"Doctor Van Helsing, I presume?"

The Eastwick warden was of the appointed administrative sort: an older fellow, roughly my age I guessed, clean-shaven to his graying temples and possessed of a sallow face and lean physique. He met my grip firmly and introduced himself as Carter.

"And, ah—" his gaze traveled up to the figure looming over my shoulder.

"My… associate, Alucard," I supplied. I sincerely wished to avoid any lengthy explanations. My companion certainly offered none. He stood silently, hands thrust into the pockets of that ridiculous great-coat, face shadowed under the brim of that even more ridiculous hat.

"Well, two heads are better than one, eh?" Carter waved for us to follow as he set off along the brightly lit corridor of the prison office wing. "I do hope you'll be able to shed some light on this for us, Doctor. Our house doctor's at the end of his bloody rope. At first we thought it was the usual infighting—we do our best to police the inmates, of course, but every now and then one of em'll fashion a shiv from a cot leg or somesuch, and then we've got a problem…"

There is another vampire here. I can smell his reek. Alucard's cool observation took the momentary forefront to the warden's uneasy chatter.

Well, that answered that question. You're prepared to do as we discussed? I kept my eyes straight ahead on Carter as I sent the query back. I could not hear the Count's footsteps on the hardwood floor, but I knew that he was on my heels. The constant undercurrent of his presence at the back of my mind quickened suddenly with a sense of hungered anticipation.

Such gutter trash is hardly worthy to walk the night. I'm going to enjoy this.

"—so we've been in lockdown since early last evening, but, well, as you can see." Carter's anxious explanation trailed to an abrupt halt as he pushed open a door and led us through into the prison infirmary.

"Doctor Van Helsing, this is Doctor Bartlett, our house physician; and our chaplain, Father Murphy." I registered the names for future reference but my eyes were not for the two men being introduced to me. They immediately fixed upon the central fixture in the room and remained there in grim horror.

Upon a cot in the center of the infirmary lay a pale figure wrapped in thin cotton sheets nearly to his chin. His eyes stared upward blankly; bedraggled blonde hair spread out in a halo around his head. I could see clearly the laboured rise and fall of his chest and hear his rasping breath.

"He was attacked last night?" I asked tersely after some moments, finally looking at the thin, watery-eyed man who had been introduced as Bartlett.

"Yes. In the middle of lockdown no less – we have no idea how the attacker got to him. He was still behind locked bars when the patrolling guard found him." The explanation came with clinical precision; but the man did not meet my eyes, staring instead with a look of intense trepidation over my shoulder.

"Alucard, wait for us in the hallway," I snipped briefly. There was no reply, but I heard the rustling swish of his heavy coat as he bowed and stepped backward out of the room.

"Odd bloke, isn't he?" Carter commented as the door shut silently.

"Yes, but he has his… uses," I gave my careful response as I removed my jacket and unbuttoned the cuffs of my shirt sleeves to roll them back. "With your permission, Doctor," I gestured to the wounded man.

"By all means, Doctor Van Helsing," Bartlett replied quickly, recovering his composure in the absence of my menacing counterpart. He drew back the thin covering, exposing a bloodstained bandage about the patient's neck, and shook his head. "I just changed this. Not half an hour ago. He hasn't got much longer, I'm afraid."

I had already guessed this, by the presence of the priest. I nodded absently, my fingers already working to undo the wrapping. The wound beneath was no less than I had expected: flesh torn raggedly by the work of haphazard fangs, still oozing forth in a half-congealed stream. There was none of the subtlety I recalled from the precise attacks of the Count a decade past. This was the result of a vicious, brutal assault. A relatively young vampire, I surmised.

I could have told you that. You're wasting your time.

Patience, I commanded with a frown. "You were right to call me, gentlemen," I spoke aloud. "Even if this were a fully-equipped hospital I do not think that such a wound could be cured by mundane medical means." I placed a hand upon the victim's forehead; the staring eyes rolled blankly up at me, unseeing. "I shall require a wooden stake."

"I beg your pardon?"

I turned a sharp look upon the warden at his incredulous query. "A stake, man: a wooden stake! Your prisoners fashion weapons from bed-legs: surely you can find the means to do the same."

"Yes, but what for?"

"He has not much longer to live. He has been attacked by a creature of the night; and when he dies, his body will become a minion of the Thing that killed him; unless I am permitted to seal it now." I tilted my head, peering at him over the rims of my glasses. "Fire would also suffice, but I presume you'd rather I not start a blaze in your infirmary."

"Right. Yes. Of course…" rubbing the back of his head, Carter stepped outside. I saw him startle sideways just beyond the doorway and then resume his stride as the door swung shut behind him. No doubt Alucard was being his usual charming self. I felt a faint psychic chuckle in response to the thought and irritably reinforced the mental barriers that kept the vampire out.

"You really mean to drive a stake through his heart?" Bartlett asked in horror as he reached past me to replace the bandages and pull the sheet back up. "I thought that was all made-up fancy for that book."

"In most things, however fanciful, there is a grain of truth, Doctor," I replied. "I take no joy in such grim work; but it must be done."

"This is barbaric," spoke a third voice; and I turned to look upon the priest, who had stood silent until now. "Convict or not, this man has been brutally attacked, and you stand there, speaking calmly of the desecration of his remains while he still breathes? In God's name, Van Helsing, what sort of man are you?"

"A man of God, I hope," I replied, sincerely respectful as I made the sign of the cross. "What this man has done in life is of no importance to us now. I seek only to spare his soul from oblivion."

"Aye, well you have an odd way of showing it." Father Murphy eyed me disapprovingly as he moved to the victim's opposite side. I bowed my head slightly and stepped back as he began to administer the last rites. The harsh sound of the prisoner's breath had taken on a desperate, rattling quality.

Carter returned, banging against the doorframe in his haste to pass the looming shadow in the hall. "Will this do, Doctor? I found a hammer in the storage room as well—" he fell swiftly quiet when he saw the priest at work. "Bloody hell," he murmured as I relieved him of the broken chair leg and work mallet. "Right circus we're making of this, isn't it?"

I declined to reply, watching solemnly as the priest completed his duty. We stood for some moments in awkward silence, the only sound in the room the rasping breath of the dying man; and then that, too, finally faded. I moved to the cot.

"I must register my disapproval of this… act," Murphy declared with a distressed frown. "This is blasphemy, Doctor. I want no part of it."

"I ask none to share in this with me. If it is blasphemy, then the stain shall rest upon my soul alone." I placed the makeshift stake over the dead man's heart and tested the weight of the hammer in my right hand. My face assumed a deadened mask.

"Benedicat te omnipotens Deus, Pater, et Fílius, et Spíritus Sanctus. Amen."

I drove the hammer downward. An unholy shriek spilled forth from the gaping mouth of the corpse and the limbs jerked spasmodically, clawing at my arms as the point of the wooden spike pierced the ribcage. The eyes glared for a single, eternal moment: not the cunning crimson I had seen so often in the Count's smouldering gaze, but the dull, ashen ember of a mindless ghoul; and then they were extinguished forever.

I jerked back from the body, passing a hand over my forehead and drawing a calming breath. Carter stood as if stricken, his mouth agape and eyes staring at the monstrosity sprawled across the bed. Bartlett was retching into the wash basin in the corner. I crossed myself again, fervently, as the body began to crumble and fall into dust, and sought Murphy's eyes; but the chaplain had shut them tightly and was whispering under his breath in a swift torrent of Latin.

I gave them a few moments to recover; but not overlong. The night's true task still lay ahead. "The other bodies," I uttered flatly into the dense, hanging air. "What did you do with them?"

"In the morgue…" Carter replied distantly after a pause. "Oh God, are they all going to be like that?"

"It's entirely possible," I replied in clipped tones. "An indiscriminately feeding vampire leaves such refuse in his wake. Where is the morgue, and with how many must we expect to deal?"

The warden swallowed hard and tried to regain his composure, squaring his shoulders and facing me directly. "In the sub-level. Opposite the maximum security wing. We've had some dozen deaths, but I don't know if they were all…" he gestured vainly at the small pile of ash that had so recently been an inmate, "like that…."

Alucard.

It's about time.

I nodded shortly to Carter. "Show me to this sub-level."

We left the physician, Bartlett, recovering his wits over the sink; but Father Murphy steeled himself and slipped through the doorway on my heels as Carter led the way down the hallway. Alucard detached himself from the wall and kept pace silently in our wake.

"Dear God…" Murphy alternated between staring desperately at me and casting fearful glances backward at the red-cloaked mass of shadow that seemed to envelope the whole corridor behind. "Was that really a vampire?"

"It was a—"

"—ghoul," Alucard interrupted darkly. "The mindless undead slave of a vampire who feeds indiscriminately on the impure." He grinned slightly, showing a flash of teeth under the shadowed brim of his hat. "The lowest form of minion. But then, filth seem to enjoy surrounding themselves with filth."

The priest raked fingers through his tousled, sandy hair, trying to process all of this at once. "And who're you, then?"

Before Alucard could traumatize the poor man further, I interjected. "He is an agent in my employ. He has dealt with these things before."

In your employ; that's clever. When do I receive my salary?

In that moment's distraction I nearly tripped over Carter's heels, as the warden stopped dead in the middle of the hallway. An alarm bell suddenly sounded stridently throughout the building. The doorway at the end of the hall burst open and two guards threw themselves through the opening, shouting frantically.

"Sir, it's a riot! They've taken over the sentry station and the entire floor!"

"How?" Carter demanded, stiffening angrily.

"I don't know, sir," the guard on the right pled fearfully. "They must have tunneled, or something – they came at us from the lower hallway – I have no idea how. Simmons put six bullets in one of them, but he just… kept coming…."

"It happened all so quick, sir – the whole block has gone insane." The second man wobbled; blood trickled in a thin stream from his left temple. "We barely got out. Simmons and Blake– they—" he choked on the words, lurching against the wall and clutching at his eyes with one hand as if trying to claw the image out of them.

The lower hallway. The morgue. He has awakened his ghouls.

I felt the quickening of anticipation in the mental voice and turned sharply. He stood, perfectly still in the center of the corridor, but exuding a palpable tension as that of a vicious animal straining at its chain. A gleeful grin split his face; his eyes burned with a predatory light. I felt my own pulse quicken in response and forced several deep breaths. This was, after all, why I had brought him with me.

"Alucard," I uttered, removing my spectacles and tugging a handkerchief from my pocket to clean them in a show of calm that I did not feel. All eyes were on me: his most intently. "Eliminate the target."

A sound very like a fulfilled sigh passed his lips as he brushed past us like a ghost, the heavy snapping sound of his coat the only thing that seemed to anchor him to our reality. As his gloved hand touched the handle of the door at the end of the hall, I added firmly, "Save all you can."

Gravity paused along with him for a single moment, his form seeming to hang suspended, as a painting capturing the act of motion. His unnerving smile flashed once more, briefly, as he glanced back to acknowledge me. "Understood."

And then he was gone. The door swung softly shut on empty space.

"Alone!" Carter's shrill disbelief broke the spell. "Have you ever seen a prison riot, Van Helsing? Does he even have a weapon? This is madness!"

The thudding sound of running feet was converging on our position in response to the alarm. "It is not madness, Warden!" I lifted my voice above the ringing of the bell and the rising noise of confused humanity. "You there—" I stabbed a finger at the first guard, "get him," indicating the second, "to the infirmary. The rest of you," and here I raised both hands above my head for attention; mercifully aided by the sudden cessation of the ringing bell. Almost, I mused, as if an annoyed vampire had ripped it from the wall.

There was no dry rejoinder to the thought this time. I could feel Alucard at the other end of his leash, but only as an indefinite sense of cathartic glee as he waded into the enemy. "Please, everyone," I repeated, sweeping my eyes over the new arrivals as the remainder of the on-duty guards skidded to a halt in the hallway with us. "The situation will be under control shortly." I hoped.

"Bollocks, Doctor!" Carter snapped. "I don't care how good your bloody agent is with those—those monsters; we've a riot on our hands and I have men down there in the middle of it! You lot: get down there and establish control. Mind the fellow in the red coat and hat; he's on our side. If he's still alive," he added under his breath as the guards filed past us.

Murphy was looking at me very hard. I didn't have time for this. You're about to have company, I thought ahead.

And? Amusement was foremost in Alucard's thought. Unknowing of what to expect, and somewhat fearful now, I hurried after the troop, ignoring Carter's shouted insistence that I stop. I heard Murphy huffing at my shoulder as the priest stayed at my heels; then some moments later, the warden's reluctant footfalls as well.

I pushed through the doorway and hurried down the stairs immediately beyond. At the landing there was a double barrier: a door of thick oak, and a grating of iron bars. Both were open. In the flickering gaslight past the threshold I could see one of the guards, his gun held stiffly in both hands, his gaze transfixed in horror at some sight beyond. I heard a smattering of gunshots, followed by muffled screams, and then all was overridden by a booming wave of basso laughter.

I pressed onward, pausing for a moment beside the solitary guard; I had to pause, for even fortified by the memory of horrors already faced, my mind recoiled at the sight now before me.

It wasn't the bodies. Bodies I was accustomed to—even scattered in dismembered parts as they were. Some were nearly intact except for the heads, which appeared to have been forcibly crushed; the frames to which they had been attached lay now crumbling sluggishly into dust.

Nor was it the blood, which painted the walls in irregular splashes and slickened the floor to a dark, sickly sheen. I was even more accustomed to the sight of blood.

But what lay at the end of the hallway baffled my senses to a standstill as they tried to interpret what I was seeing: a mass of twisted shadow, insubstantial yet solid; real yet contorted in such a way that no living thing could have cast it. Alucard.

I could recognize… parts of him. A glimpse of a hand here; an elbow there – though not in any place proportionate to the hand. A hint of his sharp profile flickered briefly across the wall as the form continued to twist and writhe, an incoherent cacophony of hair and teeth and burning eyes. Above it all erupted the leering demonic face of a creature born from the imagination of Hell: a wolfish parody of gaping jaws and far too many eyes; and from its teeth dangled the broken form of the lesser vampire. The great menace of Eastwick Penitentiary seemed rather an inconsequential afterthought now.

"ALUCARD!" My voice was drowned in the sea of shouts and screams and frantic gunshots; but I felt the Seal between us vibrate like a live thing in response. I felt his rebellion; his defiant ferocity at this small taste of freedom after a decade in chains. But even as the hellhound turned three sets of its eyes toward me and let forth a vicious, rippling snarl; even as I heard the bones of its monstrous victim splinter and crack under the crushing force of those shapeless jaws… I felt him also recede slightly. A lucky bullet caught the devil dog in what passed for a cheek, ripping a tendril of shadow away with its passage.

As if a hole had been punched in a balloon, the shadowed monstrosity began to collapse on itself. Two more gaping, impossible mouths stretched wide in the shapeless mass, bellowing forth mocking laughter from nonexistent throats: for there was nothing behind them; no yawning gullet; just an endless array of laughing eyes. The hellhound's head whipped angrily, snapping the prey in its jaws like a boneless rag, and then snatching it up and swallowing it whole.

I found myself trembling with the effort to rein the monster in. He thrashed and fought against the binding even as it tightened around him. "Compose yourself…" I growled through clenched teeth, mustering a force of will to match his. "Your Master commands it!"

The Seal snapped into place. A sudden vortex seemed to draw the shadows into themselves; and then Alucard stood alone in the epicenter of the carnage, utterly serene except for a slight unearthly flapping of his coat in a nonexistent breeze. The guards drew back, uncertainly. Insufferable in his self-satisfaction, the vampire strode forward, idly crushing the skull of an already-dead ghoul under a boot heel. The stunned silence parted only for the sound of his calm footfalls; and finally he stood before me. Utterly unrepentant, he bowed his head and smiled.

"The target has been eliminated."

I had several choice things I wanted to say to him, but present company made this awkward. He seemed to have no trouble reading my thoughts in any case, and his smile broadened to a vulgar grin.

It was the priest who finally spoke, seething with righteous fury as he brandished a stout wooden cross before him. "Wha' in God's name ARE you! Monster!"

"Yes," Alucard agreed, reaching forward suddenly to pluck the cross from the Murphy's startled grasp. He tossed it lightly over in one gloved hand, testing its heft. "A monster, to kill another monster. Ingenious, isn't it?" He smiled in a disturbingly congenial fashion and stuck the end of the cross in his mouth, bracing it against one fang and chewing on it like an oversized cigar. The effect was amplified by a slight wisp of smoke that trailed from his lips at the contact.

The chaplain crossed himself and scurried backward nervously. "This is an outrage, Van Helsing!"

Given the circumstances, I had to agree. "You were ordered to spare all you could," I observed coldly.

The vampire glanced casually over his shoulder. "But I did," he remonstrated mildly, shifting the cross from one side of his mouth to the other. "Of course, your interfering guards shot a fair number of fleeing prisoners. Such a shame they got in the way; I had things well in hand."

"Clearly," I growled. He turned his eyes back to me, and in them was the monster: bound but fiercely unapologetic. I held his gaze for some moments and then keeping my voice level with effort, uttered, "Return to the manor. You will interact with no one until I return."

He bowed deeply and dispersed in a swirl of smoke. The cross clattered to the floor. I turned stiffly and walked past the stunned, silent faces back to the stairwell and upward. That which had preyed on the prison denizens was dead; but I felt that defeat had never weighed so heavily on my soul.