Adult-FanFiction.org : Anime

Hunting the Hunter	By : DreadfulPenny Category: Hellsing > General Views: 6416 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Hellsing, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 28
- 29
- 30
As they walked the checkerboard hall through the staff quarters and deeper into the building, Walter and Doru passed many open doors into rooms painted red with fresh blood. Walter saw familiar faces frozen in the pain and terror that marked their last moments of life. At the first guard post, there was a naked body on the floor, riddled with bullet wounds. He would have congratulated the guard for his success in killing one of the wereghouls, but that would have required assembling the dismembered parts of his body and a miracle.
Walter passed his own bedroom with just a glance to ensure it was empty before he moved on.
Doru strode beside him saying nothing. The vampire was alert but apparently unmoved by the destruction, even amused, if the upward curve of his lips was to be trusted.
He served as the foil to Walter’s rising rage. This was Hellsing! This was his!
The next guard post was manned by monsters. Two wereghouls bayed an alert and raced toward Walter and Doru. Walter cut them down without a moment’s hesitation, using nearly invisible wires to send more blood spraying to join the virtual river of it that already ran down the hall.
From the corner of his eye he saw Doru drag his fingertips along a wall dripping with crimson and bring them to his mouth to lick it away. If they had been anywhere but Hellsing, that might actually have served to distract Walter, at least for an instant.
He held up a hand to stop Doru when he heard the chatter of gunfire again. There were two choke points out of the main hall where the guards could have set up barricades. One led to the main living quarters, the other to the east wing with the conference room and business offices.
He set off at a run, trusting Doru to stay on his heels.
He stopped at the door into the cavernous main hall with its open expanse of bloodstained black and white tile and assessed the situation. The guards had managed to barricade the entrance to the east wing out of the main hall, but at great cost. He saw uniformed bodies among the naked ones of dead wereghouls.
The double doors were torn off their hinges, but the guards had piled furniture from the offices in front of the entrance to provide both a barricade and spaces through which to shoot. Wereghouls lurked on both sides of the open doors out of range of the defenders’ weapons. Every so often one would dart in and jerk at part of the barricade, making everything shift and groan.
The doors to the hall that led to the Arthur’s living quarters and guest rooms stood wide open and undefended and Walter could see garish splashes of red on the walls and floor there. The entire manor stank like an abattoir and there seemed to be nowhere he could step that he did not walk in the blood of people he’d known.
From his vantage point he couldn’t see if the double doors at the base of the wide stairs that led down to the cellars were open, but he didn’t expect them to be any more secure than the other doors.
He glanced back at Doru, who had stopped when Walter had. “Just stay back,” he cautioned in a whisper. “It’s going to be messy in there for a few seconds.”
With that, he stepped around the corner and raised his hands to conduct a brief symphony of destruction.
The room filled with glints of reflected light before suddenly going red as blood sprayed from the assembled wereghouls. There was a brief patter of thumps amid the hiss of raining blood while the now disassembled wereghouls fell in pieces to the floor.
There was silence for the space of an indrawn breath before a panicked guard squeezed off a random spray of automatic fire. Walter cut the bullets out of the air with a sweep of his hand.
The gunfire cut off to the sound of cursing from behind the barricade followed by someone’s voice, "Sweet Jesus, it's him!" and a ragged cheer from the defenders.
Walter stepped carefully among the fallen bodies and peered through one of the holes in the barricade the defenders had been using as weapon ports.
“How many back there?”
“Six of us guards, sir,” came the response. “And four civilians other than the Round Table, but the knights are locked in the conference room. We heard more fire from the staff quarters, but that stopped about ten minutes ago.”
“I came through there,” Walter said grimly. “They’re all gone. How are you doing for ammunition?”
“Could be better.” Walter had to smile. It was just such perfect understatement given so blandly that he couldn’t help but love his adopted countrymen.
“Give me a moment.” He set to collecting weapons and ammunition from the fallen guards to pass through the gaps in the barricade. Glancing around, he didn’t see Doru. Perhaps he had been drawn into the open hall into the main quarters. He had to trust that the vampire could take care of himself.
“Any injuries?” he asked after he had collected all the nearby weapons.
“A secretary with a broken ankle, I think. She panicked and fell, but other than that, if they get their claws on you, you’re done for.”
“You stay back there. Don’t let anyone in except me. I’m going to clean up and then I’ll be back. Keep the knights in that conference room.”
“It was Mr. Hellsing, sir,” the guard said. “It was that Richard that let them in. If you see him, remember that. He was on the Tannoy wanting them to put out Sir Arthur. He’s out there.”
Walter’s expression turned grim. “I’ll remember.”
If Richard had been on the Tannoy, he had to have been in the security office. After glancing around for Doru and not seeing him, he sprinted upstairs to try to hunt down Arthur’s traitorous brother.
Upstairs the destruction was just as complete, just as devastating. He passed Lily, the upstairs maid who was planning to leave service in six months to be married, and her friend and fellow maid, Angela. Both had died with expressions of sheer terror on their faces.
It was always harder when he knew the dead, but it was still worse that these were not just people he knew, but noncombatants.
He would tear Richard Hellsing apart. Slowly.
There were wereghouls on the second floor, but not in great numbers. He dispatched each creature ruthlessly until he reached the security office. Before Richard had left, he - or someone else - had smashed the monitors that might have let Walter track the movements of the intruders.
The Tannoy was still in one piece. Walter thumbed the button on the microphone and issued a calm warning. “This is Walter Dornez, trashman of the Hellsing Organization. If you pray, now is the time to do it, because I’m coming to send you to Hell.”
He knew Arthur would hear him in the closed conference room. He hoped Richard was still around to hear him and feel fear. He wasn’t dead or stranded in Aberdeen; he was coming.
He methodically checked every room on the second floor, killing every wereghoul he found. He found many corpses, but no survivors. On the first floor, he went back through the staff quarters to be certain there were no stragglers he had missed and moved on to the main quarters. The story was the same there - fewer wereghouls than expected and no survivors.
After clearing the kitchen and dining rooms, he stood again in the great hall. He had not come across Doru in his searches and had only the cellars and the dungeons beneath them to search.
The heavy double doors at the bottom of the stairs into the cellars lay shattered on the floor and bloody clawprints told the story of more wereghouls in one place than he had seen on the first or second floors.
“Good,” he murmured to himself. It was easier to clean up if the trash was all in one place.
The lights were on down in the cellar. The wereghouls hadn’t seemed to need much light to attack him in Aberdeen. With luck that meant that Richard was down there. He couldn’t imagine why unless the man had decided to bring down Hellsing by planting explosives at its underpinnings.
The thought gave him a chill all the carnage had not.
He found the first brutally dismembered nude body around the first bend in the corridor. Soon after he found more, all killed in the same manner - heads ripped off, hearts torn out, body parts strewn carelessly on the floor. The air was filled with the smell of blood and other less savory things from punctured stomachs and unraveled intestines. Even the light had a reddish cast from blood that had sprayed up to cover light fixtures.
It was like a descent into Hell.
There were no living souls in the first cellar level, be it wereghoul or guard. Walter found the stairs down into the sub-cellars that Arthur called the dungeons and followed the blood trails through more red-lit slaughter.
Far up ahead around a corner he heard voices, too far to make out meaning, only tone - one pleading and another making a growling demand.
For a moment he thought he saw shadows writhe like tentacles in the bizarre hell light of the bloodied dungeons as though cast by something around that far corner. The pause in speaking was cut by a high pitched scream and then a babble of speech before all went silent again.
The shadows writhed again as he approached; this time he was certain he had seen it and quickened his pace. If he broke into a run, he was certain he would stumble on a piece of a wereghoul. Dismembered bodies made for poor footing.
When he rounded the corner, he stopped at the sight of Doru and Richard standing at an open door. The wall all around the door had been painted with arcane symbols and Walter knew that the door itself was also covered with red-painted symbols. It was the first time he had ever seen the door open.
Doru held Richard up by the front of his shirt, his toes barely brushing the floor. The man was obviously terrified, but Walter saw nothing that could have cast the shadows he had seen when he had approached.
Before Walter could say anything, Doru snarled in Richard’s face. “They sent you here for her.” He shook Richard and the man flopped like a rag doll. “You can’t have her!”
Richard babbled something - a plea for Doru not to bite him, Walter thought as he picked his way forward. The number of wereghouls was greater here than anywhere else in the manor, so Walter surmised that this had been their target, no matter what Richard might have announced on the Tannoy.
“Doru-”
Doru shook Richard again and scornfully said, “I wouldn’t bite you. Your blood smells like filth.”
Then he raised a long arm and tore Richard’s throat out with his bare hand.
He dropped Richard’s body and stepped through the door into the murk of the room beyond and Walter hurried to follow him.
The room was unlit and Walter could barely make out Doru’s silhouette ahead of him. While he slid a hand down the wall beside the door to find the light switch, he saw Doru’s shadowy form kneel.
The harsh white light when he found the switch revealed a room empty save for two coffins. One stood leaning against the far wall, so tall it towered above Walter. The other, beside which Doru knelt, lay on the floor.
Walter approached as Doru laid a hand on the coffin’s gleaming surface. It was a rich, light wood, and not nearly so large as the standing coffin.
“Doru?”
The vampire looked up at him, no longer snarling or even faintly amused as he had been upstairs. He looked simply weary. “Richard told me about this. She is why madmen gave him infernal forces to use as he wished.”
“She?” Walter asked.
“She is the beginning and the end,” Doru murmured, stroking the wood. “Destined to be fought over even when she only wanted peace.”
“Then there’s someone in there?”
“Yes. Guarded against those who would use her to their own ends, whatever those ends might be.”
Doru stroked the wood of the coffin as he had stroked a hand down Walter’s back or thigh, then rose to stand over Walter, looking down at him. “But I think...” he reached for Walter’s hands and clasped them in his own, “...I think she belongs here after all.”
Walter tilted his head up to search Doru’s face for some clue to his meaning. Doru squeezed his hands more tightly and bent to brush a kiss against Walter’s lips before whispering, “‘Tis not strange that even our loves should with our fortunes change.”
Walter opened his mouth to ask what Doru meant, but never got the words out of his mouth when the vampire struck, sinking razor teeth into the flesh of his throat.
God, no.
The pain was instantaneous and searing, but when Walter tried to jerk back, Doru used his hold on Walter’s hands to keep him in place. The stories always said that the bite turned to pleasure, but all Walter felt was pain that spread from where Doru had torn his flesh and gripped him down the length of his spine.
He could barely feel Doru’s lips against his skin past the agony both of the wound and of his betrayal. He had trusted him.
“Bastard!” He jerked his head, but Doru followed his movement, never parting from his feeding at the gashes in Walter’s throat.
Walter thrashed more, kicking him, jamming a knee up to slam into his testicles, slam a heel down on top of his foot, anything to get him to let go, but Doru remained attached to him like a leech. Doru drained away his strength, if not his will, with every swallow until Walter sank down to the stone floor, too weak to stand.
Doru followed him down, going to his knees with Walter’s hands still gripped tightly in his until he transferred his hold to a one-handed grip and wrapped his free arm around Walter to cradle him against his chest.
When he pulled away from Walter’s throat, his skin was flushed as though with exertion, and while Walter was cold, Doru’s skin was fever hot against his.
Walter turned his face away when Doru kissed his forehead.
“Look at me, Angel.”
Walter squeezed his eyes closed and kept his face turned away.
Doru shook him. “Look.”
Walter shuddered and kept his face turned away.
“Angel, you don’t want to be a ghoul.”
Walter shook his head.
“Then look at me.”
Walter slowly opened his eyes and turned his face back to look up at Doru’s.
“Good.” Doru smiled, and Walter could have sworn it looked sad. “I have betrayed you, Walter. In so many ways.”
As Walter watched, Doru’s features softened and shrank until Mihaela looked down at him and kissed his forehead.
“Mihaela,” he breathed, not believing what he was seeing. Perhaps it was an hallucination as he neared death.
“There’s more,” she said in her little girl’s voice. “I am Mihaela, and I am Doru.” Her face bloomed out into Doru’s again.
“You never saw us together, did you?” Doru asked.
Walter mouthed No, too shocked to speak.
As Walter stared up at him, his hair bled from coal black to stark white, and his face grew sharp and savage. He bared razor teeth at Walter and blinked hell-red eyes.
“And you never saw us together, did you?” the white-haired vampire asked.
Walter’s brow furrowed. Of course he had. In the house where he killed Christian. He had seen the white-haired vampire and then he had been in the dark in the attic and then... And he had heard Doru fighting him in the deep shelter.
Hadn’t he?
“No. You never saw us together.” His hair darkened to its former color, his face filled out, and once again Doru looked down at him. His familiar and beloved features within reach if Walter’s hands had been free.
“It has all been a lie, Walter. All of it. My name is not Doru, or Mihaela, or deVille.” He brought his face down to whisper in Walter’s ear. “I am Dracula.”
Walter gasped and pulled weakly at the hold Doru - Dracula - had on his hands to no effect. If he had been anyone other than who he was, perhaps he would have wept at his foolishness and the true scope of Dracula’s betrayal, but what he felt instead was a swell of rage.
He managed a question, “How?” How had Dracula survived when he was supposed to be dead? How had he involved Richard? How had he known to come to this room? How could he use Walter this way?
“Why?”
Any of them. All of them. He wanted so many answers before he became a ghoul. He wanted to destroy Dracula to save himself.
He wanted to have never given any love at all to this monster.
“Through decades of planning. Old Abraham thought he could kill me with just a stake, but I am not some vampire created by another’s bite. I was created through will, and so can you be.”
Walter looked up at him, uncomprehending.
“Do you hate me, Walter?” Dracula asked.
Walter rasped a fervent, “Yes!”
Dracula smiled, and if it had been Doru, Walter would have said he looked sad, but what did he really know of this creature? Nothing. Everything had been a lie. All of it.
“Then use it.” Dracula shook him gently. “Don’t let me get away with using you, betraying you, killing you. Hate me. Hate me so deeply that you will not let the grave claim you.”
Walter stared up at him. Hate him? Oh God, yes, he hated him. Hours ago he had wanted to tell Doru he loved him and Doru was Dracula?
The hate he felt warmed him despite the chill of blood loss. He wanted to see Dracula on his knees begging for his forgiveness.
And would he give it?
No!
He mouthed the word and felt the world shift.
No, he would not die. He would not be this monster’s ghoul. He would not give in!
The air in the room grew thick and Walter felt Dracula release him and lay his body on the floor. He could barely keep his eyes open, but he saw Dracula pick up the tall coffin leaned against the wall and carry it to the door.
Blood crawled across the floor from the bodies Doru had left on the floor. It spilled down the stairs from the first and second floors, streams of blood, rivulets of blood, rivers of blood, all called by Walter’s hatred and his will not to die.
The blood flowed past Dracula’s shoes and rose up to offer itself to Walter, swaying in a column like a snake before a snake charmer.
Walter mouthed Yes and the blood plunged down, into him, arching him up off the floor.
Dracula watched until Walter’s eyes, now red, fluttered closed and his body went limp on the floor, then he turned and walked away with the coffin Abraham van Helsing had stolen from him more than fifty years ago.
He left Mina to her rest.
- 28
- 29
- 30
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Hunting the Hunter