Author's note: I'm back! I really appreciate all the reviews and I apologize for the long wait! I finally bought the third VHD novel, "Demon Deathchase", but I haven't started it yet. The books make me laugh. If I write another VHD story after this, it will be a parody of the novels. Ok, back to the story: In this chapter we meet the final new character. It's still January 1945, immediately after the conclusion of the previous chapter.

Chapter 19: Slings and Arrows

"That was so Shakespearean," D's hand commented as D rode away from Naumburg in the frigid pre-dawn light. D didn't answer.

"Why so gloomy?" the demon asked. "Come on, talk to me! You're not feeling ill, are you? You haven't been poisoned, have you? Because, if you die, I've got dibs on the 'goodnight sweet prince' line!"

"You've got it wrong," D said softly, knowing it was a mistake to get involved in this kind of conversation. "Claudius didn't want to die."

"But he was evil and deserved it anyway!"

D frowned slightly. "I think I should also point out that Aldrich never killed my father or married my mother. In terms of Shakespeare, Aldrich was more like Brutus."

"You're saying he was honorable? 'This was the noblest Vampire of them all'?" the demon cackled gleefully. "Aw, that's touching."

D closed his eyes halfway, and then spoke in a very calm, mature voice: "Brutus said, 'Our enemies have beat us to the pit. It is more worthy to leap in ourselves, than tarry till they push us.' That's the same as what Aldrich believed."

"But it was Strato who held Brutus's sword, and Strato wasn't a prince," the demon pointed out smugly. D merely sighed. "Anyway where are we going?" the gruff voice asked.

"I don't know," D replied wearily.

"Shame on you for forgetting Ophelia," the hand said, clearly hoping to instigate an argument. Annoyed, D held his palm up so he could glare at the parasite's shriveled face.

"Your analogy is completely off-base," the dhampir said coolly. "But I haven't forgotten her. However, it's been almost twenty years... By now, I hope, she has forgotten me."

"Unlikely," muttered the hand. "You're going to have to face her again sometime, and you know it. It may be a sore subject with you, but she deserves an apology. Come on, now that the war's winding down, let's make our way across Europe, merrily hunting vampires as we go, until we make it back to England. What do you say?"

D said nothing.

"You always say that," grumbled the demon.

In truth, D was uncertain about where he should go and what he should do now that his 'training' had come to such an abrupt conclusion. The horse was walking steadily down the snowy road, taking D further away from the timeless cathedral and closer to the frenetic human world with every step. D had read every book in his uncle's library and listened carefully to every sad, rambling history lesson, but he was certain that there was much more to learn, especially about magic and demons. Aldrich was fond of saying that experience was the best education, and so perhaps now it was time for D to venture out in search of experience.

For the past five years, D had lived in the world he had known in his early childhood: the world of torches and candles that lit and extinguished themselves with a mere gesture or glance, the world of beings that walked through walls, a world where mirrors held no reflections. In that secluded world, the cycles of the sun and moon had no relevance to the passage of time. How many times does a human blink in a day? For a vampire to judge the passage of time by the sun and moon would be as tedious and as ridiculous as a human measuring his days by counting his blinks.

And yet during those five years, each 'blink', each day that passed in the human world held incredible significance. The cocoon left by the Great War finally burst open, revealing a new creature with seemingly inexhaustible capabilities. Mechanized armies raced over entire continents. Bombed cities burned day after day, night after night. Entire populations shifted and scattered, were uprooted and exterminated. Ships the size of cities were built in days and the entire Pacific Ocean became a battlefield. Airplanes clawed through the skies above the Himalayas as submarines prowled the depths of the seas.

And as if the physical and mechanical dimensions of the war weren't staggering enough, scientists and doctors invented new ways to kill more people with less effort than had ever been imagined. The war had unleashed human malice and human genius on an unprecedented scale, and the world was changed.

D knew about all of that. He knew about current events; he knew that the Germans had finally lost the great battle in the frozen Ardennes, and so now the war would end. But D didn't know if he could function in the human world now. He didn't know if he could keep up with the swiftness of technological progress. He felt that he was already an artifact of the past. There was something comfortable about being submerged in the mystical, old-fashioned world of his heritage, and the differences between that world and the one that lay before him now seemed too great to reconcile. Perhaps D had been too young or too preoccupied to realize it before, but now he understood that this was the dilemma his father had encountered, the one which had prompted the Vampire King to summon a hundred Nobles to his castle to plot a course for the future.

The future…

D stared straight ahead as snow began to fall. His horse sighed, its breath creating large, curling clouds of steam. D looked up, and saw the faint wisps of his own breath diffuse softly into the cold air. It was actually a rather encouraging sight. He was alive, as much as you could be when you were never going to die-- at least, he was more alive than the vampires, and if they could adapt to the times, well, so could D. He had a purpose for existing now, so he would make himself at home in the modern world after all—and he would hunt vampires.

The horse seemed to sense that D had reached a decision, for the animal picked up its pace just a bit. D gazed idly at the horse's furry ears, wondering if living in the modern world would require him to learn to drive an automobile any time soon.

Suddenly something didn't feel right.

D's eyes narrowed and he peered cautiously into the snowy forest on either side of the road. He had no idea what it was that was making him so uneasy. And then, before he could think of a good reason for it, he reacted to his instincts and leapt up out of his saddle. He traveled easily at least twenty feet up in the air, and did a back flip, landing lightly in a crouching position on the ground a good distance behind the horse-- just in time to have his face splattered with tiny droplets of blood as the horse was riddled with exploding rounds from a machine gun.

The deafening rattle of the gun died away practically in the same instant it began, and the silent forest absorbed the remnants of the sound before D had time to determine which direction it had come from. D realized that Aldrich's sword, which had been slung across his back, was now in his hand. He had automatically drawn the weapon as he jumped off the horse. The animal collapsed, and D knew that it was already dead from the smell of its blood, which was quickly spreading towards him through the snow.

D forced himself to ignore the distracting sight of the horse's amply-bleeding carcass. Where was the gun? Why had it stopped firing? Why had it fired at all? D focused on the farthest reaches of all his senses, but there was nothing. The snow continued to float down passively around him, landing mutely on his hat, his shoulders, the dead horse… by now more than half of the horse's ten gallons of blood had leaked from its tattered body and into the snow.

Suddenly the dark silhouette of a man appeared barely a hundred yards down the road. Once D saw him, he found that he could hear and smell him, too, and D knew that the man was human, but there had been no sign of him an instant earlier. The man had one hand in the pocket of his heavy winter coat, and in his other hand he held a strange-looking rifle. Slowly, almost casually, the man raised the weapon and pointed it at D.

The instant the gun fired, D rolled to the side, but it didn't do any good. Because instead of a projectile, a colorless flash of something like lightning burst from the weapon, and was drawn to D like a nail to a powerful magnet. Stunned by something akin to electricity, but almost definitely magical in nature, D dropped, paralyzed, beside the body of the horse. He heard the crisp crunch of snow under boots as the man approached.

"What the hell!" D's hand hissed angrily, the demon's face materializing. D tried to say something but was unable to speak. The face in his hand clenched its teeth in determination. "How did you get yourself into this situation? Ugh, never mind. You've got to get your strength back now!"

The sound of the footsteps crunching the snow was getting louder.

"Look, I'm going to help you," the demon said hurriedly. "So you better cooperate. Let's go!" Moving of its own accord, D's left hand flopped forward in the snow. All D could do was stare.

D had no idea what was going on- he was lying paralyzed in the snow, staring sideways at the dark, awkward shape of his dead horse, and the man who had shot him was probably going to finish him off with a stake through the heart any minute now. His possessed hand, meanwhile, was dragging itself inch by inch away from his body. Where on earth did the damned demon think it was going? If it was trying to flee, it wasn't going to get any further than an arm's length away. D watched, oddly fascinated, as his fingers dug into the dark red snow. He couldn't even feel the snow- his limbs were completely numb. Now that the demon had managed to gather a handful of the blood-soaked snow, it began to move itself back towards D's chest. The hand moved in spastic jerks, but it was making progress.

From the sound of the footsteps, the man was still about fifty yards away. D's hand came to rest directly in front of his face. The fingers were curled around the frozen blood, so D couldn't see the demon's face as it spoke to him. "All right, listen up," it panted. "This is just some watered-down horse blood, understand? Horse blood. I don't know what kind of spell you're under, but I know you can get out of it. You are way stronger than this magic, D, but at the moment you're at a physical disadvantage and you need a little help. I know you're going to hate me for this, but please, open your mouth!"

Under the circumstances, D felt it was probably in his best interest to do as the parasitic demon asked. He tried with all his might to open his mouth, but his lips seemed frozen together, his jaw locked. His eyes trembled from the effort of trying to move, just trying to do that one small thing… but his mouth remained shut.

"Hurry up, D!" the hand pleaded desperately.

"My God, are you actually still awake?" the man asked in a youthful, heavily accented voice as he came to a stop directly behind D. "Hmm," the man said, taking a few more steps so that he could see D's face. He saw the bloody snow clenched in D's hand, and shook his head in wide-eyed amazement. "Helping yourself to a bit of breakfast there?" he asked the paralyzed dhampir. D's left hand twitched. "That's really quite impressive," the man commented pleasantly, and rolled D's wrist under his foot until the hand was palm-up on the ground. Then he pressed the muzzle of his gun into the palm of D's left hand, and pulled the trigger.

When D woke up the first thing he realized was that he was underground. The second thing he realized was that he was held in place by a something around his neck. He was relieved to find that he could move his hands and arms again, and he brought them up to discover that the thing around his neck was a kind of heavy metal collar that was attached to the wall behind his head. He was in a tiny cube of a room with concrete walls and two metal doors. He was about to ask his hand if it was all right and if it had any more brilliant ideas about how to get them out of their current predicament, but just then one of the door handles creaked, and the man who had shot D stepped into the room. He was still wearing his winter coat and D could smell horse blood on his boots, which meant that D hadn't been unconscious for very long. And that meant they couldn't have traveled very far. D stared at the man, who stood before him, just out of reach. He was perhaps in his late twenties, of average height and build, with bright white-blond hair cut quite short. His eyes were startlingly pale yellow in color.

"Well, how do you do?" the young man asked, smiling amicably. "I'm Amadeus Hesselius, but everyone calls me Hess for short. My mum positively hates it, but fortunately she's not present at the moment."

"Hesselius," D repeated.

"Yes, exactly," Hess said, smiling. "I presume you've heard of us?" D made no reply so Hess went on, almost babbling: "My family has been hunting vampires in Europe for three and a half centuries now, but I must say, you're the most valuable catch anyone's made in a while, even if you are just a half-breed."

D was not impressed by Hess's cheerful tone of voice. "You killed my horse," he muttered dangerously.

"Ah," the young man said, clasping his hands behind his back. "Under the circumstances, I felt it was prudent to do so, but perhaps I misjudged. Either way, the poor creature certainly didn't deserve to die, so you have my sincerest apologies. I'll be sure to notify the next of kin."

D's face remained as expressionless as stone.

"Hmm," Hess said, when it was obvious that D was not amused by his attempt at a joke. "Sorry about that. I've found that a morbid sense of humor is actually quite useful in this line of work. Do you have one, by chance?"

"Have what?" D asked.

"A morbid sense of humor," Hess said, as nonchalantly as if he were asking for a light for a cigarette.

D thought of the parasite in his hand. "More or less," he grumbled.

"And obviously less, at the moment." The young man smiled. "But never mind that, let me explain why you're here. For the past ten years, there's been a desperate contest amongst us vampire hunters to capture you. The prize, of course, is a lordly sum of money- which, ironically, is probably going to come out of your pocket."

D blinked, feeling depressed. Just as soon as he'd mustered some optimism about becoming a vampire hunter himself, he'd ended up as easy prey instead. "Who sponsored the contest?" D heard himself asking, although he felt he already knew. It was either his father, or-

"Ms. Samantha Rowntree," Hess informed him.

Yet Another Note: I know this was a weird chapter but I had to get D to interact with human vampire hunters somehow. If you're a vampire lore-lover, you already know that Doctor Hesselius, from the 1872 story Carmilla, was Bram Stoker's inspiration for Abraham Van Helsing. Oh, and for the record, I love Shakespeare but I hate Hamlet. D has nothing in common with that miserable sulking lunatic except perhaps those couple of lines in the monologue from whence this chapter derives its title. The next chapter contains a final bout of humor before we begin to wrap up the serious issues. Hopefully it will be posted within a week!