Disclaimer: The characters and concepts in this story pertaining to Van Helsing are the property of Stephen Sommers. This is an amateur writing effort. No infringement on copyright laws was intended.


Chapter 5: Alone, Naturally

"Would you stop looking over my shoulder please, Friar Carl? You're making me nervous," Father Roderick was bent over the table, staring into the small magnifying scope as he scanned over a map. As the Order's finest navigator, Roderick was employed as the map maker, constructing maps that lead specifically to ancient castles and haunted caves where monsters lurked. Often times, his maps were kept in the archives so the Vatican could monitor previous mission sites. He lifted his head and looked at the small friar who was pacing anxiously back and forth in front of him. His blue eyes gleamed. "What seems to be the problem, friar?"

"Problem?" Carl asked in surprise. "No problem here father, none at all. No problems at all. Nothing you should be worried about. Nothing at all, no problems, no nothing. Why do you ask?"
"Friar," Roderick began, standing up straight. He was a few inches taller than Carl at full height. "You've been pacing around my desk for nearly a half an hour. Your palms are sweaty, your brow is sweating, and you're babbling quite insensately whenever I ask you a question."

Carl stopped pacing. Every symptom Roderick had just named was accurate. His palms were shaking and sweating, his brow was dripping with perspiration, and he had just babbled about there being no problems. His physical reaction told everyone in the Vatican one thing: there was definitely a problem.

It was in Carl's favour that no one else but Roderick noticed.

"Oh, yes, well..." Carl said, wiping his hands on his robes. Roderick smiled and bent over his map once again, taking up his feather quill and dipped the sharpened tip in the ink well. With a skilled hand, he drew a small 'x' on the paper, right where Dracula's ice fortress would have been in the Carpathian Mountains. The second his eyes were off Carl, the friar was off and pacing again, just as nervously.

Carl's mind was moving at a hundred miles a minute. He was gifted with a brain that could move quickly, drifting from one thought to another with amazing speed but maintain a coherent thought process. Any stage of his thought could be accessed without having to spend agonizing moment backtracking through the trail of ideas. His mind started at the Vatican, the current state of the priests inside. Twenty-four hours later they would all start transforming into thralls.

Thralls, he thought to himself, a type of slave or serf, one in bondage, intellectually and morally enslaved by a higher power. So Elizabeth has transformed every single member of the Vatican into one of her servants.

But how did Van Helsing know about it?

"Friar Carl you're blocking my light when you stand there," Roderick said, lifting his head for a moment.

"Oh, sorry," Carl stepped out of the way, still lost in thought. He started back where he finished, taking no time to ask. Now where was I?

Van Helsing knew about the venom, he thought, pacing further from the light Roderick was using, which meant that Elizabeth must have told him.

But why would Elizabeth tell him something like that? Carl couldn't understand it. Gabriel had the ability to sense evil; that Carl did know. But never before had Gabriel ever been able to sense anything other than the darkness within a creature. The hunter would not have been able to 'sense' the venom that poured from her fangs.

Carl groaned. Why the hell can't I figure this out? What am I missing?

"Finished," Roderick announced, holding up the map. He smiled at his work, looking over the carefully sketched black lines of rivers and mountains to the red X's that marked off important places. Carl glanced from his handiwork and then back to the floor, mumbling about the excellent work the priest had done.

Van Helsing knew about Elizabeth's venom. He couldn't have known it was venomous unless Elizabeth told him. The only reason Elizabeth would have told him would have been to taunt him. And the only way Elizabeth could have taunted Van Helsing is if...is if...

Carl stopped short. He went rigid.

Is if Van Helsing was infected too.


Van Helsing pushed Mina behind his back, putting his body in between her and Dorotta as a human shield. Dorotta wouldn't kill him. She'd throw him around a bit, probably scratch him up a little more, but she wouldn't kill him, not without the permission of her mistress.

Mina wasn't a part of their plans. She was collateral, like the two people upstairs.

"Such a pretty little girl the hunter is in love with," she said with a coy smirk. "My mistress would love to bathe in blood as rich as hers."

She hissed again, bearing her fangs menacingly. Gabriel's hand hovered over his holster, considering what weapon he could pull out of his coat of tricks next. His pistol was nearly empty and he had little time to reload. The tojo blades were almost useless against vampires. Hand-to-hand combat in general was hardly ever effective against vampires unless you could manage to be equally as quick as they were.

In Gabriel's experience, female vampires were usually quicker than the male ones. That did nothing to make his grim situation any better. He reached inside his coat and yanked out his pistol anyways, hoping to buy some time before the vampire attacked Mina.

Dorotta hissed again, but couldn't react fast enough before the bullet struck her in the right side of her ribcage. She was thrown back and lost her footing. Gabriel rushed forward with the tojo blades, slashing at her with every ounce of strength he had left.

"Get out of here!" He ordered Mina. With her lips pursed in a stern expression, she ran to the bedroom rather than the front door. Gabriel kicked Dorotta to the floor, slashing her from naval to throat before punching straight into her ribcage, shattering the bones as he reached her un-beating heart. It was not as suitable as a stake, but it was enough to delay Dorotta until Mina could get out of the house.

Dorotta was not so easily subdued, and even as he fumbled to grip the stone cold organ, she had already begun to transform once more. With a flap of her mighty wings, she threw Gabriel back to the ground. Once on her feet, her skin and bones healed and prepared to fight Van Helsing once again.

"You're so naïve," she said with a smirk. "Vampires are not so easily destroyed as that."

SNAP!

Dorotta's body was thrown back limply like a rag doll. Her head stuck the mantel on the fire place before she dropped to the ground with a shrill cry of pain. Gabriel sat up on the ground, watching as she writhed in pain, reaching blindly for the arrow that had impaled her chest. Her claws had just grabbed it when Mina drew another arrow. Another snap followed, and this time, it found its mark. The silver tipped arrow hit Dorotta in the chest, throwing her back on the floor with her head just inches from the fire.

Mina lowered her bow, her fingers still on the bowstring, prepared to fire again if necessary. Dorotta's body had already started to destroy itself, changing from flesh and bone to ash and dust in only seconds.

Gabriel got up and off the floor, dusting himself off a little as he did so. The arrow had seemed simple enough, just the design you would expect for a Saxon bow, but there was something different about it. No regular arrow, silver-tipped or not, could destroy a vampire. He lifted the arrow from the ground and examined it. The smell was unmistakable. The shaft was made of ash, a wood formerly used to make stakes for killing vampires. They had stopped production because silver stakes broke less often and were reusable. The ash wood deteriorated quickly, and did so within moments after Gabriel had picked it up.

"Carl has been doing custom work has he?" Mina released her bowstring, leaning the weapon against the wall. She gave a small nod, ever so slight, but the hunter noticed it anyways. "I thought you got rid of that thing?"

"I was considering it," she replied. "Who was that, Gabriel?" she asked, changing the subject back to the present rather than reminiscing further (pleasant as it would be).

"One of Elizabeth's servants," he replied, kicking the ash a little. "She attacked the Vatican."

"How?"

"I don't know. I was hoping you could tell me." Mina crossed over to the chair beside him, picking up her books once again. She flipped through the pages as Gabriel played with the arrow in his hands.

"She is an elder. That denotes a certain level of power every other vampire lacks." She flipped through the pages a little more and lowered herself into the chair, sighing deeply. Gabriel blinked hard, trying to hold his attention on her. His eyes were starting to blur again. The fire in his peripheral vision made his head hurt so badly he almost blacked out.

"Becoming an elder involves a ceremony called 'the Dark Embrace,'" She said, reading aloud the important points from her book. "It describes the passage of a soul through the Nine Gates of hell. The first stage is thrall, namely a servant to a higher level of vampire. The second is wraith, third is daemon, so on and so forth until you reach the elder or Incubus as it is referred to in vampire legends." She held up the book to him, showing him the picture of the Nine Gates and the names of the levels associated with them. Gabriel had to squint to read them clearly, and even then his eyesight was still dancing hazily as if he were on opium. He handed the book back. "Elizabeth actually started out as a thrall to her aunt. As a teenager she was introduced to all the glories and pleasures of the underworld, orgies and whatnot. And then she was married to the Blood Prince of Hungary, and then the real trouble started."

"Oh, just then?" he asked sarcastically. She gave a small smile, brief and flippant, nothing more. "Let me guess: she started making pacts with the devil, murdering countless innocents, and then somewhere along the line I knew her?"

Her eyes narrowed at the last comment, before she lifted an eyebrow in surprise. "You knew Elizabeth Bathory?"

"Mina, I have known every dark lord and lady I have ever faced in my entire career." He looked away from her. The eyebrow dropped.

"You are aware that Elizabeth Bathory lived over two hundred years ago?"
"And Dracula was over four centuries ago. There isn't any difference." Gabriel groaned again as the pain in his neck flared up once more, spreading further up through his face, all the way to his temples. He grabbed hold of the mantel for balance.

"Are you alright?"
He paused for a moment, gripping the mantel tightly as he opened his eyes again. The world had changed somehow, as if everything around him was brighter and bolder. The fire astounded him, its long waves of red and yellow flames and black smoke rising up to the chimney. The smell of the logs made him stare harder as if he had never seen fire before.

The sounds were louder. He could hear the clock across the room ticking as if it were just inches from his ear. Above him, blood dripped from the corpses left by Dorotta. Mina was breathing slowly, watching his every move. Even the swishing of her eyelashes as she blinked was heard as sharply as the rest of the room.
"Gabriel?" she asked again, rising from the chair. Her voice failed to register itself in his mind. The swishing fabric of her night dress drowned out her words.

"Gabriel..." the haunting voice in the back of his mind reached his ears, finding it's way past the sounds of the clock and the blood, burrowing deep within his brain. "You can hear me, can't you? Of course you can. It's the first sign that you're losing grip."

"Gabriel..." Mina laid her hand on his shoulder. Gabriel jerked awake. He felt better than before, but his current physical and mental state could best be described as 'shit'.

"I'm fine," he replied. "I'm fine. I need to find Elizabeth..." he stepped away from her. Mina stared down at the fire before looking after him. He was slipping his tojo blades back in his sleeves, reloading his pistols and searching his many pockets for another cylinder of arrows for the crossbow. Naturally, Mina thought bitterly, a weapon first and then the lady. Typical.

"What are you going to do? Ride off to Cachtice, march inside, stake her and then walk back out again?" she demanded. There was a hint of anger in her voice, enough for him to pick up on it.

"I certainly can't stay here," he replied, putting another bullet into his pistol. "The Cardinal has already arranged for me to go."

"And so you go."

"Yes," he answered quickly, putting the gun back into his holster before turning to look at him. Mina's jaw was tightened. "Did you expect anything else?"

"I would have expected you to come up with something better than that," she replied, "Even with your history of vague details."

"What do you have in mind?" he asked her.

"Something to do with getting past an army of werewolves, hundreds of thralls, and then perhaps a plan of how you're expecting to kill an elder."

Gabriel gave a small shrug. "Thralls, wraiths, elders, they're all the same. They just get harder and harder to kill." Mina rolled her eyes, mumbling under her breath about how he just didn't get it. Gabriel either didn't hear her or he just ignored her, since he was already on his way to the door. Mina rushed over to her bedroom, picking up her bow on the way. She started ripping off her night clothing, grabbing a one of Jonathan's old trousers, shirts, and jackets from the wardrobe.

"What are you doing?" he asked her, stopping just by the door. Mina dressed and tied her hair in a knot on the back of her head.

"I'm going with you, what does it look like I'm doing?"
"No you're not. You're staying right here."

"No." She answered quickly, taking up her bow and quiver once more, slinging them over her shoulders onto her back. "No I'm not. I'm tired of just staying here."

"Mina, you're not coming to Transylvania with me. It's safer for you to stay here." She didn't seem to care as she walked to the door, standing next to him with her head held high. Gabriel looked down at her, her eyes fierce and gleaming.

"I'm coming with you Gabriel, one way or another."

Mina was stronger than Gabriel had ever seen her before. It wasn't often that she jumped on the chance to go on a mission with him. Not that he would have minded. Any other time he would have loved her to come along. Carl hated being dragged to different countries and cities. He loathed the outdoors and everything to do with it. Mina enjoyed getting away once and a while, although hunting monsters was hardly her cup of tea unless she really had to.

"You cannot tell me what I will and will not do, Gabriel," she said, her voice stronger than he had ever remembered it. "I'm going with you. That's final."

"Mina?" He asked her quite calmly. Her eyes narrowed, suspicious of what he was about to do. Her arms were ready to stop him from detaining or forcing her back into the house. What he did was the one thing she wasn't expecting. He reached into his coat and yanked out the spray canister of tranquilizer. Mina twisted her head away but breathed in enough of the spray to send herself into a swoon. As she fell back, she inhaled once more and passed out. Gabriel caught her before she hit the floor.

"Sorry," he told her, knowing she probably couldn't hear him. He took the quiver and bow from her back, setting them aside before carrying her into the bedroom.

Van Helsing laid her on the bed, wrapping the jacket around her tightly so it acted as a blanket. He placed a gentle kiss on her forehead before walking out of the room.


Author's Notes: I have a job, J-O-B! Yes, that's right. Sorry, I've been unemployed since the summer and I'm going through employment deprive. And I'm making more than my friend without promotion! Sorry, I had to take that moment to be petty. She's been bragging about her 7.50 since she got a job, so now it's my turn!

Okay, I'm done now. Thanks very much to Grissom who had this chapter edited and ready to go as quick as she could. Everyone can owe the flawless spelling and grammar to her. Thank you so very much, Griss! Also, my first paragraph was also a sign that my updates might be sporadic again, just so you know. I haven't died or anything, my employer is just working me to death.

Hope everyone enjoyed the chapter. Oh, and just a question to make conversation with everyone, how do you think this story should end? I have a few possibilities, some that readers won't be impressed with and some they might have my head for thinking about, but I want to hear what developments you would like to see. Have a Happy Halloween, everyone, and don't eat your candy until it is checked by an adult! Oh, and always wear bright clothing so the cars can see you, and watch out for razor blades in caramel apples. And if you're not going trick-or-treating, a fun and exciting past time is eating a large amount of chocolate while watching the Van Helsing special features (Curses limited edition for being released AFTER I got the normal one). Happy Halloween!

Reviews:

DoodilyDoo: Glad to have made your Van Helsing day even better! And I hope this was fast enough. I would hate to be chased down by Brad Pitt. Have a complimentary Carl shaped chocolate bar and have an uber-spooky Halloween!

Saerry Snape: I believe I have left you with another cliffhanger (ducks down behind desk to avoid being hit by flying projectiles). Please don't hurt the cliffhangers! I might have to sick my army of plastic flamingos on you. Now here, have a Carl chocolate bar as a consolation gift.

J: So many terrifying inventions for Carl, so little time, what with being dragged to Transylvania and England (twice, mind you, if you've seen the London Assignment which you have since I recall you mentioning how hilarious the kiss with Victoria was). I will check out Ellen Brand, I would love to see her work.

Mystery lady with crossbow? I'll never tell... (in Brittany Murphey's voice from Don't Say a Word) until I write the chapter that reveals all, of course.

Oh, and you may have a Carl chocolate bar as well.

Trinity Van Helsing: The book Interview with the Vampire is absolutely excellent! Of course the movie left out a couple of things and ruined a few characters' appearances, but I can't see many parents lining up their five-year-olds to play the vicious Claudia. Kirsten Dunst was great anyways.

Happy Halloween (tosses her one of the previously mentioned chocolate bars)

Fanfiction Fanatic: I hope you've bought the movie by now. If not, I'll watch it twice tonight: once for you, once for me. Or maybe twice for me...I don't know. Van Helsing looks really good with his shirt off, and no matter how many times I will it to happen, a plane will not fly through Anna's face (growls). Alas, there are more important things to worry about, such as Van Helsing 2. WHERE IS STEPHEN SOMMERS WHEN WE NEED HIM FOR A SEQUEL!?

Oh, and here's a chocolate bar. Happy-Belated-Van Helsing Day!

HyperCaz: Van Helsing Returns seems like a very possible title, although I was hoping for something more original like...Van Helsing 2: The Something from Something or Other (insert big musical climax here). Silly Stephen Sommers and his predictable titles. Why can't anyone be like George Lucas anymore? I was so taken aback by the clones attacking in Star Wars Episode 2: The Attack of the Clones (please note the sarcasm).

I heard about the animated franchise. If they were going to do one, I would want it to be focused on the previous adventures of Van Helsing instead of Transylvania in general. Ah well, whatever makes you money right?

Oh! And here's your Carl-shaped-chocolate bar.

Emeraldjewel: (Smiles coyly) I will not reveal the true name of the mysterious woman-with-the-bow-and-arrow until the proper time. No hints will be given; although I can tell you that you may or may not be right (does something shady).

No worries about spoilers in your review! Here, have a chocolate bar.

Vampire Princess Morwinda: Thank you for the Happy Birthday! I finally watched the commentary with Will Kemp, Richard Roxbourgh, and Shuler Hensley and laughed my butt off all the way through. They were great together! I loved learning about all the wire stunts and the repeated mentioning of how cold it was in Prague while they were filming. Lol. It was good.

Nice to hear that your luck is changing! I'm glad you had a good time in Ohio and that you got a chance for revenge, with a tojo blade no less. Note to self: Must find tojo blades if it kills me.

I'm out of Carl chocolate bars, so you can have the Velkan one.

Lady Nessa: I'm sure a victory for the good guys can be arranged. It's always a nice way to end a story, although character death is good Just kidding! Awesome commentaries on the DVD, very informative. God, I want a sequel. Take a complimentary Velkan chocolate bar before you review.

Scholar: Hmm...no bone in this chapter, sorry. I suppose I'll have to up the meanness on Elizabeth Bathory, but that's a story for the next chapter. Mina will be back!

I wish I still had some Carl chocolate bars. Umm... (searches around messy computer desk) How about a Carl action figure with karate chop action?

Darkchylde: I loved the whole falling scene! It was made even funnier with Hugh Jackman saying he wouldn't trip, and then it seemed like he did nothing but tripping! The Marishka chase was excellent though, I agree. I still have to watch the "You are in the movie!" thing. I'll get to that later tonight.

I've heard of Anita Blake and wanted to get my hands on them, but I still have very long book lists and it's really irritating when I have plenty of other things to read. But vampire politics and magick sounds fun!

Lol. I'm sure plenty of Van Helsing fans would love to get their hands on either Anna or Stephen Sommers for the ending. She gave Mufasa a run for his money (The Lion King).

Farewell as you watch Stargate (Season 1 is the best, O'Neill is my hero, and the episode 'Solitudes' makes me cry). Have a wonderful Halloween, and take this chocolate Cardinal Jinette because he's funny, and he'll make an appearance in later chapters.

PS: What are dissertations?

ShadowHawk: I'm sorry. My e-mail is set to exclusive and any other addresses end up in my Junk Mail folder (I've signed up to so many sites they all send me really weird stuff). I'll write down your e-mail so if you try it again I'll get it.

Happy Halloween! Take this Cardinal Jinette chocolate bar.

xImmortalx: I'll try to keep him from becoming a thrall. You're right though, he just doesn't fit the role of a servant, especially to the psychotic Elizabeth Bathory. Hungarians are crazy people, no offence intended if anyone is Hungarian. My friend is, and even she agrees with me when I say that Hungarians were some of the most violent people on the planet.