Ch 1. Two of a Kind
The whole of the store, what used to be a store stank of gunsmoke and fresh death. What opened it's door's yesterday as a bookstore on Hampstead High Street, greeted a rare clear London morning as one of a hundred scenes of the indiscriminate horror of the night before. When war crazed ghouls from fifty years ago in their Jerry Hun regalia rained down on the city and shot, beat, ripped apart and feasted on man woman and child, and Mother Church answered her Anglican sister's dismay with gunships and a declaration of Reconquista, only to be likewise gobbled up by the No life King in an orgy of atrocity. The kid leaned against the wall as he staggered over bodies, his right hand clutching a wet hole in his side. The great hulking Branwen run through with bayonets, and Cardel entangled with two more of the freaks like lovers in each other's arms. Two good men who weren't lucky enough to die saving good men, or stopping bad. The three of them wouldn't have even been in England if their signals office and Vauxhall Cross could have pulled their thumbs out. Three officers of a blacker-than-night splinter cell sent to knock on Hellsing's door because a certain Walter Dolnez hadn’t picked up the phone.
Picking a path over toppled bookshelves, bodies, and puddles of blood and worse waste, he hobbled out onto the street and looked around. Broken-in shop windows, overturned cars, buildings blasted and their rubble strewn about for blocks, but beyond that near silence. No bodies in the streets. Had that horrifying flood of red sable swallowed them too, and taken them when it dissolved in the daybreak?
Gotta think. Any chance finding a secure phone line to call home? They’d brought over a secure telephone unit that sat packed back in their hotel two miles east. He wasn’t sure if he could make the trip but also didn’t see any alternative.
He started walking and kept walking east, the crackle of moldering fires the only report in the morning’s loud silence. No screams for help, no cries, wait, a few miles distant he heard sirens. Fire engines and Ambulances? He leaned against a lamppost to catch his breath, his left eye closed against blood that ran down his face from a cut on his scalp, and his left arm hanging useless, the shoulder barking at him with red agony where he’s caught the burst of a sub machinegun. He was in good shape and knew it, but breathing came hard. He felt an icy grip in his toes that might finger its way up his legs. Bad news he thought. Then he heard the car.
The soft hum of a single engine like a familiar dog in an alien place caught his ears and he jerked his head to see a four door slow to a sharp stop a few yards away from him.
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Integra had almost shocked herself numb looking out the window as the sedan they appropriated picked through the city with her sole servant and protector, Seras behind the wheel. Looking with her right eye, that miserable little toad had gotten lucky, and the last bullet in his pistol smacked the bone on the side of her left eye, shattering it and grazing the side of her face. She’d torn off the sleeve of her olive green jacket and wrapped a tight bandage around her head, thankful to have the pain filtered through waves of after action adrenaline. It would hurt like an absolute bastard tomorrow, she was sure.
Storefronts and the lower floors of high rises be what they may, but Alucard’s Level Zero release had washed the streets of London clear for miles, his army of the ancient dead ensnaring and gorging on everyone in his path before he closed his eye for the last time. She hadn’t seen signs of anything still alive and moving, most of the wounded having succumbed to their wounds hours ago. Then a sorry stumbling figure caught her eye at a cross street, a boy who didn’t look old enough to have graduated, an arm to his side as he staggered forth.
“Seras pull up!”
Seras Victoria reigned in the car as her eyes shot from the road to the boy, her ghastly left arm coiling the steering wheel, she slowed the sedan to a stop, she saw him shudder and rely on a lamppost to keep his feet before she turned to Integra.
“I should get you home first Sir, that eye needs a doctor!”
“There’s no hurry, aren’t police supposed to help people?”
That remark cut deeper that she’s meant it to. Seras let out a sigh as she jumped out of the car. She fairly floated from the side of the car to the boy’s side. She saw right off he was hurt bad.
“Easy kid, where are you hurt?” She put a hand on his shoulder to steady him as he looked at her, eyes unfocused, breathing hard.
“Kade. Not kid… feels cold. Shot. You’re police?” he managed to gasp. Why couldn’t he talk right?
Seras looked him up and down, cut up and down his arms and bleeding from a cut on the side of his head, a shallow one, but head wounds were notorious bleeders after all. Arms looked like defensive cuts up and down, and the left arm was flaccid, the boy reeked of gunpowder. His shoulder was a mess. She gently tugged away his hand where he was holding his side and saw the bad news. A round had caught him below the right side ribs, a liver shot? Even if a surgeon could be found he didn’t have that kind of time.
He didn’t feel his legs shaking and didn’t know why he was falling; he tried to fall to the side so he wouldn’t knock over this nice cop. Then she caught him and he was surprised at her strength, he collapsed into her and she lowered him down gently to his knees. His head drooped lazily and she pressed her forehead to his. She couldn’t save his life and she knew it. She breathed in and smelled his blood. It smelled clean, well he was young. She couldn’t do that, could she? Seras glanced back at Integra, who had stepped out and was leaning on the side of the car, smoking. She was looking at Seras, but Seras saw that look in her eyes back when she still had been a cop. Her boss was way past fatigue and disassociating. She turned back and lifted up the boy’s face, her choice made.
“Kade? Don’t close your eyes yet, listen up. I can save you, but you…. You won’t be the same. You have to choose. Do you want to come with me?”
A choice? He hadn’t been offered too many of those before. Felt weird to be given one now. Not that he’d been allowed to ask help before. First time for everything. Nothing to lose either.
“I don’t want to die here. Please… Take me with you?” it was almost a question.
She cradled the back of his head and bit in, piercing the base of his neck, marking him, drinking him in, he tensed up like a taught steel cable for half a second before melting into her for support. She flinched and blushed a little to hear a faint moan, or was it a mewl? Was I like this when Master took me?
The bite felt amazing. He was no stranger to vampires but no one told him it felt this damn good. One second he was racked with a grinding, messy pain all over. The next he felt relief. Simple and clean, washing over him head to toe. No soreness, no pain, no breaks. Just warmth embracing him all around. The boy’s breathing slowed then stopped with an exhale soft as a cat’s footfall. He might have been a babe fast asleep. He practically was. Seras let go her bite and licked his neck clean of a few spare droplets before the puncture wounds discolored, greying from blood to purple, and mellowing to the boy’s cinnamon-sugar skin tone. She looked back and saw Integra who had climbed into cat’s shotgun seat, looking despondently at anything ant seeing nothing, she dropped her cigarillo listlessly out of the window and fumbled trying to grab out another, almost crushing the fine cedar matchbox before fishing out a second and catching a light from a trembling Zippo.
For the first time in months, Seras was thinking like a cop. Bollocks. Boss is fatigued and going into or gone into shock. Get these two back home safe before anything else creeps up.
Seras lifted the boy into the back seat and laid him down, clasping in the seatbelt with a little slack, before she retook the wheel.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The drive home could have been worse, their stolen Vauxhall slipped through side streets past two layers of desperately erected and heavily defending barricades as they got out of the city center. Ghosting their way along the Great Circular road, breaking away at High Road and coasting into Finchley to what remained of the Hellsing estate. A great manor on a huge gated field plateaued right across Frith Lane from Inglis, the Mill Hill barracks. Most of the Cambridge’s own Middlesex Regiment had been working through the night with first responders to coordinate rescue of what paltry few survivors had lasted, and quarantining any surviving Freaks or Reconquistadors who had been left holding the bag when their mad bishop’s grand ambition broke against the night’s terror. Seras was surprised to see two fire engines pulled onto the field behind the manor, having extinguished the now charred skeleton of a crashed Zeppelin. She thought she knew who’d brought them onto the grounds, and was glad to see him at the entrance awaiting her arrival.
Captain Fargason was a broad shouldered man in his late fifties, balding with an almost monkish tonsure around the back of his head, he wore a full mustache in the style of the old British Army, the color of dull sliver, and a scar from what might have been a sabre cut below his left eye going halfway down his cheek. He had the passenger side door opened, at the ready to report to his commander, but Integra could have barely muttered “I’m glad to have you back, Captain” before marching through the large foyer and up the stairs, Seras and Fargason both tailed her as far as the Residence on the third floor, but didn’t dare pursue her into her own quarters. Integra turned to face them briefly.
“Seras, send up a surgeon. Then shoot anyone else who opens this door for the next twelve hours.” They were left in the hallway and shared a glance.
Fargason used a radio on his uniform’s chest rig to call up one of the doctors, who took one look at the grazed orbital and insisted she be brought to the barracks’ hospital wing. The Lady Hellsing insisted the welfare of the Manor and its’ faculty were her duty and she’d be damned before leaving the house until all was set right. But her voice was wavering, as long as she was conscious she’d stand defiant against Hell and High water rather than fall back a single step now that she was back home at the last. Seras had about had enough of seeing people white knuckle their way through mortal injury by now, she pushed in the door and strode up to where her master, her master’s master? Was sitting by her desk and gave honest counsel.
“Sir Integra with all due respect you’re in shock and that wound should have been looked at hours ago! If you don’t listen to the doctors I’ll drag you to Pill hill my bloody self! Doctor, what do you need to safely operate here on the premises?”
Surgeon Major Davies gave the fiery officer what her boss needed to hear. “We’d have to move the hospital wing into the mansion. The patient’s orbital bone splintered and there are five fragments lacerating the eye.”
Seras let out a sigh and knelt to face her boss, trying not to sound like a policewoman to a child but needing all the same authority in her voice. “Sir, we all need you alive and well. If you want to do your duty you have to let them do theirs.”
Integra was hours past exhaustion, she wanted to bark but just didn’t have the strength. No strength to bark orders and no strength to cry. Just a dull crushing tiredness baring down on her harder with every goddamn minute.
“Fine. You will have to carry me I’m afraid. Have Fargason take receipt of any dispatches and communiqué.”
She let Seras ease her from her unsteady seat to lay down on a gurney one of the nurses had wheeled in, she helped the nurse fasten down restraints to keep her from moving too much. Three minutes later Davies ushered the Lady Hellsing into Inglis’s medical wing where he set to work with two other surgeons. Finally Seras rejoined Fargason back outside the main entrance, and stood at attention to report when he stopped her with a raised hand.
“I trust Seras, the enemy has been silenced. I’ve spent most of the night running back and forth between the communications and surveillance centers, I saw Walter… And I saw Alucard. You stood by Sir Integra through to the end of it. Whatever comes next, I doubt very much you’ll be taking orders from me any more.
He leaned against the large door-fame and for the first time Seras didn’t see her superior Officer, not the almost grandfatherly teacher who’d taken her under his wing as Police girl and refined her into a specialized operator. Now she saw a man made sharp by thirty years of special operations and covert warfare, and worn down by ten years of teaching younger men the same. Those last ten years served faithfully with the Hellsing estate, a family he’d help built into the outfit it was, a family he’d seen set about by savages twice now. Set upon and sorely battered. Battered but not beaten, but for all his resolution this was a tired man.
“What’s the status of the men?” Seras asked him.
“Ten of the Wild Geese Company are mission capable, in addition to Defense ministry fire crews I’ve requested a company on engineers, the fire crews were kind enough to bring over a few medical corpsmen; they’ll be taking the worst cases back to the base hospital, for everyone else we’ve converted the first floor dining room.”
She tucked that away, bound to mean a lot more back and forth between the Manor and the barracks than usual. And the Usual was rare if ever, she was glad security wasn’t her job.
“There’s something else, Sir, I need a moment.” She all but bolted back to the car, her second charge none the worse for wear; she eased him out of the car and carried him into the manor, careful to put herself between him and the intrusive rays of morning shining in through blasted out windows and walls. She was surprised to see it didn’t hurt her. The old man raised a curious eyebrow
“Is he-”
“The boy’s mine.”
Even she was surprised to say it, and the Captain didn’t argue. She carried him to the manor’s second floor, where communications offices, mercenaries and the manor’s small domestic staff mingled in haphazard groups of the grievously injured waiting to be moved across the street, and the not-so seriously injured, with army medics going about from person to person, applying patch up work to anyone who could be treated without needing to be ferried across the street to a proper hospital ward.
She hauled the boy to a spare guest room on the second floor that had its south wall blasted open in the siege on the manor, but still had bed where she could lay this fledgling to rest, she didn’t want to retreat to the basement levels. She wasn’t even sure how long the boy would sleep before he woke again, in truth she wasn’t even sure if he would at all, when he collapsed she was certain she’d seen him stop breathing, only for his chest to start a faint rise and fall after she slid him into the car.
Closing in on twenty hours on duty, but with the taste of fresh blood on her lips she felt like she’s taken a few strong cups of coffee. No, Pip’s blood was a hefty wine. Kade’s tasted lighter, like a berry flavored red tea. She looked on the boy she’d…Abducted? Where did that come from? She tried to disrobe him and look closer at the wounds that would have, surely had killed him but dried blood and scabbing stuck them fast to his skin. She fetched a bucket of warm soapy water and a washcloth, and sponged and gently washed around his surface cuts, abrasions. Like a proper nurse might have done any patient, what cop couldn’t minister decent field medicine?
As she washed him she studied him. Maybe seventeen? A little short for his age but he must’ve been an athlete, compact muscles that he looked three years too young to have developed, a little too much body fat for a runner, maybe wrestling? She teased off his gray shirt and saw something she hadn’t in a couple years. Something she wished she’d never see again. The boy had a series of cigarette burns, faded along the top of his shoulder. She ripped through the fabric with a finger and teased off the sleeve, a line of faded burns dotted from his left collarbone up the shoulder, the first few were like burnt toast, growing subtly brighter as the oldest moved on to more recent offences, dotted in a double stacked line that terminated in a last angry mark at the top of the collarbone. This boy had been hurt long before last , Not by monsters either night. She felt a gross hot rage in her gut. Her second week on the Avon police force she’d stood by as an Inspector interviewed a boy of twelve, his stomach marred with a great bruise from his drunkard father’s factory steel toe. She’d almost run out of the interview room. Her Sergeant had found her crying in the car park after she’d bloodied her fist on the outside wall.
As she scrubbed his chest and stomach, a thin cylindrical case fell out that had been tucked under his belt. Did he pick up a poster from a gift shop? Why hide that? She set the case next to the pillow and a second look only deepened the mystery. He wasn’t just built strong, these were work muscles, built through regular training, and his defensive wounds suggested knowing a thing or two about close fighting. Had he gotten into shape so he could stop the abuse? As her washcloth trailed down to his waistline she found something that must have escaped her notice earlier. Reaching behind his belt she pulled out a Mauser pistol with the plunger style hammer locked back on an empty chamber. The mystery deepened, he’d definitely nicked it off on of freak soldiers. She felt a bulge in his back picked and pulled out two full stripper clips for the pistol’s integral magazine. Boy knew to hold onto it in case he had the chance to reload. The pistol and two clips went on to a nightstand beside the bed.
The mystery deepens. She could have opened the case to learn more but she didn’t need to. His blood was a part of her now, his unlife. His soul was tethered to hers sure as Pip’s. She was hit by the realization. Kade was hers. Her Fledgling. Servant and student and… child? There was a novel thought. She certainly hadn’t had siblings in the orphanage, never even really made friends until her three years at Exeter University. Seras Victoria’s caregiver experience was… Shall we say rather limited.
The thought of intruding on him with telepathy died fast. She’d had her own mind pried in to last night and relived memories she would have just as soon left buried. Memories of her parents and how they’d died. The sod off bitch who’d opened that door had had her skull ground down against the brick walled corridors of the third floor until her head was reduced to a horrible red strip of what used to be facial tissue.
She could know everything this boy had to tell if she wanted to. She didn’t. At least not that badly.
This kid must ‘ave really given them some hell came Pip’s voice. Seras had drank his blood as he died and he lived on as her Familiar, living body and soul inside her blood. Though I didn’t expect you’d cheat on me so quickly’ ouch! She had willed the image of a hand pinching his ear like a saucy child. The Captain of the Wild Geese had been weirdly quiet for the last few hours.
He’s hardly more than a child Pip, would have been miserable to just leave him there!
Still you could have gotten one of the doctors to help you with this part, they’ve seen plenty of rough job patch ups.
They’ve got more than enough on their plate. They may even need help.
The wounds that almost bled him out has stopped completely, cuts eerily feeling themselves whole again, torn flesh crawling back together like convulsing spider’s legs , punctures and bullet holes radiating a chill breath as his humanity gave way to a cold second life. She tucked him in under the fine Egyptian blankets and left him to slumber, then went out to see what was to be done about setting the rest of her house to rights. There was work to be done.