Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing or its characters, which are the property of Kohta Hirano. I do not own Read or Die nor any of its characters, which are the property of Hideyuki Kurata and his collaborators. A number of the characters in the following story are my own creations, however, and I am solely responsible for them. Fans of the two series will know which ones those are.I am also to blame for the story as a whole.
Brazil
I
Schrechlichkeit
The Villa Coutinho stood on a low hill, overlooking the beach and the old city below. There had been a villa there and a Coutinho in the villa for more than 400 years.
The Coutinhos were as odd and old-fashioned as the crumbling baroque palace they dwelt in. They hoarded their wealth, avoided politics and their fellow men in general, and regarded the modern world with deep distrust. As the town they had once helped to build decayed around them, they looked on with indifference. Yet the Church in this corner of Céara had no better friends.
Joaquim Coutinho was different. He had grown up far away, in Rio and Los Angeles and Paris. He was determined to bring the home he had inherited up to date. The villa was renovated in the latest style. Climate control replaced the ancient fans. There were two swimming pools and a hot tub, a twelve-car garage, a helicopter pad, a computer system, high-definition television, and much more. Since this was Brazil, no expense was spared to insure security. The villa was surrounded by barbed wire and floodlights, and there were the usual cameras, dogs, and armed guards. When he was done, Joaquim Coutinho had a home he could feel proud to show to his friends: designers from Rome, porn stars from Las Vegas, and drug dealers from Amsterdam.
The old women and the old men of Sao Judeo shook their heads and said that no good would come of it. As usual in such cases, they were right.
Belts of trees and thick undergrowth surrounded the villa, and little of what went on there could be heard in the town. The townspeople had long since learned to leave the Coutinhos—and especially the latest of the line—to themselves. That was probably why it took so long for the truth to be discovered.
It was early in the evening on a hot July night. The sun had been down less than an hour.
Normally, Joaquim Couthinho would have already been entertaining his guests or showing his rare books and antiques to prospective buyers. Failing that, he would have ordered up some prostitutes from the town.
Yet tonight nothing stirred in the Villa Coutinho. The floodlights came on, but they illuminated emptiness.
The guards lay dead, their weapons unfired. Some had been beheaded, while others had their arms cut off. Several of the dogs were dead also; the others cowered in their hutches, too afraid even to bark.
The servants were found inside. One Indian woman had time to say her rosary before she died. The head butler had gotten to the phone before he was decapitated. Calling would have done no good, since the buried line had already been cut.
One of the strongrooms had been broken open, but little had apparently been taken. Whatever the thieves were after had been small and easily concealed, or so the police reasoned later.
The last of the Coutinhos was found in several pieces, most of them in the bedroom. The head had been severed and was found floating in a pool, minus the eyes but with another portion of the anatomy stuffed into the mouth.
Such attacks on wealthy persons were more common in the big cities to the south than in a sleepy provincial centre like Sao Judeo. The extreme violence of this particular assault was certainly unusual, though not without parallel. The speed and silence of the massacre at the Villa Coutinho, however, made it altogether unique.
When they heard of it the following day, the townspeople crossed themselves. The few tourists made haste to depart.
It was indeed a baffling case. The local police furrowed their brows and summoned help from the capital.
II
Kriegstagebuch
A black shadow, sleek and swift, emerged from the wire that surrounded the Villa Coutinho. The shadow passed beyond the range of the floodlights and hid itself in a gully.
Lieutenant Zorin Blitz sighed with pleasure at a job well done. Zorin enjoyed solo missions. There was something marvelously free about them. They took her back to her Werewolf days in the Black Forest, waiting in the woods for incautious French jeep patrols to strike the piano wires.
Zorin Blitz dismounted the blade from her scythe, plucked a handful of grass, and wiped the blood and brains from the blade. She folded the shaft in half and packed blade and shaft together in their carrying case. She strapped the case across her back and opened radio communication with headquarters.
"Nerthus here."
"Here is Wotan. Report, Nerthus."
"Mission accomplished, sir. The objective has been secured."
"Excellent, Nerthus. Any resistance?"
"Negligible, sir. No rounds were fired and they gave no alarm. I was too quick for them."
Zorin Blitz heard the Major's chuckle in her ear. "You always are too quick, Lieutenant. Any casualties?"
"I killed twenty, sir. No survivors."
"Excellent, excellent. The Doctor will be very pleased to hear that you have got the Führer's manuscript."
"Yes, sir. Your instructions, sir?"
"You will wait in the hotel, Nerthus, until daylight. The police will send a team to deal with the case. The Dandy will be with them. He will get you out when he arrives. Do NOT let the manuscript out of your sight."
"No, sir. Wotan?"
"Yes, Nerthus?"
"I did not get much fresh nourishment, sir."
"No?"
"No, sir. I have my reserve rations still, but during the attack I had to move too fast to drink as much from the humans as I would have liked. Those were your orders."
"Yes, yes. Though you have never been too—particular about orders, have you Nerthus?"
Zorin Blitz said nothing. The Major was at his most dangerous when he was feeling playful.
"You have done well, Nerthus," he said at last. "Yes, you deserve a leave. Yet be discreet, this operation will have caused enough of a stir. We are still here on sufferance until our moment comes."
"No one shall be missed, sir."
"Yes, I know your tastes. Enjoy yourself, Nerthus. You have earned your reward. Out."
"Thank you, sir. Out."
The shadow left the gully and disappeared into the trees. A second shadow, slightly smaller but just as fast, followed at a distance.
III
Aufklärung
Lieutenant Zorin Blitz sat on the beach below the Hotel Bella Donha, smoked a cigarette, and gazed out to sea. The night was dark, cloudy with very little moon: ideal for hunting. The funny thing was,Zorin reflected, that in this country you hardly had to hunt at all.
Brazil was an ant-heap, aswarm with desperately poor young imbeciles eager to sacrifice themselves: nameless girls and boys with no homes, no families, and no birth certificates.
It would have been different in Germany. Everybody there was filed and numbered and regulated. A victim was missed, questions were asked. In Brazil, it was almost too easy.
Tourists were filed and numbered, too, which was why Zorin Blitz rarely preyed on them. A few were drifting about on the promenade and the hotel verandah: an ancient American couple; a bearded, scruffy-looking Englishman; a fat Japanese. There was even a German girl, a shocking example of what democracy had done to the volk. She was pretty for all that and in Rio Zorin might have taken a chance, but tourists would be missed too quickly here.
Zorin Blitz loved the beach. Long ago, in that former life, she had spent her best hours there. She had spent many days sunning herself on the shores of the Baltic, displaying her muscles to the admiring little blonde maedchen and the occasional foolish knabe. Then she would take them into the dunes and enjoy them.
Now she had to be wary of the sun. She could handle it in small doses, but you didn't get many small doses of it in this country; concentrated rays could be dangerous. The Baltic was gone for good: the Polacks had it all now, rot them.
But Brazil had a beach, too; that was the best thing about the place. On warm nights like this—warmer far than anything in Germany—Lieutenant Zorin Blitz would stare far out into the blackness, across the forbidden sea towards the Fatherland and the life that she had left behind.
There was good hunting on the beaches here. Not hunting at all, really, more like the queue in a mess. All you had to do was wait.
Zorin Blitz waited, with her pants unbuttoned and belt undone. That would be sign enough. The girls and boys here were like stupid little animals, purely sensual and amoral. If you showed them that you were ready, then they were ready too. Reading their minds was neither difficult nor interesting. Foreigners to them were like oil wells to Arabs.
Zorin Blitz looked down the beach to her left. The low lights of the Sao Judeo waterfront glinted across the sand. A group of teenagers cavorted in its beams, running in and out of the surf: they were white, black, brown, red, yellow, and every shade between. None of them looked older than fifteen or so, yet they wore almost nothing.
Virginity was a problem. Virgins were the tastiest, of course, but they didn't last long in this country, despite the Church. Sao Judeo wasn't one of the big cities, though, so the chances of finding one here were a bit better.
Zorin knew her way about this country well. They had been in Brazil for many years now but no one else in Millennium really knew the place; they were all too busy pining for the Fatherland. Zorin Blitz found much to appreciate here, but then she had never been such a slave to ideology as the others. She loved the dark silences of the Sertao, whose lonely ranches were such a rich source of fresh prey. The others still demanded Nordic blood, but Zorin had developed a more sophisticated palate. A human here might contain almost anything, and Zorin found the exotic mixture of blood types intoxicating.
Zorin had been a stranger everywhere for much of her life, even before her unlife began, so she found adaptation to circumstances easier than many of the others did. They had found a use for her in the war, of course (thank you, Major), but before that she had been considered a freak fit only for the Pomeranian State Institution for Girls and the dark quarters of Berlin and Hamburg.
Now Zorin watched the hermaphroditic teenagers disporting themselves in the surf and she knew that the world had caught her up. Once upon a time her appearance in the street had caused respectable men and women to shudder; now she got hardly a second glance in most places. Nor, she knew, were most of her habits considered exceptional these days. Now she blended in with the humans more easily than anyone else in Millennium.
Zorin had marched in the Rio carnival one year, carrying her unsheathed weapon and clad only in blood from head to foot. She had even won a prize at the Gala afterwards. The joke had been especially delicious, and Zorin had never enjoyed better hunting. Soho had been fun, too. She'd had to put up with the Valentines, of course, but their girls were ample compensation.
Zorin had been careful to enhance her usefulness; she spoke Portuguese almost as well as the Dandy, and better English than anybody in the organisation. The Major prized her ability to adapt to human society, which was why he trusted her with so many undercover missions. He hardly ever let Doc put a chip in her.
Zorin was grateful to the Major for that, because it gave her an opportunity to get away from him and away from all the others, too: away from Schroedinger's obscenities, the Doc's schemes, Guensche's silent brooding. She would kill them all one day, if the enemy didn't first. They bored and irritated her. All except one.
Zorin was tired. Killing was hard work, after all. And for what? She'd gotten a drink, but it had been too quick to enjoy properly.
She looked at the fat parcel in the haversack next to her. All for a book, twenty humans for a book. Two books, rather: Mein Kampf and the Second Book, the original manuscripts with additional unpublished chapters and notes, all in HIS own hand.
That rich fool shouldn't have tried to sell them, even clandestinely. It was all very, very important, according to the Doctor.
Screw the Doctor, Zorin thought. Yes, he'd kept everybody alive, but what sort of life was it? No future, no pleasures other than killing. Not that that wasn't fun, but anything could get dull after a while.
Screw the Führer too, for that matter. She had cared about ideology, once upon a time, but what was it good for now? The fool generals still talked of victory, but Zorin agreed with the Major. The only thing left to them all was to cause as much destruction as possible and get what enjoyment they could from that. Ideology, even victory and defeat, meant nothing anymore.
Only killing? No, there was still one other pleasure left.
Zorin closed her eyes and thought of Rip. She allowed her memory and her imagination free rein.
Zorin heard something just then, something other than the babble of the teenagers and the crash of the waves in the night. Someone was singing, even more sweetly than Rip herself.
It was quite beautiful. People sang at Millennium, but it was always the same songs: marches, Wagner, Weber, and so on. This song was in Portuguese, with a lilting melody like the song of a bird. Zorin spoke Portuguese well, but she disliked its gobble-gobble. The voice that sang now was light and airy and delicate and gave the language a sound Zorin had never heard before.
Zorin had loved music. She had adored the great Lutheran hymns she had heard as a small child in the grim white church in Hakenfraudorf, and she had tried to sing them. But even then her voice was not a girl's voice: it was too deep, too harsh, a voice made for a battlefield. So God—through the pastor and her parents—forbade Zorin to sing.
She had known a girl once—her first girl—who had sung beautifully. Then she met Zorin and she stopped singing. Not long after she stopped singing, she hanged herself.
Zorin Blitz rose from the sand, slung the haversack across her shoulder, and followed the song.
IV
Fall Lorelei
She found the singer not far away, behind a sand dune and close to the high-tide line. She came upon her from behind and was careful not to disturb her.
Zorin saw a nearly naked young woman with yellowish-copper skin and dark, tangled hair. She danced alone, her eyes shut and her body moving to a silent rhythm, and as she danced she sang:
Once I loved a man, he loved my sister;
Once I loved my sister, she loved my friend;
Once I loved my friend, she loved a man;
And now I do not love.
The girl stopped singing and knelt in the shallows. She hummed the tune she had sung and washed herself with seawater.
Zorin Blitz stepped forward, drawn by something other than her usual hunger.
The girl turned and looked up at her. "Hello."
Zorin noticed the girl's eyes first. They glowed redly in the dark, even as Zorin's own did. For a brief, dangerous second Zorin feared that she might have found one of her own kind by sheer improbable accident. Zorin quickly sniffed the mental air for other signs, but there were none and she relaxed once more.
Still, eyes like that were certainly unusual among humans. That alone made this one worth investigating.
"Your song," Zorin Blitz said. "I heard your song. It was—pretty."
"You're a foreigner," the girl said.
"Yes."
"I'm glad you liked my song," the girl said. "Are you a German?"
"Yes. How can you tell?"
"Oh, we get some tourists, and a few Germans live here. I'm part English and part Dutch, but also part German, too. I don't speak German, though."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Zorin said. "It's a beautiful language for singing. Will you sing another song?"
"I don't know," the girl said. "I make up my own songs. That's as far as I've gotten with that one."
The clouds now parted slightly and the moonlight increased, enabling Zorin to get a really good look at her victim. There were bluish-purple streaks in the girl's hair. Despite her bronze Brazilian skin, she had the slender nose and pointed chin of a Northern European. The corners of her eyes were slightly pinched, hinting at Indian or Oriental blood. Such mongrel mixtures were typical here, but this one at least seemed predominantly Nordic.
There was something to be said for just a little bit of racial mixture. Hadn't Doc told her that once? Powers—mirrors like herself, huntresses like Rip, deeps—all occurred where two or more human racial lines had crossed, even in the distant past. Zorin Blitz owed her own mental power to the wandering Jewish peddler who had made the odd personal name Zorin hereditary in the Protestant Blitz family ever since the 16th century.
The girl's bust fascinated Zorin Blitz. She had known only one other to equal it. Zorin remembered the cow-eyed, round-bottomed little hiwi who had trotted so faithfully behind her in Russia. This one's breasts were just as large and shapely as Nikita's had been. Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, Zorin thought as she gazed at them. Then she laughed aloud at her unspoken witticism.
"What's funny?" the girl asked. Her eyes became wide and slightly stupid. Despite the seawater, she smelled strongly of dirt and sweat. They all did here.
"Nothing you'd understand," Zorin said. "What's your name?"
"Marguerita," the girl said. "Marguerita Ana Kurata."
Being part Japanese as well as part German, this girl qualified as both an ally and an honorary Aryan. Perhaps Zorin would spare her on that account.
At this thought, Zorin laughed again.
Marguerita frowned. "Are you making fun of me?"
Zorin Blitz smiled. "Not at all. You are part Japanese, too, are you not?"
"Yes. My grandfather came here from Japan. My father is a hatter in the town." She pointed in the direction of the harbor lights, just in case Zorin had forgotten where the city was.
The girl had a magnificent figure and she would obviously make a splendid meal afterwards, but she had a family. That might complicate things. She was young, but still older than Zorin preferred them. Given her age and some of her manner, virginity was unlikely. There was something intriguing about her, though.
Zorin opened the girl's mind and peered inside. Getting inside was absurdly easy and much of the material within was boringly familiar: the usual jumble of pop music, TV and film, Catholic superstition, and peasant ignorance. The dreams and ambitions were mostly unsurprising: fame, riches, travel. Delusions would not be necessary with her; like so many others, she had already deluded herself.
Yet Marguerita Ana's mind had some unusual qualities. In places, it was very difficult to read. It lacked coherence and logic, like a book whose pages had been printed out of order or with pages inside from a completely different volume. That was a sign either of near-idiocy or exceptional intelligence, sometimes of both at once. There were faint traces of memories—probably collective—which were very old indeed, racial throwbacks to her German and Japanese ancestors. That, no doubt, was the explanation for her musical skill.
The girl's memory contained the usual sins, but many of these had been committed with a special kind of innocent zest: betrayal of lovers, hatred of a sister, numberless lies. Her mind had a greater capacity for lust than any Zorin Blitz had yet encountered. All this was mixed with vast guilt and great kindness and gentleness, making a delicious emotional cocktail. A broad violent streak added a special twist.
Most interestingly, a few of the girl's memories could not be penetrated at all. There were locked doors in Marguerita's brain, things she had concealed even from herself. Yet corpses rotted behind the doors, and the rot was sweet in Zorin's nostrils.
Oh, yes, Zorin Blitz thought. This one had potential.
Zorin shut Marguerita's mind and let her own power rest. It was priceless, but tiring to use; even a little bit of combat could drain it. Besides, it would be much more fun to allow this girl to surprise her.
"Your body is all funny," Marguerita said suddenly.
"How do you mean, my dear?"
The girl pointed at Zorin. "You've got tattoos all over."
"Yes, so I do."
"Did they hurt?"
"Yes, at first," Zorin said. "But then I learned to like being hurt."
"I want to get a tattoo, but my father won't let me. I like being hurt, though."
"Do you?"
"Yes, I deserve it. What do your tattoos mean?"
"Many things, my dear," Zorin said. "Whatever you like."
"My father says that people with tattoos are evil. Are you evil?"
"Yes," Zorin said. "Yes, I'm evil."
"Perhaps you're a kami. My grandfather talks about them a lot; he says there are many of them in Brazil."
"Your grandfather is right."
"I think I saw one once. He looked like an old man. He frightened me at first, but then I decided that he was handsome."
"Do I frighten you?"
"Yes, but you're very handsome, too."
"Then I must be a kami." Zorn Blitz reached out and touched the girls' arm with her fingertip.
"Your finger is very cold," the girl said.
"I know."
"I like you," the girl said. "I know I shouldn't, but I do. Do you like me?"
"Yes, I like you, too," Zorin answered. "I probably shouldn't either. It's not good for me to like people too well."
"Do you want to—?"
"Yes," Zorin said. "Of course I do. I'm evil."
She grasped Marguerita's wrists, but the girl interrupted her.
"Wait. You must promise me something."
Zorin Blitz took her hands away and laughed once more. It was becoming a very amusing evening.
"You want to travel, don't you?" Zorin Blitz asked.
"Yes, how did you know?"
"I'm a kami, dear, remember?"
"I want to go to Germany," the girl said. "The girls and boys there are all blonde, like you. Will you take me to Germany?"
"Of course. We may have to stop in England first, though. Would you like to see England?"
"Oh, yes, yes! The Queen, the Guards, the Spice Girls…"
Zorin Blitz rubbed the girl's shoulders. "Is there anything else?"
"Yes. I want to go to the hotel."
"The hotel?"
"Yes. You're staying in the hotel, aren't you? All the tourists do."
"But it's so nice out here, my dear," Zorin Blitz said. "So nice and quiet and private."
"The hotel has wonderful beds, everyone says so," the girl said. "I've never been inside. I want a nice bed."
Zorin Blitz looked the girl up and down and grinned.
"I hardly think they'll let you in like that."
"I don't care," the girl said with childlike stubbornness. "I want to go to the hotel."
The two stared at one another for a moment. Then Marguerita grinned back at Zorin Blitz, a grin as sharklike as Zorin's own, and Zorin knew that she would grant the girl her wish.
"Impudence like yours must be rewarded," she said. "Besides, I see too much of the dark as it is."
She chucked the girl under the chin.
"You'll learn to like my cold fingers."
"I already do."
"I'll call you Lorelei," Zorin said. "Because you sing so well."
"What is Lorelei?"
"A beautiful maiden who lured sailors to their doom. Will you sing for me again?"
"Only if you take me to the hotel."
Zorin Blitz took the girl by the hand and pulled her up the beach towards the hotel. She giggled and Zorin giggled with her. Zorin Blitz had not giggled since the age of thirteen.