Prague.
The morning after.
Elena Ward stood in the nave of the deconsecrated church of St.
Lawrence-under-the-Hill with broken glass under her boots and tried to understand what she was looking at.
Every window was gone.
Not smashed inward, the way a bomb blast or a thrown brick would do it.
Blown out.
The colored glass lay in glittering drifts on the cobbles of the lane outside, red and blue and gold, as though something inside the church had breathed out once, very hard.
The plaster saints had fallen off their brackets along the north wall and lay in pieces on the floor.
The pews were overturned.
There was a dent the size of a car door in the stone of one pillar, and a long smear of something dark down it, and the smear had been there for six hours, and it was still wet.
And the blood.
She had seen a great many vampire kills.
She had seen the arch in Bermondsey and a nest in Antwerp and a farmhouse in the Peak District when she was nine years old.
She knew what a room looked like after vampires had fed in it.
Blood went everywhere, in a feeding.
Sprayed and spattered and pooled.
This was not like that.
The blood in this church had not been sprayed.
It had been drawn.
It lay across the stone floor of the nave in long, fine, curving lines, dozens of them, like the lines iron filings make around a magnet, all of them curving inward toward a single spot at the foot of the altar steps.
Toward a patch of floor about the size of a man, perfectly, eerily clean.
As if every drop of blood in the building had tried to crawl toward something standing there.
“Ward.” Tariq’s voice, from the vestry door.
He’d flown in with the rest of the team at dawn, when her call came through from Romania.
“You need to see the body.” There was only one.
A big man with a shaved head, in a long, beautifully cut dark coat, lying on his back in the side aisle.
His neck was broken.
He was very old, by the look of the ash already crusting at the edges of his skin: two hundred years, at least.
And he was white.
Not pale.
White, like paper, like candle wax.
Drained.
Elena crouched by him and looked at the two neat punctures in his throat for a long time.
“He fed on a vampire,” she said.
“A two-hundred-year-old vampire.
And then he did that.” She nodded at the floor, at the lines of blood curving toward the altar.
“Three days ago he was Veyr’s ghoul.” Nobody answered her.
The ghoul who ran the Black Rose was called Havel, and he would not talk.
They found him in his cellar at noon, sitting behind his bar with a bottle of plum brandy and an expression of total, weary resignation, as if he had been waiting for them.
The vampires had all fled the night before.
The red lamps were off.
Havel watched Elena come down the steps with her pistol drawn and didn’t move.
“You’re Hellsing,” he said, in German.
“Yes.” “I thought you’d come.” He poured himself another brandy.
Ghouls could still drink, a little.
“I’ve been here eighty years.
Nobody from Hellsing has ever come down those stairs.
Then he comes down them, and the next morning, here you are.” He drank.
“Funny, isn’t it.” “Where did he go?” Havel looked at her over the rim of the glass.
His sad, potato face was perfectly calm.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.
Shoot me if you like.
I’m old.
It’s fine.” Elena looked at him for a long moment, down the barrel of her pistol.
Protocol was clear.
A ghoul without a master was a ghoul who would find another, and serve it.
A ghoul who sheltered vampires was a ghoul who had already chosen a side.
There was no rehabilitation.
There was one procedure.
Nobody told me how to stop.
“Tell me one thing,” she said.
“Last night.
When he walked in.
What happened?” Havel was quiet for a while.
“They bowed,” he said at last.
“Every vampire in my cellar.
Thirty of them.
He came down the stairs and they all looked at the floor, like dogs.
They didn’t even know they were doing it.” He turned the glass slowly in his fingers.
“I’ve seen a lot of things, girl.
I saw Veyr.
I saw the Duchess.
I saw Sokolov’s people, once, in 1968, when the tanks came in.
I never saw anything like him.” He looked up at her.
“And I’ll tell you what else.
He brought two ghouls and a girl with him.
The girl died in that church.
I heard about it.
And he could have gone after the ones who did it.
He had them on the run.
He stayed with her instead.” He finished the brandy.
“I don’t know what he is,” Havel said.
“But I know what Veyr was.
And he’s not that.” Elena lowered the pistol.
She could feel Tariq watching her from the foot of the stairs.
She didn’t look at him.
She holstered her weapon, and turned, and went back up into the gray light of the lane, and behind her she heard Havel let out a long breath, like a man who has been holding it for eighty years.
She told herself it was tactics.
A cooperative asset was worth more alive.
She would put it in her report that way.
She did not put it in her report at all.
The Intelligence Division found the Land Rover by three that afternoon.
It was easy, in the end.
The Prague blackout had lasted nineteen minutes and covered most of both banks of the river, and the Czech authorities were blaming a cyberattack, which was correct.
But one traffic camera on the embankment road had been running on a backup battery, and it had caught a battered black Land Rover Defender coming down the ramp from the Charles Bridge square at 4:23 in the morning with its headlights blazing.
Hellsing’s analysts had pulled the plate.
False.
They had followed it through the city on the cameras as power came back.
It had gone to a bookshop in the Old Town.
It had left the bookshop at 6:40 a.m., headed south.
At 10:15 it had crossed the Austrian border at Mikulov.
“Vienna,” said Elena.
She found him on the third night.
It was luck, mostly.
Luck and thermals.
Vienna was a big city, and old, and full of the dead; the Foundation’s own files listed it as the single most densely populated vampire city in Europe, though nobody, not even the Intelligence Division, could say where they all went.
They had a dozen known nests in the old districts, and a hundred rumors, and a lot of blank space on the map.
Elena put her eight hunters on rooftops around the First District in pairs, with thermal scopes, and told them to look for cold.
A vampire, in a thermal scope, was a hole.
A black shape against the warm, faintly glowing city, the residue of a day’s heat in stone and tile and brick.
A vampire on a rooftop at night was the easiest thing in the world to see, if you were looking for it.
It was Jonah who saw him, from the roof of a bank on the Graben, at 1:40 in the morning.
“Got something,” he said, low, over the net.
“Stephansdom.
South side.
On the roof.” Elena swung her scope around.
The great cathedral of St.
Stephen rose out of the heart of the old city like a mountain, a vast mass of blackened Gothic stone with a spire four hundred and fifty feet tall.
Its roof was famous: a steep, enormous slope of glazed tiles, a quarter of a million of them, patterned in green and gold and black in long zigzags and the double-headed eagle of the old Habsburg empire.
In the thermal scope it glowed a dull warm gray.
And halfway up the south face of it, sitting with his knees drawn up and his arms around them on a slope so steep that no human being could have stayed there for a second without a rope, was a black shape.
Cold.
Utterly cold.
Colder than any vampire she had ever seen through a scope.
Not just cool, the way vampires usually were, a few degrees under the warmth of the stone.
Cold like ice.
Cold like the bottom of the sea.
He was alone.
And he was not moving.
He was just sitting there, on the roof of the cathedral, looking out over the city.
“Ward?” said Jonah.
“Orders?” Elena watched the black shape for a long time.
“Hold position,” she said.
“All of you.
I’m going up.” “Alone?
Ward, protocol says—” “I know what protocol says.” She was already moving, already sliding the scope into its case, already checking her weapons by touch.
Silver for the blood.
Fire for the flesh.
“If he runs, track him.
If you hear shooting, come.
If I don’t come down in twenty minutes, call Reed.” She switched off her mic before Jonah could argue.
She didn’t know why she was doing it.
That was the truth.
She would try to explain it to herself later, and fail.
Tactics, she would tell herself.
One hunter approaching was less likely to spook him than eight.
A chance to observe.
To assess.
To get close enough to use the serum rounds before he knew she was there.
All true.
And none of it was why.
She was doing it because she wanted to see his face.
Magnus heard her coming when she was still on the street.
He had been hearing everything, for the last three nights.
That was part of why he’d come up here.
The flat Adrian had found for them in Leopoldstadt, above a closed café, was warm and dry and safe, and Silas and Irina were asleep in it, and Noah had left a fridge full of blood bags, and Magnus could not stay inside it for one more hour.
He could hear the people in the flats on every side.
Their televisions.
Their arguments.
Their heartbeats.
A baby crying three floors down.
A couple making up after a fight.
An old man alone across the courtyard, coughing in the dark, coughing and coughing, his heart going ragged and uneven in a way that made Magnus want to go and knock on his door and also want to do something else entirely.
And Petra.
He could hear Petra, everywhere.
Not her heartbeat.
The silence where it should have been.
In the van that wasn’t there anymore.
In the empty space on the mattress beside him.
In the place in his chest, behind the second heart, where the thread had been, and was now just a severed end, whipping loose in the dark.
Adrian had gone down into the Hidden City on the first night, to petition the Warden for their entry.
Something unprecedented, he’d said, needed permission.
It might take a few days.
Stay inside.
Don’t go out.
Don’t be seen.
Magnus had lasted two nights.
On the third, he had climbed out of the window and up the drainpipe and over the roofs of Leopoldstadt and across the canal, stepping from shadow to shadow, until he reached the oldest, highest, darkest thing in the city, and climbed that too.
It was quiet up here.
That was the thing.
The city was down there, all of it, glittering and breathing and humming, but up here on the cathedral roof there was only the wind, and the stone, and the great black spire overhead like a finger pointing at the stars.
He could not hear any single heartbeat from up here.
Only all of them together.
A long, soft roar, like the sea.
He had been sitting there an hour when the woman came into the cathedral square below.
He noticed her at once, because she was the only person in the square walking with a purpose.
Everyone else at that hour was drunk or lost or going home.
She was small and quick and moved like Lyra moved, like someone who had been trained, and she went straight to the scaffolding on the north tower, where the stonemasons were working on a restoration, and started to climb.
She climbed well.
She climbed better than any human he had ever seen.
And as she came up the scaffolding, closer and closer, the wind shifted and brought him her smell.
Gun oil.
Kevlar.
Iron.
Old, consecrated silver, a hundred pieces of it, in bullets and blades, that made the back of his throat burn.
And underneath it, her blood.
Young and quick and strong.
Type B, his new senses told him, without his asking.
Rich.
Faintly salty, from the sweat of the climb.
A trace of strong sweet tea.
A woman’s blood.
A hunter’s blood.
He didn’t move.
He sat on the roof with his arms around his knees and watched her come.
She came over the ridge of the roof forty feet above him, and stopped.
For a long moment they just looked at each other, there in the wind, on the steep patterned slope of tiles, in the light of the city coming up from below.
She was crouched on the ridge with one hand on a stone finial and the other holding a pistol, aimed at the center of his chest.
She was younger than he’d expected, about his age.
Short dark hair blowing across her face.
A narrow, pale, serious face, all bones and shadows.
Dark eyes.
A small black iron cross on a chain at her throat, outside her body armor.
It glinted in the city light.
She was looking at him the way he imagined he was looking at her.
As if she had expected something else.
“Magnus Williams,” she said.
It was the first time anyone had said his full name out loud in five years.
He felt it go into him like a nail.
“Hellsing,” he said.
“My name is Elena Ward.
I’m with the Hunter Corps of the Hellsing Foundation.” Her voice was steady.
The pistol was steady.
“I’m here to bring you in.
If you come quietly, nobody gets hurt.
You’ll be taken to a secure facility in England.
You’ll be given medical care.
You’ll be treated well.” Magnus laughed.
He couldn’t help it.
It came out cracked and strange and the wind took it away.
“I’ve been to one of your secure facilities,” he said.
“They treated me very well.
They gave me a room with a view.” Something moved in her face.
It was there and gone.
“I’ve read your file,” she said.
“Then you know what they did.” “I know—” She stopped.
Her jaw tightened.
“I know what’s in it.
I know it was wrong.
If you come in, I’ll make sure—” “You’ll make sure what?” He stood up.
The roof was so steep that standing should have been impossible.
It wasn’t.
The pistol tracked him.
“You’ll make sure Mordane doesn’t cut me open again?
You’ll make sure they don’t dump me in a forest for the next Veyr?
Did you read Protocol 9, Elena Ward?
Did you read what happened to the twelve before me?” “Stay where you are.” “Did you read about Tobias Kane?” The pistol wavered.
Just slightly.
Just for a second.
Then it steadied again.
“Last warning,” said Elena.
“Get down on your knees and put your hands on your head.” Magnus looked at her for a long moment.
Then, slowly, deliberately, he shook his head.
“I’ve done enough kneeling,” he said.
She fired.
He had expected it.
He was already moving when the gun went off, stepping sideways into the long black shadow of the spire, and the bullet went through the place where he had been and shattered a tile.
He came out of the shadow on the ridge of the roof, behind her.
She was already turning.
She was so fast.
Faster than Ferrante’s enforcers, almost, for a human: she must have heard him, or felt him, or simply known, and she spun with the pistol up and fired again, and this round hit him high in the shoulder.
It was not silver.
It was something worse.
It went into him and burst, and something cold and burning spread out from it through his blood like dye through water, and everywhere it touched, his blood recoiled.
Curdled.
Went thick and sluggish and wrong.
He felt his arm go dead.
He felt the shadows close around him like a door slamming.
He staggered on the ridge and nearly fell, and caught himself on the stone finial, and stared at her.
“Hellsing Serum,” Elena said.
She was breathing hard.
“Disrupts supernatural blood.
Stops you healing.
Stops you shadow-walking.
In another minute, it’ll stop you moving.” She kept the pistol on him.
“I’m sorry.
Please.
Just come in.” The voice in his blood said: Kill her.
Not calmly.
Not patiently.
It said it the way it had said it in the armory, with the Quiet Ones’ teeth in him, cold and sharp and certain.
Kill her.
She is Hellsing.
She is Van Helsing’s child.
She will take you back to them, to the vault, to the knives.
Kill her.
Drink her.
Now.
And under the serum, under the dead arm and the curdling blood, something answered it.
Not the second heart.
Something deeper.
The thing Ferrante’s blood had woken.
He could feel her blood from here, every vein of it, the whole branching red tree of her.
He could feel how quick it was, and how frightened, though nothing in her face showed fear.
He could feel, very clearly, that if he reached out for it, it would come.
He reached for his own blood instead.
It was harder than anything he had ever done.
Harder than refusing Veyr.
He reached down inside himself into the place where the serum was spreading like frost, and he took hold of his own blood the way he had taken hold of Ferrante’s, and he pushed.
Out.
Through the wound in his shoulder.
A thin dark jet of it, burning, foul, full of the serum, spattering across the green and gold tiles of the cathedral roof and hissing where it fell.
Elena stared at him.
His arm came back.
Slowly.
The shadows opened again, a crack.
He straightened up on the ridge.
“That’s not possible,” she said.
“I keep hearing that.” She fired again.
He was already gone.
They fought across the roof of St.
Stephen’s Cathedral for six minutes.
He would remember it, later, as one of the strangest nights of his life.
Not because of the danger, though she nearly killed him three times.
Because of how good she was.
He had fought Veyr, who had been strong and cruel and lazy.
He had fought the Northerners, who had been soldiers.
He had fought Ferrante’s enforcers, who had been killers.
Elena Ward was something else.
She fought like a chess player.
She fought like someone who had spent her entire life preparing for exactly this, and nothing else.
She ran out of serum rounds and switched to silver without missing a step.
She threw a flare that lit the whole south face of the cathedral like noon and he had to dive behind the spire to escape it.
She came at him on the steep slope of the tiles with a short silver-inlaid blade that she handled as if it were part of her arm, and opened a cut along his ribs that burned like acid, and he got inside her guard and caught her wrist, and she drove a wooden stake at his chest with her other hand, and he caught that too.
And for a moment they were frozen there, on the edge of the roof, three hundred feet above the cathedral square, with her wrists in his hands and her back against the stone parapet and her face six inches from his.
He could smell her blood.
He could hear her heart.
She was breathing hard.
So was he.
She didn’t look afraid.
She looked furious.
And under the fury, something else.
Something that looked, he thought, very much like the expression he had seen in Havel’s eyes.
And in Silas’s.
And in his own, in the mirror of the bathroom of the safe flat, every night since Petra died.
She looked lost.
Drink, said the voice.
“No,” said Magnus.
He let go of her wrists.
She was so surprised that she didn’t move.
Neither did he.
They stood there on the edge of the roof, a foot apart, with the wind blowing between them and the city spread out glittering below.
“Why?” she said.
Her voice cracked on it.
He didn’t know how to answer.
He didn’t know himself.
Because she was Hellsing, and Hellsing had done what it did to him, and he hated them more than he had ever hated anything.
Because the voice in his blood wanted her dead, and he was learning, slowly, that whatever the voice wanted, he should probably do the opposite.
Because she had looked lost.
Because she had hesitated, for one second, when he said Tobias Kane’s name, and nobody from Hellsing had ever hesitated before.
Because Petra had told him not to kneel to anyone.
And he was beginning to understand that killing someone because a voice told you to was just another way of kneeling.
“Ask them about Protocol 9,” he said instead.
“Ask them where they drop the bodies.
Ask them about Annex C.
And then ask them what they were planning to do with me if it had worked.” He saw something flicker on the stone between them, glinting.
The black iron cross.
Her chain had broken in the fight.
It was lying on the lead flashing of the parapet, between their feet.
He bent down and picked it up.
It burned.
Of course it burned.
It was iron, and old, and it had been blessed by someone who meant it.
It burned his palm like a coal, and the smell of his own scorched skin rose between them.
He held it anyway.
He held it out to her, on his open, burning hand.
She stared at it.
Then at him.
Slowly, very slowly, as though she expected it to be a trick, she took it.
Her fingers brushed his palm.
They were warm.
He watched her eyes go to the burn on his hand.
He watched her watch it heal.
The blackened skin going pink, and smooth, and whole, in the time it took her to close her fist around the cross.
“I’m not going back,” Magnus said quietly.
“Tell them that.
Tell Mordane.
I’m never going back.” Then he stepped backward off the edge of the roof, into the long dark shadow of the cathedral, and was gone.
Elena stood on the parapet for a long time after he had gone.
She stood there until the wind dried the sweat on her face and the burning in her lungs went away.
She stood there until her hands stopped shaking.
She looked at the cross in her fist.
It was warm.
It was still warm from his hand, the hand it had burned.
She could see a tiny smear of something dark on the iron where his skin had been.
She did not wipe it off.
In her ear, when she switched the mic back on, Jonah was shouting.
“Ward!
Ward, report!
We saw the flare, we saw—are you all right?
Where is he?
Did you get him?” Elena looked down at the city.
At the square below, where the first early trams were starting to run.
At the long shadow of the spire, lying across the rooftops, pointing east.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Lost him.” She climbed down.
She went back to the safe house the Foundation had rented in the Ninth District, and sat on her bed with the cross in her hand, and did not sleep.
She filed her report in the morning.
It said that H-013 had been sighted on the roof of St.
Stephen’s Cathedral, engaged, and lost.
It noted the effects of the serum, and the subject’s apparent ability to purge it, which was not in any file.
It noted the subject’s speed, his strength, his apparent resistance to consecrated iron.
It did not say that he had let her go.
It did not say that he had asked her about Tobias Kane.
And it did not say that she had spent the rest of the night with the Foundation’s secure laptop open on her knees, searching the Archive Division’s database for a document called Protocol 9, and finding that her clearance, PRIORITY ZERO, the highest she had ever been granted, the highest anyone in the Hunter Corps had ever been granted, was not high enough to open it.