Hunting the Hunter

"Say it."

A cry, a gasp, a shift of body on cloth...

"No."

"Say. It."

"I am not like you."

A chuckle, cold and hot, and a whimpered denial.

∙∙∙

Walter shifted the photographs across the borrowed desk and impassively scanned the graphic images.

As the coroner’s report had so clinically described, the girl’s body had been decapitated and exsanguinated. He suspected it was likely not in that order based on the wounds she bore. A quick scan further into the coroner’s report confirmed his supposition.

A vampire did not leave neat little punctures like the Saturday matinees would have people believe. Those extended canines tore into a victim leaving long gouges for the blood to pour out of.

Gouges that this headless girl wore in graceless tears across her white, white body.

The town of Christchurch had not lost only one daughter this way. Shuffling those photos aside, he flipped open another file folder to confront similar images. A third folder carried a third cargo of second-hand mutilated flesh for Hellsing’s man to examine.

After a time, he closed the folders and set them aside. He didn’t need the photographs any longer, the images were emblazoned in his mind, and he was certain that Christchurch did indeed have a vampire problem.

∙∙∙

Christchurch wasn’t a big city, but it was a populous enough town that Walter had far too many places to look. The one thing he had to go on was that all three girls were students at the same school. Not that that was a huge coincidence, given the small number of schools in the town, but it was someplace to start.

The coroner’s reports, thorough as they were, made it clear that the girls had something else in common. Unfortunately, it wasn’t something Walter would be able to recognize on sight.

How had the vampire known they were virgins?

He sorted through file folders. This time they contained photos of the living. Each folder contained a file on the girls’ parents. Under those folders was another stack containing records for each of the girls’ teachers.

If Walter could determine just how the vampire was selecting its victims, he could exterminate it like the vermin it was.

The parents weren’t particularly helpful. They spoke to the young stranger with the (completely genuine) police credentials, but none of them wanted to discuss their daughters’ sex lives with someone who hardly looked old enough to be having sex himself.

Walter felt the pressure of time weighing heavily on his shoulders. He had to find this vampire before it killed again, or worse, started creating ghouls. Those grieving families had no idea that death was a mercy compared to what could have happened. Newly created vampires often returned home, first. The contagion could spread like wildfire.

Decapitation had been doing the girls and the town a favor.

Why did that thought raise alarms? Walter tried to pursue its logic, but could find no explanation for why something felt wrong with that idea.

So, the young hunter pushed onward, asking questions during the day, prowling the town’s streets at night, grudgingly snatching a couple of hours of sleep in the early morning before rising to begin again.

On the third day, news came that two more girls had disappeared.

That news brought him both rage and a sense of failure. He’d been there for three days. He was supposed to be the great vampire hunter – the best of his generation – and he’d made no progress at all and two more girls were going to pay for his failings.

∙∙∙

The break came accidentally. There was no sense of accomplishment to stumbling over the answer to the mystery.

With the school closed and parents keeping their children inside out of fear of the predator in their midst, it was a darkening Friday afternoon when Walter strode up the front walk to the school nurse's home. With her position of trust for the students, Matilda Fenton might know more about the missing girls than some of the parents.

Blind luck, then, that he heard a muffled sound from the back of the house. It could have been a cat, a creaking hinge, the cry of a bird, but the sound set Walter's hackles rising.

His life depended on instinct. Not that he always listened to it, but he always heard its clamor. Now instinct told him that the cry was nothing but what he thought it was, wanted it to be. The cry was an opportunity to save at least one life before it was too late. A slim one, but one he had to take.

He followed the sound around to the back of the house, a sweeping glance taking in neat hedges, a well-tended stone wall, a tidy patch of bare earth that was probably a vegetable garden in the warm months, and a crack of blackness against the house's stone foundation that had to be a coal chute that was ajar just a few inches. Ajar enough to let the next muffled shriek reach his ears and pull him onward, searching for a way down.

There were dirt-clouded windows along the base of the house's foundations. All Walter could tell, crouching down to peer into first one, then scuttling to the next, and the next after that, was that there was light on behind one of them, shadows moving behind the ingrained dirt.

Another cry, muffled, but still with a note of pain and protest.

Walter sprang up, running around to the back door and a flicker of silver from his fingers cutting the knob and lock out of the wood without pausing. Kitchen. Hallway. Sitting room visible down the hall. Doors. Stairs up. Damn. Damn. Damn!

He pulled open the closest door and grimaced. No. A pantry wasn't going to help. Next was a WC. Opening the next cast light down wooden stairs that promised to creak the moment he set foot on them. Shit.

He gathered himself and jumped, feet barely touching a step mid-way down the stairs, but enough for the wood to groan under the weight.

To the left was another closed door with a crack of light showing from underneath. In three swift steps, he had crossed the distance from stair bottom to the door, an invisible flick of wire cutting it off its hinges to fall forward into the room under a hard kick.

Everything moved in the stutter stops of life illuminated by a strobe light.

Red. Vibrant, screaming, blood red. On the walls. On the floors. Painting the room's bare lightbulb to add the stink of cooking blood to the hot copper scent already thick in the air.

A man, mouth painted in blood. A girl, gagged and still and hanging by her arms in the center of the room, a figure shrinking back against the wall, a still life of another girl, this one hung by her feet over a bucket, droplets of blood dangling from her limp fingertips waiting for gravity to pull them free.

And silver, flickering out to catch the man, whirling him as he reached for something, caressing his body before drawing tight and spinning arms, legs, and head in different directions in the small room, adding a fresh, hot spray of blood to the abattoir-stench already in the air.

The Angel of Death's attention turned to the other moving figure in this room when a woman's voice screamed, "Anthony!" Wire flashed inches from her, sent to dispatch the accomplice with the master when Walter recognized Matilda Fenton behind the mask of blood and anguish. The instant of shock let him register one other thing - the spray of blood had been hot. Not cold. Not even warm with borrowed heat as a vampire's blood might be after just feeding, but hot.

"Human," he breathed, coming into the room. His muscles were tense, ready for the woman to attack him, but she had dropped to her knees and crawled to where the man's head had rolled, picking it up to cradle against her breast.

"Anthony. Anthony. Oh, God..." she moaned to the glassy-eyed face while Walter checked the pulse of the girl hanging by her arms. She was still warm as life, but her heart did not beat, most of her blood lost down the front of her body from the brutal gashes in her throat.

"Damn," he muttered in a mix of anger and frustrated resignation. Vampire victims were never survivors anyway, but this girl had been brutalized by a human man.

Or a man and a woman. He glared down at the sobbing woman.

"What the Hell were you doing?" he snarled, kicking the head out of her hands, sending a set of metal fangs flying from its slack mouth. "Why?"

"Anthony!" The woman wailed and tried to snatch at the head, crawling after it as though the center of the universe revolved around that piece of the man she had clearly loved.

Human. She was human, too.

Walter stood over her with hands clenched into fists and for a moment, considered ending her life then and there. He could do it. He could get away with it. He was judge, jury, and executioner for vampires; he would be forgiven if he stretched it just a little farther to eliminate this murderer. He'd done as much before during the war and even in handing that child molester over to Mihaela.

His fingers opened and closed. Silver dropped from them in a flicker of leashed death, then disappeared with another twitch of his digits.

No. Killing her would be too easy. He backed away from Matilda and the temptation to kill her, leaving her with her agonized cries for the man who had obviously been named Anthony.

As he stepped away from a deadly sin he had once told Mihaela he was not subject to, Walter did not see the slither of shadow that crept up the wall and out through the coal chute's cracked door.

∙∙∙

Matilda sat alone in her cramped isolation cell. The officers had already come and gone, voicing their disgust, reviling her, and in one case, spitting through the bars on her shoe.

What did it matter? Anthony was gone. That horrid, horrible man with the rings on his fingers and death on his face had killed him and taken away everything she lived for.

She rocked back and forth on the hard cot, dried tears leaving taut tracks across her cheeks. It was over.

She couldn’t even tell the authorities that what they had done had been all for the Master. Those words stopped on the tip of her tongue and refused to go any farther.

You are not worthy to speak of him.

She was… unworthy to speak of him.

All the good is gone from the world.

All the good was gone from the world with her love.

There is nothing left.

She had nothing. Not her love, not the Master, not her home, not her career, not her friends. She had nothing left.

There is a way out.

The agonized woman looked down at the bunk she was sitting on and suddenly jerked up like a puppet with someone manning its strings. There was a way out.

First one centipede, then a tide of them skittered over her shoes while Matilda escorted herself out of the world with a rope made of torn bedsheet tied tightly around her neck. It had been knotted so that even when her nerve gave out, she was unable to release the garrote to scream at the creatures. Then oxygen deprivation bore her away from the horror and down to a peaceful blackness she did not deserve.

By the time a guard found her body on the next welfare check, the cell was populated by only the most natural of shadows and one corpse, its face frozen in a rictus of horror.

∙∙∙

Arthur Hellsing hung up the phone and gave his complete attention to the man standing in front of his desk.

“His mission is complete and he is on his way back to Hellsing. You understand your duties, Bernadette?”

Gérard Bernadette barely contained his eyeroll. “Oui, Sir Hellsing.” His accent was thick, but not incomprehensible. “You want us to follow your man. You want me to tell you what he does. You want us not to get caught. It is very simple, non?”

Stupid Englishman. He was hiring professionals, what did he expect?

“It is not so simple,” Arthur said, leaning forward intently. “He is a trained hunter. He is accustomed to being paranoid to stay alive. I have hired you and your men because I cannot set any familiar faces to follow him.”

He sighed and pulled a cigar from the humidor before leaning back in a good impersonation of a relaxed lounge. “He is the best. Be discrete or you may find yourself dead if he deems you a threat.” Dead in many small pieces.