Chapter 7: Lady D; By Ethan Winters
Catherine's phantom lived her most important moments a second time with grief clear in her expression, that was the way everything began... She had almost forgotten.
It had been so long ago.
"If you help me get the crown, I'll give you anything! Gold! Power! The whole country, I only ask of you, give my daughter and me a chance!" Catherine knelt in front of this man, this was her only opportunity, she didn't even think of asking anyone for help except this person, it would be futile.
Asking a preacher for help resulted in this...
The teenager glanced down at her with disdain clearly visible, as if she was an ant he could step on at any time.
"Why should I accept? Gold, I already have. Power? I'm powerful enough. I don't need any of that. However..." The teenager glanced at her beautiful face and deteriorated body that held potential.
This was Catherine Montgomery Rothschild, the most beautiful woman in England and Wales, wife of the late Crown Prince of England.
He smirked, "I'll give you your kingdom but in exchange... I want you. You will be my slave, do you accept?" He stated his condition with a wicked smile.
Catherine's body shook as she looked down with a depressed smile.
'Hehe, hehehe... This again' a laugh of anguish that was.
Could it be that she was fated to be someone's slut? every path leads to this...
She gave her daughter a glance with her tear-stained almost red eyes, under Alucard's phantom's watch.
Her daughter's eyes couldn't be any redder from so much crying. She had tried to avoid her daughter from having to live this, but it was all for nothing.
'I'll support you dear, no matter what...' She whispered to herself with closed eyes, accepting her fate, all for her daughter.
"I accept."
**
**
Thirty years went by in but a few minutes and eventually, the two opened their eyes simultaneously coming back to this nigh-destroyed bloodied room.
The stench of the blood was no longer filthy, now it was different, it was sweet.
Catherine's now red eyes met Alucard's, his were still red from drinking her blood.
Alucard had lived all of Catherine's thirty years of life, together with a few key moments in his life. Something that by the way... Never happened before.
Whenever he transformed someone into a vampire, he would be able to witness their memories, what he didn't understand was why were his memories also included? It was just a handful of his most important moments.
Unbeknownst to him, those moments had been completely looked on upon by Catherine, the Queen only managed to live a few months of Alucard's life together with her most important moments, that was her brain and soul's limit.
She managed to see her husband once again, but she also saw his death... Lived the most painful weeks with her daughter and became that man's 'object'...
But all that was unimportant, now there was something else... Something more important. Her shining eyes glanced at his, and the overwhelming oppression of Alucard's identity came upon her like the heavy mass of a railway train.
Count Dracula, far beyond anything she could have possibly heard of the enigmatic vampire in this world's books.
No, That was a faker... In front of her, no, on top of her rested the Real Count Dracula, a monster embodied from the darkness, with an unimaginable amount of blood and souls in his body.
Her body shook and her mind numbed in a haze, she could feel it, there was something telling her to follow this man.
She had felt that loneliness, and she wanted to state it...
He had felt her despair, and he wanted to protect her...
As fast as that thought passed by Alucard's mind, his eyes opened wide, flickering between Pink and Red.
'NO!' He denied!
Darkness seeped from his body, covering the whole room and 'eating' the corpses of the guards he assassinated or slaughtered...
Catherine's lungs held a deep breath as she noticed a change in his behaviour and essence.
He's leaving!
"Alu-!" She tried to pronounce it but it was too late, the next second everything was gone!
Alucard, the corpses, the darkness, the blood. Everything was gone! Leaving only walls full of holes and a destroyed seat.
She just rested on her bed in a daze, feeling the pain in her neck quickly residing.
Her hand instinctively went for a prod, but even before she could even touch the wound, it was already healed! There was nothing! the wound caused by his pointed jaws disappeared together with the bones he broke in a frenzy of bloodthirstiness.
'Amazing...' she thought, still not fully aware of what she had actually become, but having a basic understanding due to his memories.
She was now a vampire... Like him.
For the next half an hour she just sat on her bed, thinking... Thinking of Alucard, thinking of his face, his life, his power, she couldn't think of anything else.
"Your Majesty!" She suddenly heard a deep shout break her out of her thoughts and she instinctively looked to the side. There, three Royal Guards stood with guns and scared expressions.
When the first team entered the room they had heard everything through the communicator, it was a massacre! Wails and the noise of flesh being torn apart
Their job and duty were to protect their Queen, but... They didn't dare come inside this room!
A bunch of cowards! The first thing they did was to call reinforcements!
Half an hour later, reinforcements came from the local police together with the secret service, it was so weird for anything to happen at Buckingham Palace that they weren't even appropriately ready to respond to the situation!
Upon hearing what happened from the remaining royal guards, what they received was a heavy scolding and the order to 'move their bloody arses' inside the room!
"Aunt!" The Queen just stood there with a glazed expression, as if in a trance, she saw the guards, and now her nephew was here together with another bunch of guards armed with way bigger guns, but she didn't really have an impression.
She didn't care, everything was so normal, so common.
Compared to what she had seen in his memories.
"Edward, what's is wrong?" She asked naturally.
"What do you mean what's wrong, aunt!? What happened here? Where are the guards!?" He covered his aunt's body that was still exposed with a nightgown, putting a blanket on her and looked to the side!
Where are the corpses? the flesh, the bones?! Because that's what he heard in that audio.
"Ah... The guards, they died... A bloodthirsty creature came and ate them completely, he didn't even leave a drop of blood." She said with a nonchalant expression, not even thinking about revealing Alucard's identity.
Not only would they think she was drunk if she told them that Count Dracula himself came into her room to ask her some questions, then transformed her into a vampire and left her there in bewilderment.
She'd be sent to the mental hospital that very night, eternally. Because she was now partially immortal, so it wasn't 'until death' anymore.
Yet she did it because her subconsciousness told her to not cause Alucard any trouble.
Edward's eyes shook at his aunt's current appearance, there was something wrong going on here.
Edward Rothschild was the current Baron Rothschild, a nobility title that allowed him to manage all the state and businesses belonging to the Rothschild family.
Catherine and Jane were owners of a big chunk of that family, together with the Montgomery family, Catherine's ancestry.
"Aunt, you're acting weird, what happened with your eyes? Why are they red?!" He asked only now noticing her blood-red eyes!
"Oh, it must be from so much crying, that creature was really scary." she said lightly as if the mass genocide that happened a few minutes ago was just a joke, she then sighed and recomposed herself in a way befitting a Queen, in a way she had never done before with her expression turning serious, "Edward, I want you to hide anything that happened today from the media, this beast didn't do anything to me. Just say it was an accident or something, you know what to do." Unbeknownst to her, a command just left her mouth, her behaviour now resembling a certain count.
Edward's eyes flickered in red, the commandment was received successfully and he nodded leaving the room not before giving the guards some orders.
'Isn't he going to ask more questions?' She thought in bewilderment but left the matter there.
The guards departed the room under Edwards' orders and she was scheduled to move to another room until hers was fixed from the onslaught it suffered today.
Throughout the whole night, even as she changed her nightgown to something better, a single thought marred her mind even as she prepared to sleep after such a hectic night.
Her daughter wasn't in her thoughts.
Yang Chen wasn't in her thoughts.
'Alucard, where are you...' that was her thought.
**
**
The moonlight shone above Alucard.
He wasn't much different from Catherine, much to his irritation, as he walked down the streets of London, St Paul Cathedral.
He couldn't take Catherine out of his mind, but there was also a prominent question that was living free of charge in his mind.
'What now?'
He had gone to the place and got the answers he sought.
Hellsing was no more, his past was gone and he found himself completely alone in a parallel universe. What now?
He also happened to create a Draculine by mistake, as that was not his intention at all, he only wanted some blood...
As he walked he also noticed something else, he felt weak... Very weak, to the point he could just lay somewhere and stop walking. His senses shrank even further, with his omnipresence covering barely three kilometres! Everything was blurry!
But much to the Count's disappointment, this weakness didn't affect his immortality. If he threw himself in front of a train, the meat patty produced by the aftermath would be just as alive or maybe even livelier than he was now.
This situation was truly a headache.
He walked past the cathedral, 'Some things never change' regardless of the dimension this cathedral was still here standing forth.
Why was there this cathedral? why was there a Buckingham Palace or even a whole United Kingdom in this parallel universe... but there wasn't a Hellsing Organisation? It was as if this parallel dimension had denied his existence.
He had seen it in Catherine's memories.
Wingates and Hellsing didn't exist in this version of England.
It didn't make sense.
*Sigh!* 'I need some good hundred years old wine'.
To top it off some kind of weird connection seemed to have created between that Queen and himself. He could hear all her thoughts and intentions as clear as water, he could see everything she did.
Even now she was thinking of him as she rested on her bed, asking him to come. Unable to sleep, because vampires don't sleep... Unless they're old enough.
This had never happened before, even with Seras, back then he could send her mental messages but not the other way around and much less with images and emotions, Catherine was different.
He kept walking for a while aimlessly, that was until he felt something calling him from a nearby place... His senses 'saw' something literally out of this world.
He opened his eyes widely as they turned red and walked slowly towards a particular store on the other side of the street.
An old museum. Due to it being midnight, it was closed. St Paul's Museum.
Alucard walked to the front as his body disappeared and reappeared inside.
He saw a message written on the door with a scary typing 'Haunted museum, thieves beware!'
He smirked and walked down the main path, his mouth leaving smoking breath indicating the obvious change of temperature within this place, unlike the cold but still bearable cold of London's spring.
He walked and walked through the store, not wanting to rush things due to his omnipresence but certainly not paying attention to the antiques that were probably worth more than hundreds of millions of pounds.
Cameras saw him pass by, motion sensors included likely, but as if he was merged with the darkness itself, they didn't activate.
At last, he was standing in front of a particularly unique crystal statue, the coldness in this place was originated by it, he could feel it.
'Looks like this place is really haunted haha' he laughed lightly upon seeing 'it'.
'A cursed object' was probably the judgement of the owners, but Alucard knew better.
The crystal statue was very tall -tall means TALL- silhouette with crystal winds and roots on the back that acted like some kind of dress.
The figure and shape indicated she was a female, her face unrecognisable.
Her whole figure was shrouded by white crystals, but what astounded Alucard was her stunning size, she towered over him by almost a metre.
His sharp fangs showed a genuine smile at the figure in front of him, there was a sense of familiarity for some reason as his gaze moved down to the 'sculpture' description.
Title of the Sculture: Lady D
Sculptor: Ethan Winters.
Description: "Little is known about the origins of this sculpture except that it was sold in an auction in Romania for the price of three hundred fifty thousand pounds two hundred years ago, by a person called Ethan Winters who claimed to be the sculptor.
He sold it to reach America with his growing daughter. The whole sculpture is made of Quartz and weighs a total of two-ton, it passed from hand to hand due to its haunted tendencies.
Owners proclaimed they could hear shouts at night together with the feeling of the chilling cold temperature despite it being summer and hot outside.
Eventually, the founder of this museum, Lawrence Sans, managed to attain ownership over it."
His senses didn't lie. This thing wasn't a sculpture, it was still alive, in a state like hibernation, but alive nonetheless.
His shadow morphed without a second thought and covered the whole 'sculpture' until it completely disappeared inside his shadow, together with the Vampire Count, leaving an empty spot in this famous museum and a few heart attacks the next day when the owner realised what happened here.
*RING!*
The moment the mechanism didn't feel the weight of the statue, it triggered the alarm. But it was already too late.
**
**
As the sun started to come out, indicating the impending dawn.
The Count didn't fear it as he sipped his wine atop 'The Shard', the tallest building in London despite it being still in construction.
'Let's see, what will turn out of you in the future.' He wondered with curled lips, interested in what kind of existence could create such a sipping cold despite the fact that she was still hibernating, or at least that's what he thought.
Ignoring whatever result might come out of the sculpture living in his shadow, he changed his mind and focused on something more important.
'Where should I go next? The Protestant knights are a thing of the past...' it didn't make sense to mumble the same thing over and over again.
That God sent him to that place in China called Zhonghai... Or could it be just a coincidence? Be it as it may, there was no point in making Europe his starting point... He was already tired of Europe.
Zhonghai it is.
Alucard started walking and within the next few minutes, due to his shortened omnipresence, he was back at Zhonghai, wondering how this place would give him the answers he sought to the questions he himself didn't know.
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