Red Roses for Your Lover

Things began to move fast out of necessity. Schrödinger was no doubt putting out the alert right now. Seras was too weak to run and she didn’t want to run, she wanted to fight. The desperate vampire reached out and found a soldier whose duties had kept him on the ship. She didn’t bother with subtlety; she blasted her imperative that he come to the room where she crouched. Recent weeks may have left her body weak, but they had honed her will into something formidable. She felt the man run down the hall and heard him as he fumbled with the door.

She was in a race against time. Soon they would find her and she needed to be strong enough to fight when the soldiers got there. The man under her control rushed into the room and stopped, looking confused. Come here and pick me up. He didn’t hesitate, but hurried across to her and picked her up. She threw her arms around his neck and clamped down on both his mind and his neck. He stood immobile as she drained him. By the time he was too weak to stand and hold her, she was strong enough to stand and hold him until he was dead. She felt him as he was incorporated into her self. It was different from the gentle joining she had felt with Pip all those weeks ago, but she had let Pip’s soul go on to his reward; this thing was going to stay and serve her. There was no comparison. She rifled through what her victim had known but found nothing of any use.

Seras tossed his body to the floor and quickly surveyed the movements of the other vampires on the ship. They were organizing and it seemed that they were methodically checking each room. Schrödinger was giving her trouble. He moved too quickly, one moment here, the next moment in a completely different location. The Major seemed to be in his usual place in the control room, Captain Günsche was not on the ship as best she could determine, although he, of all the vampires, could hide from her if he chose. Walter was not on the zeppelin, but her bond to him was strong and she could feel him down on the ground now that she was looking. Doc was hurrying down the corridor to his lab. Perfect.

If there was a place on this ship of the damned that Seras knew well, other than Walter’s room, it was the lab. She found the slip and stepped forward, willing that her next step would take her to the lab. She grinned with delight at how simple it really was. I spent too much time working too hard at that.

She ducked behind a table as she felt and heard Doc approach the door. His thoughts were hurried and worried and he had correctly guessed that she held a grudge against him. She waited until he had entered and crossed the room before standing, enjoying the shock on his face more than words could convey. “Hi, Doc. I wanted to talk to you.”

She stepped between him and his anxious glance at the door. “I wish I had time to share with you some of my personal findings about your treatment of young women.” She held out her empty hands. See, I’m harmless. I’m just the little girl you’ve had strapped to your lab table for the past few weeks. “But I really must be going soon.” She stepped closer to him and was rewarded when he backed into a cabinet in his haste to move away from her. Are you scared, Doc? I know you are. You can’t be scared enough to pay me back for what you’ve cost me.

She stepped into the slip and out right next to Doc. She used one of her favorite police academy takedowns to wrestle him to the floor. She couldn’t help but remember Jan Valentine and the way Walter had begun to torture the vampire before he escaped her. She didn’t give Doc a chance to struggle free; she tore open his throat with her teeth and drank as much of him down as her stomach would hold. You’re mine now, bastard.

Seras had been so absorbed in killing her tormentor that she wasn’t paying attention to the movements of the other vampires. She turned her blood-smeared face at Schrödinger’s voice, “I told the Major that you’d come here. He’s going to be very angry with you.” She grunted as his booted foot caught her in the face and tossed her back from Doc’s body.

“If you’re here to rescue him, you’re too late. He’s mine now and that corpse of his is never going to move again.” She rolled up into a standing position and watched the catboy. More soldiers were converging on the lab and she wanted to do this her way, not theirs. She found a room that only had two occupants and slipped through, leaving Schrödinger behind once again.

The two vampires were not expecting her to appear behind them. She had the strength of the blood of two men buoying her up and out of the weakness she’d been forced into for weeks. Before either could act, she had torn the head off of one and grasped the other by the throat, lifting him off the ground and throwing him into the wall. The killing rage that had come upon her after Jolene was there and she was going to ride it this time with her consciousness still there and in charge. She dispatched the second vampire and walked out into the hallway. She kept a piece of her mind on the twin threats of the Major and Schrödinger, but the rest of her was going to bring a one-woman bloodbath to Millennium.

Seras made her way through the zeppelin, deftly dodging Schrödinger whenever she felt him appear too close to her. She left a trail of destruction behind her, leaving no vampire survivors. It felt so good to be free and powerful after her time of bondage. She paid them all back for everything that had happened during her captivity and did not stop until there were only the vampires on the bridge and Seras and her anger left on the craft.

She stopped and pulled Doc out of the depths within her to which she had consigned him. It took no time to extract from him what she wanted to know about the Major, Schrödinger and Walter. Even Doc couldn’t fill in many gaps for her about Captain Günsche; the man was as much of an enigma to his compatriots as he was to her.

Schrödinger would be a problem. He didn’t seem to be killable. He wasn’t overly strong or powerful, but according to Doc’s memories, there was no way to pin him down long enough to destroy him and she’d seen firsthand that he could take a bullet with the best of them. I’ll just have to work around him, if I can’t go through him.

The best, most encouraging information she got from Doc was about Walter. There was only one thing she could do about him tonight, but Doc knew enough to give her hope for Walter for the future. The one thing she could do for and about Walter tonight led her inevitably to the Major.

The Major was the person to whom Walter was sealed. Like Alucard’s seals to Hellsing, in theory, the bond would pass through the Major’s bloodline. The Major had no children, but Seras had a good idea of how she could work that in her favor. Unfortunately, according to her insider information, the Major’s mental discipline was formidable and he would present a real risk to her, not physically, but psychically.

Integra or even Walter would have recognized the grin that spread across Seras’ face as she settled on a course of action. Her laughter preceded her onto the bridge as she slipped in. The slight young woman grasped a vampire around the waist and slipped away from the room to kill him at her leisure in another part of the ship. She could feel the panic her maneuver had caused on the bridge. They had thought that their proximity to the Major would save them and she had proven them wrong. They deserved their fear and she planned to feed it.

Schrödinger disappeared from her surveillance of the ship. Seras doubted that he was making a run for it; he was probably gathering forces down on the ground to come up and try to deal with their runaway lab animal. She wanted to get off of this ship before Captain Günsche or Walter showed up to put a kink in her plans.

She stepped up her hit and run attacks on the bridge, taking two vampires at once when they were both within easy reach. She whittled down the number of vampires there to fewer than ten, including the Major, who had done nothing to stop her yet.

She felt Schrödinger return to the bridge, but he wasn’t alone. The glass and fire that accompanied the Warrant Officer signaled the return of both Captain Günsche and Walter. This was far from what she wanted. She could feel that Walter was furious, but the Captain gave nothing away.

Seras was frustrated and angry. She had one more target on this ship and he was too heavily guarded to rationally go after at this time.

The ship’s intercom system crackled into life, “Seras Victoria, I am very disappointed in you.” She scowled at the speaker grate in the ceiling. “You ate an old friend of mine.”

Seras twisted the mind of one of the surviving vampires on the bridge, pushing her words through and out of him. All eyes turned as the man stood up from his console and spoke firmly, “Doc wasn’t your old friend. You aren’t capable of friendship. But he was both tasty and informative.” She winced on her end of the link with the vampire as Walter’s wires swept out and tore the soldier into pieces. One less bloodsucker to worry about.

A crawling feeling started behind her eyes. Finally coming after me yourself, Major Pig? She was glass, miles thick, opaque and impenetrable; there would be no finger hold, no cracks. She bit her lip as something hammered against her barriers, but they held.

Her focus on the Major’s forays was her weakness. She was looking inward, not out, and the arm that wrapped around her throat and squeezed came as a surprise. She reacted automatically from her police training and threw Schrödinger off of her and against a wall. The Major thrust against her mind, but she was able to keep up the shields. She slipped away to a different deck before the boy could recover.

She knew if she kept playing cat and mouse with them, she would lose. She did not want to face either Walter or Hans in combat. Seras had gotten enough memories from the vampires she’d consumed to know that the silent Captain was formidable indeed. They’d also shared something that nobody else would ever know about. She just didn’t want to have to kill him. And Walter was Walter – her lover, torturer, former friend and the Angel of Death. A showdown with him was destined to end badly for one of them.

The intercom spoke again, “Glass shatters all the time. Don’t cut yourself.” She felt a suggestion pushing at her barriers about breaking glass, the fragility of glass, the fact that glass is just a very slow liquid. How could she trust her protection to something as unlikely as glass?

Seras slipped to a random room, trying to stay ahead of Schrödinger. The Major continued his whispering campaign on the edges of her mind. She could either keep playing this game until she was caught and killed or she could go on the attack again.

She had an idea that brought another grin to her face. She slipped into the weapons bay and found a supply of grenades. From there, she popped onto the bridge just long enough to toss a present into the Major’s lap before slipping away. His momentary shock and dismay while he dealt with the grenade was her opening. His offense and defense flagged and she pressed harshly into the mind of the vampire she hated above all others.

It was ugly in there. Seras was repelled by the sheer maggoty feel of his thoughts, but she did not pull back. She pushed in, as hard as she knew how, using the rage and pain that she had been ruthlessly suppressing during her captivity to push toward what she felt was the core of his personality. The explosion of the grenade opened him still more to her and she had enough strength to cut him off from his body just long enough for her to slip back onto the bridge and slip away with her enemy in her arms.

The two vampires stood in a street in Berlin that she had never seen before. She knew that directly above her and her captive, floated the blimp that had been her prison. She had had enough preliminaries with the Major and his mind was cursedly strong. He was pressing her back out of his thoughts. In a moment, she would be expelled entirely and he would be able to attack her once more. She did not hesitate as she fulfilled one of her dearly held fantasies and tore into him and drank him dry.

The young woman, clad only in an outsized uniform shirt, stood over the body of her last victim. Her observer watched as she shuddered and pulled herself out of her reverie to look around her. He was enormously gratified when she turned and stared directly at him.

“You.” One word contained immeasurable venom.