Hunting the Hunter

Gasps no more, but panting.

“Stop. Now.”

“You don’t want that.”

“I do want…. Stop.”

“And leave you wanting?”

•••

Walter’s restless feet led him through London’s midnight streets again. Arthur insisted he should have occasional nights away from the manor and his duties, that he should have some connection to the world outside of Hellsing. Walter wondered just how this was supposed to make him feel more connected to the people he protected.

He’d gone back to the pub where he’d met Maeve, thinking perhaps to take her up on her offer if she made it again. But the man behind the bar had gruffly told him that she’d stopped coming to work a few weeks back and moved out of her flat without leaving any way to contact her.

Walter wondered if she would have stayed around a little longer if he’d gone up to her flat with her. That question was moot, though and he dismissed the what ifs and put the girl from his mind.

He stopped for a pint in a different pub, but left when he realized he had nothing to say to most of the people there, and no small amount of contempt for many of them. They went about their lives in a blissful fog, accepting the world around them at face value. His role in helping to keep them in that fog had apparently made him cynical.

So, back out onto the streets. Reflected street lights flashed off store front windows, unpredictably dazzling. Cars rumbled past, and the occasional person or couple or group walked by, sometimes on silent business of their own, sometimes boisterous with drink and company.

Walter passed them all with his hands stuffed in his pockets to keep his fingers warm, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. In contrast to life during the war, the store windows were full of merchandise - clothes and furniture and the latest advances in housewares. He kept track of the latter for Hellsing’s household and cared little for the former two.

He stopped for a moment to watch a man in a department store window rearranging the display. Here a man in a dapper wool suit, there a woman in an evening gown and wrap, and Junior following along in short pants and a suit coat of his own. He picked them up and shifted them around, subtly changing their places in relation to each other, tilting a head here, raising a hand there, until at last they gave the impression of a content and cohesive trio.

If only it were so simple.

He moved on from the man in the window and glanced into the next one at the display of young girls at play. The window dresser had apparently not finished with this one, as he could see no reason why the one mannequin would be facing away, rather than turned toward the street to show off the winter white suit she was wearing.

Then she moved and turned to face the window, a smile breaking over her face when she saw him. Mihaela.

She held up a finger, One second, and darted out of the back of the window display and around to the one with the man working in it. She exchanged a few words with him, pointed out the window toward Walter, and nodded when he said something to her that looked to be an admonishment.

Walter could read the words, Thank you, on her lips, and then she threw her arms around the man’s neck in a quick hug and gave him a chaste peck on the cheek.

Moments later she exited a side door and came up the sidewalk to join Walter.

“What were you doing in there?” he asked without preamble.

Mihaela pouted at him for a moment before dropping the act. “Is that any way to greet a friend?”

“If I had a friend here, I would greet her differently. What were you doing in there?”

“Fine,” she huffed. “I was hunting. This man found me and asked why I was out. I told him my parents were fighting and that I didn’t want to go home, so he offered to bring me here.”

She turned back toward the window to wave and flash a bright smile, even though the window dresser probably couldn’t see the dark street from his lit display the way the vampire had.

Picking up a brisk pace, she walked away from the store, passing other lit display windows without attention to spare for them. “I thought he would be dinner, but he was honestly a kind man who had no designs on me other than to give me a warm place to stay until I could go home.”

Walter’s long legs had no trouble matching her much shorter stride. “Would you have let him go if I had not come by? Or were you waiting for me so you could show that you aren’t always a killer?”

The little vampire looked up at him through dark lashes and smiled with her eyes while her lips turned up the barest degree. “Such pride you have, to think that I would engineer that just for your sake.”

Walter took two cigarettes from his case and lit one, passing it to Mihaela before lighting one for himself. “I am not slothful, greedy, gluttonous, envious, rage-full nor lustful; if I must bow to one of the deadly sins, let it be pride.”

Mihaela drew on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke before saying, “How interesting, then, that the Angel of Death shares the sin that shook Heaven and made angels fall.”

Walter frowned down at the girl who was not a girl. “At least my pride is not so great that I would question God.”

The vampire turned guileless eyes up at him. “You hunt my kind just because we are as God made us. Do you question that God has a plan?”

“Humans hunt wolves that prey on our sheep. In India, they hunt the tigers that prey on villages. To be a hunter is as much a part of the plan as anything else, and not everyone is suited for it.”

Mihaela’s smile grew. “So you, the Hunter, do God’s will?”

While they spoke, they traveled away from the shopping district. Walter didn’t really know where they were going, but it wasn’t the destination that mattered at that point.

“Hellsing’s insignia says as much: ‘We are on a mission from God.’”

“But you are talking a vampire. You’re even sharing a cigarette. How does that fit in your world where you are the shepherd and I am the wolf?”

He was easily two feet taller than she was, but she was right, she was the wolf. Why was he talking to her?

“A good hunter must know those he hunts. If you are as you say, then you serve a purpose, and I must understand it. Then I will know when to hunt the rogues and when to leave the others to their work.” Even as he spoke, he wondered if that was anything more than the flimsiest of excuses for something he didn’t want to understand more deeply.

“Then I serve a purpose?” Mihaela stopped on the sidewalk and tilted her face up at him. “God’s purpose?”

Walter stopped because she had, but wished they could keep walking rather than stopping. It gave the question greater weight and he didn’t know how to answer.

“Well?” For once the tiny vampire didn’t seem to be trying to look young and innocent. Her eyes were dark, hints of red flickering in and out of the irises.

When he didn’t answer her quickly enough, she pursed her lips, eyes narrowing. “Maybe you should think on that. While you do, I must go. I did have other plans this evening, and they did not include keeping your unarguably charming company.”

She spun and walked away, leaving Walter wondering what had just happened. Had he offended her?

He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of “other plans.” She had been hunting when she’d come across the good Samaritan. And then he had further distracted her.

Without thinking about his motives, Walter began to follow Mihaela as she moved farther from the shopping district and into less savory areas. Her white suit was luminous and easy to follow, even while he maintained as much distance as possible from his quarry without completely losing her altogether.

Her path took them closer to the river, the vampire girl leading the human man through the night on some journey with an unknown destination. Then a third person joined their travels.

A man slid out of the shadows and watched the tiny figure in white before leaving his place to follow her. Walter held back and followed the human instead, watching him suspiciously. He didn’t think that this man was also going to offer her someplace safe and warm for the night. At least not honestly.

Their little train wound through more streets until Mihaela stopped at the distinctive glass dome that marked the entrance to the Greenwich foot tunnel. As a public highway, it was open twenty-four hours, but at this time of night, there was no traffic for the tunnel that led under the Thames to the Isle of Dogs.

Walter hung back while Mihaela passed through the open entrance and started down the spiral stairs. Her stalker – or her other stalker – waited long enough for her to get well ahead of him on the stairs and then followed her in.

Her other other stalker considered leaving them both to their fates. Likely the girl needed no help with this man, although she had seemed unaware of anyone behind her.

It was curiosity that spurred him forward. He had to see. Some part of him still had difficulty reconciling her appearance with the reality of what she was.

No sound filtered up to Walter as he made his way down the stairs with the silent skill of a practiced hunter. He’d never liked the tunnel – the white tile-lined walls were too close, the sense of an entire river above his head too claustrophobic. It was too much like being buried alive for his comfort.

The white tiles under the tunnel’s unforgiving lighting made for a glaring contrast with the blood that was the first thing to catch Walter’s attention when he made it to the bottom of the stairs and into the tunnel proper.

Mihaela’s stalker was a rag doll in her hold, his throat a ravaged horror as she tore into it again with a mouth full of gleaming white, razor-sharp teeth.

Incongruously enough, Walter’s first thought was that they’d never looked like that when she was smiling at him. His second thought was that she was an incredibly messy and wasteful eater, based on the amount of blood that gleamed on the tunnel walls and soaked into the white suit she always seemed to be wearing.

He was torn – here was a vampire attacking and killing a human, but that human barely merited the title, given his obvious ill-intent toward someone he had thought was defenseless. It was too late to protect him and Walter wasn’t sure he cared enough to want to if it weren’t.

During the moments he conducted his internal debate, Mihaela finished with her meal and let the man drop, holding him carelessly by the collar as a real girl might with a dolly.

“Are you going to kill me now? Or would you agree that it’s better that the man you watched stalking me met this fate instead of finding a truly defenseless target?” As she spoke, Walter observed that the blood on her face seemed to be sinking into her skin and disappearing.

So, too, did the blood on her clothes, and the blood that he had thought would “go to waste” on the floor and walls began to flow toward her, disappearing under her shoes as though it had never been there.

“What are you?” Walter tried not to gape, but he had never faced a vampire that behaved as this one.

Mihaela smiled, and once again the mask of a little girl settled over her face. With stolen blood warming and coloring her skin she would look as human as Walter, if it weren’t for the limp body dangling forgotten in her hand. “I am the true undead. Not some pathetic creature that hasn’t the sense to know that it should stay in its grave.

“Was this what you wanted to see when you followed me?”

Walter’s gaze shifted from the man’s ruined throat to Mihaela’s face and back again before he deliberately met her eyes. “Yes. It was exactly what I needed to see. Don’t come near me again. If you see me, go the other way. If you try to talk to me again, I’ll kill you. Give Doru that message as well. It’s more mercy than I usually give.”

He turned on his heel without waiting for a response from the vampire and walked back toward the stairs, fighting to ignore the itching between his shoulder blades. He knew he shouldn’t turn his back on a vampire after threatening to kill her, but he had a point to make – he wasn’t afraid of her, no matter what scene she’d engineered for him. He’d seen worse.

Her only attack came in words: “I have never lied to myself or to you about what I am. Can you say the same?”

•••

Walter considered avoiding Arthur and his inevitable questions about his night out. The man seemed genuinely concerned that his retainer should not isolate himself too much.

He just didn’t know how he would tell Arthur that a vampire had made him seriously question his own humanity. Shouldn’t he have cared that Mihaela had killed a human being right in front of him? At least a little?

Arthur took the decision out of his hands, finding him in the hallway as Walter made his way back to his room, telling himself he’d just get tidied up before reporting to his employer.

He greeted the younger man and beamed. “Walter, my boy! How was the city tonight?”

I watched a vampire rip a man’s throat out and then attract the blood to herself like some sort of magnet. And the thing that bothers me the most is that it doesn’t really bother me.

“I think I’ll need a few days to think about that before I can answer you.” He bowed his head slightly to Arthur and pushed on toward his room where a hot shower and clean clothes awaited, leaving his employer to speculatively watch his departure.