Book Dragon: (blinks. Pinches self.) "Oh wow, that was something I definitely didn't expect…Thank you blackpanzer, teardrops, My Haven, and Sirus183 for your support, I greatly appreciate it. Um, like I said before, I don't own Hellsing. Erm, to the next chapter…"

Chapter 2

And woke up in her bed the next day.

The duration of the morning was spent wandering between these two thoughts: 'Was it a dream?' And 'Is anyone going to find out?' These two thoughts were always conflicting with one another because Lorian wasn't sure if the night had been true or fiction at all. It was a dream, so she shouldn't be having this nagging worry about someone finding out about something she didn't even do. Yet, it felt real and she kept worrying.

Standing in front of the mirror and seeing her shirt without blood or dirt on it didn't provide a 'yes' or 'no' for either question. Lorian dressed into a pair of pants and a shirt. As she buttoned it up, she glanced nervously at the clock. It red 8:06 in crimson flashing lights. Maybe the red from her basement dream? But that was a thought to consider later. The current one had to be that breakfast was taking place, and if she didn't hurry up, someone would notice.

Breakfast consisted of toast and eggs. Lorian ate them slowly, taking frequent glances at both of her parents. Dad sat at the head of the table, as usual, his blonde hair golden in the morning light and his blue eyes fierce. He gestured and spoke to her mother about business. Her mother, a brunette with equally blue eyes twirled her fork around and asked her father pointed questions. Both ran the family, though Dad wore the pants of it, so to speak. Still, if anything ever happened to him, Mom could've taken over just as easily.

Gab was spared one glance. One glance only. That was all she needed. He was pressed and calm looking, eating his bacon and pancakes. He smiled and nodded and commented, posing interested questions and nodding when their father offered him some attention. He was tranquil, but from the way he refused to even look at her, Lorian knew he was on a new level of angry beneath. When she left the room and they were properly alone, she'd feel it.

And she did for the most part.

Lorian didn't get much of her breakfast down, a little too sick with apprehension from the on coming battle. When he grabbed her upper arm in a strong painful grasp, the sickness went away and she was pleased to find it would be sooner than later. Her body was twirled around, and when she saw Gab's look she was stunned.

"Where the hell were you?" He asked.

His eyes, boiling oceans, burned in their sockets. There was anger, but ruling above that she found curiousness. A hunger for knowledge that was making his fingers, even in a death grip, shake a little bit and his lips press hard enough together to be white.

For a moment, Lorian could see her brother descending the stairs, twirling that little black key around, humming to himself. She could see him reach the door, say a few consoling words, then provoking ones, to try and get a rise out of her. Then she could see him getting angry, throwing the door open, and finding no one. Running through the halls trying to find her for since dawn, until she came to breakfast.

"In my room." She told him, taken aback. He shook her, hard and painfully.

"No you weren't! I checked there ten times! Where? And how'd you get out?" He snarled.

"Is there a problem, Gabriel?" a voice asked. The young man looked up and found their teacher, a lanky but incredibly intelligent man, staring at them coldly behind a pair of spectacles. He let go of Lorian and straightened up and give a bright little smile.

"No, Mr. Howl, Lorian just cheated while we were playing hide and seek. I lost my temper with her, sorry Lorian." He said, looking at her pointedly for a moment. Lorian just nodded, a bit dazed and didn't quite meet her teacher's gaze. He didn't ask her if it was the truth. Lorian always felt Gabriel had a charm that always bewitched people. When the teacher just smiled and nodded, she knew that would be all. She also knew that after classes, Gabriel would be on her again.

So she was distracted, trying to think of some answer to appease Gabriel instead of the dream she had had. It couldn't be real. Her clothes would've been covered in grime, blood, and dust; couldn't be truth. Maybe she had found a way out in her terror and simply went back to bed without remembering, because if it was real, all of it, then that meant so was the…

The thing…

"Are you cold, Lorian?" the teacher asked. Lorian hurriedly shook her head.

"Then why did you shiver?"

"M-muscle twitch."

The teacher stared at her for a moment, but raised the chalk back to the board and continued to lecture, eyeing her and making sure she was paying attention and wrote everything in her notebook.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Hours later she twisted the handles of the sink and plunged her hands beneath it. They were starting to blister from four hours of fencing. It was their teacher's idea to make her fence against Gab because he was her superior. He had been relentless today. She'd been slapped on every bit of her body that had been exposed with the blade and now her skin was irritated and red in long red lines in places. That and she was just sore all over.

The water was icy bliss to her aching hands.

She sighed with pleasure and let her sweaty forehead lean forward and rest against the mirror, fogging up the glass with her chaotic heat. It would go away, but the pain would not. It would plague her in the morning and fencing would be hell for the first hour.

But for now, it was quiet, and she noticed she still smelled like gun smoke. That was the only weapon she found herself entertained with. It was easy to fire a gun. That's why they only practiced with it for an hour each day instead of four with fencing.

Still, it was an hour where she forgot herself for a while, pointing at paper targets and shooting. It was a time where there was no constant yelling and she got to wear safety glasses and earmuffs. Not to better her brother (that was impossible), but to be content with feeling the gun recoil and hearing its muffled bang.

Lorian shook her wet hands before drying them.

She glanced out the window and found the sky that crimson flame as the sun fell out of it. Dinner would begin soon. After that, Gab will have recovered from his fatigue. The day proved very busy, thank God, and Gab hadn't had many chances to get the answer to her amazing escape act. After dinner, there were no more classes and educational actives to safe her.

It would be just her and him.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

But she got lucky.

At dinner Dad decided it would be better if he took Gab to a meeting, just to give him a perspective on what his future would contain. After all, the organization would be going to him. Gab didn't look at all displeased, but Lorian knew he was livid. It would be all the worse when he did finally catch her.

As for the organization, Lorian was not jealous of her brother. He wasn't chosen to have the organization because he was the oldest or that he was her brother. He was picked because he was the best for the job. He succeeded, exceeded, in everything they threw at him in little to no time. And what did she do? She failed everything miserably and had to try and try again until she finally got it right, even though she knew it would just be better to drop it and give up.

Inadequate. Not right for the job. Insufficient.

All of it meant failure.

Lorian Integra Michaela Hellsing was a failure.

And she knew it.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Dusk passed to absolute dark blue night.

Lorian hid in the library. She'd found a shelf that was open in the back corner of the library, under many of the old texts, long ago as a child. It had been big enough to sit in, at the age of six, and even better the back panel was ripped out making the only entry point to the place behind it, a narrow closed-in space that was dimmer. It was a tight squeeze now, but she made it, brushing the shelf about and making the books hide the entrance to her secret place as she crawled further in.

Among the treasured things she felt had no place in the eyes of her family, she sat with her little plain notebook and worked away with her pencil. To the walls were taped her drawings, and in the notebooks and folders she collected, were all the little stories she had put to paper.

Writing and drawing. Those were the two things she liked and could do without feeling utterly useless. It was sad really, considering. Both were just for fun. Story-telling and drawing had little to do with Hellsing. It wasn't a major prospect. It was only beneficial to those that kept records.

None of her things were of that nature.

That's why no one saw them.

Lorian was in her place, curled up in a ball and sketching feverishly for more than half the night. She froze all movement when one of the servants occasionally came in to do some light reading. Sometimes it would be a long cramped hours, lamp burning next to her leg, listening to pages fluttering boredly past outside, but when they left she breathed easier and started her business again. This disturbance proved more fortunate, having taken less than five minutes.

Alone again, she started her picture for the second time: a hand drawn completely in graphite, slightly reaching out, and fingers in mid-movement. Strains of drool connected them like spider webs and she made little marks that looked a bit like moving dusty air. Or cold breathe. Part of her wanted to draw teeth, and she was lowering her pen to do so when the light went out.

Lori blinked and looked up at the ceiling, checking it for any other lights that might be on in the room. No soft yellow glow flowed up there. That meant someone had shut all the lights off in the room. Still, she tried clicking her own little lamp on and off. Found it no good. She sighed and crawled back and out through the shelf. Stood up and blinked. The windows were open and moonlight poured in. Other than that, the electric yellow twine was gone. Everything was dyed fairy blue.

In the twilight she made her way to the nearest light switch, one by a hard wood desk, a computer monitor sitting on it with a keyword with the clutter of paper on it. Flipped it on and off with no result. There goes drawing for the night; right out the window. Couldn't balance a flash light and try to draw at the same time, and candle-light was not good enough; hurt her eyes after a while of straining.

So she sighed.

And heard something move behind her.

Lorian whirled around and found no one there. She knew better, especially in the dark. Very, very slowly she studied all the walls with her eyes, flickering over everything and making sure not to miss a single detail. Her body was tense and ready to move under her command.

The carpet was bare. The shelves were neat. Business papers, paper clips, and a letter open sat glittering on the top of the desk. Chair was pulled out slightly, open and empty in front of the desk with a bit of moon light splashed onto it from the window behind her.

Nothing, still nothing.

Her heart was jumping in her chest when she found nothing at all had changed, just the damn lighting. She sighed, but was still creeped out. Looks like the rest of the evening would be spent with people within ear shot.

The girl turned, ready to hunt down the door that was behind her.

And found a man in a very large hat.

He was at least two and a half feet taller than her. Tall, but not abnormally so by human standards. What was odd about him was the color of his clothes. He wore a blood red trench coat over a plain black business suit. An odd red tie tied in some kind of bow encircled his neck and the white shirt collar beneath. His boots were black and ended up at his knees. He wore gloves and the backs of them held strange markings and words, but she didn't focus on them.

Her eyes moved up in a flick and found his hat, also red with a lighter silk ribbons buttoned together in a criss-cross pattern above its rim. Lower, was his hair, ebony like volcanic glass. His skin was pale. His glasses gleamed hard yellow. Below was a not to big, not to small looking nose, and finally was his mouth.

Two pointed fangs overlapping the other thirty white teeth.

He was smirking.

Lori grabbed the letter opener off the desk and had it risen in her hand before she could so much as blink. He stood there, unmoving and still grinning murderously. She couldn't seem his eyes behind the yellow glare. Her feet spread, ready to lunge at him, as her voice came out.

"Stay back." She said.

If the child within Lorian could've seen this before, that child would've said that it probably would be the only moment in history that would not have made her great-great ancestor roll over in his grave in embarrassment and or disgust. It would've been the thing that would put a satisfied smile on her father's face.

"What are you planning to do with that?" The red stranger asked, humored.

His voice was exactly the same. Lorian studied the man again, connecting the beast in the basement to odd man. There was an urge to tremble, but she fought it off. Now, out of the dark and with this thing in the light and appearing as a man, her fear wasn't so great. It was still there, but it wasn't dominating. It was an illusion that made her calmer, even as she glanced at the letter opener sticking out of her hand.

"…I'll stab your heart."

"You need a wooden stake to kill a vampire. For being a daughter of a family of vampire-slayers, you aren't too bright." the man (the thing) said.

Lori stared at him, confused. Was he making fun of her?

"T-there are no such things as vampires." She told him, and then flinched when he let out a giant wave of booming laughter.

It rocked off the walls and seemed to surround her. Her legs twitched and almost leapt at him without her say so. She made herself relax them a bit, but kept her eyes on the red stranger and his two very pointed teeth. He was clearly a vampire. Saying they didn't exist was very stupid thing to do.

"Oh really. So your family has been doing nothing for the past three hundred years?"

"We protect the Queen and Country!" She shouted indignant.

"And killing bloodsuckers is not doing that?" He asked, his voice still mocking. Lorian opened her mouth to say something…and then realized she had no retort for that. So she shut it again and stared at him with the coldest and most unafraid stare she could manage.

And that's when her ancestors would've started turning in their graves again.

Because there was still lingering doubt. Still.

Lorian started to lower the blade, unsure. So very unsure. He was beyond scary, but he seemed to have a very good point. Did she really know what her family did for a living? And wasn't it strange that they were trained in weaponry, war-history, and equally as much in mythology?

When he stepped forward, she fought the urge to step back.

Lori lifted the knife up again, between them.

"I told you to stay back." She said, but her voice was uncertain.

"I heard you, but are you my Master?" He asked.

Lorian watched him take another swaying step forward. He continued to smile. Her foot tried to edge back and some part of her mind was yammering to run like hell. With all its noise, it was very hard to ignore. Still, somehow, she clenched her teeth and bore it.

"This is your last warning." She growled.

"Let's hope so." He said.

And took another step forward.

Lori's feet charged onward and closed the distance. A few seconds of eternity occurred to her in nothing but flickering pictures. All sound and sensation was gone. She watched her hand come up and plunge the blade, gleaming blue in the moonlight, into his body. Watched it sink in up to her fist and the blood well up to her fingers.

But nothing happened.

She stood for a full second like that, suddenly aware her own teeth gritted together in a disturbed little smirk. It came off when he didn't sink away or grab his stomach. Instead, her eyes slowly crawled up his form and found him still standing there, grinning down at her.

It took another second for her own murderous little smile vanished and terror filled her face. All the power and will suddenly ran out of her like cold water. She lost control of her feet, now aware that her body had decided the flight method was better than dealing with this threat. Not that she got far. His hand clamped around her arm, in the same exact place where her brother had grabbed her that morning.

She snarled at the pain as he lifted her right off the ground. She twirled in the air and somehow managed to roll her other free arm around and dig her elbow right into his cheek. She felt it connect with his jaw, and felt it dislocate as his face rocketed to the left. There was no time for a surprised look. She let out a battle cry and kicked him in the stomach, trying to make him over balance.

It didn't work.

Lorian watched in disbelief as he simply turned back, the grin crooked and his teeth a bit bloody. As he turned, she could see one eye behind one of the yellow lenses, his glasses knocked askew. It was as red as the death of the sun each and every day.

And it was staring right at her.

The man continued to smile at her, even as he took his face with his other gloved hand and shoved his jaw back into place. That done, he grinned a little wider and showed off his fangs again.

"Not bad, little hell cat, but I think you can do better."

Lori stared at him.

Don't give up. Not yet. Please, not yet. But she could already feel her will waning beneath that grin. That was a death-grin. She didn't need to hear any bell toiling for her to know that. Her eyes stared at those pointed teeth and her imagination offered her what it would feel like to have them sink into her throat, the blood rushing out of her body and into the gullet of-

Her foot flew up and smashed into his chin.

When her leg came back down, it screamed protest. She wasn't use to having it stretched over her head like that, and she spun around by her arm from the momentum created from such a sudden move, gritting her teeth, but not screaming at the pain yet. She was getting close. Her eyes flew up to his fingers and she clawed him, ripping a layer of skin off both of them as she dug beneath his fingers and tried to pry them off.

A bit of blood trickled down her arm and the pain was fierce, but she ignored it. The monster was now laughing at her again and she could see his head coming down through the corner of her eye, his glasses winking like screwed up diamonds. His fingers weren't budging and she knew was in trouble when he grabbed her other arm.

She found herself hanging by both arms now, her body dangling like the letter Y before him. The pain lessened, but that wasn't going to do her much good. He had her arms and her hands, the most useful tools of the human body. But for a vampire? He had a more valuable and fatal weapon sitting in his mouth.

The glasses dipped to the bridge of his nose and she was staring at two blood red orbs. They stared back at her with narrow pupils. Not reptilian, but getting a little too damn close for comfort.

"Now what?" He asked, "I've got your arms and hands now." And he rubbed his thumbs against her wrists to prove this point, repeating what she already figured out.

"All that leaves are your feet."

Lorian looked down at her feet. They dangled uselessly in her shoes.

She looked back up and found him still staring. Before she could even begin to pull them up, he bent his elbows and brought her closer. She swung her legs around, but no amount of kicking had any effect on the lower half of him. He stopped when their noses were maybe three inches apart.

"And that takes care of that. You have no weapons, little Hellsing. What will you do now?" He asked.

Lorian rolled her head back and smashed it into the bridge of his nose. It seemed she was doing this a lot lately. When the stars stopped whirling around her vision, she observed the blackish blood starting to ooze out beneath his nostrils, but he was still grinning like a lunatic.

"This is fun, but-" She tried to head butt him again, but he extended his arms. Her head hit nothing and all she managed just to do was get dizzy.

"-you're going to break your skull doing it. Try something else. Be creative." He invited.

Lori looked over him again, trying to ignore his mocking. She saw the knife and kicked it further into his guts without thinking about it much. It didn't hurt him at all, even as the blood started to flow and the hilt disappeared into him. She was running out of things to do. Her arms were starting to ache again. Soon it would hurt too much to think right, not that it was any easier right now.

She tried to lift her legs, bring them up and try kicking his head hard enough to break his neck. They were too weak to do it in one swoop. Gritting her teeth harder, making her jaw ache, she lifted her legs and curled them around his chest. Going to rest them and then pull them up the rest of the way when he started laughing again.

"Not shy, are you?"

Don't you dare think about that! She snarled at her active imagination, but her eyes were too busy lowering down to observe the situation for herself. The hold was loose, he had her too far away for her legs to curl around him and lock like a lover's would, but still it could've been imagined from a third point of view. Still, the surge of embarrassment brought the power she needed.

Her legs came up further and his neck went between her ankles. An idea was trying to work with the physics of the situation. She wanted to use her ankles to twist his neck and snap it. The problem was she wasn't able to move her legs the right way to do that.

Her brain was still trying to get around it, but her tactile nature ruled now. It had been for the last few minutes. Her feet came down and pressed against his chest, instead. Her back arched and she attempted to walk up him. The only reason why it worked was because he tilted one foot behind him and obliged, leaning back and loosened his hold on her arms. Lorian stood for a moment on his shoulder, then crouched because it rested the strain it caused on her arms.

Now it was clear he was playing with her. She was swaying up there, trying to keep her balance, but she continued to stare at him, meeting his crimson gaze. He didn't let go of her wrists, just tilted the brim of his hat back enough to stare back at her.

For one insane moment, it felt like they were dancing.

Then he let her go in a flash.

Too fast. Lorian over balanced and hit the floor with a thundering bang. Groaned at the shattering pain there for a moment, wondering if she broke her back as she stopped herself from curling up into the fetal position. The girl rolled over towards him. From a ground level view, she watched him plunge his hands directly into the knife wound. Blood slid down his sides in small streams as he dug around, found it, and pulled it out without so much as a grimace.

He put it back on the desk before looking down at her and offering a hand.

Lori stood up without taking it, and held her fists up like a boxer, even as her legs buckled beneath.

He laughed at her.

"I think that's enough fun for you tonight." He replied stepping forward yet again.

She threw her arm out in a weak punch with everything left in her. He caught it easily, twirled her around. Lorian found her back pressed against him and her arms crossed in an X over her chest, restrained. She was panting and sweating a bit, and now all movement was arrested. Her eyes slid to the side of her face and his breath swam in her ear canal.

"Now its time to be quiet and follow…"

He started taking steps back. Lorian was unable to let herself be dragged, and she found her feet moving numbly. Dumb stupid things. They turned out of the door's view and down an isle. She looked around wildly, still hoping for escape because he'd be biting her soon. That's what vampire's did to their food. Nothing presented itself to her.

The door opened instead.

Lorian opened her mouth wide to scream something, but a gloved hand slammed over her lips. Her bellow was nothing but a straggled mutter. There were footsteps minutes later. No voices. A shadow came wandering up, closer and closer. The vampire artfully curled her wrists and covered her mouth with one hand to free the other. A shadow came closer and closer. Lorian tried to struggle and escape, to shove back so the books would rock from their shelves and hit him on the head, to warn the person, but he restrained her easily enough.

It proved to be in her best interest anyway.

The owner of that shadow wasn't human either. Lorian watched the figure come stumbling into view, eyes widening. It looked humanoid at first, but when its orange eyes turned towards them and she could see its huge pointed ears, she knew that was a dead mistake. Brown, almost black in the moonlight, it stood with a slight hunch, and it had a muzzle as long as her forearm, and fierce set of teeth.

But the vampire's arm rocked out before it could even twitch. It didn't shove him back. His hand pierced and went right through its chest. It hung impaled for a moment, before loosing the lights of its eyes and swirling away to dust. It was over in less than three seconds. His hand came off her mouth and her arms were released, but it moved and just grabbed the back of her shirt in a blur, to make sure she didn't go anywhere.

Lori didn't let it stop her.

She pulled the shirt right off and started running, flew out past the doors and down the halls, in the dark, like a hunted animal with nothing on but her pants, her shoes, and her bra, running at full tilt down the hall.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

And so it is probably easy to imagine the look on the maids' faces, whom saw her first, flying down the hall virtually topless. Personally, she was lucky. Further down, the cooking staff (which consisted mostly of boys and older men) was going home for the night. The ladies were able to get a towel around her quivering shoulders and into a room before the men showed up to the high pitched screaming.

An hour later Lori was sitting in the same room, a cup of hot chocolate in one hand, and her father demanding what in the name of hell had gotten into her. An hour is a long time to think of a cover story, considering no one would belief a vampire was running around in the house. She thought up of several before finding the one she wanted. Her shirt had gotten caught in a door jam and she found herself stuck, so she took it off and was running to her room to get another one before anyone would find her indecent.

Dad didn't buy it, but he didn't pester the truth out of her. From the way he pinched his brow and shook his head, it was clear he didn't want to know and he thought it frivolous, especially in the middle of the night. Lori hung her head. She didn't want to look at their hard grim faces anymore, and the feeling was mutual. She was sent to her room and told not to come out until she stopped acting like a child.

The only thing good about it was that Gab couldn't torture her. Now that the man in red was running around in their very house, it was a silly worry. She sat up half the night, unable to sleep, staring at her door, ready to see him come walking through it. Game over, and now it was feeding time.

She fell asleep around three in the morning.

X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X

Book Dragon: "Comments? Again, I'm taking flames."