The sounds of gunfire roused the Iscariots on the airplane. Anderson was pushing through the rising priests toward the open back hatch shouting, "Ye'll stay right where ye are until we get ye some weapons," when he heard the distinctive sounds of Alucard's guns.
As much as he hated to admit it, the two Hellsing vampires would probably be able to handle almost anything out there. He leapt down onto the tarmac. But they weren't going to handle it without him.
Anderson's feet had hardly hit the tarmac when he was hit with a barrage of automatic weapons fire. The impact of bullets spread a murderous grin across his face, and the paladin ran without hesitation directly toward the line of lorries that was sheltering their attackers.
Behind him, the windows of the airplane were crowded with the faces of watching priests. Anderson had been forced to wait until they arrived in Italy to resupply his Iscariots with weapons, which meant that most of them were not much use against their attackers. The Vatican warriors had thrown almost everything they had into the breach in London, and the British government had not been kindly disposed toward its would-be conquerors. The Catholic warriors were lucky they'd been allowed to leave England at all, it was definitely asking too much for the Crown to supply the invaders with weapons, too.
One of the watching Iscariots, Father Alvin Davidoff, nudged Sister Heinkel, who was watching Anderson fixedly, and pointed to the tarmac between the plane and the lorries. Alucard stood in front of his coffin with his long red coat flaring and flapping around him. The observers assumed that his coat was moving in the wind, or perhaps with the impact of bullets. What they could not see from their perspective was that his coat was moving to intercept the bullets before they could touch Alucard's precious Last Domain. He was grinning a sharp white grin and firing his guns with casual precision, never missing and often killing more than one enemy with a single shot.
Wolfe looked around for Hellsing's other vampire; she was just wondering if he was less useful than they had been led to believe when a glint of silver caught her eye. She nudged Father Davidoff in return and the two of them watched Hellsing's newest vampire doing something that made no sense to either of them – the slender man in black was positioned between the plane and the line of lorries that shielded their attackers and dancing? He controlled whatever was making the silver flashes, but neither Wolfe nor the priest she was sharing a window with understood what the point of his antics was. They watched him step and turn across the landing surface like some sort of improvisational dancer who had been suddenly dropped in the middle of a war zone.
She and Davidoff exchanged a puzzled glance before returning their attention to the scene outside.
Wolfe didn't turn away from her fascination with the carnage that had erupted outside their airplane when she heard one of her compatriots whistle and murmur, "Holy sh–" Instead, she quickly surveyed the melee for the source of whatever had elicited such a response from a hardened Iscariot killer. Of course – their leader.
Anderson had found his enemies. There were some quiet cheers and exclamations from the warriors as they watched their section chief cut his way through their attackers. Bullets did not stop him from sweeping through the assembled enemies. Whoever had spoken up must have missed the sight of Alexander Anderson in London fighting toe to toe with vampires and winning again and again. This hardly compared in terms of ability to inspire awe.
Wolfe had heard him referred to as "Sword Dancer," and it was entirely true. Anderson was wed to his blades and he and his weapons moved together as a perfect partnership. Men fell in front of him and the priest shouted with giddy glee and imprecations against his enemies. Wolfe could hear his voice drift through the open door of the plane above the roar of bullets and the screams of the dying, but she could only hear tone, not words. The tone said that Anderson was enjoying himself.
The scene outside was a chaos of gun muzzle flashes, flickers of silver from thrown barrages of bayonets, and the subtle silver glint of whatever the butler was playing with.
Then everything came to a halt – no more gunfire, no more thrown blades from Anderson, no more impromptu dance performance from the younger vampire.
The silence was not deafening. It was filled with the ringing of their ears from the noise that had come in through the open hatch at the back of the plane. Through that, all of them clearly heard Alucard's shout, "Is that all you have? Is that really all?"
•••
Shadows spread under the door to the lab – shadows with gleaming red eyes that opened to survey the laboratory.
Seras was not bothered by the lack of illumination in the room. A fine vampire she'd be if a little bit of gloom kept her from her work. Looking around, though, she didn't see what had drawn her back here when she'd passed in the hallway. She saw no human forms, nothing moved, but still she had a sense of things being wrong. She had learned some vital lessons about trusting her instincts – the predatory instincts of a vampire were what were needed to keep Sir Integra safe and Seras was not going to fall short on her commitment to Integra or to Hellsing.
Don't forget me, piped up Pip with a mental huff. I'm going to help you keep the boss safe, too.
How could I forget you? People talk about soulmates, but they have no idea what that word really means.
Which was a problem to dwell on another time. Seras had a feeling that there would come a day when either she, or Pip, or perhaps both of them, would want this cozy arrangement of theirs to change. Right now, in the midst of an ongoing war with an enemy that had already taken so much from both of them, both were happy to have each other to lean on.
Seras felt briefly warmer when Pip's thoughts brushed over hers with reassurance and affection.
She spread her shadows across the room, touching everything just to reassure herself that everything was as it seemed. Everything seemed right until she spread out to the far corner of the room and found that the darkness there wrapped around her questing tendrils of shadow and bathed her in a sudden, acidic pain.
Seras suppressed a scream and tried to pull away from whatever it was that was hurting her. Darkness that made the simple lack of illumination in the pitch black basement room seem daylight bright flowed out of the corner to envelop more of Seras' shadowy form.
•••
Alucard's face twisted with dissatisfaction as he surveyed the destruction he and the paladin had wrought. It had been too easy. Surely Millennium weren't scraping the bottom of the barrel already were they? That would be disappointing. After the setbacks in London, Alucard had looked forward to straightforward carnage and a bit of a challenge as a remedy.
So far, Millennium wasn't delivering.
He sighed out an irritated growl and picked up his coffin again. "There are no more humans with guns here, Apostate, you can let your little flock off the plane now." The vampire strode across the tarmac to the lorries and opened the back of one. "They didn't bring your weapons," he noted. With a careless shrug he loaded his coffin into the empty cargo space.
Anderson nudged over a body with a toe and looked at it. They were dressed in Italian army uniforms. More traitors? Or had they been innocent pawns manipulated in the hands of a traitor or traitors? He said a prayer for their souls; at least they had died human. He prayed for their sakes that they'd been blameless tools who would see a brighter reward in the afterlife.
After he finished with his prayers, he returned to the airplane. By the time he arrived, Walter was just jumping down carrying his own coffin to join Alucard's. The priest looked at the vampire with contempt. "And what were ye doing while we fought? I saw you flittering around doing nothing."
Walter raised an eyebrow and pointed to the ground around his feet. After setting his coffin gently down on the ground, he bent over and picked up a few of the fragments that he had pointed to and held them out in the palm of his hand for Anderson to look at.
The priest poked at the dull bits of metal with a big finger and looked at Walter again, "So?"
"So, Father Anderson, that 'flittering around' that I was doing kept your airplane full of assassins from going up in one very large, and no doubt very holy fireball." He poked around at the fragments in his hand for a moment before coming up with two pieces that he fit together. He held up the bullet for Anderson's appraisal before releasing it to fall to the ground in two pieces again.
He met the priest's angry green eyes with his calm red ones. "I may not be as loud as Alucard, but I am useful in my own right. Don't underestimate me just because I don't find it necessary to push your buttons to amuse myself."
He turned away to load his coffin next to Alucard's while Anderson organized his people to retrieve all weapons and ammunition from the bodies of their attackers that they could.
•••
Acid. Holy water. Burning tar. Seras screamed silently and writhed in the grip of whatever it was that had hold of her. The pain was so all encompassing that her actions were broken down to the basest of fight or flight reactions.
Alucard would have been proud. Seras' flight reaction was easily and quickly drowned out by a red rage that pushed the importance of the pain down to nothing. Seras knew that she was in pain, she could feel the damage being done to the shadowy substance that was her body, but she also realized that it didn't matter at all.
She hit her attacker, whatever it was, with a focused anger that would have surprised anyone who still thought of her as just the Police Girl. I am a true Nosferatu, and you are filth! She poured her contempt into her retaliation, using it to paralyze the thing that held her in its grip for the moment it took for her to call the rest of her body, her shadows, up into a wave that dropped and swept her attacker back into the corner.
Seras used her will, augmented by Pip's, to envelop her opponent's will in the same way her shadows were enveloping the other's. She compressed herself around the other, drawing her shadows in to crush the shadows that had been burning her moments before.
The fight drifted off of the physical plane. What was important was no longer the bodies involved, but the minds. Seras pushed past the memories that her opponent tossed up at her as distractions. Try something new. I tore apart the last vampire who tried to use memories against me.
She retaliated with a memory of her choosing. She shoved the memory of touching the Morrigan's mind down into her opponent's psyche and held on with all her mental and physical strength while their shadows spasmed and lurched.
Maybe Seras would have lost. Maybe Seras should have lost. But she had an advantage that few vampires would make the necessary sacrifice to have – she had a second person willingly inside of her, supplementing her strength and providing his own not inconsiderable will to her own.
Together Pip and Seras crushed their foe out of the shadows and back into her solid body. Seras resolved her form back into her comfortably familiar human semblance and nudged the body at her feet with a toe. The girl on the floor pulled her knees up to her chest and wept unashamedly while Seras looked on, wondering what to do next.