A/N: Finally an update. I hope you all like this one. It's kind of short, I guess. But don't be afraid. Lots of stuff happens on in here. I dunno; writing feels kind of chaotic write now. I have so many ideas. this chapter just feels like a stupid mishmash of both. With lots of caffeine.

A Dhampir Story
Chapter XX

Leaving the castle, without the Count's terrible phantoms - ghostly but very, very real - was like leaving a boneyard. The demons left their lethal hideaways. Now those same places, without gleaming crimson eyes or fangs or claws were simply hollow sad places. The vaulting ceilings no longer kept hovering cocoons armed with teeth when they engaged in their hunt at flight. Doorways opened on rooms that had not seen an occupant in thousands of years. The crumbled stairway no seemed desolate rather than menacing. The light-footed vampires moved down along the ancient passageways at a mortal's pace.

There was one hallway they took that looked desolate that remained in good shape. There was something strange about the walls, the surfaces - they were too bright, glossed too much. D scoured his mind to find memories of this hallway, but he could not remember exploring it that fateful day. When he tried to remember it, however, he saw it in a different light. Every object in his mind's eye at a different eye level. That planter seemed much smaller to him now than it had been. The wall length mirror much taller. The painting of a beautiful, stern looking woman with long dark hair and glasses farther up along the dark walls.

As familiar to D this was, it was more incredibly alien to Miranda who had never seen too many insides of a Noble's home before, much less the castle of the oldest and most hated of all Nobility. This hallway was new to her for another reason as well.

"We didn't go this way before," Miranda pointed out. Then, not wanting to get any attention from the black-hearted Count, she whispered to D, "Why is he leading us out this way?"

"I ordered him to escort us out, so that's what he's doing."

Even though she knew D often did not look at people when he spoke to them, she wished that for an instant, he would look at her - and in that one, long look, reassure her that everything was going to be fine and according to plan. But the fledgling vampiress gritted her teeth and hissed softly, "I know he can hear me. But I want you to answer." She gave a pointed look at Alucard, who walked ahead of them. "How do you know he'll... do everything you say? What was all that ceremony for?"

As the vampires moved along, it gave D a little time to think of a way to answer - or perhaps buy him time to dodge the question altogether, Miranda suspected with a scowl. But then his soft, musical voice began to speak and of course she listened. As she did, she began to notice a common theme with the paintings on the walls. All of them were portraits of the same woman, or were old faded photographs of the same group of people. Beautiful people, too. Even the older man, with a sharp cunning monocle, stared at her with a secretive lethality that seemed to jump from the canvas.

Whose clever hand painted these? she wondered in silent awe.

"My mother," D whispered as he nodded at the woman. Her beauty was astonishing. More astonishing was the cruel hard look in her peridot blue eyes. The painting itself seemed to have the same commanding effect as if she were standing before her in the flesh. "She was a beautiful woman. My father hated and loved her. In a time before time, it's said, she actually used him as a tool to destroy other vampires. Back then, they were just leeches sucking on the wealth of mankind as well as the blood."

"But what happened?"

"A war. Some cataclysm. I don't know." His eyes clouded a bit with worry. "Everything fell apart... and the line between master and servant blurred. Thus, in the chaos after, I was conceived."

"A child of war." The voice cut through the conversation like a poisoned knife. Alucard looked back toward them, and out of the corner of his eye, she met his gaze. It chilled her to the very marrow of her bones once again. She looked away, loathing that he could make her so afraid. The vampire's eyes were glazed... and something in them scared her and enticed her. She looked at the painting of the woman and Alucard.

"When the war ruined the world, I was her instrument." The nosferatu swayed to the cadence to his words very slightly, reciting this old tale as if he had done it thousands of times, out loud, perhaps only to himself in the lonely crypt-like dark. "More and more I killed - all for her. I scoured the country and kingdoms besides to reap my own kind's ruin. I hurried their end, but the war raged on. The vampire covered the entire world, consuming all like a plague. The cause seemed... hopeless. But she... My Integra... she was as bloodthirsty as they. She never hesitated once to send me forth like a torch into the darkness - and burn every last one she could find. I had no other desire than to obey.

"But it seemed the longer we fought, the more hopeless it seemed. Integra was mad. She did not want to admit to surrender. Neither did I," Alucard continued. A bloodlust filled his eyes that was different from that of hunger. Darker. Sharper. Focused. "But it was no longer in her best interest to fight. I had to save her from herself. She had lost an eye to battle. I was afraid to see her slowly tear herself apart as she engaged in battle."

"Afraid?" Miranda snorted. Then she was slashed with such a look that made her stop short and nearly stumble into the wall, eyes wide with fear and almost pain. If Alucard had struck her with his fist, the result would have been exactly the same.

"If you can believe it, I convinced her to abandon her cause at last. At the time, there were three of us. She can't tell even today if she hated me more for it, or fell in love with me. Integra was always one to show her feelings in strange and unexpected ways."

"Three?"

"Look well." He nodded at one of the older paintings. They had backtracked to view it. "The female in the uniform." His lips smirked and he muttered under his breath something that sounded like "Police" something.

"What happened to her?" Miranda asked with as much polite modesty as she could. But Alucard turned away without answering and continued down the hallway. The track took them to the familiar great hall with the winding stairway. They moved to the front door which was closed shut tightly. D stopped suddenly, as if jolted.

"Oh, yeah," he said quietly and with some disappointment.

A sliver of winter daylight crept across the floor through a window that should have been covered by the hard metal bomb shields that had fallen askew with time. Miranda jerked away from it with a feline hiss.

"We'll have to stay here for the day." D looked at his father without any compunctions about it. He turned right around and started to look around for somewhere for the three vampires to sit tight before the night journey to the orphanage in the evening. "For now, show us where the guest rooms lie."

All around the castle that day, it had begun to snow with thick, dangerous puffy flakes. The tracks, if any, were smothered by the fresh fall. Sunlight barely breached the clouds, although it was still visible. Miranda was resting in one of the guest coffin rooms, in a coffin as sumptuous as a queen-sized bed. D did not sleep. He sat awake throughout the day, at a small dining table in the guest room with his legs crossed and his eyes half-closed. His relaxed posture belied his true inner thoughts. The other vampire, the No-Life King, was also awake. He sat across from his son, mirrored perfectly, although his eyes were closed completely as if to shut the sight of him from his eyes and mind.

The sun reached its zenith. Both creatures of the night showed signs of discomfort to the trained eye, relaxed as they were, but the daylight even through thick wintry clouds still caused discomfort. For several hours after Miranda had gone to her day's rest, they had not spoken a phrase to one another.

Finally the lord asked, "Drink?"

"No."

A pained wrinkle appeared at the corner of his eyes. "Wine, I meant."

"No, thank you." The dhampir tried to sound his best to sound delicately apologetic about turning down his offer. He offered the slightest of smiles, only because this was his father and, for lack of a better reason, he wanted to make him feel appreciated for trying to show him genuine hospitality.

The message went through clearly. Alucard saw him smiling, now his eyes were slitted and somehow warm in a way.

"No one has come to see you. Not even the uniformed girl came to find you after all these years."

"She found her own way. She hid herself, preferred quiet to glory. I would have preferred her to stay the hell away from me. Her very existence was a bit of a drain on my patience." But there was still fondness in his voice.

D knew his father was lonely. But for such a creature, could there be any comfort?

The night opened up at last; Miranda woke up, took a drink of thousand-year-old blood stored in nuclear-power freezers. Miranda thanked Alucard begrudgingly for the drink. It restored her strength to a noticable degree; he did not respond to her at all, but instead just looked at D sourly expecting his next command.

"We'll take the road again on horseback. We may not be able to avoid detection from passersby this way, but it is the fastest pathway."

"You say that as if you expect people to be out there."

"Nearby villages no longer fully fear this place. They might come to harvest the wood from the forest and the herds of large roebuck are hunted for their meat, bones, and horns." D fastened a saddle bag to his mount before he returned himself to the saddle once again, gripping the reins.

Miranda was watching Alucard, standing alone in the brisk night wind with a long dark vermillion cloak. He rode no such thing as superfluous as a steed.

"Can you keep up?" D asked of him, with a sliver of playfulness in his voice.

"You won't see me. But I will be with you, boy. So don't think I have abandoned my duty to you."

"Duty, is it?" the dhampir murmured. But then he kicked his heels into his steed's flanks and started forward into a swift trot. As the second horsebound rider followed, Alucard seemed to lean forward ever so slightly after them and then - vanish completely. All across the twilit sands of bone, an oily mist had fallen to obscure all.

Through the mist, the moon rose again. A cloudless night was viewed as either lucky or unlucky - for there were such creatures that fed from lunar illumination like werewolves. Not only that, it lent the night a threatening air, as if the moon were helping unwary travellers to see their fate before it savagely fell upon them. Alucard stayed hidden as promised, but D did not seem to care whether he was in sight or not. Miranda, however, felt no such comfort. She knew from the demonstration of his power the previous night that, although he was not seen, he was there and every inch of her skin crawled with the sensation of him watching her at times.

The desert was crossed in a matter of minutes. They sped along with a demon's speed. Nothing in the snow-laden sands stirred; all was deathly quiet except for the shape of an enormous owl crossing the moon only once, but it never appeared again since the thick mist covered their tracks and thick-packed snow on top of the sand muffled the horse's hoofbeats.

They encountered a wall of dense trees suddenly in mist. D seemed to stop instinctively, or else rider and horse would have crashed headlong through the forest and lamed the beast and possibly taken a bruise or two for his recklessness. Miranda halted up beside him. D looked at the trees for a moment, then glanced up at the sky, before turning to the right and continuing at a slower pace following the treeline. D sought the missing path that would allow them through the woods, although now somehow it had eluded them or moved itself.

Finally they came to it at last. D guided the cyborg horse through the trees. Naturally such a tightly enclosed space with thick snow would have deterred a horse, but either D's presence itself had taken its anxiety away or the horse was genetically designed to be bold. The cyborg steed moved unerringly forward, stomping through the snow. The mist faded. The road ahead of them was occupied by several figures on horseback, the woods cut away to form a semi-circular emptiness that was not there the night before. There was no stirring, no movement from beneath the untouched virgin snow.

D looked it over carefully, decided that he would go forward none the less. And forward they went. The woods were not empty. There were still a few wolves and giant bears that roamed and scavenged the woods for their hidden bounty. D could see the shapes of the sly hunters gliding through the forests, the moonlight glinting off their reflective eyes and dagger-like teeth. The beasts kept to themselves, for those of Noble blood would forever be their masters.

D wondered if Zhou was among them, a ghost among living flesh. If he was, could the wolves tell him apart from their own? Did they accept him blindly among their pack as a strange secret hunter?

All along the forest's edge, the snow had piled in drifts. The wind had been blustery that day, but tonight it was as crisp and still as death, preserving their moment in travel with perfect clarity now that the mist had fallen away. The No-Life King walked among them also unseen, keeping his own senses alert, taking joy in the strange freedom with a shockingly reserved outlook. Millennia in confinement could not make him lose his cool. Now he was outside in the night, free, observing the strange changes the world had undertaken while he was locked within his own home.

The female vampiress rode at D's side, the two horses running abreast. Suddenly D kicked the cyborg horse into a headlong rush through a thinner layer of snow where the trees had grown over the path, their branches heavily laden with snow and hidden dangers. In a few moments, they had navigated the ancient confusion of spells and dimensional traps and reached the fork in the road. They continued along the main road until they came across the orphanage, hunkered sleepily under a blanket of ivory.

But the place was no longer abandoned. In the wide front yard that had once been enclosed by a tall electric fence, several vehicles were parked and a large burning bonfire was in the center of the yard, casting a blood-like glow on the snow. There were nuclear-powered vehicles and lanterns besides. The lanterns threw off no heat, so the necessity for the fire accounted for its presence. The men all around the fireplace started at a shout from below. One among their number had spied the rider's silhouettes against the moonlit forest backdrop and road.

The riders sat very still, watching from a distance. A mist was rising from the lake beyond the orphanage proper. Curling, reaching fingers of moisture arched toward the air but no one noticed it thicken and take more definitive shape.

The entire camping group rode up to meet them. Their shadowed forms became clearer; all of them hardened warrior men armed with diamond-coated weapons, energy weapons, and old-fashioned gunpowder rifles. Most of them were of broad shoulder, highly muscled, and thick beards white with frost. All of them looked at the two figures with feverishly anxious eyes.

The proposed leader - naturally the largest man in the bunch - spoke up to them. He hardly wasted any time. "Go away. We don't welcome strange folk coming up in the night to our camp. I won't tell you twice."

"We have just as much right to be here as anyone else!" Miranda snapped. "We have business here besides and it doesn't involve any of you."

The mist thickened more. Then it seemed to take the men no time at all to notice it.

"What the hell?!" cried a man with an energy rifle. He turned the weapon on the very mist itself. "What is this shit?"

"Don't do it," D murmured, barely audible. But the leader must have had exceptional hearing as well as size.

He wheeled on the dhampir. "What's that you said? Don't do what, stranger?" He drew a massive sword from the sheath on his back. Waves of heat rolled from its surface, rippling in the air. His muscles bunched and flexed beneath his super-dense warm bodysuit. "Answer me! Don't do what?!"

In the night, some feet toward the edge of the group, a man screamed in the darkness. D closed his eyes and drew the slender, deadly blade from his back. The large man roared in fury, swinging the heat-searing weapon at the youthful beauty. Miranda's horse reared and both woman and horse screamed a challenge full of fury and fear.

D's mount whirled to present its left side to the gigantic man. The heated blade came sideways as if to cut the horse out from under the dhampir. D somehow deflected the swing and jerked sideways from the massive strength behind the giant's blow. The sound of steel on steel rang like a bell; the warrior band exploded into action. Then the mist became a fog and then: an impenetrable darkness. The world vanished behind a sudden veil as if everyone had been struck blind. Men cried out in fury as they blindly struck out in the night, trying to find themselves in the blanket of emptiness.

D and Miranda could still see. By some miracle, their sight was spared. What they saw would have frozen the blood faster than the winter around them. There were eyes again - but not just the eyes but silhouettes rising and forming out of the shadowy substance flowing like slow-moving oil around the men. The silhouettes were shaped like men; armored creatures, armored men, beasts, and more modern-dressed figures. Whether once human or monsters themselves, D could not say. They all shuffled toward the nearest victim of blindness as if hungry.

"Command me," Alucard's mind whispered into D's thoughts. "They will bring nothing but death to everything and everyone in their path. Monsters cloaked in human flesh - only their flesh is merely human and nothing more. They care only for themselves in a world that has shown them nothing but how cruel it can be. So they are crueler, and make the world worser for it. So command me. You have the power to do away with another smear on the memory of this place. Do they not defile this place with their very presence?"

"Who am I to judge them?" D replied calmly.

"They are murderers and you know it. You can see it in their very eyes."

Shockingly, D shuddered. The men could see what was hunting them now in the dark. They started to holler threats, then began to fire into the mass of darkness around them. Even the big giant man had abandoned his weapon for firearms - but no one hit their mark. The quivering mass of Alucard's minions waited, snarling and snapping. Ravening maws opened and closed, as if already eager to fill their mouths with warm, hot meat.

"Look at the vehicles!" Miranda shouted suddenly. D did look. The vehicles and trucks were out of bounds from the living darkness. He saw in between long metal bars a small face peering from between them, then a second and a third. They were frightened children, not older than eighteen and no younger than four years. They were bundled yet cold and starved.

"Who are they?"

"Orphans. Slaves, maybe. On their way to market farther north." His voice was hard, stone cold, and empty of all reserve.

"Well?" Alucard chuckled, though there was a disgust in his voice too from this new mark of injustice toward the humans. "I am your tool now, too. You may put an end to them as swift as a striking hawk. But I can deliver justice with enough slow and painful clarity as to make them weep on their way to Hell!"

The dhampir held his sword down near his side. The horses were stamping and very anxious to get away. D turned away, skirting around the shadows. "Make them all suffer. Let none live. I command you."

Then he and Miranda raced down toward the young children in their cages down below. The bonfire illuminated their tiny pale faces; most of them were human. Non-humans, or half-blooded children, were isolated in a much smaller and draftier steel carriage. They opened this cage first of all with one swift blow from D's sword to the cage lock. It swung open. The children rushed toward the bonfire and watched with stricken, horrified faces as their captives were lost in the thick, roiling blanket of teeth just up the driveway. The screams of the men were muffled, but their pain was unmistakable.

One of the younger children began to weep with joy.

The voice that commanded the devourer of all life, the No-Life King, spoke to the children gently as he opened the cages for the humans as well. "You are all equals in each other's eyes, as of this moment. You were all slaves, but now you are all free."

"We're free, true, but now we're all going to die," an older boy complained, his rough complexion showing years of days toiling in the sunlight since he was very young. "The cold will kill us all before hunger."

"We'll hunt for you," Miranda said kindly. Then all eyes were on her, round small faces eager for love and attention and yet something in Miranda scared them. They starved for a mother's love - but she was no mortal like they were. She was a Noble. The unnatural blood sang in her veins and showed itself in her very voice. "We will make sure you are fed until we can take you somewhere safer than here."

"You're all Nobles. How can we trust you?" the same older boy had said. He glared at them, huddled in the forefront. Already he was looked up to for daring to speak against their saviors. But he truly did not believe they were saved - not quite yet.

Suddenly a familiar face popped up from the sea of expressive eyes. It was pale but familiar scars made themselves known in the firelight. "They're definitely trustworthy, kids. For these people are my friends and I'm so glad to see them!"

It was Mouka. He had been captured among the people at the last town where they stayed for his outlandish habit of calling forth fire. His eyes were glistening with grateful tears and he threw himself at D and hugged him tightly. "Oh, boy, you can't imagine how glad I was when they let slip where we were going! Then I felt I had a chance of running into you."

D offered the slightest of smiles. But he did not share the same exuberance Mouka did.

"Children, listen well! This isn't just any Noble. He's the greatest vampire hunter in the whole world. His name is D, and you can bet he's the safest place in the Frontier right now!"

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Miranda muttered under her breath, turning to her side, but she was glad to see that the fire eater was well also.

These were darker, harder times than any of the children had known before. These new young faces were cheerlessly watching the darkness beyond the light of the flames as Alucard feasted on the impetuous slave traders, feasted on their pain and screams and their blood. It was nothing the children had seen before, nor would lay eyes on again in all their lives.

The smell of death and fresh blood stirred Miranda's bloodlust. Finally she turned away from all the young, warm creatures warming themselves by the fire. Mouka helped pass around some food from the slaves' store. She walked away, toward the edge of the lake, where so many memories had been forged for D.

The cold press of D's presence whispered across her back. She was weak with thirst. "D..." Her eyes closed and everything seemed to fall out from under her feet. She leaned against the dhampir's chest that made no sound at all. "D, I'm so thirsty... what can I do now? Mouka is here, but so are those children, and I'm... I'm going mad." She swallowed. "I want to join Alucard in his... in his punishing of those men. I want to at least slake my thirst on someone who deserves to die."

"Only to be thirsty again," D whispered. "Survival is a full-time job."

"I can't do it anymore. Blood pills. Cold corpses of animals in the forest. I can't do it." She slumped and everywhere around her, she could almost see blood dancing on the cold winter breeze.

His hands, always strong and there forever, slid away from her shoulders. "Go."

Miranda turned slowly, stepping onto the icy lake. Her eyes widened fearfully. "D..."

"Go. It will take decades, a couple of centuries, to be able to go without feeding nightly. Thousands of lives. Are you sure there are that many evil people in the world, Miranda? Are there so many people that deserve such a fate? And could you find them every night?"

Her face became pinched with pain and moral anguish. Her lips were stained with her own blood as she bit her lip. Then she slowly walked around him with her head bowed shamefully, creeping toward the killing ground where Alucard took part in his own feast. She joined the darkness inside after standing at the brink, watching the madness unfolding, her own fate illustrated in the bloodbath inside. Then she vanished within, folded delicately inside. She would emerge - fully-blooded, full-fledged Noble.

Dawn again. Miranda slept without dreams in the basement like before. Alucard stood outside in the dawn light before he went inside, uncomfortable in its light. Children were sleeping, packed into the dormitory room. There were scores more children here than the building was originally intended to house, but with blankets and clothes and combined body heat, the structure provided easy warmth.

The two Nobles stood back to back in the doorway leading into the main dining room where the fireplace crackled and where Mouka, too, reclaimed lost hours of sleep. The Nobles watched the children sleeping.

D's lips barely moved. "Miranda must go."

"I saved her one. He's gagged and tied in one of the vans. He will trouble no one, after what horrible visions I visited on his pathetic mind." Alucard smiled cruelly. "Don't think I do not keep her needs in mind, child. After all, she's your dear precious one."

"I spared her because I love her." His voice barely whispered over the second to last word. His eyes frosted over and then heated suddenly. Tears threatened, but never fell. He was too far gone for human tears. "Now I have to watch her go and hope that she never falls in front of my blade in the future. At the same time, I hope she has good fortune finding evil men in the world."

"Or you could give her to me," Alucard said, tipping his head back slightly as he considered it. "I will take her unto myself. There, she can live forever. She may not remember all she is or was, but of my champions, few forget who they loved and hated."

"In your mind, none are free." D slipped from his side and turned toward the windows, his arms crossed. "You make a prisoner of everyone. Even those you love." He was talking of the spirit of Rhea, who dwelled here, hiding from all these living creatures. And at that hidden jab, Alucard suddenly snarled and grabbed D by the back of his neck and spun him around, a fury so wide and deep it saw no end burning in those infinite eyes.

"Watch what you say. I come at your bidding, so now I am your prisoner. And don't forget what you are!" He hissed passionately and furiously into D's ear. Then he released him and stormed away, melting like a ghost himself through the basement door to find his rest.

D was trembling ever so minutely, but he was not afraid of his father. He was afraid of Miranda - and what would happen tonight when she awoke. What would happen when Rhea selected her moment to appear to Alucard and tell him what she wanted him to know.