Author's note: Sorry about the long silence, but my past months my life has been an all-consuming shitstorm.

I know that at the end of the last chapter, I promised all sorts of things, but keeping all my promises this chapter would have been way too long. Which is why I split it into three shorter chapters.

Now, let's continue the story.

Rome, Italy, May 1527

The six Priests fired their guns at the same time. Adam felt a bullet hitting straight into his head, and he fell on the ground. The shots burned his body like nothing before. He later learned that Section XIII used blessed silver bullets.

As Adam fell on the ground, he saw Helena falling beside him. One of the silver bullets had hit her straight into the heart. Adam watched how his little sister's beautiful red eyes slowly turned gray, as life slowly left her.

He started to panic when he couldn't sense Helena's thoughts anymore.

She is dead.

Truly dead.

The monster inside of him was enraged. It bellowed as Adam turned his face toward the sky. "Helena's God, if you are there, I curse thee! I curse Thee, the God of Heaven, and I bless the God of Hell! When the day comes I will fight in Lucifer's side, and I will kill you!"

"The Antichrist!" one of the priests yelled.

Adam's glowing red eyes came to rest upon the priests loading their pistols."You call me the Antichrist?" he said, and then he spread his arms, and lolled his head against the left shoulder, mocking the crucifixion of Jesus. He floated ten feet up before raising his head. "No, I'm not the Antichrist, I am the Beast. I am the Beast of the sea," he said with a cold, toneless voice, smiling at them with a mouth full of razor-sharp fangs.

"And they worshiped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: And they worshiped the beast, saying: Who is like unto the beast? Who can make war with him?" Adam quoted the bible as he landed back down to the Piazza. "No one. Do you hear me? No one can make war with me! I am the Beast of the Sea, and you killed my daughter! You will pay for that. This city will pay for that! Your world will pay for it!"

"We are the Iscariot; we do not fear vampire trash," said one of the priests who stepped over Helena's dead body and yelled, "Fire!"

Adam's muscles quivered, his body shook, his nerves twitched in waves of pain as the blessed silver bullets ripped his body into pieces.

And then the absolute darkness, absolute silence.

Silence.

Then.

Somewhere, far away, someone was screaming.

Howling, screaming, roaring, and crying.

Releasing his anger, rage, and pain.

The sounds rose higher and higher. Adam realized, vaguely, that it was he who was crying and howling. Suddenly the absolute darkness covered him. The people around him were screaming, and guns were fired, but nothing helped. The black mist that only seconds earlier har been Adam started to whirl and expand. Soon the whole Piazza Navona disappeared under the black, cold fog.

As the people were screaming, trying to escape the mist, thousands of blood-red eyes appeared on the mist. The eyes looked at the priests loading their guns. The eyes blinked in unison just before under them appeared thousands of mouths full of fangs.

"You killed my Helena!" The mouths howled in pain. Adam wanted to get his revenge for killing his daughter, his sister, his Helena. Time seemed to slow down as Adam attacked the priests. He devoured their blood, souls, and bodies. But his rage hadn't been fulfilled yet. Killing the priests wasn't enough to satisfy his hunger for revenge.

Adam looked at the people screaming in horror.

They were still alive.

That wasn't right.

Helena was dead.

Everyone in the world should be dead too.

Adam sunk the fangs of all his mouths into the flesh of the humans. All of them at once. He devoured the souls and bodies of all of the people that had been on the Piazza. He then left the piazza behind. As the black mist floated upward, there was nothing but bloodstains on the ground left of the people who had been in the Piazza. They now were part of Adam. He grabbed dozens of people at once, sinking his fangs into them and devouring them.

Adam floated around the Eternal City, howling out his pain as he devoured every living being that the mist that was him touched. Adam devoured men, women, children, dogs, cats, rats, and insects.

Then, all of a sudden, Adam heard Helena's angry and commanding voice inside of his head, [Adam!] she yelled, [That's enough! Stop! Now!]

Adam whimpered, during all the years he'd spent with Helena he had learned that angry Helena never was a good thing. His sister could be a very inventive and cruel woman.

"Sorry," Adam muttered as the mist gathered into his human form, and only then did he realize the significance of Helena's voice in his mind. Adam spun around and laughed when he saw Helena standing there. He went to her and pulled the girl on his embrace. "You're alive!"

"How observant of you," Helena sardonically said. "Please, let me down."

The silver bullet had pierced her heart. She had been dead. She should have stayed dead. Adam frowned, God knows how many silver bullets had pierced his heart and head, yet it had not killed him. The blessed silver bullets barely had slowed him down.

Adam looked at the empty streets behind Helena. He realized that none of the soldiers he'd met on his way to the Vatican had slowed him down. Quite the contrary, more of them he had eaten stronger he had become. Adam looked into Helena's beautiful red eyes. "What are we?" he asked. "Vampires don't survive what we did... vampires don't turn into a cloud of mist that eats everything it touches... what are we?"

"I don't know, and we don't have time to discuss that now. We have to go; more soldiers are coming." Helena said.

"I could kill them all, I had no troubles of killing thousands of humans while you were taking a nap," Adam said.

"Yes, but you've already gotten too much attention. We need to find a safe place for now," Helena said.

Adam listened to all too familiar noise coming around the city. He'd seen and heard enough war fields to know that those were sounds of an army entering into the city. "What the hell is happening?"

"They are going to sack the Pope," Helena said.

Adam nodded, when they had traveled to Rome, they had seen the Imperial army marching toward Rome, but Adam hadn't believed that they actually would attack Rome and Vatican.

"In that case, no one will pay any attention to my rampage. Maybe it will be completely forgotten," Adam said as they got into a building nearby.

Helena shook her head. "You are a lucky man," she said. "We can use this for our favor. If the Habsburg army enters into the Vatican, we can sneak in with them; there has to be a lot of information about the Iscariot in the Vatican archives. A list of all their agents, their informants, maybe even files about us and others of our kind. We should infiltrate to the Imperial army if they'll get in and try to steal as much of Vatican files as possible."

"You're insane," Adam declared, then he sighed. "But you're also right. We need more information about Iscariot. And what would be a better place to find that information than Vatican's archives?"

They didn't have to wait for long for the battle to start. The next day the ransacking, raping, and killing started. Adam had no idea why the Imperial army was in such a hurry, but it worked on their favor. No one noticed two young men (Helena had cut her hairs and dressed as a young boy) who had suddenly appeared among the rest of the army.

For the first time, Adam was part of the battle and not just scavenging dying men's blood on the battlefield. He loved to pretend he was one of them, just a human soldier killing other human soldiers. Adam kept his strength and speed at human levels and tried not to get stabbed or shot.

Adam soon found out that he loved being a part of the war machine.

When Adam and his troops were facing Swiss Guards, Adam was impressed. There weren't many of them, but they fought well, and they didn't give up. Adam said a prayer for their souls when his side massacred the Swiss Guards. When the rest of the mercenaries headed forward, Adam stood there, smelling the blood, guts, gunpowder, cordite, smoke, burning flesh... Adam inhaled the battlefield with an insane grin on his face. During the Sack of Rome, Adam realized that he loved war.

The army who took the Vatican shed no tears over the dead or destruction of such a beautiful place before looting started. Both Helena and Adam had their hands full, trying to keep civilians safe from stealing, murdering, and raping men. Over a day, they kept civilians inside of the Vatican as secure as possible before they found a safe place for them, and then two of them finally had time to get into the Archives while looting of the Vatican continued above them.

They'd been reading the documents over six hours when Helena finally found a vault that had a silver door. On the door, there were carved numerous religious symbols. Not only Christian, but Jewish, Buddhist, Chinese symbols, neither one of them could read, even Islamic symbols. The only reason for Christians to use all those symbols of other faiths was to keep monsters like them out.

"Whatever is behind that door has to be just what we're looking for," Helena said.

Adam touched the door, and the shock he got almost knocked him out. "It is blessed and burns even me. There's no way we can get in," he said.

Helena smirked. "It is a vault covered with protective symbols. Can you imagine what kind of treasures humans will imagine behind that door? They have looted almost every valuable thing inside of the palace and churches... except this... Wait here," she said and left to convince mercenaries that there was a vault that there has to be something valuable in the vault.

Not to mention that the colossal silver door itself was worthy of a fortune. Fifteen minutes later, there was a small group of men trying to get into the vault. It took them two hours to open the vault door, and after which, they stole every item inside of it, leaving only the documents behind. They also took the silver door with them as they left the place.

But the vault was still out of their reach; it was protected by a holy barrier. Neither Adam or Helena could get in. Adam went back up and compelled two men to carry every paper, every papyrus, every file out from the vault.

Adam and Helena packed as much as they could into sacks, carried them out of the city, and came back eight times before they had gotten every document out. Then they gathered papers all around the Vatican and threw them into the vault and set it on fire to hide the fact that they'd stolen Vatican Section Thirteen's files.

They got out of Rome just before the new army entered the city. They traveled back to Rotterdam, and after a very heated argument with Abraham Anker. Even though Anker was 38 years old, he had kept himself as a virgin in a vain hope that Helena would turn him, which she declined. They placed every document into their bank's vault. On the way to Rotterdam, Helena had read every document, and she had an eidetic memory. All of it was stored in her mind, but they needed the documents in case they'd someday have to blackmail the Catholic Church, and now they had more than enough material to do that.

Helena found a witch to seal the vault so that humans couldn't get in, and to open it, you had to use their blood. After erasing witch's mind, Helena renegotiated the deal with Abraham Anker. From now on, they'd get only 25% of the revenue while Anker's would get the rest of it. Helena did it to compensate for the fact that she had not given immortality to Abraham.

"Here," Helena said and placed a parchment on the table.

"What is it?" Adam asked.

"You want to go to war, don't you?" Helena asked, and Adam nodded, he had gotten a taste of war and wanted more. "Well, that's the solution for you becoming a soldier. I found a blood spell from the Iscariot's archives that can bind our powers."

"Why would I want to do that?" Adam asked.

Helena sighed. "It is a spell that can bind us to someone's blood and bloodline. Originally it was used to bind fledgling to his or her master even after he or she becomes True Nosferatu. If we do this to each other, our powers can be reduced about twice as strong as a human," she smiled. "And, since I am your daughter in blood and your blood already flows in my veins... if I am right, if we simultaneously drink from each other long enough, it will make our blood similar enough for the spell to think we're one and same vampire. There is a chance that after we've done the spell to each other, we can decide when to release our seals ourselves. If we do this, we can fight in human wars without the fear of showing too much strength."

"And if you're wrong, you can give me permission to release the seals and vice versa," Adam said.

"Yes," Helena said.

"Then it sounds good," Adam said. "Drinking my blood again also will make you stronger."

"There is that too," Helena said.

*=0=*

Europe, 1527 - 1554

For a few decades, they fought as soldiers in the human wars. Then, 1554, while they were riding in rural Tuscany, Adam suddenly felt the presence of powerful vampires. There was at least half of dozen of them, none as powerful as they were, but neither of them wanted to face that many vampires. They turned around to avoid the vampires.

But a day later, they sensed a vampire riding toward their campsite. The vampire was immensely powerful, almost as powerful as Adam.

"The Butcher of Rome and Little Death," the vampire said as he jumped down from his horse. "It is nice to meet you finally."

Adam arched an eyebrow. "Who are you, and what do you want from us?"

"He is Vlad Dracula III," Helena said. "So it is true, you are one of us."

The vampire looked at her. "Do I know you?"

"No, but I saw you when I was a kid. My people think you as our savior," Helena said, "You are Vlad the Impaler, the man who kept Turks out of Wallachia. But you also saved my people from your army. My tribe will always be in debt to you."

"Aaah, Little Death is a gypsy," the vampire said.

"Yes," Helena said. "Don't let the hair color fool you. I'm Helena of the Kalderash."

"So, Vlad, what do you want from us?" Adam asked.

Vlad sat down on a tree trunk. "I have come to ask if you two would join my army," he smirked again. "You have made some name among our kind. Vampires who attacked the Vatican itself... Such a beautiful carnage you caused in Rome... they say that it was an empty city after you were finished."

"Not nearly, and we didn't attack Vatican Section XIII, they attacked us," Adam said. "What can you offer? Why would we join your army? Whom are you fighting?"

"War is what I am offering. War in which you don't have to hide what you are," Vlad looked at the carriage. "There's a snack in there, and I'm a bit peckish, care to share him with me?"

Adam went to the carriage and dropped the man in there on the ground in front of Vlad. Adam and Helena often compelled evil men to work as their servants; that way, they always had a meal on foot with them. "Help yourself," Adam said.

Vlad, the Impaler, lifted the man on his lap and drank. He drank as if he'd been starving for some time. Then he licked his lips and tossed the man's body away. "Thank you; I needed that. It has been too long since I have had a decent meal," he said and

"You're welcome," Adam said as he grabbed the body from the wrist and phased into the earth.

"I have never thought about doing that!" The Impaler said. "It is a good way to hide the bodies, and that would be a painful way to die... I heard how the earth crushed his bones when you left him there."

"You haven't lived in a city where you have to hide bodies; the earth crushes their heads too, no ghoul, no corpse, no fuss," Adam replied, ignoring his comment about how painful way to die it would be to phase a living human underground.

"I have lived in cities, but I have never had any reason to hide the bodies. I just rip off their heads and leave them," Vlad said.

"Which is stupid," Helena said, "Section Thirteen uses bodies drained from blood to track us down. It is best to hide our kills unless you want to fight the whole Vatican."

Vlad burst into laughter. "Oh, what a glorious battle it would be! But, you are right, I'm not yet ready to fight Vatican demon hunters," he said. "I am fighting a secret war with Ottomans. I will fight till the Turks are all dead or have been pushed out from Europe. Suleiman has sent an army of 18 000 men to kill me while humans are having their little battle in Marciano Della Chiana. I have only 8000 men, and only eleven of us are vampires. I need more our kind on my side," he smirked. "And Suleiman's army knows how to kill our kind. So, in this war, your death is a real possibility."

The idea of being in real danger of losing his life in a war tickled Adam's nerves, made him anxious to join Vlad's army. Adam loved being part of the war machine. Adam wanted to say yes. He looked at Helena. "Helena, what do you say?"

"We'll join your army, but I have two conditions," Helena said. "First, you promise that you will never try to kill us if we don't attack you. Two, you let us be a part of the planning strategy. If I'm going to be part of your army, I want to see your strategy."

Vlad frowned and looked at Adam. "Is she a good strategist?"

"Helena has a brilliant mind; she's a practical and cunning woman. She can master whatever she wants to."

"I agree to your conditions, Helena of Kalderash," Vlad said. "On the condition that as a General of my army, I have the last word, and you will not confront me publicly."

"You have my word," Helena replied.

"I guess that you just recruited us," Adam said.

TBC

*=0=*

The Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527 was a military event carried out in Rome, then part of the Papal States, by the mutinous troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (24 February 1500 – 21 September 1558) was Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria from 1519, King of Spain (Castile and Aragon) from 1516, and Lord of the Netherlands as titular Duke of Burgundy from 1506. His reign encompassed both the long-lasting Spanish and short-lived German colonization of the Americas. The personal union of the European and American territories of Charles V was the first collection of realms labeled "the empire on which the sun never sets".

The Battle of Marciano (also known as the Battle of Scannagallo) occurred in the countryside of Marciano della Chiana, near Arezzo, Tuscany, on August 2, 1554, during the Italian War of 1551. The battle marked the defeat of the Republic of Siena in its war against the Duchy of Florence, and resulted in Siena losing its independence and being absorbed into the Duchy of Florence.