The slight jolting sensation of landing on solid ground nearly shook Grant's suspicions along with him. The floor beneath still looked, still felt, so sturdy and familiar and real, no different from that of the cobbled alleys and town squares where he'd shown off his acrobatic feats for coins in happier days. Shouldn't a seasoned performer like him recognize the difference between the genuine article and a fake?
He almost felt... safe.
He ran for his life anyway.
That was just the damn castle's way, he knew: if it couldn't snare your body, it'd catch you by the mind. At times like this, he had to trust in this fact more than he trusted himself.
He forced his attention away from the sweep of columns ahead that enfolded hazards they were yet to pass, and tried to focus instead on what was immediately at eye level: Sypha's back. As the hunters moved in and out of candlelight, the monastic robes flickered blue-white before him, like a ghostly shroud in the darkness. It did little to distract Grant from his knowledge of the real ghosts that lay waiting at their heels.
The first low rumbles of collapsing brick from behind him, closer than he'd expected, were enough to clear his mind of any thoughts but escape. He pushed himself to move faster, no longer caring about maintaining the distance between himself and Sypha, tactics be damned. The increasingly loud echoes of the rapidly crumbling bricks were matched only by the beating of his heart.
As he continued to race down the seemingly endless corridor, he thought that he could hear, between his desperate gasps for air, the sound of something even more concerning—that of the shattered shards of clay colliding against something below them and clattering to a heavy stop.
Images of bloody stakes and moldering bones filled the catacombs of his mind. He risked a glance over his shoulder, and realized too late—goddamn this castle, seriously—that he was risking his life too.
Row upon row of spikes stretched like fangs out of the black maw of the pit behind him, the darkness nearly close enough to swallow him up too. From the corner of his eye, he thought he could just make out a figure below, fallen and crumpled and stabbed through upon the stakes. Grant turned back around, already having seen too much.
The gory afterimage lingered before his eyes, all too similar to what lurked at the edges of his memory. It was the corpse and not Sypha that he saw as he strained to run faster still.
He'd already stumbled against the monk before he realized what was happening, throwing the both of them off balance as what little remained of the crumbling floor rushed up to meet them.
They locked eyes for an instant as reality set in. Sypha's face was ashen beneath the cowl.
There was no time for apologies, no time even to think. No sooner had the hunters pushed themselves upright again than the floor fell away beneath them.
Sypha shrieked as the two of them plummeted into the vault. It took Grant a moment to realize that he was screaming too.
I'm a goner—
Something heavy and metallic was forced into his hand. The darkness was flooded with otherworldly blue. Then—
—he stopped.
He hung suspended in the air, his feet just inches above a heap of cracked and bloodstained skulls. At first he could only stare, stupefied, barely daring to breathe. Then he realized what had saved him.
Sypha levitated above him, encircled by a faint aura of glowing blue. The sheer force of the magic caused the trailing ends of the monastic garments to flow out around them both. One hand clenched the Belnades staff.
Elegantly carved whorls of metal dug into Grant's own hand from his death grip on the staff's other end.
"Hang in there," Sypha muttered, teeth gritted in concentration.
"Nice choice of words," Grant muttered back. "Very apt."
Sypha said nothing in response—only bit down harder with narrowed eyes as the magic radiated out in pulsating shimmers around them both.
Grant knew it wasn't the best decision to take cheap shots at someone with mystic powers who'd just saved both of their lives. But if he couldn't find something he could pretend to laugh at, then he might just end up screaming again. With no easy way out of the pit and Sypha's magic straining at its limits, their deaths hadn't yet been averted so much as they'd been delayed.
"Sypha! Grant!"
Through the hazy veil of blue, Grant could barely make out Trevor's silhouette, not so very high above them but unreachable all the same, atop the crumbled ledge that now marked the passage's far end.
"Don't move!" Trevor called again. "I'll get you out."
"...make it quick," Sypha said, in a voice more strained than it had sounded only seconds before. "I can't… do this forever."
Trevor was lowering the Vampire Killer into the darkness before that sentence had even finished. "Grab on," he said. "Just... look out for the morning star, all right?"
Grant tilted his head to watch Sypha grasp onto the chain links of the whip, avoiding the spiked metal ball that dangled at its end. Before Grant had the chance to ask if he was meant to grab on too, Trevor had already acted once again, his shadowed form receding past the blue mist and disappearing from view as he stepped backward with deliberate strides.
Grant had no option but to continue to clutch Sypha's weapon like a lifeline as Trevor steadily pulled the length of the Vampire Killer back toward his own direction hand-over-hand, slowly raising the two hunters out of the jaws of the pit.
Even as the pile of skulls below grew more distant and Trevor's form above more distinct, Grant knew he couldn't consider himself saved until they were all on solid ground. It didn't matter that Sypha's magic was still pushing back against gravity to lighten Trevor's load, or that any Belmont worth the whip was sure to have the freakish strength that caused the rest of the country to shun them in the first place. Any second, those blue sparks could go dead or the whip would jerk free, and then two new skulls at least would be added to Dracula's hoard.
Grant couldn't allow himself to become someone else's bad memory, one more corpse left unburied in someone else's mind. Not without going down fighting.
As soon as the side of the ledge was near enough to touch, he swung himself closer and clung on, releasing his grip on the staff at the same time. Now Sypha and Trevor had one less thing to worry about—in all that time since their quest began, he'd never fallen from a wall yet.
But his teammates didn't seem to see it that way. He heard Sypha gasp at the sudden sensation of a falling weight, saw Trevor miss a beat in his rhythmic hauling of the whip.
...guess I shoulda warned them, he realized—too late once again.
No matter. Now Sypha was stepping hesitantly from midair onto the top of the ledge with the whip's end still in hand, the levitation spell's aura dissipating at the first contact with solid ground. The mage's legs seemed unsteady after this prolonged use of magic, causing Sypha to lurch forward and collapse against Trevor's chest. They seemed to hold onto each other for a few moments longer than Grant would have expected before Sypha stood upright again.
Sure that the rest of his team was safe, Grant scaled the last stretch of the ledge's wall. Just as his arms touched level surface and he braced himself to climb that last and hardest distance to the top, the beating of leather wings sounded from overhead and a swirl of mist before his eyes clouded his vision. Something was gripping his forearm before the mist had cleared and pulling him, a bit roughly, to a kneeling position atop the few bricks that remained of the passageway.
The swirls of mist faded to reveal that it was Alucard who had just "helped" him, staring down at him now with the same fixed expression as always: a stony, almost empty look vague enough that Grant couldn't tell if it signified concern or contempt, or neither.
"That was foolish," Alucard said.
So, it was "contempt" then.
Grant stood up in a rush, dusting off the knees of his trousers. "Thought you'da realized by now that climbing's my specialty," he said. "Hell, I could probably hang from a ceiling longer than you can, bats. I wasn't exactly begging for help."
"You nearly had your allies convinced you'd fallen to your death," Alucard said. "Such antics could easily have led to disaster."
Well, Alucard had him there. Grant couldn't deny he'd realized the same thing the instant he let go of the staff.
"Y'know what?" Grant asked. Alucard remained silent. "You're right."
Grant waited to see if Alucard's expression would change. It never did. He merely turned away from Grant with a flutter of his cloak.
Just ahead, Trevor and Sypha were still standing close together, speaking in hushed voices and apparently not knowing or caring that the others could still hear.
"And you thought I'd burn up if I touched that thing," Sypha muttered, elbowing Trevor in the side.
"Not exactly," Trevor said. "It's called the Vampire Killer, not the L—"
"Oh, not again!" Sypha cut him off, laughing.
For as much as the two of them were off in their own world now, there was no doubt in Grant's mind—there never had been—that Trevor and Sypha had come to see him as not only a useful teammate, but even a friend. With Dracula still lying in wait in a tower that hung over their heads like the sword of Damocles, a vampire hunter didn't endanger their life for the sake of another's without a damn good reason. Grant had felt the same about his own group of rebels, when they'd stormed the clock tower on that ill-fated night so long ago. And if their last interactions had proven anything, he'd even bet money that Alucard, for all his silence and indifference, valued his comrades' lives too.
But as Trevor and Sypha descended, side by side, from the last remnants of the crumbled passageway to the room at its far end that waited below, with Alucard stalking behind like a shadow, Grant couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if the situation had been just a little different. Would Sypha have bothered to save Dracula's son if it were Alucard who'd knocked them both into the pit instead? And if Grant had done something to put only Alucard at risk, would anyone else on the team have gone out of their way to lecture him in the vampire's place?
As uncomfortable as it was to admit, even if only to himself, Grant had his doubts.
He realized it was pointless to dwell on these thoughts even as they arose. Alucard didn't fall into the pit because he could soar over it as a goddamn bat, and he'd never been at risk because he was almost definitely as immortal as his old man. There wasn't anything about the vampire's demeanor that suggested any of this had bothered him at all.
And yet…
The sound of voices from the room below brought Grant back to reality.
"Oh no," Sypha said. The magician's flat, hushed tone indicated this was a massive understatement.
"This doesn't look good," Trevor agreed.
Grant raced ahead to see what they'd discovered, bounding over the short ledge at the passage's end to join the rest of his team. He skidded to a stop just inches before another massive pile of human skulls, tinted rusty with dried blood and stacked in a pyramidal mound, and had to throw out his arms to prevent himself from stumbling headlong into it. The crests of two more hills of skulls beyond it rose up from where all three were arranged at the center of the small room.
"Holy hell," he said, taking a few steps back. "So, are we gonna have to kill someone, or what?"
"Sure feels like it," Trevor said.
No further explanation was needed—not after a trip through all the horrors of Wallachia, followed by a guided tour of Count Dracula's estate. Every hunter there perceived the meaning as instinctually as they knew that a nest of skulls foretold nothing but danger.
Another one of Dracula's guard was heartbeats away from launching an attack upon the castle's latest intruders. They could sense it in the very air.
It was an electric current of mounting tension, the tingling trace of the unseen eyes of some unknown beast scanning their waiting forms from somewhere out of view. Any second now, that thick sphere of suspense that enclosed them all would be sliced through and shattered: by razor fangs, or by gutting claws, or by the worst spawn of any nightmare from a monster hunter's mind.
The silence was stabbed by a voice.
So, you've finally returned, 'Alucard,' the disembodied voice, as chilling and hollow as the depths of a crypt, sounded from everywhere and nowhere. Lord Dracula's prodigal son…
The three sets of eyes that had been scanning the room for their hidden opponent centered on Alucard instead. Stoic as ever, Dracula's son strode without a sidelong glance toward the skulls at the center of the room.
"What do you want from us, Death?" he asked. "We have no time for games."
Grant nudged Sypha's arm. "Death?" he mouthed.
Sypha just shrugged.
'Us?' 'We?' the phantom voice echoed. How you've debased yourself, Alucard. Allying with the same lowly race of mortals whose crimes forced your father's hand... to say nothing of what they did to your mother.
For the first time since they'd met, Alucard finally did what Grant had just begun to believe was impossible: he reacted. The vampire seemed to clench his jaw, drawing back his lips just enough for the sparse light to glint off a fang, as his golden eyes narrowed the slightest bit.
It was a subtle transformation, really, an expression that would indicate no more than minor annoyance on anyone else. But after watching Alucard coldly dispatch attackers all night without that same placid resolve changing at all—after seeing him silently endure slights against his nature and allegiance ever since he'd joined Trevor's cause—Grant knew this shift in demeanor could mean only one thing:
Alucard was pissed.
"Enough of this," he said, in a voice that was almost too tightly controlled. "Did you come here to face us, or to sling insults like a coward?"
I felt the last moments of countless soldiers of Lord Dracula, all slain at your hands, Death said, and I came to intervene. Are these truly the ones for whom you'd renounce your inheritance, Alucard? This pathetic group of mortals? I know each and every death that's shaped the course of each one of your lives—I know who you are...
"Then get the introductions over with and fight us," Trevor snapped.
So you're Trevor Belmont... Death's spectral voice went on, … the one who will lead all his allies to their graves, like so many Belmonts before. Are you aware that you fight for a land that despises you?
Trevor's expression showed that he was. "Someone has to do it," he said anyway.
And you, Sypha Belnades—
Next to him, Sypha stiffened, hands white as they clenched the Belnades family weapon.
—you, who've fallen to this castle once already. Do you believe those months trapped in stone have prepared you to fight again?
"Come say that to my face, you bastard!" Sypha yelled, swinging the staff and hitting nothing but air.
Amusing. You were more useful as a statue.
The staff swung at nothing once again.
And you're Grant Danasty.
A chill ran down Grant's spine, though nothing in the room had noticeably changed. He felt as though an icy hand were gripping his neck.
The last survivor of the rebel force Lord Dracula so easily crushed. What makes you so certain your new comrades' fate will be any different?
Nothing. Nothing did.
Every one of Grant's fellow hunters was skilled—and he knew for a fact he was, too. But he'd felt the same about his old team months ago, before they'd met their end and vanished from his memory. He could hope and boast and, most importantly, keep on fighting, but he'd never be confident they could kill Dracula until they were pulling the stake from his heart.
If one thing about traversing Castle Dracula was certain, it was that nothing was.
Still, Grant wasn't about to let some mouthy ghost know it'd touched a nerve. "Is this your strategy?" he asked. "Talking us all to death?"
Impatient, are we? Death responded. Very well. I shall not burden Lord Dracula with the knowledge of what his bloodline has been reduced to. Now, look before you, and see the fate that awaits all mortals...
All at once, the cramped, empty little room fell silent and still once again, as though the ghostly presence called Death had evaporated alongside the anticipation of imminent battle that charged the air. There appeared to be nothing left in the room worth noting but the four hunters and the macabre carpet of skulls.
Grant knew better than to get too comfortable, though. Things had become too quiet, he realized—quiet as the grave.
That was when the skulls started rattling.
The grimy, bloodied piles of bones began to slowly rise into the air and spread outward, coming to a stop once they'd formed an oblong shape that hovered above the center of the room. Through the gaps between the floating skulls and the portholes formed by empty eye sockets and hanging jaws, Grant could just make out something inside the skeletal sphere rising too. It moved from base to apex in a blur of light and dark, too quickly for his eyes to track. Then the thing within was breaking through the layer of skulls like a butterfly emerging from a grotesque cocoon, sending them scattering across the floor as it came to a stop in midair.
The thing that now floated above them resembled a pallid skeleton clad with a dark and hooded shroud—Death in the nonexistent flesh. Two bony hands clenched the shaft of a scythe, its blade honed to a fine point and gleaming even through the dim light. Death's skull was locked into a knowing grin as it gazed down on its latest challengers through hollow eyes.
"And you know this thing how? " Sypha whispered in exasperation, staff tilted accusingly at Alucard.
Alucard seemed to pointedly avoid looking at the other hunters directly. "...friend of the family," he finally said.
Grant bit back a grin of his own. Of course it was. He couldn't tell yet if it was really the Grim Reaper itself or just some ghost with a costume and delusions of grandeur, but, this far through Dracula's lair, neither option could possibly surprise him.
What did surprise him was how fearless he suddenly felt.
If this were even a year ago, Grant was quite sure the sight of Death's skeletal visage and raised scythe would be the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen. If he were just an ordinary Wallachian with an ordinary life, he'd surely be on the floor begging for mercy instead of struggling to keep a straight face.
But this was 1476 and he was a hardened monster hunter and the world had gone to hell. Now even the ordinary Wallachians were dealing with more lumbering zombies and floating ghouls than could have been imagined outside of a ghost story. And after squaring up against any and every demon in the land that dared to stand in the way of him and his team, even Death itself was starting to look like nothing more than an overgrown, overdressed version of the skeletons they'd been killing all night.
Grant had already looked his own death in the face just minutes ago, when he'd fallen into the pit—and it was a whole lot scarier than this bag of bones. He wasn't a magician like Sypha, able to grapple with death's companions: those mighty unseen forces that guided humans' lives. But this Death was appearing before them now as a monster, and any monster could be slain.
Still, when the first scythe spiraled right for his neck, he made damn sure to get out of the way.
