Chapter 2
The healer labored over Anna for several hours, but she had lost too much blood. With his acute werewolf-enhanced hearing, Van Helsing listened as her heartbeat finally came to a stop. Anna slipped quietly into death.
Van Helsing was the last to leave Anna's bedroom where her cooling body lay. He paused briefly to pull a sheet over her and touched his fingers to eyes. Then swept out of the room. He had a job to do. Now was not the time to grieve.
Van Helsing passed through the mirror to Dracula's lair. He would avenge Anna's death and rescue the Frankenstein monster.
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-~~~~~~~~ (Van Helsing succeeds in killing Aleera and almost killing Dracula.)~~~~~~~~~~-
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Dracula injected the cure into his own arm before Van Helsing's werewolf venom could kill him. As the last stroke of midnight faded, Gabriel lost his mind to the wolf and ran off into the forest.
While Dracula was no longer poisoned, the battle had been vicious. He had lost far too much blood to heal effectively. Aleera was dead. Verona, Marishka, and all of his progeny were also dead. Van Helsing had seen to the effective murder of his entire family. For the first time in 400 years, Dracula was once again, the only living vampire in the world.
As his mind faded in and out of consciousness, it stretched out into the vast emptiness around him. An emptiness that had once been filled with the incessant chatter of the thoughts of his brides…. and if he cared to listen, his more distant relatives, vampires his brides and other descendants had created. The silence inside his own head was absolutely deafening and unnatural after 400 years of constant companionship. On top of that, the horrible price of his werewolf antidote was a side effect that would make him barren for all eternity. The antidote was potent. He would never again have to fear a bite from a werewolf, rendering Dracula truly immortal at last. But the ultimate price for this was the loss of his ability to create more of his kind. Hence, why he had saved the antidote, to only be used if there was absolutely no other choice but to take it.
However, he had never dreamed he would end up in a situation so desperate that someone would manage to kill every single member of his family, and then force him into a situation where he had to take the antidote. That was the ultimate cruel irony. Truly immortal at last, but now utterly, utterly alone for all eternity. His sanity almost collapsed under the weight of it all.
So consumed in his despair, he almost overlooked the slight whisper at the farthest reaches of his mind. Turning all his focus on this thread, the flickering light of some other being he was connected to, helped him struggle to his feet.
He was too weak to sense who it was exactly, but someone somewhere had survived the slaughter of his family. He would feed first, and then focus all of his attention on finding this person.
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Anna awoke in silence and darkness. She realized she was home in bed, but the house was icy and silent. No fires had been lit. She had been left lying in the dark and the cold like a forgotten corpse. She dragged herself out of bed and stumbled over to the mantle to try to light a fire in the grate. Warmth, she needed some warmth.
As she struggled to get a fire going, her mind flashed through everything she could remember, up until the excruciating bite from Dracula himself. She clutched hastily at her neck in response to the vivid memory. Her neck was clean. No wounds or scars to be felt. Now she wondered if she had dreamed it all. Maybe it was just a nasty nightmare after all. Where the hell was Van Helsing? He'd drugged her before to go after Dracula. Maybe he had done so again. How dare he? Anna was going to murder him as soon as she found him again.
Failing to light a fire for the fourth time, Anna felt pain creeping in at the edges of her mind again. She clutched her head as a wave of pain passed through her. Sorrow, anger, grief, hatred hit her like bricks one after another and she cried out from the pressure of it inside her skull.
"Anna..." her mind seemed to whisper at her.
"Oh god, someone please help me..." Anna choked on a sob, curling up on the floor in agony in front of the dead, cold fireplace.
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I'm sure you can guess what happened. But I'm hoping I can surprise you here and there with the details. Please remember to review!