Integra surveyed the conference room again. They wouldn't start arriving until the evening, but still, it paid to be prepared ahead of time. Everything seemed in order, all seats laid out properly, pitchers of iced water in positions that favoured no knight above any other. Her notes were all ready, neatly laid out. Finally, everything was settled. She flipped out a hand mirror, checking her reflection…yes, the contact lenses were still there, and her makeup was un-smudged. She looked human, just about.

Closing the mirror, she sank into the high-backed chair in which she would sit during the conference. It had been a hectic week, but an interesting one…very interesting. She reached into her pocket to bring out a cigar to chew whilst she mulled over the various happenings.

I could smoke them now, she thought, rolling the cylinder of leaves up against one fang. It's not like lung cancer is going to be a problem for me…

Maybe not though. The knights knew she had given up, that sort of slip-up could be what gave her away.

So…what had she learned this most eventful week?

A lot of things, but nothing made sense.

The first useful clue they had gathered was when officer Victoria had called on an elder vampire who lived on his own in a remote Scottish castle, where he mainly painted and drank sheep, perfectly acceptable activities as far as the Hellsing organisation was concerned. Pragmatism played a great part in the organisations decisions: Why go after 700 year-old true vampires who never hurt anyone when there were three-day old FREAKS slaughtering whole households?

Apparently men claiming to work for a water company had recently set up pumping units near a local sacred spring. They were apparently 'measuring the water level', but were actually doing nothing except pump thousands of gallons of pre-sanctified water out every day, shipping it off to somewhere far beyond the vampires area of influence.

Another interesting fact had been gathered by accident. During a raid on a FREAK nest in the London docklands a soldier had noticed a familiar logo on a crate being unloaded from a nearby ship. The ships crew were detained and the crates pried open. Napalm shells, 7.62 mm, thousand upon thousand of them. Napalm was the poor mans blessed silver, very effective against ghouls and even vampires if used in bullet form, and several orders of magnitude cheaper. They had thousands of them waiting down in the cellars in case their supplies should run low.

So, what did these two things indicate.

Someone, somewhere, was building up a stock of materials with which to fight the undead, outside of Hellsings knowledge. But who? Who had the knowledge, the money? Some independent group, funded by Rome in order to confound Hellsing's plans? Some obscure but potent cult with access to a hidden body of vampire lore? Maybe one of the elder vampires, known or unknown, intent on securing dominance over the rest of the countries undead and forming them into an army of the night?

It was maddening.

Her teeth sliced straight through the cigar stub with worrying ease as she growled in frustration, and she cursed lightly, dumping the stub in an ashtray and taking a new cigar.

She would have to remember about that. Her teeth were designed to slice through flesh with a good deal of the ease of a knife, she had to be careful with cigars. Thank goodness she had never developed any habit of chewing her own tongue or anything of the kind.

She straightened up slightly in the chair, and her eye caught a beam of weak sunlight. She hissed and sank back down. Too bright, too hot. Why couldn't she have made a clean break, acted as one dead from the start? She could have used Arthur as a puppet until he came of age, she could have avoided all this…contact lenses and pleasantries. She wanted nothing more, at that exact moment, than to abandon all the horrible, weighty chains of duty that she had built her human existence on and be with the one she, inexplicably, still loved. Even without the bonds, she loved her, though now it was a different love. Roles had been reversed. She could now look on the blonde haired vampire as something more akin to a younger sister than the absolute master and mother she had been before. Yet she was a younger sister with much to teach Integra. Now she had broken the first barriers of morality and humanity it all seemed so easy. She wanted to learn to fly, to transform her body, to speed regeneration at will, to bend men's minds to her own purpose at the merest thought.

She smiled as she imagined the knights, blank faced zombies, moving like puppets to her dark design. Satisfying. Very satisfying.

She flicked up her watch.

Still hours to wait. Maybe a nap would help pass the time, she was very tired…

She was seven, she was skipping through the gardens of the mansion. She could see daddy on the lawn, sitting at a table, Walter bringing him tea. She stopped and waved. He waved back. She turned again and skipped off. Suddenly a strong chill ran down her spine…she felt someone was looking at her. She thought she saw an eye in a shadow. Suddenly, the afternoon light was terrifying. Every shadow laden with monsters. She turned to her father, and saw him lying across the table, dead in his newspaper. There were two puncture wounds in his neck. How come she could see them? Suddenly she realised she was next to him, looking down. She was taller, older. She reached out to touch her dead father, and she saw her hand. Long, perfectly pointed nails, white and shiny as glass. Her skin looked pale and dead, a strange grey tint on her dark flesh. She gasped. And she felt her mouth full of fangs, and the delicious taste of blood. She reached up to touch her lips, and there was blood on her fingertips. Familiar blood. It tasted almost like when she cut her lip.

She looked down in horror at her fathers corpse.

No.

She couldn't?

And then the shadows of the table and the corpse lengthened, becoming solid, unfolding like origami. Eyes and teeth.

"Excellent, daughter." Said Alucard. "Now we are totally free of the humans. Take my hand and we will feast on the ones who once enslaved us."

And with horror she found herself taking the hand, and following him into the house, into the servants quarters, the soldiers…screams, futile attempts to defend. She felt her fangs sinking endlessly into the shuddering flesh, piercing the arteries and veins, the hot blood spurting into her mouth till she could take no more, and it glutted her veins, ran out of every orifice, so she was nothing more than a cackling demon made of blood, gore trickling from her face, from between her legs, vomiting from her mouth. And still she had more. More and more and more. She had never felt so warm and full and content and happy ever. She wanted to drink all their blood, take them and possess them utterly. It felt so good, so satisfying. She wanted to drink it forever, bathe in it, revel in it, dancing naked through a rain of blood, an endless torrent of life bringing warmth and meaning to endless living death. And there, dancing with her, naked, was her love, her Seras, laughing as she smeared the carmine fluid on her smooth white limbs, embracing her, kissing her, biting her. An eternal universe of pleasure and pain and darkness and light and beauty and death, death, death, death, DEATH!

She sat up with a jerk, breathing heavily. Her mouth tasted of blood. The memory of her dream was fresh and vivid in her mind, sharply detailed in black and felt nauseous. What on earth was she?

The sun was down, she noticed suddenly. It was night. She felt stringer, more certain. Now, the waiting must be almost up?

Surely enough, she heard the crunch of the wheels of the first car on the drive below, perfectly sharp to her inhuman senses. There was the hiss of a door, voices. It was Sir Caldwell, she could catch his nasal tone even through the armoured glass.

The conference had begun.