Disclaimer: All credit for this fic goes to my fantastic brain… and Scott Summer's awesome brain too.
Van Helsing arranged the logs over the ashes of last night's fire and held a candle to the wood, waiting until the flames licked at the bark before looking towards Carina.
The woman had been silent since Serafim had mocked her in the village, and had not said a word since they had arrived. She now knelt beside her father, watching him.
Watching him die.
There was nothing else she'd been able to do. The man's wounds were too severe, his blood loss too great for any recovery. Not only that, but the vampyres seemed to have some form of control over him - even though Carina's father was a victim, and not a vampyre himself, he was at their mercy.
And the vampyres, now that they could no longer drink his blood, wanted him dead. And so, he was dying.
"Ca… ri… na…"
Carina knelt closer to her father, her ear to his mouth, to listen to him. Van Helsing looked away, allowing them some privacy, and concentrated instead on the fire. It was burning now, but would not last if he did not put more wood on it.
The wind outside howled and raged. The blizzard was back again in force.
Carina rose to her feet, crossing the room to pick up an old leather-bound book. Kneeling once more by her father's side, she opened it and began to read.
"He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust'."
Carina's father settled himself more comfortably in the blankets, and listened with his hands crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. Only the rise and fall of his chest showed that he was still alive.
"… His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear…" Carina steadied herself, then continued, "You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrows that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in… in darkness." She closed her eyes for a moment, then continued, her voice strong and sure. "If you make the Most High your dwelling, then no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near your home. For He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. They will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone… 'Because he loves me,' says the Lord, 'I will rescue him. I will protect him, for he acknowledged my name. He will call upon me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honour him." Carina was near tears now, but she did not falter. "'With long life I will satisfy him, and show him my salvation'." She closed the Bible; her eyes as well, and quoted from a different psalm. "Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever." She looked down at her father.
He was still now, but there was a smile on his face. He had been set free, and where he was, there was no more pain.
"Amen," Van Helsing said quietly.
"Amen," Carina echoed. She wiped the tears from her eyes. "Rest in peace, father." She reached out and rested her hand on his.
The fire was crackling now, and the room was slowly heating up. The cauldron on the fire would bubble soon, and the soup would be ready to eat. But Van Helsing didn't feel like eating.
"Why did you come here?" Carina asked, her voice barely a whisper. Van Helsing almost wondered if he'd imagined her speaking, until she turned her sad brown eyes towards him.
"I followed the strigoi," Van Helsing said, aware of the grief that Carina was trying her hardest to control. "I came to destroy them."
"What sane man hunts strigoi through a blizzard?"
"A man who is sent by God to hunt down evil, wherever it may be found."
She looked at him then, long and hard. "'Wherever it may be found'? How far have you travelled?"
Van Helsing looked into the fire. The flames flickered and leaped. "Far enough to see the world." He looked back at Carina. "And long enough to lose the memories of who I was before." Van Helsing sighed. "Now, I have nothing left but my quest to destroy evil."
Carina studied Van Helsing carefully, then looked away. "I do not envy you that." She stood up. "I will bury him now." She made for the door, and unbarred the way.
Van Helsing moved swiftly, and put a hand on her arm, stopping her. "You can't go out there. The vampyres could be waiting for you."
"It's early afternoon," she said calmly. "They can't harm me."
"And why would that be?"
"In sunlight, they can only take human form. They have none of their powers in the daylight hours." She pulled at the door.
Van Helsing put his hand on the door. "This is folly. The ground will be frozen solid - it will be days before you'd be able to dig a grave deep enough for him."
Carina's eyes were heavy and burdened once more. "I already have. I thought my father was dead long ago, and I dug him a grave." She looked away. "It's not far from here."
"Then I'll help you," Van Helsing said, "You shouldn't be doing this alone."
Carina looked at Van Helsing curiously, then nodded. "My thanks."
They carried Carina's father into the snow, where the blizzard lashed at them furiously. Van Helsing kept his guard up, expecting the vampyres to attack at any moment. Carina did not seem to care. She brushed away at the snow until she found the corner of a canvas cloth. Peeling it back, she revealed a deep hole, dug square in the ground.
"I have no coffin for him," she said, pushing the frozen cloth into the grave, fitting it perfectly. "This will… This will have to do."
"It's not very deep," Van Helsing noted.
Carina stared sightlessly at the open grave. "It will serve. Beasts and monsters alike… they do not feed on those the vampyres have tainted." She knelt down and put her arms under her father's, and started dragging him into the grave. Van Helsing stopped her.
"Let me," he said gently. Carina looked at him, too broken with grief to protest. She watched as Van Helsing placed the old man in the grave, arranging his hands so they crossed across his chest. Just like they had when Carina had read him the 91st Psalm. With a slight smile on his lips, Carina's father looked like he was sleeping.
"Requiescant in pace." Van Helsing said, crossing himself, and wishing the old man's soul on its way to God. After a moment's silence, he turned to offer some comfort to Carina. But she was not there.
Through the snow, Van Helsing saw her coming back out of the warehouse, her form almost obliterated by the furious blizzard. She was carrying something in both hands. A rod, a sceptre of some sort. A gift to bury with the dead?
It was a sword. She was drawing it as she approached the grave.
"Carina, what are you doing?"
Carina didn't say anything. Her eyes were glazed, dead, resigned to whatever task she had to perform. She pushed past Van Helsing, and knelt over the open grave.
The sword sang through the air, slicing snowflakes in two, and cleaving her father's head from his neck.
Van Helsing leapt forward, knocking the sword from Carina's hand. It fell softly into the snow, leeching pale blood into the surrounding flakes.
"What do you think you're doing!" Van Helsing shouted at her.
Carina met his stare evenly. "You know nothing of vampyres," she hissed. She turned away from him, and turned back to the grave. Pulling a small wreathe of withered flowers from her cloak, she leant down into the grave and picked up her father's head. Wincing slightly, she closed her eyes as she stuffed the plants into her father's mouth. Then she placed the head back in the grave… but between the corpse's knees. Only after she wrapped the canvas cloth around the old man's body did she finally allow herself to cry.
Van Helsing stared, confused and horrified by what he'd just seen.
Carina knelt by the graveside, no longer containing her grief, but venting her screams and cries to the wind. With every cry, she pushed a handful of earth onto her father's wrapped body. Within minutes, he was buried. The snow would obliterate the site of the grave mound in less time than the woman had been taken to bury her father. But Carina continued to cry.
Van Helsing turned away, giving the woman privacy as much to give himself some time to breathe, to sort out the thoughts in his head. Why had Carina desecrated the body in such a manner? Why had she said nothing? What manner of place was this? He shivered, though not just from the cold of the blizzard.
He looked back over his shoulder. Carina was still crying by the old man's grave, her head in her hands, rocking back and forth.
There was nothing Van Helsing could do for her. She wanted to be alone with her grief. And Van Helsing wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He headed back to the warehouse, his footsteps seeming loud and accusing in the snow. The wind whipped at him like clawed hands, chilling him to the bone.
He had nearly reached the warehouse when there was a cry on the wind. A high keening wail; too human to be strigoi, too unearthly to be human. A vampyre! There was no time to wonder - Van Helsing dashed back to where Carina was kneeling in the snow.
"Get up, quickly! They're coming!" She didn't move. "Come on!" He pulled her to her feet, then draped one of her arms over his shoulder and dragged her away from the grave, hurrying back to the warehouse… and the safety it offered them.
Van Helsing slid the iron bar back into place, fastened the locks tight, and listened carefully. It seemed quiet outside - despite the howl of the wind and the shriek of the blizzard, there was no further sound. No vampyres shrieking, crying, wailing. Just the storm, and nothing more. Van Helsing turned to Carina. She was standing at the far corner of the room, holding the tarnished mirror in both hands, staring at her reflection with blank eyes, totally absorbed; but somehow, not seeing herself at all, but something beyond.
When Van Helsing had first found shelter here, it had been Carina's home. This place no longer felt safe. It felt like a tomb.
"Why did you do that to your father?" Van Helsing demanded, angry without reason. "Why did you desecrate his body?"
"To keep him safe," Carina whispered, her throat raw from mourning her father. "To protect him."
"To protect him from what?"
Carina did not lift her eyes from her reflection. "From the vampyres."
"He's dead, Carina. They can't harm him."
She sighed, and her eyes were burdened and sad once more. "They kept him alive for nearly a year, just so he could feed their horrible hunger. I thought he was dead. Now that he is…" She slowly set the mirror down on the table, but still did not look away from its polished surface. "He would have been the best way to get me to open the door."
Van Helsing frowned, wondering why the argument was becoming so circular. "But he's dead!"
"I KNOW THAT!" Carina whirled on Van Helsing, tears spilling out from her eyes. "But so are the vampyres!" Her voice shook, but still she continued. "They raid a grave as easily as you or I take a breath - their life is in the death of others. If they so choose, they could make my father a strigoi… or worse, one of them." Carina closed her eyes and began sobbing again. "Whether he is dead or alive, they would have taken him."
Van Helsing stared. The fire crackled and popped. Outside, the wind howled.
"I'm sorry," he said, after a long silence. "I didn't know."
Carina opened eyes that were filled with tears, but said nothing. She turned back to stare into the mirror, her hand straying to her eyes, her hair, her lips.
Van Helsing sat back down in one of the chairs and stared into the fire. The flames danced and swayed, taunting Van Helsing with promises of lost memories returned. He did not listen to them. Just as Carina did not listen to the voices that howled with the blizzard.
"If it's any consolation," Van Helsing said cautiously, looking up at the woman. "I admire the way you did not shrink from the task."
Carina turned slowly to face him, and shrugged hopelessly. "I did the best I could, given the circumstances."
"You know how to prevent the dead from rising."
Carina's eyes went dead. "The same way I learned to judge time from within these four walls - trail and error." She looked down. "I lost my mother and my brothers to the vampyres… because I did not know they needed to be protected after death. And I had seen other families within the village trying to protect their dead. Beheading, next to putting a stake into the heart of the dead, is the most effective form of preventing the dead from rising. Other methods were not as successful…" She trailed off, unable to continue.
Van Helsing looked back at the fire. A log crumbled away into ashes, and the fire dimmed. From the other side of the room, Carina headed for a pile of firewood. She picked one of the logs up and brought it to the fire, braving the heat of the flames to set it in place. She sat back, and wiped her brow with the back of her hand.
As she did so, her sleeve slid back from her wrist.
"That looks like a nasty scar," Van Helsing noted, concerned.
Carina's hand snapped back out of sight, and she pulled her sleeve down. "It was an accident," she said, shortly.
"Are you sure?" Van Helsing asked, aroused to suspicion by the woman's reaction. "It looked like it was made on purpose."
"I didn't do it." Carina said stubbornly.
"Of course not," Van Helsing noted, setting aside his blanket and warming his hands at the fire. "Because it is a mortal sin to commit suicide."
Carina smiled acidly at him. "I may be Christian, Van Helsing, but I am no Catholic. I follow the Lord, not the clergy."
Van Helsing stared at Carina. "You were trying to kill yourself?"
Carina sighed, suddenly irritated. "I told you, I did not cut myself. I didn't try to kill myself. I never have, and I never will." She looked at her wrist, an expression akin to despair flitting across her face. "This was not me. This was not my choice."
Van Helsing stared at the woman for a long moment. Neither he nor Carina spoke. Finally, she rose to her feet and headed back for the mirror, touching her lips, her eyes, her hair… and she held her wrist up to the mirror to examine it.
Under drab peasant garb in dull browns and greens, with her hair hidden under that headscarf and tears in her eyes, Carina could have been any woman in any village across Romania. She could have been anyone at all. If it wasn't for the scar, she might have been anyone at all.
The fire crackled and snapped, the flames licking at the new log greedily. Outside, the wind howled and screeched, the sound of light snowfall muffled and soft.
"How long have you known?" Van Helsing asked quietly.
Carina turned back to face him, a strange light burning in her eyes. She said nothing, but peeled off the headscarf and pulled at the ribbon that held her hair. Long beautiful tresses of glorious chestnut hair cascaded down. She ruffled her hair slightly, freeing it, before lowering her hands and meeting Van Helsing dead in the eye.
Her eyes had not been brown. They had been the muted colour of new amber. Now, they shone in all their golden glory. Her lips were vivid red, her pale skin almost luminescent. Everything about Carina was different - she was bright and beautiful now, now that she was no longer hiding behind pretences.
"I was wondering when you'd realise," she said softly, the points of her teeth showing in the red firelight.
A/N: -gasp-