Alucard, it turns out, somehow thinks that while he may have stupidly handed Sypha a way of making anything she feels like in defiance of God and man she'll still listen to his lectures about how very serious and boring it needs to be. Alucard is kind of an idiot.

"What you've done won't even last the year," Alucard continues. "You need to -"

"I only need it to last a few hours," Sypha says, because also, she's practical. "Oh! Actually I don't even need that, do I? If it falls apart before we return, I could just put it back again."

Alucard insists, "If you put it together properly, it wouldn't fall apart at all." And then he tries, "The mathematics underlying architecture are actually very interesting."

"Dhampirs are supposed to be good at lying," Trevor tells Alucard. "Are you actually a runt? Are you like the vampire equivalent of raising a puppy on bread, do you look fine on the outside and it's your brain that goes?"

This is supposed to be a joke. He has no idea why Alucard's head snaps toward him with an expression of murderous fury.

"Sorry?" Trevor hazards.

Alucard looks away again. "A parrot," he mutters. It sounds like a curse of some kind.

Okay so yes obviously this is a sensitive subject for mysterious vampire reasons Trevor can't even guess at but now that he's thinking about it it's starting to sound very uncomfortably possible and, "Are you sickly, actually?" Trevor asks. "Malnourished?" If regular vampires eat any human blood maybe half-vampire means only some types of blood work. Alucard's fucked up so much else, maybe he didn't stock enough of the right blood either. Whatever that is. The virgin thing never made much sense given purity's supposed to be what you drive monsters off with, but maybe the other way around? Sinners feeding monsters? Maybe that's why vampires are supposed to encourage that kind of thing. Like turning grapes into wine.

Might explain why they like eating kids so much, kids are little shits.

"I really do look forward to finding out whose voice is echoing out of you," Alucard tells him. "I think I'll eat their heart."

"I feel like that's kind of a yes." Can animals sin? Because Alucard specifically disrecommended goats and if anything can sin it's goats, but maybe he just meant he didn't want Sypha wasting good food.

"Perhaps it'll be some comfort for them to die knowing their concern about my diet has been addressed."

"I'm not saying you suck in a fight, you didn't get killed, but there's different kinds of messed up. You look nothing like Dracula," Trevor continues, "and you can point to any kid, say someone's its father, and everyone can and will immediately find a score of reasons the kid looks just like him, and Dracula actually is your father. I mean, I'm assuming your parents fucked like people. So you really should look like Dracula, and he looked like death warmed over a few dozen times too many. So are you supposed to be more corpsey looking? Is that what healthy looks like on a dhampir? Are you more dead the less dead you look?"

"I thought your family knew about dhampirs," Alucard says. He does not sound like he particularly cares what Trevor answers, but that's fine, Trevor doesn't care about if Alucard cares.

"Mostly in the immediate sense. There's some sort of plan and then fuck, one of them's a halfbreed and that doesn't work right and now someone's in five pieces, hurry up and stake it before anyone else dies. That's not real conducive to telling if one's a bit under the weather. But I do know you guys are not, uh, known for being light eaters."

"Doesn't it seem strange, Belmont, that you would think this yet agree to travel with one?"

"It was a concern, alright? Nothing personal. But it wasn't like Sypha would listen to me, would you Sypha?"

"I'm listening right now," Sypha says. "Listening to and agreeing with aren't the same thing."

"See?"

"And I'm right not to, aren't I?" she continues. "Since Alucard does not devour either of us, or anyone else."

"But you didn't know that."

"You told me so yesterday."

"That doesn't count!" he fumes. "Neither of us knew then, but you just were insisting that since he was your messiah it would work out. Even if prophecies were real, which they're not, there's a whole lot of non-prophecy people in Gresit he could've eaten!" Thinking back on this...so much showing why he shouldn't listen to Sypha, and he still did. Because he wanted to. He really does deserve to be here, doesn't he? "But," he allows. "Alucard didn't. So after a couple days I figured we'd be fine for the Dracula hunt part." Trevor waves a hand dismissively. "Well, there was all that blood down there and dhampirs are also supposed to be able to go a good while without eating." One of the many ways it was hard to actually pin one down. "I figured it was that. It's like, that lodestone thing you were talking about. Dhampirs are all opposites. You can pretend to be normal for ages and then you're eating a village."

Alucard says, "It is so difficult to tell what nonsense you were told and what's your baseline idiocy."

"Unlike Dracula, we just killed stuff. We weren't doing science on what happens if you starve them or chop bits off or shove a spear up their asses."

Alucard doesn't reply to this for a while. Then, "You're confusing dhampirs with newly turned vampires. They're generally the cause of sudden massacres."

"We did not!" Trevor says, offended. "When I said you guys blindside people it's because it's way too hard to scope out all the bloodsuckers just in case one of them was something that practically never exists, not because we can't tell the difference when there is one."

"In a story I heard, after wiping out a village the vampire burned up in the sunrise," Sypha says.

"Symbolism," Trevor dismisses. "Glory to God, let's be good and sit quietly and the problem will go away by itself." Not technically blasphemy, God, Trevor's right about how waiting real hopefully goes for people and blasphemy involves being wrong.

But Sypha shakes her head. "I wasn't there myself, and the Speakers who were arrived only in the aftermath, but we are good at getting as much truth of the matter as can be found. It was kept rather quiet. Apparently the vampire was actually staying with their priest, you see." Of course. The one fucking time they didn't jump on the first excuse to murder someone and it was someone who actually needed killing. "He arrived at night in a bad state and couldn't, or I suppose wouldn't, explain what had happened. The people thought he was sick. He couldn't keep down food, and then in one night he came out and slaughtered almost everyone, and then he didn't go back inside in the morning."

"There was something wrong with that one, then. Vampires can go crazy sometimes like people do."

"It's normal behavior," Alucard says. "Utterly predictable."

"If vampires did that, we wouldn't have to bother hunting them!"

"I suppose the Belmonts decided on thoroughly burying what happened with - I believe he was called Gilles?"

"Fuck you, there was nothing to be ashamed of. And he didn't kill a village or go skipping off into the nearest sunbeam, his sister cut his head off." The lucky bastard.

"Preemptively, I'm sure."

"No shit. Soon as they finished killing the rest and Gilles turned his back." And obviously Alucard disapproves, but hey, he's the one who decided to impune the honor of Trevor's family. "He died without eating anybody." At Alucard's expression, he clarifies, "Anybody who counted. Vampires don't."

"My apologies for ever doubting your family's talent for rationalizing. I should have known better after meeting you."

"Well, I know it was definitely a halfbreed who ate its way through half of Bavaria."

"You think she did that because she got hungry?" Alucard sounds appalled. "Do you - just the logistics - you understand blood is a physical substance and vampires have stomachs, not unending voids?"

"Hard to miss how much of the blood ends up splattered on the ground. If it didn't have to, then the whole thing was an even worse idea. Got itself killed, after all."

"Well. We all have our traditions." What, dying like an idiot?

"You're talking about the demon Ilerai," Sypha says, and yeah Trevor really should've kept his mouth shut, shouldn't he. "That was really a dhampir?"

"Ilaria, not Ilerai, but yes," says Alucard like he sees absolutely no issue with claiming a mass murderer as a relative. Well. Another mass murderer. Trevor supposes eating only a couple cities is a step up from Dracula.

Sypha was fine with Alucard when Trevor was actually trying to convince her he personally ate people probably, so it likely doesn't matter much. "Vampire hunters went after Octavia's court," Trevor starts.

"Court," Alucard repeats with utter disdain.

"That's your stupid word."

"It's not my word."

"So they're your people when you're bitching about skulls but not your people when they're pretentious fuckers? Because you're more a pretentious fucker than you're a skull, Alucard. You're entirely pretentious fucker." Alucard decides to go back to being boring and doesn't reply, so Trevor continues, "As I was saying, Octavia's whole lot of murderous bloodsuckers gets wiped out by vampire hunters. Not us, some other, significantly less great guys. Now, they swore that the dhampir escaped in the chaos and that they were definitely looking for it afterward and just couldn't find it, but what we figure happened was they thought it was some human woman and either didn't think it was at all weird they couldn't find her afterward or didn't even bother to look. Not to speak ill of the dead," Trevor adds reflexively. "And dhampirs are really rare. But so are mysteriously healthy humans that run away from the people saving them from monsters, and they were all dead by the end which tells you a lot about how good they were at their job. That dhampir turned out to not even be as dangerous as most of them! Killed a ton of regular people, but my ancestors ended up taking it down without losing anybody. Even the little fuckers brought somebody down with them."

"How surprising," Alucard says sarcastically.

"Hey, if you've got special vampire insight into why vampires do stupid shit, I'm all ears. Did it tell other vampires whatever the fuck it meant to be doing and then they told you?"

Alucard's voice is getting dangerously clipped. "Of course not."

"Really?"

"Who would she have told?" Alucard snaps.

"Despite a lot of hard work, there's still plenty of vampires around," Trevor points out.

"Ahem," Sypha says. "Alucard, why did it happen?"

"How could I possibly know when I'm but a figment of Belmont's slumbering imagination," Alucard retorts. "It's an unsolvable mystery."

That - that doesn't mean anything, Alucard would say that, Alucard's just a dick like that. "What's your problem?"

"We'll never know," Alucard tells him. "We're bound to the limits of your brainpower. A cart hitched to a legless foal."

Sypha huffs. "You're just making yourself angrier dragging this out."

"I can't be angry, I'm not real."

"You can't be angry because it'd get in the way of sulking about everything," Trevor tells him.

Which just makes Sypha turn on him with, "Really! You should know better too."

This is unreasonable, because it's not like Alucard's actually angry. That would require Alucard to have an emotion range beyond being an icy well.

Which means he has a lot in common with the hallway ahead. Perhaps they can commiserate. Ha, maybe that's why he's so insistent on leaving the things around.

Alucard stops well before the ice. Sypha does not stop, but Trevor could guess as much so he holds an arm out in front of her.

"I've never seen anything like this…" she says. She ducks around Trevor and touches the ice. There's a faint and not particularly intelligible sound. Given it's horrible ice ghosts, probably Trevor just found out what a scream of rage sounds like through ice.

Alucard yanks her hand away. "Don't do that!"

"They can't reach us here, though. Right?"

"Yeah," Trevor says. "Literally the only good thing about dealing with these, they're nasty but at least they can't chase you. They can only go a certain distance from their" - skulls - "tethers."

"And that doesn't change over time, if we leave them here?" Sypha asks. "They can't go further and further?"

"No," Alucard says. "The opposite. Once they calm down what remains in this world will stay by their skull."

Shit. So close. So fucking close to getting through this without finding out what happens if Sypha hears about them being ghosts. God, why is Alucard like this?

Well, admittedly Alucard's a demonic mockery of humanity created by Satan, so, possibly Alucard's not God's fault, but also all creation flows from God so that means anything Satan does has God's approval on some level? Ugh. This is the only downside of never talking to priests, you don't know what everyone else has figured out already.

At least Sypha isn't doing anything stupid yet. "You mean, their own skull?" she says. "They're undead?"

"No," Alucard says.

"Why are you even trying to lie about this," Trevor groans. Sypha doesn't seem to care much, so at least one thing is going right. "Yes, they're ice ghosts. They freeze people to turn them into more ice ghosts. They're incredibly dangerous so if you kill them let's drop the ceiling instead of going closer."

"None of that is true."

Trevor groans again. Back to the other, more pressing question of why, and also how, Alucard is so bad at lying. "They're not dangerous. Even you're too scared to walk into that room but they're not dangerous."

"They made it perfectly clear they don't want anyone near them."

"Well, tell them that's very mutual."

"I can't tell them anything. They don't want anything to do with me." Lovely, now Alucard's losing his grip on sarcasm.

"Alucard," Sypha says, "what are they, if not undead?"

"Undead transform after death," Alucard says. "These transform themselves and leave behind their body, which then dies. Likely of exposure, though other regulatory processes could fail. I don't know much about the specifics, because they do not want anything to do with me, but the skull of their former body still serves some purpose to them and they are harmed by harming it, so they're understandably concerned about that."

"Murderously."

"If you won't leave them alone."

"And they lure people out and kill them if you do," Trevor adds.

"They do not. They can't. It's a voluntary transformation."

"So they mind-control people into killing themselves. That's even worse, do you not get that?"

Alucard opens his mouth, then suddenly bites open his wrist right through the glove and slaps his now gushing hand on the stone beside him. The blood crawls across the rocks with impossible speed.

Trevor is now staring at a stone wall.

Well. That's a way of resolving the issue of if they should block it off or deal with it now.

Alucard looks...wrong. Bad. Wrung out and less, probably because a whole lot of him just ended up in that wall and blood loss is one of the few things vampires can't shrug off.

"So," Trevor manages. "I guess that's why you wanted Sypha to fix your shitty courtyard."

"That wasn't the same spell," Sypha says. Her voice is very tight. So yeah, Alucard's definitely looking bad if even she thinks he looks fucked up.

There's explosive sounds like trees bursting in winter and Trevor watches as frost blossoms across the cracking stone.

Alucard yelps, then grabs both of them by the collars and hauls them backward, although they don't actually get any further from the wall.

He does not let go and from the downward weight Trevor's not sure Alucard can.

Ice flakes to the ground as the shattered rock that Trevor's pretty sure is now a lot further up the hallway than it was a moment ago melts back together.

Alucard is still gripping his collar.

"What just happened?" Sypha asks.

Is Alucard about to eat someone? Does Trevor need to do something about this?

"...I…" Alucard trails off. The weight on Trevor disappears as he finally lets go. "They noticed. Too close. I upset them."

Well. Alucard may not really care about Sypha, but he hates Trevor by now, or hates him more because possibly he always hated Trevor and was just being polite some of the time, so it's unlikely he'll pick Sypha as the target. Plus Trevor definitely has more blood in him and so is the better choice.

"They're trying to get out, then," Sypha says.

Unless Alucard's complaints about Trevor are because booze ruins the taste. Fuck, what if Alucard's a picky eater? Is that even a thing vampires can be? If Alucard is going to go crazy and-or die without food, he'd fucking better not be concerning himself with who's tastier.

"No! They, they can't perceive objects. What I did, it would have looked like me to them, I should have -"

"That was aimed at you?"

"They -"

Vampires probably can't tell if you're healthy or hungover or straight up poisoned, it's all just blood to them right? Must be, because it wouldn't have worked if…

"Can you smell holy water?" Trevor interrupts.

"...what?" Alucard manages.

"What?" Sypha demands.

It's a simple question. "Alucard, can you smell holy water," Trevor repeats.

"No."

So vampires aren't picky about blood like people are about food and whatever complaints Alucard has about Trevor are separate from his suitability as a meal. Alucard will probably attack Trevor if he's going to attack anybody. That's fine then.

Wouldn't even hurt, really. It's surviving that hurts.