Author's Note: Obligatory apologies for the delay. There's a lot going on in this fic, so I really wanted to take the extra time to make sure everything is where I want it. That said, I did end up having to make some changes to 'Chapter 1: Living Legends.' Nothing big, just rewording specific sentences so the meaning comes across a little stronger.

All set, onward.

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Chapter 6: Old Bones and Shattered Homes

Alucard was furious.

All his life, he'd intimately known the mountains and valleys that surrounded Poenari, his sister's secluded castle. During the many visits of his childhood, he'd roamed these forests in search of wild herbs for his mother and game to hunt. He'd fished in the rivers and explored caves, trained and played here, or simply spend many hours walking amongst the trees to clear his mind. Seras had taught him how to shift into his wolf form here and they'd once passed an entire evening chasing firebugs and trapping them in glass jars. Blackberries grew in the undergrowth, which he gathered every year to bring home.

And all this time, he'd never known on whose bones he trod.

So many stories at his father's knee. So many cautionary tales his sister had whispered to him in the dark of the Belmonts and their exploits. Not once had either of them told him how close the notorious hunters' estate was to Poenari.

It took every ounce of his restraint to keep his gaze disinterested as he and his companions approached the ruins where he once played as a child, alternating between boy and wolf pup with an ease that came naturally to him. When the three of them accessed the crumbling interior through a window, he thought back to Belmont's words in Gresit about what lay beneath the house. If there really was some hidden wealth of knowledge or weaponry beneath the surface, had Seras known of it? Had Father? Vampirekind had been searching for the Belmont Hold for centuries.

His confusion only grew when they uncovered a hexed door disguised as a hearthstone, a door only the magician among them could figure out how to open.

"I didn't know it was a fucking, magic door," Belmont growled. "It doesn't make us black magicians."

They made their descent, following the stone steps into a dark corridor, which led onto a spiral stairway that drilled even deeper into the earth. Alucard imagined Seras walking this same path, hidden by her ever present shadow as she followed some unsuspecting Belmont into their most guarded secrets. It would have been an easy task for her, wouldn't it?

"Belmont isn't even a Wallachian name," Sypha said as they passed by moth-eaten banners bearing a sigil Alucard had only seen in books or painted on shields or helms in the armory of Dracula's castle. "That just dawned on me."

"No, the family is originally from the kingdom of France," Belmont said.

"Like Pip?" He remembered asking Seras that when she'd told him of the vampire hunter family's origins.

"Yes, pet. Like Pip." she said with her usual indulgent smile. She was always smiling at him that way. Always affectionate. Always elusive. Always distant. How many secrets did she keep from him? How many topics skirted or avoided altogether? Her and Father both?

When they reached the bottom of the staircase and Belmont forced open the door, Alucard expected the Hold to be an ill-maintained closet of forbidden knowledge and cursed artifacts the family had deemed unholy and discarded.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when Sypha spread the fire from her torch into the countless lanterns that lined the chamber. This…this collection was on par with Father's archives, if not greater. Rows upon rows, entire floors, of books seemed to stretch on forever, punctuated here and there with display cases and shelves containing alchemical compounds and chemical solutions. The skeleton of a white dragon, believed to have gone extinct in the twelfth century, hung from the ceiling in a grisly display.

"Is it organized?" Sypha asked, barely able to contain her excitement. Alucard supposed she'd never seen a library of this magnitude in her life, and wondered what she'd make of Castle Dracula's. "Is there a way to find things?"

"I imagine one sacrifices a chicken and then divines the location of the book you are seeking by the shape of its entrails," he scoffed. "Or maybe Belmont has a crystal ball for you to look into."

"Shut up," Belmont said, glaring at him.

It angered Alucard to think his family had lied to him about this place. A petty anger, he knew that, and maybe he was wrong about Seras and Father. But…he knew in his heart that if Seras had known the Belmont Estate was so close to Poenari, then it stood to reason she knew about the Hold as well. So why had Seras allowed a century's worth of bloodshed and persecution upon the vampires? As he came to a stop before one of the glass cabinets, his mood blackened further at the sickening sight of vampire skulls lined up like specimens or trophies, as though they were not fit for a dignified burial.

"What was this Leon Belmont doing in Wallachia?" he heard Sypha ask behind him.

Rather than wait for Belmont, Alucard answered her himself, "Hunting Dracula."

No one, it seemed, had anything to say to this.

Alucard frowned at the littlest skull in the display case, a tiny thing whose cranial bones had not fully ossified over the fontanels. The skull of an infant. A dhampir child who had done nothing wrong and was snuffed out before it ever had a chance to be anything, and he imagined the Belmonts finding his mother, ignorantly killing her for witchcraft, and then killing him simply for existing.

"This is amazing," he heard the Speaker woman call out to him from the lectern where the library's index lay. "Isn't it? It's amazing!"

"Charming," Alucard said sourly.

"You're not even a little impressed?"

"Well, it's like a museum dedicated to the extermination of my people, so no. Not thrilled."

Sypha looked up at him as he approached, then back at Belmont, who was messing with some hideous whip comprised of chain links. "Where should we start?"

"Draculina," Belmont answered without pause. "Maybe we can find some clues as to what she's looking for."

"And just how would your biased and outdated histories of a century old vampiress help us discover her recent activities?" Alucard snarled, although he too was troubled by the conversation he'd overheard the other night. In all honesty, he found it hard to believe it was his sister in the magician's tale. What knowledge could the Speakers have that was not already in Dracula's keeping? However, he could not deny that another vampiress might have been cruel enough to slaughter Sypha's people whether they had what she wanted or not.

"If that was Draculina at all," Sypha said with pointed annoyance as she flipped through the old index's pages. "Remember, the vampiress I met didn't introduce herself. And we can't go jumping to conclusions based on her 'ample proportions.'"

Alucard's lips broke into a bitter smile at the disparaging look on Belmont's face. "Just tell me what shelf she's on. She's probably listed under Draculina but might as well check Red Death too, just in case the stacks were never consolidated when my family figured out who she was."

Not so organized a collection then if that's the case.

As Sypha turned the index's pages to the first third of the book and read off an inane jumble of numbers and letters that sent Belmont trotting down the rows of shelves, Alucard felt a pang of déjà vu. In his mind's eye, he pictured Master Bernadotte rattling off the numbered codes of books and Seras sprinting through the library to retrieve them. "Adrian, make yourself useful," she'd said, hand patting his head as she passed him, and then, "Pip, where do you want these?

"I've been wondering," Sypha jolted him out of his reverie. "Is Draculina your sister?"

Startled by her voice, albeit a quiet one, Alucard nodded.

"But…she's not a dhampir, right?"

"No," he answered. "We call ourselves brother and sister for simplicity's sake, but there is no blood relation between us."

They lapsed into silence again, broken when Sypha called out another code, to which Belmont's disembodied voice shouted back, "Hold on, I haven't gotten to the first one yet!"

Alucard snorted, glanced over the Speaker's shoulder to scan the page's contents, then set off on his own. "I'll go get it." Make yourself useful, Adrian.

The book was a volume called The Compendium of Vampyres, found tucked away on one of the upper tiers on a bottom shelf. When Alucard found it, he had to brush away a cobweb and a film of over a decade's worth of dust, and the spine protested fiercely when he cracked it open and slid his finger along the table of contents. Walter Bernhard, Olrox, Helen, Zorin Blitz, Zufall, Grimaldo, Joachim Armster, Carmilla—there she was. Page eighty-seven, Draculina: The Red Death. Carefully and somewhat worried the tome would crumble in his hands, he turned to the desired page. There was his sister's coat of arms, laurel wreaths around a salient lion, and her motto: Though Hell shall bar the way.

There was a sketch of her, but it was a rough depiction and had he not seen who it was supposed to be, he probably would not have recognized Seras. Draculina, he read. True name: uncertain. This was crossed out and an addendum in neat handwriting asserted Seras Victoria. The book also said nothing of her birthplace, except for the tentative note of Wallachia? and Not a Wallachian name. Roman? Older than a century? Alucard frowned. If Seras was as old as the Ancient Romans, she would have to predate Dracula, and that simply wasn't the case. Unless Father was far older than he claimed. He turned the page to find a series of illustrations showing the different formations Seras' shadow could take on as well as the Belmonts' various methods for countering it: the black wings, a shield that morphed and changed as needed, a storm of what the vampire hunters called 'shadow knives,' and other forms Alucard had never seen the dreaded thing take on.

Most vampires, read a small paragraph. Have the ability to become mist, deadly gas, or even a colony of bats. Not so Draculina who wears the form of a corporeal shadow which acts as cloak, shield, and dagger in tandem.

Cannot form shadows in total darkness.

Razor-sharp.

Threat level…. Here the words trailed off as though the original author had been unable to settle on a word to describe Draculina's strength before they penned in, Weaknesses: Sunlight was crossed out as was silver, garlic, the Cross, stakes, holy water, Latin prayers, blessed steel, iron and salt until only running water remained. With a question mark. Threat level was repeated here, followed by a single word:

Deathless.

Alucard closed the book and tucked it under his arm. By the time he returned to the lectern, Belmont was already there, lips moving soundlessly as he flipped through the pages of a small leather-bound tome.

"What do you know? It can read."

The hunter ignored him, discarded the book, and picked up another, this one titled, The Dread Progeny of Dracula. He leafed through this one for a couple seconds, then turned it around for the two of them to see. "Is this her, Sypha? The vampire who visited your tribe?"

Alucard turned to Sypha in time to see her eyes flare in recognition and she nodded. "Yes. That's her."

So Draculina really was the vampire lady who had sought out the Speaker tribe, Alucard thought as he studied the charcoal rendering of his sister's face. It was an uncanny likeness, capturing her deceptively soft features and the mischievous look in her eyes. Her head was tilted, like she was smiling over her shoulder at them, ready to vanish into shadows at a moment's notice. Whichever Belmont had sketched this must've had an exceptional memory to have drawn her so accurately.

"Have you any idea what she could be looking for?" Belmont addressed him this time, setting the open book on the lectern.

Alucard shook his head. "If Sypha says this was last year, then—"

"My God." They both turned to Sypha, who'd suddenly gone pale. "What if this is it? What if she's looking for the Hold itself? Belmont, is there anything down here your ancestors wanted out of the hands of the vampires?"

The hunter raised an eyebrow. "Have you any idea how little that narrows it down?"

"But this place is so close to Poenari," Alucard spoke up. "Seras must know about the Hold. Wouldn't she have come down here long ago to find what she was after?"

"What if she doesn't know how to open the door?" Sypha pointed toward the way they'd come in. "Can she understand magical runes or would she need someone to translate them?"

"Someone like a Speaker," Belmont put a hand to his temple. "Shit."

This doesn't make any sense, thought Alucard. If a translation to open the Belmonts' magical door of death was all Seras needed to get into the Hold, all she needed was to go to Master Bernadotte. Even Father could have assisted her. Moreover, it was more like his sister to just aim her goddamn cannon at the door and get it over with. Even the strongest of magic wards had a limit, and gunpowder was a pretty effective method of finding it.

Or maybe…was it possible Seras had gone to the Speakers because she had something to hide? No, that couldn't be it either. She could hide something from Father, sure, but not Bernadotte. She loved the Master Librarian and trusted him more than she had any other human.

For her to keep something from him…it would have to be truly terrible indeed.

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Author's Notes: I have a lot of speculation that Alucard lived a very sheltered life before Lisa died. At least in regarding the vampire world. Isaac refers to him as a 'spoiled child' in season 2, and when Sumi and Taka mention Cho in season 3, Alucard says 'if she was in Dracula's castle, then she died there.' Meaning he did not recognize her even when they fought, which shows he'd never met Cho. Furthermore, his comment on Leon Belmont hunting Dracula in season 2 seems very hostile, which shows either he doesn't care Leon hunting his father had a valid reason, doesn't know Leon's side of the story, or it's probable the Netflix version isn't staying true to the game.

But his hosility is also justified in the fact the Belmonts were killing innocents. The last skull he was looking at in this episode really was an infant's skull. The split running down the middle of its forehead is known as a fontanel, which is a soft space between cranial bones and is only found in newborns. They usually close up and are replaced by immoveable bone sutures between the ages of nine and eighteen months.

Final notes, Seras' coat of arms and motto are a couple references. The laurel wreaths represent the Greek goddess, Nike, whose Roman equivalent is Victoria. As for the lion, the Spanish word for lion is 'león,' which is a possible indirect mockery of Leon Belmont and the entire lineage. Her motto, Though Hell shall bar the way, is a quote from the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.

Thanks for reading.

I own neither of these series.