I am Van Helsing. He called me Gabriel, the right hand of God.
He was Dracula, a vampire, and someone I killed in my forgotten past.
When we met face to face down in the dank chamber when I witnessed the hatching of his vile offspring I felt a stirring of something in the back of my mind. I knew his face. Though according to the dark man before me my heartbeat was calm, my mind was all but.
I knew his face.
How do you know me? How do you know me? How do I know you? How do I know you?! My mind was pleading for me to grasp him by the collar and hold him to a stone collum until he told me what he knew.
I was forced to remain calm, and he kept talking.
We had a history. What history? Was he the reason I remember nothing?
Was it his fault I was half dead crawling up those steps of the church
so long ago? Keep talking, I pleaded silently to the dark being, just
keep talking.
Stake through the chest. Crucifix. He was unalarmed by these. He knows that nothing can kill him. I knew the same, yet I persisted. How could I know?
Sitting next to the blaze that is Anna's resting place, I can hear the faint mumblings of my companion, Carl. My gaze is torn away from the horizon and onto my hand, where I still wear the ring.
His ring.
After I was human again he had started talking about our history. He pointed to the ring on my finger, explaining that it was his. He proved that he was it's owner by showing me his right hand, where his ring finger was a mere stub. Why would I take his ring? Why would I go to the trouble of taking his finger with it? The venom in my veins roared with bloodlust and my questions were all forgotten for the time as I ripped the key to my past's throat out.
Now I'm sitting on the edge of a cliff, behind me burning the body of a loved one, and yet I am pondering what I could have learned from my arch enemy instead of damning him to the seventh level of Hell where he indefinately is and belongs.
But what could I have found out if I had just let him talk...if but a little longer...
What if he kept talking?