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Anna has never once had her heart broken in her entire life, which she considers to be one of the best of her accomplishments. Bones, however, she has broken many of. Most recently it was several broken ribs, suspected at first and confirmed later by Carl when he examined her, and a probable bruised spleen that could not be confirmed without a comprehensive autopsy as Carl cheerfully informed her. The weight of a full-grown werewolf landing on top of you like a sack of stones would do that to anybody, he reassured her. You were lucky not to die.
And yet there is something that pinches at her heart as she stands on the landing of the second storey, watching her brother skulk from one room to the other like he is a guest. A stranger, unwelcome, tentative in his conduct.
She thinks to call out to him, invite him up to the reading room to keep her company for the evening, but he is out of sight before she can. She slouches against the bannister, sighing.
Velkan may have shed the skin of the werewolf but its shadow remains. She has reason to believe it still has a grip on him somewhere deep down in his body, which must now feel alien to him. He lost the ears, the tail, the coarse mud-brown hair that burrs and brambles snare in, those bright, too-human amber eyes. His form shrank and his bones reformed themselves to the shape of a man. Here is her brother again, born anew into his flesh and as uncertain of himself as a newborn lamb.
“You look like you’re having deep thoughts. Those tend to get you in trouble, or did you forget?”
She turns to raise an eyebrow at Gabriel. He must have crept up behind her, silent as the grave. “Don’t tell me what I may or may not be doing.”
“Alright, alright.” He raises his hands in surrender, chuckling. “I’d offer you a lira for your thoughts but,” he pats the pockets of the black trench coat that is without equal, “I left all my money in Rome. And Carl was responsible for it, so…”
“He spent it all on weaponry?” Anna asks.
“Not all of it,” Gabriel says. “Mostly laboratory equipment, some artifacts of interest. He did get his hands on a nice roromaraugi, though. Worth it, in my book.”
She folds her arms. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“A type of club from the Solomon Islands,” he replies. “He’s always collecting things he’ll have no use for.”
Tipping her head, she glances at the faint flicker of light emanating from the great hall, where Velkan presumably retreated. This close to midnight, it’s almost guaranteed to avoid other people which would appear to be his primary goal these days. She thinks again of the gregarious brother from before. When they were children, he laughed at her when she stumbled and fell chasing him through the gardens in a vain attempt to keep pace. He laughed, helped her to her feet, brushed off her too-red dress, checked her stockings for tears, and then he took her hand.
He defended her when their father brokered a marriage arrangement for her in Moldavia. It was part of a peace treaty struck to placate one lesser aristocratic family warring with another over a border town, and Anna was the sacrificial lamb. Her intended was a man at least as old as her parents whom she had met once in passing: kind-faced but milky-eyed and age-spotted, well past his prime. He walked with a cane and a pronounced limp, and he wheezed each breath like it was his last. She was newly eighteen winters old, a woman grown in her father’s eyes.
Ripe.
She still remembers with clarity the nausea that befell her in the hours after it was announced at the dinner table over stuffed cabbage rolls and a platter of rich cheeses and smoked meats. Velkan’s mouth agape, fork halfway to his mouth. Her mother’s pitying gaze. More than that, her silence.
This is the way of the world, her honey brown eyes said. We have our place, and the world is made for men.
There is a lifetime of memories of the brother she knew before he was touched by Dracula, and he is no longer. The past is viscous like tar. She is mired in it.
Gabriel’s voice nudges her back to the present. “Those deep thoughts again.”
“He’s different now,” she admits.
Realization crosses Gabriel’s face like the dawning sun. “Your brother?”
“Yes.” Anna’s teeth worry into her bottom lip. “I don’t know what to say to him anymore.”
“Sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all.”
“How is that helpful?” she questions, quizzical. “Don’t speak in riddles.”
“It’s not a riddle,” he says, irritatingly patient. “It’s exactly what it sounds like. You can just be there for him. He may not want to talk about it.” He pauses and his eyes wander away for a moment. “I know I wouldn’t want to.”
Anna furrows her brows.
She has been focused on the solution of approaching him and engaging him in a conversation to leech the poison from him. The obvious solution. Gabriel’s is an absurdly simple idea, one she didn’t consider. She has been taken off guard by Gabriel’s understated insightfulness before.
Some say you're a murderer, Mr. Van Helsing, she had told him, convinced she knew the answer already: one man’s answer was the same as any other’s. Others say you're a holy man. Which is it?
It’s a bit of both, I think, he had said with that wry smile, and she was less convinced.
A smile creases her face now as it did then.
Velkan does not often dream anymore, but he does remember.
He remembers instinctively shoving Anna aside, firing off a shot, and colliding with the werewolf with force enough to knock the air from his lungs. The gun slipping from his hand. Anna, panicked, screaming his name as his own voice was consumed by the roaring wind. His body hurtling in a freefall, the impact with the churning river below, the numbing shock of the sub zero water.
After that, all he recalls is bits and pieces. Parts of conversations he overheard with that sharp lupine hearing. Dracula’s disfigured servant provoking him with an electric prod. Gabriel dodging his snapping jaws. The look on Anna’s face in the library when she recognised him for what he was: she was already in mourning for him. Another body on the Valerious family pyre.
“Small fire! I said small fire! That is not small!”
He pushes his furs aside and sits up to see what Carl is creating a fuss over. There is no sleeping with that cacophony.
It’s past sunrise. The ground is covered with frost to herald the coming winter, the first since Dracula was vanquished. He would rather be alone, holed up in his room back at the castle with the fireplace blazing but Anna insisted on a hunting trip, claiming the storerooms needed to be restocked with dried meats before the heavy snows fell and the woods became treacherous, the well-worn paths in the mountainside impassable.
The fire is substantial by Velkan’s standards. Over it stands Gabriel, tending to it as attentively as a mother would a colicky child. Periodically, he drops a poplar branch into it to feed the flames.
“Carl is right,” Velkan points out. “It’s not small.”
Gabriel shrugs a shoulder. “Unless you want to eat undercooked meat, this is the fire we need.”
Velkan will admit that he has a point. He consumed rotting flesh against his will, driven by the deep-seated hunger of the wolf. Then there had been the fresher kills, meat so raw the blood drained down his muzzle in rivulets. He swallows down the memory and says, “I prefer it overcooked.”
“Then leave the fire and the cooking to me, and not your sister.”
With that much, Velkan agrees: Anna’s cooking is abhorrent and he is not particularly selective when it comes to food.
He looks to Carl. “Let him do what he likes. It’s for our benefit, believe me.” Then, to Gabriel: “How long ago did Anna leave?”
Gabriel closes one eye in thought. “Maybe an hour.”
Still time enough to catch up with her, then. Velkan remains for a while longer, waiting for Gabriel and Carl to fall into another argument about the fire – this time about whether to put it out using water or dirt, with Carl arguing that water makes smoke billow, and Gabriel retorting that smoke doesn’t matter because they aren’t being hunted by Dracula’s creatures anymore, and Velkan turns his face aside at the guilt flitting over Gabriel’s face after the words slip out. He wonders if Gabriel thinks of himself as one of those creatures, too.
They lapse back into bickering, and he takes the chance to slip away after his sister. He follows the imprints of her boots in the light dusting of snow that fell earlier in the night. After half an hour, he hasn’t caught up to her, though he does infer from the erratic looping tracks she leaves that she was on the trail of a rabbit that she must have caught, based on the smattering of blood at the base of a tree.
He leans over to examine it. At a cough behind him, he turns abruptly, then relaxes. “Didn’t the Vatican instill in you the sense not to sneak up on people, especially people who carry weapons?” He sheathes the knife he had reflexively reached for, sighing. His nerves are frayed.
Gabriel chuckles. “There was a lot of sneaking involved in my particular line of work.”
“You followed me?”
“I suppose.”
Velkan considers him for a moment. “Why? Do you think I’m incapable of being alone? Keeping an eye on me?”
Gabriel is undeterred by the torrent of questions. He replies, “You know that I’m not.”
Velkan persists: “Then why?”
“Tell me the question you’re really asking.”
Anna did warn him about the man’s ability to see through you, to pierce the veil. The courage of the wolf is nowhere to be found now that he is in the crosshairs of such a question. For the first time, Velkan misses that kind of power. It is the only thing he could find value in now.
“Why did you use the antidote on me? I was a lost cause. I should be dead.”
He can scarcely believe that he says the words aloud. There is something comforting in the steadfast Gabriel that lends itself to an iota of the courage he does not deserve.
“I used to think I was being punished,” Gabriel says, drawing closer. He skirts the question like a deer that knows the shape of a snare and the certain death it signifies. “The cardinal liked to remind me often that my memory was probably taken from me as penance for something I did in my past life. Of course, he never speculated as to what that my transgressions might be.”
Velkan pulls his furs tighter around his neck. In the bleak, muted backdrop of the forest, Gabriel blends in, camouflaged by their surroundings. He remembers the tales that reached their village of the man, somewhere between a myth and a legend. A hunter, blessed and favored by God, unrivaled in skill and combat. Notorious across the world for his slaying of monsters and his unorthodox methods, which were sanctioned unquestioningly by Rome. Travelers gossiped with the owners of market stalls and patrons at inns, and they regaled the children playing in the streets who paused to listen, enthralled by the deeds of the great Van Helsing. Minstrels plied their trade in the chateaus of aristocrats and the wealthy, stoking the flames of Van Helsing’s reputation.
“You don’t know what you did?” he questions.
“Ironic, isn’t it? Hard to repent when I don’t know what I should be repenting for. The cardinal disagreed.”
Velkan asks, “How?”
"Hell found me, in the end,” Gabriel answers. “As it did you, I suppose.” He looks down, drags a boot through the snow. “It shouldn't have been too difficult; I'd been sending out invitations for years."
Despite himself, Velkan laughs. Gabriel looks taken aback by it, too, then recovers with a grin.
“That’s amusing, is it?”
Shaking his head, Velkan raises his eyes to the tree canopy. “No. What’s amusing is that you felt the need to follow me.” Then he locks gazes with Gabriel, a hint of reproach in his tone. “You don’t trust me.”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I thought you might enjoy some quiet–” Gabriel pauses, grins at the irony– “company. Your sister and Carl, they can be so loud.”
Velkan eyes him. “And that’s all?”
“Well, and another thing.”
“And that would be?”
Gabriel places two fingers in his mouth to whistle. A few moments later, his horse – a tall bay destrier caparisoned in the colors of the church, yellow and white – canters through the dense forest. It breaks to a trot, halting at Gabriel’s side. He places a foot in the stirrup and hauls himself into the saddle with ease. Sitting astride the horse, he looks the part of a warrior from a time long ago. He reaches a hand down to Velkan.
“You need to give yourself grace,” he says. “Take it from me.”
Taken off-guard, Velkan stares at the hand in uncertainty. It feels like an unspoken offering, an opportunity.
“Are you coming?” Gabriel asks with a grin, wiggling his gloved fingers. “Let’s find your sister before she decides to take on a bear by herself.”
With a sigh, Velkan clasps the proffered hand. Doubling up on horseback is an exercise in trust if nothing else and for his second chance at life, he needs to begin somewhere.