidst the blood and gore.

A network of passageways greeted them upon exiting the lift. Alex was sickeningly reminded of his night spent negotiating these hallways. He was all healed now from that fight even when a human still wouldn't have been able to walk. He was coming to realize that despite how much he hated the man Vergil might have been telling the truth.

The endless corridors were making his feet numb. He should run now that Vergil had stopped yanking him about by his collar, but there was nowhere to run. He had long ago lost all sense of direction; he had absolutely no idea which way they'd come. Maybe this place was designed to work like that, to confuse you and trap you, so that only those who were authorized to could get back out again.

He was jolted from his thoughts by a piercing screech and stopped dead in his tracks. Alex knew that sound and pressed himself into the wall as two of those things bounded round the corner at the end of the corridor. He was trying to pull himself together, concentrate his energy so that he could attack, but all he managed was a few useless sparks as he rubbed his fingers together trying to create friction or something.

In the end he didn't have to. Vivienne withdrew a whistle from a chain around her neck – it was small, delicate, to anyone else it might have seemed like a lucky charm – and blew hard on it. Two sharp sounds rent the air and stopped the monsters in their tracks. Instead they stood, sniffing the air at the end of the corridor. It didn't make Alex feel any better about them.

"What are those?" Alex managed, because some part of him wanted to know.

"You'll find out soon sweetie," Vivienne replied, painted lips pulling into a smile. She took Vergil's arm again and tugged him gently into action. It was only then that Alex realised the man had stayed silent the whole time. In fact he hadn't moved since Vivienne blew the whistle. Alex watched the man for a moment in confused silence, then he turned icy eyes – eye, he still hadn't seen the man's right eye – on him and began to walk again with short confident strides turning down a branch and leaving the monsters at the end of the corridor.

It made Alex's skin crawl turning his back to them, but he had little other choice. He was safest with Vivienne and that whistle for now. The creatures were forgotten quickly as they entered the next room. It was a vast expanse of clinical whites and greys. The doors they stepped through opened onto a tiled balcony and below them was a huge circular disk glowing ominously. It filled half of the large room, laid flat on the floor, slightly raised on a platform. It was strange, ringed with metal and wires; it belonged in a Sci-fi movie.

Normally he might have asked what it was, but he realized that an answer would not help him to understand any the contraption any further. That and now that they had supposedly reached the end of their journey he needed to start planning a way to escape. They were, after all, alone – well minus those monsters anyway – these two couldn't hold him forever if he really tried.

He took a step back from the balcony and turned slightly to look in the direction they had come. Alex didn't want to return that way if needs be. There was another door to the right, and that was it apart from jumping over the balcony which would most certainly result in death. Vivienne was staring over the marble wall of the balcony with awe filled eyes. She clutched at the whistle about her neck and a faint smile appeared across her lips. Vergil remained impassive, watching the flickering circle with a cold stare.

It took a split second to make up his mind, he turned and ran. Shoved his way through the right hand door and out into the corridor moving blindly and forcing his legs into action. He needed to go up, get back and go up, not hard when he was already heading in the wrong direction and every corridor in this place looked the same. He heard Vivienne screech something behind him as the door banged open.

His nightmares from only a day ago were back as he threw himself into the darkness and mass of corridors which lay beyond. Each fork in the path became a game of Russian roulette as he made decisions blindly, knowing that at some point he was going to come face to face with those monsters. At one fork he hesitated for a second, eyes wild in the gloom, choking on his own panting breaths. It was just a second too long, before he even registered someone, or something behind him something cracked across his temple and the world went black.

Dante drummed his fingers on the desk in front of him, he was itching to move, but it was still light outside and Trish had decided that running in all guns blazing wasn't going to help. They needed a plan, but Dante didn't do plans. Trish had returned a short while ago, with blood in her hair – which she had combed out with a decent amount of complaining. There had been something about demons messing up her house as well, but he couldn't care less what happened to it. His home was here, even if it was nice to have a quiet place to sit away from all this once in a while. Thing was he really didn't feel complete without the sense of normality (or abnormality as the case may be) that his shop held. He didn't think he'd ever been ready for a nice quiet life. He didn't do quiet either.

"Human?" Dante watched Trish apprehensively as she paced. She didn't seem to like that she'd killed innocent people if that's what it could be called.

"Yeah, they were demons, but human," she answered stopping her pacing to look at them both; Dante sitting behind the desk Lady still propped against a far corner. "Like were-wolves are human, I've never seen them before."

"There were some weird demons in that office building where," Dante shrugged and looked down. "Where Castor got Alex. I didn't really stick around long enough to figure out what they were. There was something strange about them though, like they were designed…"

Lady's brow was furrowed in concentration. "You mean like they had intelligent thought behind them? Man-made?"

"Well yeah, but that's impossible," Dante reasoned glancing at her. He knew that tone of her voice, both he and Trish did, she was about to come up with something elaborate and intelligent.

"Not entirely," Lady's voice was hesitant and her eyes narrowed as though she searching for the answer to something. "A while back now, before I met Mark one of my cases lead me to a company, can't remember the name, it was a private company run by an eccentric billionaire. At the time it wasn't a problem, scientists working on demons and their regenerative abilities, supposedly going to sell the information on to pharmacists who would claim it as their own. It was meant for good, they were taking demons off the streets and I never got enough information to track them down so I never looked into it. Maybe I would have if I got the time, but… well…" She stopped and glanced between the pair of them. "You think it has anything to do with them?"

"Well there's only one way to find out," Dante answered reaching across the table for Ivory and checking the cartridge. He'd done this five times in the past hour and hadn't moved from the sitting position at his desk.

"We still don't have the amulet," Trish sighed worry marring her features. She glanced out of the windows of the shop, checked the sky. She wasn't certain what she was waiting for, maybe for her little boy to be returned to her, to come racing through the door safe and sound.

"We have half, I don't even want to hand that over, I just want to get Alex," Dante said determinedly eyes fixed on the reflective surface of Ivory. If it was up to him he'd have been there already, waiting for Vergil, waiting to give him a good old smack in the mouth for even daring to touch his son. It was something he couldn't get his head around; in fact two things, one that Vergil was apparently very much alive and then that he would stoop so low. It was wrong, everything about this was wrong.

"MOM!"

The scream had both Trish and Dante scrambling for the stairs. Lady stood, hand reaching for a gun though she stayed where she was. If demons were attacking then there was normally always more than one, and they could be trying to create a diversion. Demons weren't normally that intelligent, but who knew with these new ones hanging around.

"Evey?" Dante shouted as Trish skidded onto the landing. After all these years he was still amazed that she could run in high heels.

Trish threw the door open, the handle cracking and ricocheting off the adjoining wall with the force. Dante followed two seconds behind her, both ready for a fight only to see Evey sitting bolt upright in bed eyes wide and staring. She obviously hadn't expected that response or even meant to shout in the first place as it was clear she had only just woken up. Trish had electricity crackling on her finger-tips and Dante still had Ivory in his hand.

Evey looked somewhere between confusion and crying. Dante sighed and lowered Ivory resting against the door-jamb. He had neglected to tell Trish that he'd managed to traumatize both of his children in less than twenty four hours.

Trish immediately went into mother mode, extinguishing the electricity between her fingers with a flick of her wrist and hurrying across the room to her daughter. "Sweetie what's the matter?" She brushed some of the snowy hair from her daughter's eyes. "Did you have a bad dream?"

Evey nodded shakily and allowed Trish to pull her into an embrace. She normally pretended to be independent and far older than she really was, but right now she honestly didn't care, her world had been flipped on its head in a matter of hours. Now the pictures of her father with a gun in his hand were haunting her nightmares.

"What was it about sweetheart?" Trish asked still stroking her daughter's hair soothingly. Despite being a demon Trish had developed a motherly instinct from somewhere; maybe it was even stronger for her demonic blood with the urge to fight and protect flowing far stronger in her veins.

The girl didn't say anything; she rested her chin on her mother's shoulder and threw Dante a glare. It hurt him far more than she knew or meant.

"I'll be downstairs," Dante said pushing away from the door-jamb and brushing some of the hair from his eyes. Evey didn't want to see him, she didn't want to know her life was never going to be the same again, and he understood her far too much in that aspect.

"What?" Trish's eyes were confused as she turned them on Dante, she could feel something in the room she didn't understand. Something he wasn't telling her. Her eyes narrowed. "What happened that I don't know about?"

"I'll tell you later," Dante answered non-commitally turning to go when he heard Evey answer for him.

"Dad shot someone," she whispered into Trish's shoulder. She didn't know how to feel about it. That man would have, could have, killed her people like that were twisted, people who wanted to hurt her family were horrible, but no one had the right to take away another human's life. But her parents weren't even human to begin with were they?

"You what?" Trish asked her tone was deadly, but still soft. She was caught between comforting her child and smashing Dante's head against a brick wall. "In front of her?"

"No," Dante started feeling the need to defend himself. This had never really been a problem before, though he understood Trish was more worried about her children than anyone he'd killed or the moralities of it. "Look can we have this conversation downstairs?"

"I'm not a little kid and you said you wouldn't keep secrets from me," Evey was angry now, her eyes blazing as she pulled away from her mother. "I know people die dad."

"I didn't mean to…" Dante stopped when the words ran dry; he didn't know what he wanted to say. "I'm going downstairs." With that he turned into the landing booted steps heavy in the corridor, then on the stairs as the wood protested his weight. It felt like his whole family had turned against him and he had only ever been trying to do what was right for them. He should have learnt a long time ago that anything he tried to do right always turned out wrong.

Lady was waiting when he came back downstairs watching him closely. He knew she was thinking and he'd never liked her thinking when it came to meddling in his personal affairs. She had obviously judged his ill temper correctly because she didn't say anything, simply watched as he sat back down and kicked the chair onto its back legs, resting the back of his arm across his eyes. Life was far too difficult sometimes and he could barely think straight with the worry of Alex on his mind. His blood, the very fibre of his being thrummed with the urge to go to get out and do something, even if it was only wander up and down the street…

He sat for five minutes before he was about to make his way back upstairs again. It turned out he didn't need to when Trish returned. Her face was grim and as her eyes met Dante's he knew he was in for an earful, but it didn't come.

"Evey thinks she knows where the amulet is," Trish announced watching Dante for his reaction. "A hollow tree down the street from our house, her and Alex used to hide things in there when they were kids… I never thought about it."

"You're going to hand it over, just like that?" Lady asked the pair eyes darting between them to read their expressions.

Dante half shrugged, he didn't want to, he hated admitting defeat, but if it meant that anything happened to Alex. "Do we really have a choice?"

A/N: Yeah another crappy chapter bleh, it feels disjointed to me... It's sorta a filler whilst I just get all the boring smush out of the way so that I don't have to explain something last minute and it seems random. And yeah I know there's still a problem with Vergil, if I didn't post this thing chapter by chapter I'd have edited him out, but we do what we can, I think I've figured out how to fix him :)

Oh another random thing I decided to do. I created a forum for DMC challenge fics. Sorta like prompts on LJ, but there's one a month and then people vote for the winner, sound cool? There's one in the LotR fandom so I figured we need one. If people join in it should be fun, but I'll just have to wait and see if it catches on.

Anyway, reviews encourage me to keep on writing :D

-Lady Luce