As Seras stepped through the doorway into the inside of the house, she felt it. Her eyes and nostrils stung and she choked slightly. The policemen seemed unaffected. She leaned against the wall, trying not to breath, and succeeding admirably, she needed some air to speak with though…it scalded her throat, burnt her lungs.

"Open the window!" she said, in a hoarse, rasping voice. She could feel her skin tingling with the stuff, good grief, he had a strong batch in this time…

One of the officers made to question why, and she shot him a look which chilled his blood even through the glasses. He flung open the window. Immediately she ran past him and took a deep breath of the outside air. She blinked a few times, and felt her eyes stop stinging,. The stuff was soon out of the room, swirling away into the night. And good riddance to it to. It still disturbed her on some deep level that in ten minutes she had turned from human to something that could be harmed so much by the merest whiff of holiness, but there was no use denying it. At least she hadn't been on the receiving end of the glass spheres that had turned the two ghouls who had been guarding the front entrance into blackened patches of charcoal on the floor and walls.

"What's wrong miss?" asked one of the bolder policemen.

She pointed to the two scorch marks. "Can't you smell it?" she asked. No of course they couldn't, you idiot. They were humans.

"Smell what?"

She shook her head, "Nothing, nothing." She turned back to them, and they all registered looks of shock on their faces.

"What?" she asked. This was actually getting boring.

"You, er, you're crying blood." Said one of them.

She sighed. "Good grief, haven't you people had the lecture?"

"What lecture?" Asked one of them. Oh dear goodness. How was she supposed to work with people like this? You'd have thought that senior policemen in a FREAK infested city such as this would at least have been given some inkling…

She sighed.

"Hello" she said bowing, "My name is Seras Victoria, and I am a master vampire, one who walks the night and drinks blood of my own will. Currently I am under the employment of the British government, more specifically the Hellsing institution. The residents of this building were FREAKs and their ghoul servants. FREAKs are lesser, artificial vampires created using a biochip and ghouls are the animated corpses of the FREAKs victims. Yesterday, Father Piotr Lieberwitz, a Catholic demon-hunter working for Iscariot, the Vatican's private army, entered this building with the purpose of exterminating the occupants. He never reported back. Hellsing has sent me to find the trail of the priests kidnappers and recover him at all costs. There you go, the truth, the whole truth and noting but the truth. You almost certainly don't believe me, although I can see certain things clicking together in your mind. Some things seem to make more sense now, don't they?"

The men were silent, digesting what she had said, thinking things over. All those unexplained happenings, strange disappearances and unusual murders. All those incidents where Hellsing had turned up and fought mysterious paramilitary groups…it almost made sense.

"Now," she said, taking a handkerchief out of her pocket to dab at her bloodstained face, "show me where this struggle took place." She smiled at them as they led her, with uncertain glances, through another door.

As they moved through the house it was not hard to see how the fight had progressed. She had to give this to the regenerator: he was fast and efficient. Doors staved in with a single kick, one or two of the sacred grenades sailing through to deal with whatever was inside. A few bullet holes spattered around the bottom of the stairs indicated that a couple of ghouls had tried to put up a fight, and a piece of black wool, torn out of the priest's coat, showed that they had hit at least once. Their guns lay twisted amid the greasy burn marks that was all that remained of them.

Damn…she was not sure even FREAKs deserved to die like that. At least she killed cleanly, with a bullet to the brain or heart. She had been splashed with holy water just once, on the arm, and she still had horrible memories of tearing her burning clothes from the arm before eventually shooting it off to prevent the blue flames spreading. That had been at the hands of this damned Iscariot dog, which made her even less happy than the rest of Hellsing to be rescuing him.

They led her along the upper corridor of the house, to a room at the end. She could see the bullet holes splintered through the door, and smell a smell she had only smelt once before…regenerator blood. It was sweeter than normal human blood, nothing like as thick and pungent as the blood of a vampire or werewolf, but quite close. She opened the splintered door with one gloved hand and surveyed the scene within. There were glass shards on the floor around the other end of the bare chamber, but no scorch marks. Whoever had shot up the priest had been human. She looked around. There were only a few bloodstains, sprayed across the walls in great circular spatters, as if made by bullet wounds. Normally, regenerators did not bleed. It took significant amounts of damage to make one do so, and even then they were by no means dead…They could only be truly killed, as Alucard had discovered, by decapitating them and ripping out their heart. Anything less and they would eventually regenerate, though severe brain trauma left them a bit odd sometimes, especially young regenerators. She believed that was what had happened to Anderson.

Now. To business. She sniffed the air, the smell of blood nowhere near as strong as it would normally be after a warm meal, and detected a familiar scent on the air. She knelt down next to one of the bullet holes, and worked a finger into the stone to retrieve the round. The depth of the hole only confirmed her nose.

Depleted uranium bullets. Of course. She had had the idea herself, once. Surely the way to beat a regenerator would be to use their powers against them. She remembered that when Alucard had fought Anderson the priest had never expelled the bullets, just healed over them. So what if one was to fill a regenerator full of depleted uranium? She was obviously not the only person to have those thoughts. So, it was humans who had kidnapped the priest then? That shouldn't prove too much of a challenge. She sniffed again…yes, there they were. She paced across the room to the far window. Looking down, she saw a fire escape stretching to the ground.

"Excellent." She said. "I've seen all I need to see. Breathe a word of this to anyone, Gentlemen, and we shall hunt you down and extract a gruesome revenge. Goodnight." And with that she hefted herself through the window and dropped into the shadows. One of the men rushed to the window, but he saw nothing, except a golden haired dog trotting out the alleyway, its nose to the ground as if tracking some scent.

This area of the docks was all but derelict. Run down warehouses, piles of broken crates, rusting hulks of ships. Away from the background noise of all the humans her preternatural senses had no trouble detecting the building Father Lieberwitz was being held in. She felt an indeterminate number of humans in there as well, maybe about twenty, but her senses could only really detect NHBs with any degree of accuracy. The building itself looked half derelict, and would have seemed empty, but for the light coming from its windows.

Keeping an eye out for security cameras, she slowly crept round the perimeter of the structure, assessing it tactically. There was only one door, but it looked like there might be stairs up onto the roof. A fire escape seemed to have been cut off the wall to prevent easy access. From what her senses told her, Lieberwitz was being held in a room on the upper floor…that window? She looked closely. It was small and barred, could be a cell…

She sprinted silently across a piece of wasteland and hugged up with her back against the wall. Then she turned round and dug one hand into the wall, her fingernails latching on like claws. She climbed swiftly but quietly, a few clanks as the weapons and ammunition concealed inside her coat all that marked her passage. When she reached the window she stopped, and peered through carefully, surveying the scene inside with one crimson eye. The first thing she noticed was blood. Lots of blood. And the priest, sitting in the centre of the room, absolutely caked in the stuff, surrounded by a scattering of little bent metal shapes.

He was digging the bullets out of himself.

She gave the rest of the room a cursory glance. No security cameras, no two-way mirrors, a solid door. Good.

"My, my, someone smells good." She said, by way of a greeting. The priest whirled round. His long black hair had come out of its normal ponytail, and fell wildly around his face, matted with blood. He hissed as he recognised her.

"Draculina!" he snarled "So it was your unholy organisation that kidnapped me.

She grinned "Think again, priest. One, if it was us, I'd have come in through the door, two, we would have just killed you."

He curled his lower lip in disgust. "True." He admitted. "So, what have you come here to do then, eh demonspawn? To gloat at a man of God in his extremity, eh monster?" She raised her eyebrows. These damned zealots were so predictable.

"Actually, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm here to deliver you from the clutches of whoever the hell it is that has put you here."

The priest gave a derisive snort. "Hah! You would never come to our aid willingly, vampire, and we would never sink so low as to ask for it. Why are you really here, eh?"

"Look," she said, angrily, "I'm going to come in through the roof, shoot anyone who gets in my way, blow the cell door off its hinges and then carve my way back out through the front door. You can either sit there and do sweet fanny Adams or you can do something useful and tell me how many guards there are. I'm taking these walls are re-enforced, by the way?"

He looked at her for a moment then nodded slowly. "Yes. I've tried my strength against them…steel plate, over the normal structure. Not even the bullets from your hellish gun would penetrate it."
"A pity." She said, swinging her arm up back onto the stonework. "Any thoughts on the gaurds?"

"About twenty…oh, and vampire…"

"Yes?"

"They have exoskeletons."

"Excellent, that almost makes it fun. See you in a bit, papist dog."

She moved up the last few metres to the roof smoothly, and hoisted herself up onto the ledge. Good…there were no gaurds on the roof. Now to plan her attack. Exoskeletons eh? She didn't know as much about them as she probably should, only that they were a new military concept from America. Hellsing had looked at them, briefly: enhanced strength, increased speed, built in armour…they seemed like perfect tools for fighting the undead. However, on closer examination they possessed none of these things in great enough quantities to actually be of any use against vampires: they weren't strong enough to allow the wearer to take on a vampire hand to hand, or fast enough to allow him to outrun one. It would make things a little bit more exciting though…

She considered weapons. The Jezebel, of course…anything else? She had five or six other guns stuffed away in various pockets. The good old Socom? The Raging Bull? Eventually she made her decision and reached down behind her back to unholster a TMP. Small, light and fully automatic, an excellent counterpart to the powerful semi-automatic Jezebel.

Okay Seras, let's do this thing.

She opened the top door quietly. No-one on the first staircase…excellent. She walked silently down to the door at the bottom, and pushed it open a crack. Beyond was a big room, two storeys high. A gantry extended across it from the door, with one man I what could only be an exoskeleton walking across it. It looked like a cross between medieval armour and a space-suit. Down below in the room were a couple of long tables. Three more men in exoskeletons stood guard, another man was stripping down and cleaning a rifle at the long table and two more were talking up against the far wall.

All too easy.

She grinned devilishly. At what point had she come to enjoy violence? She had no idea, but she was sure it had started at the Tower of London. Whatever, it was with her now…she craved this sort of thing almost as much as blood sometimes. A creature of passions, that was what she was. Blood, violence and sex…she could control that last one, had always been able to, but the other two seemed to get the better of her sometimes…

Let's see how thick that armour is, eh?

She planted a firm kick in the middle of the door. It instantly broke into two halves as she stepped through it, firing three rounds from the Jezebel into the back of the nearest gaurds head. His faceplate exploded, spraying the room with a shower of armoured glass, blood and brains.

Not quite thick enough.

With her other hand she cut down the two in conversation with a spray of automatic fire, their bodies puffing out and spurting red where the bullets struck, seemingly randomly. She brought the Jezebel round and took another one of the armoured ones off his feet before he even had a chance to move, the bullet passing cleanly through his head without exploding. Damned faulty ammo. The other two had now had time to react. They turned and fired at her with their assault rifles. She felt bullets hitting her, blowing chunks out of her, but no pain. Normal bullets could not stop her…

She grinned even more wildly as the idea came to her, then slumped off the gantry, landing on the floor below with a dull crack. She had broken something, obviously. Better not be her spine. That was annoying when that happened.

The two armoured troops lowered their guns. That's right…come closer…she saw two more in exoskeletons come rushing in from a doorway at the top. The unarmoured man gingerly approached her then knelt down beside her, feeling her neck.

"There's no pulse." He said. An American accent…well, well, well... Maybe she should play dead for a bit longer to learn some more.

"Shit me, would you look at that gun?" said one of the armoured ones, his voice muffled by the face-mask.

"How the hell did she fire that thing?"

He reached over as if to pry it from her grip. Ok, no way she was loosing her gun.

"It's quite simple." She growled as she opened her eyes. The mans eyes widened as he looked down at her. She grinned, showing fangs.

"Vampire." She said simply, then head butted him with enough force to break his spine. Blood from his nose spurted across her face as she sat up, the Jezebel roaring as she put a bullet into the head of the two nearest her.

"Silver bullets!" cried one of the farther ones.

So…they have silver bullets, eh? Very interesting…

She leapt forward and rolled, coming up to place another two bullets in the chest of one of the new arrivals, smashing him off his feet. She had five bullets left, and she had killed seven…and the priest reckoned there to be twenty. The other one started firing again, but she made more of an effort to dodge this time. She could see the splatters of mercury coming from the bullet holes. Damn…she rolled back to her feet and shot him in the face, the bullet drilling a neat hole through the glass before the inside of the visor became opaque with blood. She realised she was still grinning insanely, and chuckled to herself. What would the Seras Victoria who had sprinted through that dark forest sixteen years ago, desperately trying to summon up the courage to shoot a few ghouls, have said to her now, a bloodthirsty, trigger-happy undead killing machine?

She really had no idea. Anyway, that was a bit of an exaggerated view of herself, especially next to some of the things she'd seen Alucard do.

She ran across the room to the door the last two had emerged from. As she suspected, there was a stairwell inside. Suddenly, bullets exploded around her, coming from both sides. She regretted the loss of her TMP, dropped in the fall, as she fired the last of the Jezebels clip down the stairs, eliciting screams and a spray of blood that flew up one wall like a paintbrush splatter. A couple of mercury ignition rounds caught her in the back, and she dropped to the floor, rolling to put herself out of the line of fire. The pain was incredible, but she managed to tense her muscles against it, expelling the bullets and flushing out their metallic payload in a spurt of blood. Damn…it was lucky that mugger had came along. She would be in trouble now without that fresh blood in her veins…

She slammed another clip into Jezebel as she heard feet coming down the stairs. She fired her first four bullets through the concrete stairs where the footsteps were coming from. There was a scream and the sound of something heavy and metallic falling. A man in an exoskeleton crashed round the corner of the stairs, his last vision the inhumanly long barrel of her gun as she put one of the explosive rounds into his heart. She stood and leapt over his corpse, pulling herself up the wall as bullets hit concrete behind her. She leant back and fired off another three rounds at the man in the top of the stair well, who had obviously not expected her to be climbing on the walls. Red explosions marked the entry and exit wounds of the bullets, and droplets of blood sprayed across her as he toppled backwards. She licked her lips, tasting it. This was fun. She jumped from the floor and landed on the corpse, still spurting blood from severed arteries. It fountained up her leg, onto the inside of the coat. She emerged into the corridor and found herself face to face with another exoskeleton. With a little growl she kicked the gun barrel, wrenching it from the mans hand. He grabbed the Jezebels barrel, forcing it upwards. The suits were strong…but the men inside were still men. She jabbed the index finger of her left hand into the crack in his elbow joint, her fingernail like a talon, tearing through flesh. He screamed and let go of her gun. She spun and delivered her best judo kick to his face, the combination of her police training and supernatural strength combining to lethal effect. The face-plate cracked and the man was flung bodily into a wall. She followed quickly with a punch that ripped through the gap between his chest plate and stomach plate, tearing into his torso with a wet ripping sound. She slowly withdrew her blood covered hand, looking with fascination at the once white glove. How the hell did Alucard always keep his clothes so spotless, even during the midst of the most bloody combat?

She threw the Jezebel from her right hand to her left as she walked down the corridor, then fired the rest of the clip off round the corner. The satisfying sound of bullets hitting flesh told her she had been successful. She walked round, seeing the shattered corpse lying against the far wall, fingers clutched round its gun. Chucking her gun back to her right hand she withdrew another clip and slid it in, pulling the slide back in her teeth as she walked up to a metal door. She fired free times, blasting apart the hinges and lock, then kicked it in. The priest was waiting for her inside. His wounds seemed to have almost healed, though he was still bloodied. He looked her up and down, and curled his lip in disgust, taking in the blood splattered across her clothing and smeared around her lips.

"Been having fun, monster?" he asked as he stepped past her, averting his eyes.

"Indeed I have." She said, pushing past him again. She fired as they came round the corner, knocking another one down the stairs. She led the regenerator down to the ground floor, watching as he stepped gingerly over the broken corpses she had left. Two more were blown apart as she strolled to the front door. Another man, unsuited, leapt at her with a silver plated combat knife. She simply decapitated him with a single backhanded sweep, the head flying back through the doorway as the body slumped to the floor. Her senses told her that he had been the last one.

"Monster…" she heard the priest mutter as she kicked out the front door.

"Just shut up and start running. I presume your people have some sort of safe house in the city?"

He just growled at her and started running off into the night. This was the kind of city where no-one would seriously think of stopping a blood-caked maniac running through the streets in the early morning.

Talking of which…

She checked her watch. Damn, it was 3AM already. Time to clean up this mess before dawn. She took a mobile phone from a pocket and dialled a number.

"Hello," said the voice on the other end, "McDougherty's carpet cleaning service. How may I help you?"

"Oh, Hello. My name is Miss Victoria, Miss Seras Victoria. I'm afraid I've had an unusually large spillage…twenty or so men are very displeased."

"I see Miss Victoria. Where was this spillage?"

"Next to pier seven, in a three storey brick building roughly twenty metres away from the water."

"I see. How bad was the spillage?"

"I think the carpet might be beyond repair."

"Understood. We'll do our best. Would you like us to move you somewhere more comfortable whilst we clean up?"

"Definitely"

She slept that day in a sun-proof room built specially for the purpose in the cellar of Hellsing's small Belfast headquarters. The coffin was uncomfortable, but she slept soundly. The few staff at the office had been nigh on terrified of her when she had walked in, up to her elbows in blood, and walked straight to the small red refrigerator outside her basement quarters where she had drunk three pints of blood, causing one person who had followed her in to have to excuse himself, probably to go vomit.

She was a monster…

No, that was negative, defeatists thinking. She was what she was, she just had to make the best of it. She couldn't help her desire for blood or her lust for violence. She simply had to reign them in as best as possible and use them to the best ends she could. Had she ever killed someone through drinking their blood? No, she had requested Alucard to teach her how to hunt without killing, and to her surprise he had, one of the few decent things he'd ever done for her. Had she ever killed an unarmed or innocent human? Never, she was almost sure…she did her best to be polite and courteous to those around her, although she was starting to develop the tendency to exaggerate her vampirism just to assert control over people, like she had with those policemen. Maybe that was the first sign of her leaving her humanity behind, of her transformation into something wholly different and far less pleasant? She did not know enough…damn Alucard. Damn his doublespeak and riddles. There was so much he could have told her, so much he could have done to ease the passage between human and vampire… As she lay in the uncomfortable coffin, drifting off into a dreamless sleep, she made herself a promise.

I will never let Integra go through the same doubts and uncertainties I did. Never.