Chapter 11
"Anna…?" Isabel entered into Anna's bedroom to find her mistress staring listlessly out the window at the cold, gray sky. She walked up and wrapped her arms around her and laid her head on Anna's shoulder. Anna didn't shrug her off this time, which was a noted improvement. Isabel had been working on her for some time. Slowly but surely, Anna was rejecting her affections less and less.
While the Master was temperamental and restless, the Mistress was cold and always depressed. Their two competing states of mind pressed at Isabel's thoughts all the time. It was very stressful, especially when they got into fights. It made her feel like curling up in a corner and crying like a child.
But she strongly believed if she could make the Mistress happier, then the Master might cheer up a bit too. She needed to find some way to bring them together, but she didn't know how. A meal? They had come together to turn Isabel, but the Mistress never hunted with the Master. The Mistress was adamant about that. Isabel had actually tagged along occasionally with the Mistress and helped kill her favorite targets: criminals and bandits. But she always returned to hunting with the Master. He didn't place arbitrary limits. He just looked for someone healthy and kept things from getting more complicated than that.
She also never detected guilt with him during a hunt. Whereas the smell of guilt hung like a heavy perfume around the mistress, even when she was viciously ripping apart her prey with undisguised relish.
"Mistress… have you fed already?" Isabel tugged on her to get her attention again.
"For the thousandth time, stop calling me that. And, no I haven't, not yet." Anna brushed her off.
"We could go together." Isabel offered her.
Anna sighed, but nodded.
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Two lithe white bodies sped through the sky, their keen eagle sight fixed upon the forest path below, looking for any sign of travelers. It had become harder and harder over the years for Anna to find her fill of roadside bandits. The area, ironically, had become ridiculously safe thanks to her feeding habits. Word had spread far and wide of a vampire who preyed only upon humans that did evil. Random people still died thanks to Dracula and Isabel, but overall the death toll from wandering around at night or traveling lonely forest roads had become extremely low. Thanks to Anna, vampires were still feared, but mutterings about vampires not being "entirely useless" were common nowadays. They were treated more and more like the spider you allowed to live so that it would eat the flies. Or the cats that caught the rats in the barn.
Isabel, quickly losing her patience, finally spotted two humans along the road and spiraled downward quietly to land. Anna didn't follow. Those men didn't look like bandits to her, so she refused to be a part of anything Isabel started with them.
That was when pain exploded in her left temple and she almost fell out of the sky in shock. A ferocious roar sounded in the back of her mind, coming from Dracula far away, but Anna fixed her attention on the ground below and swooped down. Isabel was pinned, shot through with stakes. The vampire hunter closed in for the kill. Anna grabbed him from behind and flung him away from Isabel. With her instincts still sharp from years of training as a human to hunt vampires, she managed to dodge at the last second as the other hunter lunged at her,
Anna quickly ripped the stakes from Isabel as she screamed in pain. Luckily, none of them had been a fatal blow. The stakes were coated in holy water and burned Anna's hands as she grabbed at them, but she got rid of them quickly.
In fury, Anna grabbed the younger hunter, snapped his neck swiftly, and threw him at Isabel to feed from and recover her strength.
Anna shrieked as the other hunter managed to stab her with a silver stake. He pressed her down into the earth, driving the stake deeper into her as she tried to throw him off, Isabel wailing "Mistress..!" in the background as she tried to heal fast enough to come help her.
Anna couldn't believe the inhuman strength of this man, to hold her down in the mud like this. Then she caught a whiff of wet dog and knew. This man was a werewolf. It's venom is what gave him beyond human strength.
"Lucien, stop!" another voice cut through the chaos.
The man on top of Anna paused for a second.
"That's the one I want alive."
"She killed Rialle!" Lucien protested and resumed trying to kill Anna.
The other man, also smelling distinctly of werewolf, ripped Lucien off of Anna like he was a doll and tossed him away. Anna caught a glimpse of this man's face and gasped. "No! It cannot be…."
Van Helsing tipped his hat at her. "Hello, Anna Valerious."
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Yeah, remember when Van Helsing ran off into the woods in the early chapters? He didn't die out there. He was busy.