The forest at night was just as Trevor remembered—just the way he'd left it. There was nothing to be heard but the muted calls of woodland creatures and the subtle whispering of leaves, nothing to be seen but the towering shadows of trees awash in the silvery glow of the moon high overhead. There was no one, man or demon, to block his path to the estate that lay mere minutes away. It was as if nothing in the forest had changed in the weeks since his world burned—nothing but him.
The journey back had not taken nearly as long as his time spent in desperate flight. There was no need anymore to cower from imagined terrors, or attempt to wait out the worst. Nothing could shock him now, and nothing would change unless he found his last shred of opportunity and seized it by the throat. He had a goal in sight now, had skills and weapons honed from experience, and God help anyone who stood in his way.
It should not have been so easy.
He must have come to trust too much in the fate he despised, believed too strongly in the stalking horror he'd grown to see as his lot. He'd been blessed and cursed in parallel, avoiding the spectre of death but forced to watch, helpless, as it descended. Always to stand at the edge of some tragedy, but never close enough to be taken by it too. He deserved to travel the roughest path, and to travel it alone, because no one else in his clan ever got the chances he'd been so freely given. Why had things only begun to turn around now, of all times?
The scant distance between himself and the ashes of everything he'd known suddenly seemed the longest of all. He couldn't find it in him to take a single step.
He sank down upon a flat-topped stone and stared into the distance to the north. Instead of the moonlit path that was waiting just before him, all he could see was an orange glow that wasn't.
He was just selfish, he realized, a selfish fucking coward using fate as his excuse. He'd abandoned his family to the mercy of the flames and the mob, had broken into the homes of the dead and left when he'd found nothing to steal. He wanted to endure more hardship and tempt death only because that meant putting off facing reality like a Belmont should. He couldn't move forward because he was too fucking scared.
Trevor continued to look out into the silvery silence of the night. It had looked like this on the night of his last real hunt, just before he saw the flames and realized that, no matter what he did from that moment on, he had already acted hours too late.
It was weeks too late, now. Maybe even months.
He bent forward with a sudden jerk and clawed his fingers into his hair, unsure if he wanted to vomit or sob.
Nothing happened. He felt too empty for either.
Minutes passed. The path to home stretched silver before him.
It shouldn't be so hard.
What a waste it would be, if he were craven enough now to turn around and leave. Weeks spent traveling homeward along that same lonely trail that existed for no one but himself, a trail he thought he'd never have to walk a second time. Countless reminders of his goal, the estate, in the constant visions where it loomed before him, far off in the future like a demon castle, dreadful and inviting all at once. So much effort—so much grief—and for what?
Maybe it would be better to let the dead rest. What right did he have to come back after the worst was already over, to pick through their home and possessions like a scavenger? How could he face whatever remained, after all he'd let their murderers do? They didn't need to be burdened with his presence, not after they'd already suffered enough.
Or maybe he should just try to forget them after all. What kind of a family brought up their children to be soldiers in some forgotten blood feud, teaching them to fight as soon as they could walk? Had he ever meant more to them than just another set of hands to clutch the Morning Star? He'd wasted all this energy on the wrong people. A crusade against a monster they'd never seen, begun by someone they'd never known? Laying down their lives all for goddamn Leon?!
Leon could get fucked.
Trevor thought back again to his great-grandfather's notes, the story of another Belmont who'd stepped back from the precipice of his so-called fate. Perhaps their situations were more alike than he'd let himself believe. Not duplicates, but reflections: similar, and yet reversed. One had abandoned his chance at glory for those waiting back home. Another stood poised to cut loose the ties of home for whatever awaited him beyond. Trevor couldn't pretend he'd gotten the better deal, and yet...
At least there's no one left to hold me back.
He waited, in the silence of the night, for those words to feel real.
He waited some more.
Who was he kidding?
He loved them, those vengeful bastards. He loved them so much that he couldn't bear to see them dead—not again. It was safer to keep his family and home as distant fantasies, as dreams he hated when he woke, than to accept them as real and mortal and closer than he could stand. He couldn't face the remains of the massacre, the corpses and the ash, made all the worse by knowing who they once were. The Belmonts still lived, somewhere in his memories. He couldn't risk letting even those die too.
He couldn't do anything at all.
The silence around him swelled, thick and suffocating.
Then it burst.
The rustling of garments from behind him. Footfalls across the leaves.
The scent of a floral perfume.
Trevor sprang off the stone and whirled to face this intruder. One arm moved, reflexively, toward his whip.
It fell back to his side at once, empty-handed, when he met her eyes.
She was beautiful.
Her eyes were the most unusual color in the moonlight, almost pink against the white of her face, like wild roses in a snowbank. Those eyes were so vivid, so pink, that somehow Trevor couldn't look away from them—could only gaze at the rest of her from the corners of his own. They stood out all the more beside her clothing: all white, from the wimple that covered her hair to the elegant gown that swept to the forest floor, shining faintly iridescent where the moonlight hit. Though clearly an adult, she was small and soft and delicate, at just the perfect height for Trevor to look directly into her rosy stare.
Something about the way she looked at him, the way she looked, made him trust her at once. She was a maiden from a tapestry, a princess from a fairytale, a pink-eyed angel sent to earth. She looked at him, her eyes narrowed with concern, and Trevor realized she was the first kind face he'd seen since before the massacre—the first other living face he'd seen since the night things went to hell.
He couldn't look away. He didn't even want to.
"You're a Belmont," she said, and her voice was soft and musical and nearly as beautiful as her eyes. She pronounced the name in a peculiar way, the final consonant almost silent, and it made Trevor like her all the more. She must be a foreigner—probably French, like Leon had been. Someone who hadn't grown up steeped in the hate the rest of Wallachia held for his family—someone he could actually trust...
Trevor held her gaze and nodded.
"You poor child," she said, and the pink in her eyes seemed to waver, like she was actually sad. Like she actually cared.
Trevor nearly forgot how much he resented being thought of as a child, as if he hadn't faced down and triumphed over more night creatures than the average Wallachian had even seen in their lifetime—and all before his thirteenth birthday. It didn't matter if she said it.
And now she was smiling: a small, sad smile that showed no teeth and didn't reach those misty pink eyes. It was almost disconcerting, after being alone for so long, to be looked at with sympathy. Her lyrical voice was barely above a whisper as she spoke again. "You've suffered horribly, haven't you?"
Of course he had. Of course he'd known he had. But somehow, hearing someone else say it made it sting all the more—as if she'd taken all the pain he'd tried not to feel and spoken it into reality.
His own eyes wavering, Trevor nodded again.
And then she was gliding toward him, white gown flowing all around her, stopping so close that, for a wonderful moment, her pink eyes filled his vision. Then she was wrapping her arms around him and pulling him into a surprisingly tight embrace, their shared gaze parting as her chin came to rest gently upon his shoulder.
Trevor's blood ran cold.
He froze up the instant her eyes were off him, his body now tense and his mind suddenly clear and alert. It was as though he'd been awakened from a deep sleep by being drenched with a bucket of icy water.
What the fuck was he doing.
What the fuck was he letting her do?!
Pink eyes. Skin the color of ivory. A dress that was the exact match for the spotless piece of fabric he'd found in that blood-splattered house.
This was the vampire that had murdered those families.
A vampire with her arms wrapped around him and her head at his neck and goddammit he'd done the one thing he was never to do and taken his eyes off the fangs.
I'm as good as dead.
He didn't know how much longer she'd bother keeping up the charade, how much time he had before the fangs he couldn't see would pierce his vein. There was no time to think up any escape plan more complicated than taking the whip in his hand—
—like he'd wanted to do all along—
—and winding it up as quickly as he could behind the vampire's back. He raised it and pressed as much of its coiled length as he could against the white skin of her exposed neck, like a firebrand to kindling.
He'd expected flames, or at least blood and screams of pain—even if the latter were only from him. Instead he felt nothing but a rush of damp air around him, saw nothing but a shapeless white cloud, as the vampire embracing him dissolved into mist.
If he weren't still within a fang's length from death, Trevor could have smiled.
Must've hurt , he realized, as he made to run deeper into the forest—it didn't matter where he ran to, just as long as he could lose her and stay hidden till dawn. She'd retreated.
Or so he thought.
A cloud in the vague outline of a woman appeared before him, and coalesced into solid form before he even realized what he'd seen. With a single, elegant motion of her arm, the vampire struck out, knocking him off his feet and sending him crashing hard to the ground some distance away.
It was only as he attempted to pull himself upright that Trevor noticed the extent of the damage the vampire had already inflicted. The front of his tunic hung in sickeningly familiar tatters, blood already dripping down his chest from five blazing points of pain.
God, he was bleeding —it'd be even easier for her to find him now, no matter how far he ran—
As he struggled again to stand, he saw the hem of her gown gliding through the darkness to meet him. The vampire stepped, ghostlike, across the forest floor, as slowly and peacefully as if she were walking in a dream.
She'd rip him apart like she had all the others—
The vampire was near enough that Trevor could see her claws, now fully extended and shockingly long, stretching from her dainty fingers like pearly blades.
No, her other victims had been indoors. If anyone found him when she was done with him—
—( no one would find him )—
—it'd be in pieces strewn across the forest.
He forced himself to stand, to face his opponent straight on like a Belmont. If this was his time to go out fighting, then he'd give her a fucking fight. He readied his whip. He aimed.
He fell straight into the rosy depths of her eyes.
He could only stand and watch them approach, paralyzed by their beauty. The hand with the whip dropped once again to his side.
He shouldn't have tried to attack her. She'd done nothing to him. She'd cared for him and loved him and had such pretty pink eyes—
She slashed at him again, and Trevor was thrown backwards a second time, colliding with the trunk of a tree. He collapsed among the roots and pressed a shaky hand to the new gashes carved across his torso, as the girlish laughter of the vampire rang out through the air like a bell.
How stupid was he? How had she managed to bewitch him again?
He could hear the quiet shuffling of her gown, the crisp snap of leaves pressed under her graceful tread. She was calm and composed and still several paces away.
This had to be completely unlike her actions the night she'd slaughtered that family, attacking at full strength in a desperate bid to escape. She intended to kill him, there was no doubt about that, but she was in no rush. She was having some fun with him first.
Maybe she really did care. She was giving him time to think.
Another step closer.
Vampires were human once. And they kept with them all the vices and failings of humankind, mutated and magnified across the centuries after their turning. Their habits, their dependencies, could sink deeper and become more entrenched than ever could occur within a mortal lifetime.
Especially when it came to combat.
And another.
With a seemingly infinite lifespan before them and with practically no one to stand in their way, they could become too comfortable with whatever bloody bag of tricks had served them well in the past. A battle technique, a weapon, a magic spell—whatever it was, the key to fighting a vampire, like anything else, was to identify their crutch and take it away.
That wouldn't necessarily mean victory. It wouldn't even with humans. But it could definitely throw them off balance.
And right now, anything that might tip the battle in his favor would help.
Even closer.
So what did this vampire have?
Inhuman strength? They all had that.
Weapons? None that he could see—not unless he counted those claws. And he was neither stupid nor skilled enough to attempt to break off all ten.
Magic? She'd turned into mist, but that was fairly common, and he didn't know how to stop that anyway—
She's here.
He squinted his eyes open the slightest crack, and raised his arm just in time to block the vampire from tearing into his midsection again. The stabbing impact still flung him farther away, where he came to lie crumpled in a bloody heap on the ground. He didn't move.
He couldn't let himself—not yet. He'd nearly figured her out.
Trevor lay still even as his heart raced, as his limbs seemed to ache with the urge to push himself upright again. By now he'd learned the hard way that to face his opponent head-on would be to lose entirely. There was something about her gaze that could capture even a killer by trade and reduce him to a gaping fool.
Charm. That was her crutch.
Utter shitloads of charm.
Somewhere in the distance, a trailing gown rustled through the leaves.
How else could she have driven him to surrender both his wits and himself so completely, with no effort on her part but a sympathetic voice and a glance of—
Her eyes.
Her dazzling, rose-hued, lovely eyes —
Even the mental image of their luster, like pink jewels set in ivory, was enough to melt his better judgment away for one blissful and horrible moment. He gritted his teeth and forced the vision into oblivion. It was clear now beyond a doubt what her trick was. She'd been using magic after all.
Somewhere, closer now, blood dripped off claws to the ground below.
He remembered a page from the longest section of the bestiary—the section that held the vampires. An illustration of narrowed eyes, blood-red and malicious and so unlike those approaching now, sending out magic in dark and twisted waves. The text alongside it, detailing the subtly lethal ability some vampires possessed: to snare the attention of their prey and hold them in thrall.
The power to mesmerize.
He knew what he had to do.
Somewhere overhead, finally close enough, sounded the quick and shallow breathing of a monster victorious.
Trevor jumped to his feet, whip held out in warning before him.
He could not meet her eyes and court his death, no matter what he longed for in some primitive and base corner of his mind. He could not check to see if her stare, like drops of milky blood, was running across the coils and length of the holy weapon that had seared her, seeking the easiest way past it to a kill.
He could only keep his head tilted downward and hope that the outstretched whip was enough to distract her from the dagger clenched in his other hand.
In nearly one movement, he raised the dagger, aimed blindly, and sent it soaring out to pierce the night. Moonlight, the color of her fangs, glared off its blade in the fraction of a second before it left the narrow battlefield within his view, and he prayed, to whichever god still gave a shit, that it would end up somewhere close to her heart.
And behold: the white gown drew back from him in a glimmering dart as the vampire, faster than he'd seen her move yet, nimbly dodged the path of the dagger's flight. Trevor, too, had stepped backwards in time with her movements, as though they were dance partners at opposite ends of a ballroom, and sent out another dagger as soon as he was certain of her new position. He needed her to remain wary but assured, focused enough to avoid his attacks but confident enough not to escape again in a billowing cloud of mist.
His priority, now, was more distance. The rest could come later.
Another silk-smooth evasion. Another slicing arc.
An arena widening, step by step, as two predators moved as one.
In a matter of moments, Trevor had nearly run out of knives, and, in a few moments more, the vampire was sure to run out of patience. There would soon be nothing to stop her from seeing through his own trick and risking the whip, clearing the new distance between them with demonic speed and unleashing the full extent of the bloody rage he had yet to witness firsthand. He couldn't risk stalling for time, tossing pieces of his weapon belt or the nearest branch he could grasp and hoping a creature with supernatural visual acuity would somehow fail to notice the difference. Distracting her even once had been accomplishment enough.
He let his final dagger fly.
Her last dodge. His last chance.
Trevor watched the hem of the white gown flutter and settle as he noted its position and distance, with an eye more calculating than he hoped its wearer suspected.
If he were to do one thing right tonight, it had to be this.
She's moved to the left now... and she's as tall as me, so... above her head... and just off center…
He aimed once more into the darkness, and the cracking of his whip fractured the night. Only then did he dare to look upward again, to face the vampire's terrible, wonderful, devouring gaze and let his mind slip away, in the fraction of a second that remained before the end. It made no difference what he did now—one of their fates had already been sealed.
He just hoped it wasn't his —
And he was submersed at once in those twin pools of roses, drowning in their jewel-like depths—
Then the spell was broken.
Trevor heard it before he saw it—before he even realized he'd been jolted from his trance.
The familiar strike of the whip's impact.
A sizzling hiss.
Cries of shock and agony, ripped from a beautiful voice.
His aim had been true. On his whip's blazing downward arc, the holy fire it contained had directly connected with what once was a lovely pink eye.
The vampire stood curled into herself, seemingly frozen in disbelief. One delicate hand, saber claws now retracted, desperately clutched the spot where the whip had burned her eye, hiding the full extent of the damage. But trails of blood and fluid leaked down her face, staining her white dress below, and the too-familiar smell of smoke and burning flesh carried on the wind.
Trevor moved in for the kill.
The fine features of the vampire seemed almost to tighten, jaw clenched and fangs bared. Her bloodied hand fell away from her face, trenchant claws shooting back out from her fingers with all the ease of a lady unfurling a fan. Her mismatched gaze centered on Trevor again: one eye still pink and beguiling, another a raw and oozing crater, and both narrowed in hate.
In that moment, the adrenaline-slow space between the whip's rise and its descent, Trevor almost understood her. Such a flawless trick that won so much easy prey, now crashing down around her thanks to one brat and his dumb luck.
But for once, this wasn't luck. He hadn't spent that blur of countless days in the wilderness for nothing. All those birds he'd snatched from the wing while foraging, the nightly target practice on demonic foes, the lifetime he'd spent within his clan's hallowed walls—it wasn't luck. This was complete and total Belmont skill.
And he would do what any Belmont hunter would.
The lash of the whip left another searing fissure on the vampire's white neck, set the collar of her bloodstained gown aflame, and still she stood, upright and furious. His weapon was no Morning Star.
It would have to do.
With a shining blur of her glossy claws, the vampire stabbed out at him. But the distance he'd created, the time he'd bought, was on his side.
The whip coiled around her wrists, locking her arms in place like scorching cuffs. Trevor hauled its remaining length forward, tugging roughly enough to force his prey to the ground.
Her body went limp against the earth, and shone out with a cloudy glow. In that instant, Trevor could do nothing more than realize how easily all could be lost, as the figure of the vampire again dissipated into mist—
—then rapidly solidified, slamming into the ground again. She was blessedly solid and burning and trapped, unable to maintain the transformation: the sacred power of the weapon was eating her strength and magic away as surely as the flames were consuming her dress.
And Trevor was lashing out again and again, faster than he'd ever had to, faster than he'd thought he could. The smoking trenches across her skin, the creeping blaze across her clothes, were reassuring signs but still not enough. If she could attempt escape, then she was still a risk, and he would not be satisfied until his target was ashes on the ground.
Because she'd killed so many for no reason more than to sate her own endless hunger.
Because he'd bet anything she was that elusive foreign vampire that had lured his relatives off on that last doomed hunt—the vampire they never got to kill.
Because—
One round and watery pink eye, as perfect as ever, shimmered up at him from the torn and blackened wreckage of the vampire's face. It stretched wide with horror, quivered with pain, and Trevor almost wanted to slow his attack even as he recognized this last, desperate ploy for what it was.
The vampire's magic reserves were dwindling as rapidly as her hold on life, and the loss of one eye must have weakened her hypnotic abilities by half at least. And yet, some last dusting of rose-colored charms seemed to dance through the air, to cloud his own eyes and choke his heart. He felt almost sorry for her, this poor dying creature, with her ethereal grace and her mangling claws.
Was he any better than her, really, to take that which was vibrant and whole and render it unknowable? Was this not the same desecration the Belmonts had endured?
Vampires were human once.
She was as dangerous to him now as a frightened rabbit, caught fast in the hunter's trap—one of those pure white rabbits, with the pink eyes...
Trevor's next strike scorched her pleading pink eye away.
Because he refused to let his story end here.
If he'd died on the night of the massacre, with the rest of his family, at least that would have been fair. And if he'd died after that, alone in the woods, it would have been his own damn fault.
But to die on the journey back, practically on his own doorstep, at the claws of some sneaking petty bitch of a vampire with one shitty little parlor trick?
Like hell.
It wasn't a hero's story. There wasn't even anyone to tell it to. But if he was the last of the goddamn Belmonts, then he'd give their legacy a better ending than some fucking vampire's next meal.
It was either her or him, and it wouldn't be him—
The thing that lay before him was dark and hideous, all traces of elegance and finery burned away. It was neither human nor vampire, but a crumbling mass that only just resembled a person. Trevor could no longer tell what exactly he was attacking, or why.
It was dead.
Trevor shakily brought his whip back down to his side, his frenzied breathing loud against the night that waited silent and silver once more.
He stood in place for several minutes longer, catching his breath and waiting for his racing heart to slow. His eyes never left the vampire's corpse.
Those spellbinding pink eyes must have worked their magic on every one of her victims between here and France. A vampire creeping into a home at night to feed upon sleeping innocents was vile, certainly, but vile in a typical, commonplace sort of way. It was expected. But to think that those murdered families had been just like him—that they'd trusted the lovely foreigner in white, with her voice like music and her eyes like roses, trusted her enough that they'd invited her across their thresholds themselves…
How easily had they all fallen before her? How long had they lasted, the ones who'd fought back? How long would he have lasted tonight, if he hadn't been wielding his consecrated whip?
And his relatives—the ones he wished he could still believe were off on a hunt from which they'd one day return. Had this vampire deceived them too? Or was it their own countrymen, ambushing them as a vengeful mob?
He'd never know. He wasn't sure if he should be saddened or grateful.
The fire of battle that had driven him was now slowly dying down to ashes. He was exhausted. Everything hurt. He could have died.
He supposed he'd suffered enough tonight to have earned the path back to the estate.
Trevor turned his back on the northern path for the time being and began the task of collecting his fallen knives, shifting his position and scanning the forest ground in the hope of catching the flash of moonlight on a blade. The sting of fresh wounds and the weight of fatigue made even this process seem a battle in itself. As he trudged on heavy legs to the location of each and bent to retrieve them with gritted teeth, he even began to wonder if returning to the estate might actually be the easier option.
He knew his current task was only delaying the inevitable. Still—if the events of tonight had proven anything, it was the necessity of staying armed at all times.
And it wasn't like he had anyone waiting back home.
Home. What a joke. At best he would be returning to a pile of ashes, encircled by a field of corpses. To connect the horrors to which he'd forsaken his family with the gilded memories of an increasingly distant past seemed almost profane.
He straightened up with a groan, his last dagger in hand, and turned again to face north. It was time.
He really didn't want to do this.
And they didn't want to die, he reminded himself, as he began the long walk to whatever remained of his home. And it wasn't as though any part of his new life had ever been anything close to enjoyable. So what difference would it make, really, to face the reality—the responsibility—that he'd been so desperately avoiding all along? Like a child, like a coward, like a traitor—
He just didn't want to see them dead. Not again. The scene of their murders loomed just before him: the dread mystery lingering at the end of the forest, and the horrific tableaus scrawled across the canvas of his mind. The corpses of the foreign vampire's victims had been bad enough, and those were recent kills—even indoors. Whatever he'd find of his family here, left to the whims of Wallachia and the ravages of the elements, was sure to be a thousand times worse.
What would remain after nearly two months? Decaying flesh? Just bones? Did he have a hope in hell of even recognizing any of them at all?
He didn't want to think about it. But it was as though the worst, most sadistic part of his mind was forcing these images upon him—a prelude to what waited just past those farthest trees.
There would be no escaping it, no matter where he turned.
So he might as well take those last few steps forward.
There was no need anymore to avoid the charms of eyes like liquid blooms, the pierce of claws sharper than any thorn. Still, he kept his gaze turned toward the ground.
It wasn't the undead he had to fear now.
He knew he'd reached the forest's edge at last when the harsh slap of moonlight against his face broke him too soon from the comforting embrace of the shadows. He'd made it home, with no option but to face whatever horrors he'd run from so long before.
He swallowed hard, then lifted up his head.
Nothing lay on the grounds between himself and the estate.
Nothing at all.
And, even now, with no mob holding him back, no certain death waiting before him, Trevor could do nothing but stare.
He remembered the bloodshed of that last night all too well, the grisly scenes lit by fire and clouded by smoke. They'd murdered his mother before his eyes. They'd brought brutal deaths upon all they'd found at the estate, every Belmont there from child to adult. Everyone but him.
They were still there, the last night he was, left to lie bleeding and broken on the ground.
And now nothing remained but the memory.
What had they done with them? Had those vultures dragged them off, plundering for valuables or morbid trophies, committing desecrations he couldn't let himself imagine? Or had there actually been another soul in Wallachia who'd cared enough to give them a proper burial?
More questions he knew would go forever unanswered.
Just as he'd suspected, he'd returned much too late—as he always had, as he always would. The skeleton of the estate, ashy gray in the moonlight's glare, towered above the empty stretch of land, a nameless tombstone for the invisible dead.
He'd told himself he'd go inside. He hadn't made the journey back, endured another brush with death, all for nothing. Rooting through the ashes for supplies still felt as selfish and squalid as the man who'd claimed his mother's crucifix, but he had to look inside for himself—had to know what further violations had occurred within the walls of his childhood home.
In the stillness of the night and the stark glow of the moon, he crossed the last distance to the ruins of the estate.
The lingering smell of smoke was exactly as he remembered. But everything else had changed.
Cracked and crumbling walls, some fallen entirely, gave the structure a jagged shape, casting a sawtoothed shadow before him. Inky spots of darkness, like blank eyes, peered down at him through shattered windows, while the remains of broken turrets reached like pleading fingers into the night. Trevor could hear the faint howl of a night breeze through labyrinthine frames of rooms and around scattered heaps of rubble, could see ash rise and settle with every step nearer he took.
It didn't look like any home, much less his. It could have been from a ghost town, a demon castle, a haunted house—but not a place where anyone had lived.
He could almost believe he'd never laid eyes on it, so different was it from the haven he had known. It seemed distant, nearly like those corpses he'd discovered by chance: shocking, tragic—but not personal.
But he knew the truth.
The Wallachians' attack hadn't even left their former defenders a façade of normalcy in death, the way those inviting little houses had enclosed their vampiric intruder's gory secret. All the Belmonts had in life had been sought out and destroyed completely.
All but him.
And so he had to do it, he reminded himself, as he shoved himself through a crack in a back wall and made to stand, blinking away ash, in the debris that littered the wreckage of the nearest room. He couldn't turn his back on his family a second time.
He'd noticed the roof of the estate had collapsed in the fire, but only now did he realize its effect. With no ceiling but a perfect view of the sky above, it felt as though he were still outside. The single eye of the moon and the dusty swirls of stars cast their light upon him even now, illuminating the remaining walls of the estate and all that lay within them with a ghostly silver glow.
With nothing but memories to serve as reminders of either the killers or the dead, the site of the Belmonts' massacre had settled into an eerie tranquility. In another place, at another time, the quiet aftermath of destruction could have almost seemed peaceful—if he were not the last Belmont living but some distant explorer, sifting through the relics of a once-great family's tomb.
The ash lay like a heavy carpet, thick and undisturbed. As far as Trevor could see, through the maze of yawning gaps that had once been doors or walls, every surface at ground level was blanketed in it. Rising out of the dusting of gray, seemingly at random, were piles of stones and tumbled beams and other materials too damaged to identify: a house in abstract.
No one could have entered in the weeks since the burning without carving a clear trail through the layers of ash, or having to physically move aside massive stones and timbers. And clearly, no one had. Whoever had cared enough to remove his family's bodies had not cared enough to ransack the estate—whether out of compassion or negligence, Trevor couldn't tell.
This should have stoked some fire in him, he knew, some all-consuming emotion like he'd felt when fighting for his life. Righteous anger, maybe, that the brutality he'd witnessed had truly been for no reason but his family's existence in itself, or even exquisite relief that he'd have no further atrocities to uncover tonight. A dull sense of resignation was all he could manage.
It would be his job, now, to further uproot his family's ancestral home. To grope through piles of ashes, hoping not to find something too human on the other side. To pretend, at the rising of the dawn, that he'd never known these blackened and familiar halls. To gather up as much as he could hold of a dead family's possessions and carry it away and make it all the easier for some new marauder to do the same.
To immerse himself fully in the waking nightmare he'd carried with him for months.
Trevor stared for a few minutes longer at the serene wasteland before him, where all that remained of the Belmonts' legacy lay buried beneath a snowy dusting of ashes.
Then he turned back around and pushed himself out through the crack in the wall, to breathe in the clear night air once more.
The ash was stinging his eyes.
He wanted to believe, as he made his way back to a forest that waited unchanged, that there was something inspiring, even comforting, about how the estate still stood. Maybe the bastards who'd seen themselves fit to mete judgment upon supposed heretics and black magicians still feared some divine retribution, from their victims' vengeful spirits or their own jealous god. Or some fool in this goddamn country still held some last trace of compassion. If he couldn't accept it as his home, then why not think of it as some solemn memorial, or hallowed ground?
More pragmatically than that, though, he knew for certain now that no one else living knew of the estate's secret: that mighty golden stone, carved with arcane runes and the Belmont crest, that guarded the way to the hold—the greatest trove of materials and knowledge that any monster hunter could wish to find. If the Wallachians too wouldn't dare to enter the ruins, to skulk past unsteady walls and shift fallen stone, then they had no chance of locating it, much less discovering the way past.
Trevor had never learned how to move the stone himself. But it was still waiting for him, somewhere in the shambles of the noble House of Belmont, safeguarding the last remains of the world he had known. And wasn't it at least some solace to think he still had the chance to see it again, on the day of his conquering return?
(He knew he would never return.)
It should not have been so easy, his cowardly retreat back to the solitude of the trees. He found himself enclosed again in the wooded gloom much sooner than he'd expected, and practically stumbled upon the blackened corpse of the vampire before he realized what it was. That last battle for his life already seemed a world away. And though the vampire was long dead, he couldn't keep his face from twisting in hate as he looked again at his newest kill, the pathetic scope of all he'd managed to accomplish piercing him like more claws.
Weeks of travel and hardship, his own life in peril, and all for this? An unrecognizable pile of ashes, the tattered clothes on his back, and a collection of new scars?
Trevor looked down at himself again, assessing the damage the vampire had wrought. Bright red slashes scored the bare skin visible on his chest and one of his arms, the blood caking in sticky, drying remnants along the edges of the wounds but no longer dripping to the ground. They were relatively shallow, a predator's playful taunts against a spellbound victim, but they were nothing good. He'd have to clean them out soon before things got worse, keep a much closer watch on all of them than he'd needed to with the single cut across his eye.
Still. He'd live.
The damage to his tunic was more concerning. It still hung in one piece, but the shreds across the front and sleeve would widen and worsen before too long. And the weather would only get colder. He could manage it before, he was managing it now, but how much could one lone human be expected to endure? Even the raised embroidery of his family crest was only hanging on by a few scant golden threads.
Trevor nearly smiled then, and let his fingers trace over the encircled cross at its center for a moment, the way he used to when he was young.
Then he gripped the crest hard and ripped it away. That vampire's claws had made it easy for him.
How considerate of her.
If he ever found some money, if he ever had one courageous bone in his body, he could force himself into any town that would have him and pretend he'd never known the Belmonts at all and that the fuckers must have had it coming anyhow. And who would take him for a Belmont at this point, battered and poor and even alive? He'd say his parents were killed by night creatures and he'd have the scars to prove it, say he had no family and it wouldn't even be a lie. And no one would ever doubt it, how sad and alone and pitiful he was, and he'd take whatever they could give.
Better food. Better clothes. A hunting job. Anything.
But he'd keep the crest with him anyway, just in case.
And if he was ever brave enough to stand up for the family he'd abandoned, if he was ever confident enough to spite the world that had rejected him from the moment of his birth, then he could make a new one and wear it with pride.
For now, though, he had to survive.
He made to slip the crest inside an empty knife holster, preparing to move onward in what little darkness remained. He stopped when he found something else inside.
He reached in and pulled out the pale and lustrous shred of fabric ripped from the vampire's gown, then released it to drift through the air and land upon what was left of her body, pristine white on charred black.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
Only then did he notice something beside the vampire's corpse, something delicate and still beautiful that glistened in the moonlight. A decorative hair comb that must have been hidden by her headdress, white as her gown had been and studded with equally light jewels.
It was small and not too ornate, damaged and even slightly blackened from the lashes of his whip. He could say it was his poor dead mother's, a family heirloom, he'd give it for any price they'd offer, and who in Wallachia wouldn't believe him?
Trevor bent down and clutched it in his hand. Then he turned away and walked farther into the forest, as ready as he'd ever be to face the dangerous and uncertain future.
He did not think to attempt pulling whatever remained of the vampire's fangs from its mouth, or counting just how many scars it had inflicted. He did not care that he was letting the story of his newest kill slip further from his mind.
He did not even realize until days later, on the outskirts of an unknown town and alone as ever, that he had become a real vampire hunter after all.