Virgin Sacrifice - Van Helsing Fanfiction

4 - The Vampire Wives

Divine interposition. Those had been the words uttered to Gabriel van Helsin with cadences of remorse, anger and fealty near a thousand times, but it still got him no closer to understanding why it had happened. It had been an act of God that his memories had been taken away, the knowledge of his past life made privy to no one other than ethereal influences. There was not a single memory at which he could grasp without an inky refrain that made his temples throb rebukingly.  

It was troubling for him to consider and it drove him to many a sleepless night when he would lie awake, his room darkened by the gossamer curtains of a moonless sky, and ponder the details of his previous life. He found that the memories most precious were the ones that ached the greatest as he agonised over the blank faces of parents unknown and unremembered. Would they still be alive today, or were they dust and ashes? In the temple of his mind, he had only calmed his feverish thoughts with the fanciful imaginings of a woman - a delicate, whimsical thing that he would call Wife - whom oftentimes would provide comfort and shelter from the rest of his tempestuous thoughts. For where the fond memories left nought but gorges of blackness, there were macabre scraps of true, bloody reality of soldier attacking soldier, the cacophonous meeting of sabre and sword as men fell by the thousand. Pain and agony to which he had bared witness, the cries of the wounded and the screams of those being ripped apart by merciless pieces of metal - battles past that had taken place centuries before, but battles, indeed, that he had seen with his very eyes. 

That same buzzing, pulsating sense was writhing within his skin now, almost as if he could reach out with his mind and catch the trace of the vampires that he was hunting. The hunter could feel their presence so eerily close that it followed him like a phantom's breath on the back of his neck, but nowhere were the immortal fiends. He regretted his foolish whim to protect the scholar, allowing his thoughts to be dominated by the thoughts of Marseille's safety had potentially cost him the lives of all those who lived in the village - villagers that would bear the wounds of Dracula's retribution. 

A haunting aura of death lingered breathlessly in the air with the distant smell of carrion. Van Helsing's skin crawled. Forcing his restless feet to be still, he exhausted each train of thought: the vampires couldn't have been vaporized by the sun (there had been no shrieks of agony) and they could not have left the village so fleetingly. Most of the villagers had fortified their homes, so the Dark Ones could not have entered the domiciles. 

Marseille seemed to have shared his same thought as she stole silently out from behind him, her footfalls soft whispers of suspicion muffled across the snowfall. By the tension in her shoulders and the guarded shift of her body as she navigated the frozen plane, van Helsing could tell she was apprehensive. The woman became only more agitated as she revolved in a circle around the opening to the old well, her eyes set in a squint as she peered tentatively at its lip as if it was the mouth of Hell itself. The woman paused - a few breaths rattled from her lips - before she started creeping forwards.

"Marseille," Van Helsing warned in a harsh whisper. 

The woman paused again, snapping her head back in irritation as she gestured for him to hurry up. This did not last long as the woman then began pacing again, her footsteps more assured. Van Helsing sputtered a curse and followed after her. 

Anna Valerious had also started a slow approach. Arming herself with a scythe, badly eaten away with rust, the woman's every step was graceful yet powerful. There was a bronze expression on her face which seemed similar to the statues of Diana, the virgin Goddess of the Hunt. Marseille, however, did not seem to realise the danger she was in and regarded everything with a sense of analytical coldness - as she so often did, she had forgotten that vampires weren't just a subject matter...they were a death sentence.