Elena Ward learned about the operation in Mariahilf the way everyone else in Vienna did: from the news.
GAS EXPLOSION IN SEVENTH DISTRICT, said the headline on the screen in the window of a tabacco shop on the Mariahilfer Strasse, at eight in the morning, when she was walking back to the safe house from a dawn sweep of the canal.
ONE DEAD, SEVERAL INJURED.
RESIDENTS REPORT “BLINDING LIGHT.” She stopped and read it twice.
Then she took out her phone and called Jonah, who was on comms duty, and said, “Where were we at five this morning?” “Canal sweep,” said Jonah.
“Like you said.
Why?” “All of us?” “All eight.
Ward, what’s going on?” She looked at the screen.
At the shaky phone footage someone had filmed from a window: a narrow street, smoke, wreckage, an overturned delivery van, four huge shattered lamps on the cobbles.
Men in black moving through the smoke, loading something into an unmarked van.
Men in armor.
With a patch on the shoulder that the phone camera was too blurred to read.
She didn’t need to read it.
She knew it.
“Containment,” she said.
The Containment Division of the Hellsing Foundation had a safe house of its own in Vienna.
Elena hadn’t known that.
Nobody had told her.
She found it by following one of their vans, that afternoon, from the city morgue in the Ninth District where the “gas explosion” victim had been taken, to a warehouse on the edge of the Danube Canal, behind a wire fence, with a sign outside that said it belonged to a medical logistics company.
She walked through the gate as though she owned it.
She had found that this usually worked.
Inside, the warehouse was full of equipment.
Crates of it.
Ultraviolet floodlight rigs, four of them still in their cases.
Net launchers.
Serum rifles, a different model from the Hunter Corps’, heavier, with longer barrels.
A row of armored suits on hooks, with the shield-and-chain patch on every shoulder.
And at the back, at a folding table, with a laptop open in front of him and a cup of coffee, a man in shirtsleeves who looked up as she came in and didn’t seem very surprised.
He was fortyish, compact, with a shaved head and a neat beard and a calm, square, forgettable face.
There was a burn on one side of his neck, fresh, dressed with gauze.
“Ward,” he said.
“Hunter Corps.
I wondered when you’d turn up.” He didn’t get up.
“Dreyer.
Containment.
Have a seat.” “You ran an operation in my city,” said Elena.
“Against my target.
Without telling me.” “Your city.” Dreyer smiled slightly.
“Your target.
That’s very Hunter Corps of you.” He took a sip of his coffee.
“It was Dr.
Mordane’s operation.
Authorized by Dr.
Mordane.
Containment works for the Dracula Research Division on recovery matters.
The Hunter Corps works for the Director.
Different chains of command.” He shrugged.
“Mordane wanted him alive.
He didn’t trust you to bring him in alive.
So he sent us.” “Why wouldn’t he trust me?” Dreyer looked at her for a moment over the rim of his cup.
Something in his calm, square face shifted, very slightly.
“You had him on a roof, I hear,” he said.
“On the cathedral.
Three weeks ago.
Alone, which is against protocol.
Six minutes, which is a long time.
And then you lost him.” He put the cup down.
“Mordane reads the reports very carefully, Ward.
All of them.
And he notices what isn’t in them.” Elena felt the cold come up through her feet.
“What happened this morning?” she said.
“We had a resonance spike two weeks ago.
A big one.
Mordane’s people triangulated it to central Vienna.
We set up on the surface exits we know about and waited.” Dreyer turned his laptop round to face her.
“He came up last night.
With a fledgling.
Went to a football match, if you can believe it.
We took them at dawn.” On the screen, there was footage.
Helmet-camera footage, grainy, in the white blaze of ultraviolet.
Elena watched it without moving.
She watched the trap close.
She watched the floodlights come on.
She watched two figures in the middle of the street, in the light, burning.
One of them screaming.
The other on his knees, smoking.
She watched the one on his knees, the fledgling, a boy with red hair and a green-and-white scarf, crawl across the cobbles while he burned, and grab a Containment soldier’s ankle, and pull him down.
And she watched Magnus Williams run into the middle of the light.
Into the worst of it.
Where it was brightest.
Where his skin was blistering and splitting and smoking, all of it, all at once, so that in the grainy footage he looked like a man made of fire.
She watched him get his arms around the burning boy, and lift him, and stand there, in the light, with nowhere to go, looking for a shadow that wasn’t there.
She watched the serum rounds hit him in the back.
One.
Two.
Three.
She watched him not fall.
And then the footage went white, and then black, and the sound cut out in a shriek of static.
“That’s when the lights went,” said Dreyer.
His hand went, unconsciously, to the burn on his neck.
“All four rigs at once.
I don’t know how.
Something happened to us.
All of us.
On the rooftops.
Like being pulled.
Like the blood in your veins was trying to get out of you and go to him.” He was quiet for a moment.
“Corporal Ames was on the roof of the bakery, on the edge.
He went over.
Four stories.
Broke his neck.” The gas explosion victim.
One dead.
“And the fledgling?” said Elena.
“Ash.
Sun got him.
We didn’t recover anything.” Dreyer shrugged.
“He’s not on the record.
Containment doesn’t log strays.” Elena looked at the dark laptop screen.
“He could have killed you,” she said.
“After.
All of you.
You were down.
He had you.” “Yes,” said Dreyer.
“Why didn’t he?” Dreyer didn’t answer for a long time.
He picked up his coffee again and looked into it.
“I’ve been in Containment eleven years,” he said finally.
“I’ve brought in forty-two vampires for the lab.
Forty-two.
And I’ve never once seen one of them stop.
Not once.
You hurt them, they hurt you back.
You kill one of theirs, they kill as many of yours as they can before you put them down.
That’s how it is.
That’s how it’s always been.” He took a long breath.
“He stood there in the street, with three rounds of serum in him and his friend’s ashes on his hands, and he looked at us.
At me.
I was lying on my back on the cobbles.
I couldn’t move.
And he looked at me for, I don’t know, ten seconds.
And then he just…
stepped back.
Into the shadow under the van.
And went.” He drank the coffee.
“I’m not putting that in my report either,” he said.
“So I suppose that makes two of us.” The file came through that night.
She had stopped expecting it.
Three requests, two denials, and a third that had sat in Pending Director Review for nine days without a word.
She had assumed it would sit there forever.
That was how the Foundation said no, when it didn’t want to say no out loud: it simply waited until you stopped asking.
And then, at eleven o’clock, on the night after Mariahilf, her secure laptop chimed.
Request approved.
H-SERIES MORTALITY RECORDS, SUBJECTS 001–012.
Clearance granted by: HARKER, J.
Director.
There was a note attached.
A single line.
In the Director’s own words, unsigned.
You asked.
You should know what you’re carrying.
She opened the file.
She read it all.
It took her until four in the morning.
She sat on the narrow bed in her room in the safe house in the Ninth District, with the laptop on her knees and the lamp off and the iron cross in her fist, and read every page.
Every photograph.
Every surgical note.
Every autopsy.
H-001 had been a twenty-four-year-old man from Sunderland who had been made redundant from a call center.
He had wanted to put down a deposit on a flat for himself and his girlfriend.
He died on day three, screaming, his blood breaking down in his veins like sugar in hot water.
The autopsy noted extensive hemolysis and catastrophic organ failure.
Under Next of kin notification, it said: Withheld per DRD Policy 4.
H-002 had been thirty-one, a former soldier like Tobias Kane.
Gulf veteran.
Living in a hostel in Hull.
Died on day nine, of a heart attack, at thirty-one.
Withheld per DRD Policy 4.
H-004 had been twenty-two.
A woman.
From Glasgow.
She had kept a diary during her time at Site Seven, in a little spiral-bound notebook, and the Foundation had scanned it and attached it to her autopsy, because it was, Mordane’s note said, of interest for its documentation of psychiatric deterioration.
Elena read it.
The first entries were about the view.
Mountains!
Real ones!
I’ve never seen anything like it.
About the food.
About missing her mum, who she didn’t speak to, and her little brother, who she did, sometimes, by text, when she had credit.
About the other subjects, the ones who were still alive then, and the games of cards they played in the lounge.
And then, slowly, over the weeks, the entries changed.
The handwriting got bigger, and wilder, and pressed harder into the page.
Can hear them.
Their hearts.
All the time.
Can’t sleep.
Hungry.
Not for food.
I looked at the nurse today and I wanted to— The rest of that line was scribbled out, so hard the pen had gone through the paper.
The last entry was on day forty.
It said, in huge letters that took up the whole page: PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.
PLEASE.
I’LL DO ANYTHING.
PLEASE.
The autopsy said she had been terminated on day forty-one.
Hellsing Serum, two rounds.
Withheld per DRD Policy 4.
Elena put the laptop down, very carefully, on the bed beside her.
She got up and went to the bathroom and was sick.
Then she washed her face and came back and picked the laptop up again and kept reading, because she had asked, and she should know what she was carrying.
And at the end, she came to H-012.
Kane, Tobias.
Male, 29.
Cardiff.
Former Royal Welch Fusiliers, two tours Afghanistan.
History of substance dependency (opioids), in recovery.
Recruited concurrent with H-013.
There was a photograph.
A big man, with a shaved head and a broken nose, grinning at the camera with an expression of such open, ridiculous, irrepressible hope that Elena had to look away from it for a moment before she could look back.
Deceased Day 19.
Cause: acute vampiric rejection syndrome; hematophagic aggression.
Terminated (Hellsing Serum, 3 rounds).
And under it: Next of kin: one daughter, Lily Kane, age 6 (at time of recruitment), Swansea.
Subject repeatedly requested that daughter be informed of his participation and welfare.
Notification withheld per DRD Policy 4.
Personal effects (1 photograph, child) destroyed with remains.
Elena sat on the narrow bed in the dark, with the iron cross biting into her palm, and read that line over and over.
Did you read about Tobias Kane?
She had read about Tobias Kane.
She called Marcus at five in the morning.
It was four in England.
He answered on the second ring.
He always did.
“Elena.” “Did you know?” she said.
There was a long silence on the line.
“Know what?” “Policy 4.
Next of kin withheld.
The twelve.
Protocol 9.” Her voice was very steady.
She was proud of how steady it was.
“There was a man called Tobias Kane.
He had a little girl in Swansea.
He asked them to tell her where he was.
Over and over.
They didn’t.
They burned her photograph with his body.
Did you know?” The silence went on for a long time.
“Not all of it,” Marcus said at last.
His voice was very tired.
“Not the details.
Not about the girl.” A pause.
“I knew about Protocol 9.
I knew in 2021.
I stood in the Director’s office and told him it was an obscenity.
I told him that one day we’d drop something in those mountains that the vampires wouldn’t eat.
I was overruled.” “And you did nothing.” “I did my job.” There was an edge in his voice now.
“I did what I’ve always done.
I protected people.
I put down the things that kill them.
I trained you to do the same.
That’s what we do, Elena.
We don’t get to choose what the lab does.
We don’t get to choose what the Director signs.
We get to choose whether the thing that comes through the door at three in the morning gets to your parents’ bedroom or not.” Elena flinched as though he’d slapped her.
On the other end of the line, she heard him take a breath.
Heard him let it out.
“I’m sorry,” he said, much more quietly.
“That was unfair.” “No,” she said.
“It was true.
That’s what makes it so—” She stopped.
Pressed her hand over her eyes.
“Marcus.
I watched the Containment footage from Mariahilf.
He ran into the light.
Into the worst of it.
For a fledgling.
For a boy in a football scarf.
And afterward he had them all down in the street, every one of them, and he looked at them, and he walked away.” “I know.
I’ve seen it.” “I had him on the roof of the cathedral.
I had a stake in my hand.
He had my wrists.
He could have killed me.
He let go.” Her voice cracked, finally.
“He asked me about Tobias Kane.
He asked me if I’d read about Protocol 9.
And I hadn’t.
And now I have.
And I don’t—” She couldn’t finish.
Marcus didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Elena,” he said at last.
“Listen to me.
I need you to stop asking questions.” She went very still.
“Not because the answers aren’t true,” he went on.
His voice was low and careful and urgent, the way it had been in the root cellar, the first time, when he sat down across from her among the apples.
“Because they are.
And because the people who wrote those answers are watching.
Mordane’s watching.
He’s read your reports.
He’s seen what you didn’t put in them.
He sent Containment because he doesn’t trust you anymore.
Do you understand what I’m telling you?
You’re asking questions about the most classified program this Foundation has ever run, and you’re asking them out loud, on the Archive database, where anyone can see.” A pause.
“Some doors, once you open them, you can’t close again.
And some of the people behind them don’t like having them opened.” “So I should just stop.” “You should be careful.
There’s a difference.” He was quiet for a moment.
“Do the job.
Bring him in.
Alive.
Bring him to me, not to Containment, not to Mordane.
Bring him in under Hunter Corps authority and I’ll stand between him and that lab with my own body if I have to.
And then we fix the rest.
From inside.
Slowly.
The way things get fixed.” Another pause.
“I can’t protect you if you burn the house down, Elena.
And I can’t protect him either.” She sat on the bed in the dark and held the phone against her ear and didn’t say anything.
“Elena?” “I hear you,” she said.
It was what she had said in the Director’s office, on the first night, when they gave her the file.
She heard it, as she said it.
She thought Marcus heard it too.
Mac found her on the roof of the safe house at dawn.
She didn’t hear him come up.
Nobody ever heard Mac come up.
He was simply there, all at once, beside her at the parapet, a big silent shape in a black jacket, looking out over the rooftops of the Ninth District toward the distant black spire of the cathedral.
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
Elena didn’t either.
Then Mac said, in his low, rough voice, so rarely used that it always sounded slightly rusty: “The boy.
In the arch.
In Bermondsey.” Elena looked at him.
“You hesitated,” said Mac.
“I saw.” “I know.
You told Marcus.” “Yeah.” Mac nodded slowly.
“I hesitated too.
Once.
Twenty-one years ago.
Lyon.
A girl.
Seventeen.
She’d been turned three nights before.
Hadn’t fed yet.
Hadn’t done anything.
She was just sitting there, in a squat, crying.
Asking for her mum.” He looked at the cathedral spire.
“I hesitated.
Then I did it.
Like we’re taught.” He was quiet for a long moment.
“Never stopped thinking about it,” he said.
“Not one day.
Twenty-one years.” He didn’t say anything else.
He didn’t need to.
He put one big hand on her shoulder, briefly, the way Marcus did.
Then he turned and went back down the stairs as quietly as he had come up.
Elena stood alone on the roof and watched the sun come up over Vienna.
She thought about a white room, and twelve white walls, and twelve numbers on twelve placards.
She thought about a diary from Glasgow.
PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.
She thought about a man in a football scarf burning in the street, crawling across the cobbles to save someone else.
And a man made of fire running into the light to carry him out.
She thought about the roof of the cathedral, and a hand held out to her, burning, with her mother’s cross on it.
She took out her phone.
She opened a new note.
She sat for a long moment with her thumb over the keyboard.
Then she typed two words, and a place.
Lily Kane.
Swansea.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she saved it, and put the phone away, and went back down to the safe house to sleep for two hours before the next sweep.
She did not know yet what she was going to do.
She did not know whose side she was on, or whether there were sides anymore, or whether there had ever been.
She knew only one thing, with a clarity that frightened her more than anything she had seen in eight years of hunting.
Someone ought to tell that little girl where her father went.
And if no one else in the Hellsing Foundation was ever going to do it, then she would.