I don’t own Vampire Hunter D, except for the Bloodlust DVD and the novels 1-11. If I actually did have D, he would be doing my chores and looking awesome while he did them.

Title: Following His Footsteps

Rating: T, for teen.

Summary: Traveling with the dhampir who may (or may not) be his brother, Dualarc learns that with D actions are louder than words.

I reared back and the man’s fingers just barely grazed my chin. His nails were sharp enough to draw blood when they touched me.

I scrambled back and almost fell over. One step later and I did fall over when the backs of my knees collided with Ari’s bed. I fell over her, my upper back hitting the floor and my legs sticking into the air. Maribel was screaming next to me.

‘Why don’t you throw a damned chair at him?!’

I could hear the man getting up, cloth sheets ruffling and bare feet slapping against the floor. There were other, similar sounds from all around. Beneath my legs and the sheet, I could feel Ari’s fingers moving. There was a surge of warmth as their body heat rose a few degrees and filled the room with the smell of fast moving human blood. The comatose victims were all coming back to life and, if the farmer-type was any estimate of the others, they weren’t in a good mood.

I twisted violently, trying with frantic haste to get my feet back under me where they belonged in a fight. Maribel was still unhelpfully screaming. I got back up just as the farmer reached the other side of Ari’s bed and lunged at Maribel. She ducked out of the way right as I swung my left fist and, as carefully as I could, gave the vampire victim a punch to the forehead. I didn’t want to kill him if I could help it, but there wasn’t much else I could do in the situation if that first hit failed to do the trick. There were others coming from all corners of the room, Ari was right beneath me and I couldn’t be gentle if I wanted to get out alive. Maribel wasn’t helping matters. I couldn’t see a weapon on her, so unless she had martial arts training like I did she was just going to be in the way.

Against my fears, the man did crumple after my love tap. That was the first time I’d ever used my vampire strength against a human being. It was easier than I thought it would be. Then again, he was trying to rip out my throat at the time. That probably eliminated a lot of the guilt.

The farmer was down, but I still had five other glass-eyed people coming at me. They were stumbling, but they were still moving pretty fast for coma victims. Maribel was running for the ward door, which I was suddenly wishing I had left open. The thing had to weigh at least a ton and even with the hydraulic system to help push it, it still was a pain to move.

“Get the fuckin’ door open!” I screamed.

“I’m trying!” Maribel yelled.

She was hurriedly attacking the controls for the door, a position that left her back to the rest of the room. The patient nearest to her ignored me and started stumbling towards Maribel. That was the last I saw before a young man with green eyes and a heavy, middle-aged woman invaded my personal space rather violently. Ari attacking my legs from her bed did not help matters. I had been trying to get to the aisle in the middle of the room, but she had grabbed my jacket before I got very far and I hadn’t been able to get her hand loose before the other two got near me.

A person who is enthralled to a vampire isn’t exactly limited to human capabilities. Even from a single bite, if the person goes under the sway of the spell they gain some of their master’s powers. I don’t mean turning into fog or commanding wolves. I mean resistance to pain; as in, I broke the green-eyed teenager’s wrist when he grabbed me and the bastard still didn’t let go. Problem, much? Yeah. Fending the older woman away from my throat with one hand and trying my best to haul myself out of Ari’s grip didn’t leave me with a lot of options. Thankfully, this guy wasn’t too smart. When I stopped pushing at his chest with my other hand and he swooped in with his dull teeth snapping for my face, I cold cocked him and he went down. I felt something give when I hit him. It occurred to me, very distantly, like it was happening to someone else, that I might have just cracked his skull and killed him.

Of course, that was when Maribel screamed again.

I had smelled her fear before. Now it was spiking sharply alongside her heart rate, which had already been racing. The room flooded with the mouth-tightening, sour smell of terror. Forgetting gentleness, I shoved my palm as hard as I could against the older woman’s chest and turned around to face Maribel even as the corner of my right eye saw the woman go flying across the entire isolation ward to smack against the wall. Ari’s grip on my jacket tightened and she pulled at me, the fabric tightening across my shoulders.

That, naturally, was nothing next to the sight of Maribel hysterically trying to slide between the six inch gap that had opened between the ward door and the wall, while the fifth patient steadily dragged her back by her blouse.

For the record, I didn’t like her. She threw a chair at me. Seriously though, if you saw someone about to be hurt, what would you have done in my place? I jumped, Ari’s fingers ripping loose from my jacket. From behind me came the frustrated howl of the sixth and final patient who had been slowest to come after me. My jump carried me clear across the three beds between me and the door. I landed hard, not expecting such a response from my legs, but even then I still used my momentum to my advantage and slammed a shoulder into the man holding Maribel. He was shoved into the wall and I felt more than heard the air come exploding out of his mouth. His grip on Maribel’s blouse hadn’t let up, even then.

I could hear movement from behind me - Ari and the last victim. There wasn’t time to be gentle, as I’ve said before, and I wanted out of the damned isolation ward. Maribel’s screaming was really getting painful on my ears, too. The enthralled man wouldn’t let go in time, I already knew it, and so I didn’t try to make him. Instead, I grabbed Maribel’s blouse sleeve above his own grip and ripped it down, tearing off the whole arm covering. The door’s hydraulic pressure system had finally opened it enough for Maribel to fall through and the moment I got her out of the man’s grasp that was exactly what she did. Tossing him aside, I slipped out with her and slammed my hand down on the close button on the other side.

The heavy door groaned at the sudden change of command and slowly, far too slowly, began swinging shut. It wasn’t going to make it in time. With four inches to go, a pale hand with too-long nails thrust through the opening and began clawing at the air. A practically bloodless face glared at me from behind the door. Ari.

I had a very clear premonition of the sheriff coming back to the hospital and finding out that his daughter had lost an arm.

At three inches to go (and with Maribel realizing that her cousin wasn’t going to pull away. “Ari, your arm! Stop!”) I stepped in close, grabbed Ari’s upper arm when it passed near me and shoved her back into the room. I heard her hit the floor and snarl before the door finally swung shut. The sound of the sixth victim scrabbling at the door remained until the heavy barrier closed. Then it was finally done, we were out and Maribel was locking the door via the control console next to me.

There was blessed silence.

The air in the hallway was almost cold where it touched me. My body’s heat had risen from exertion. I was panting. Turning away from the door, I began to ask Maribel if she was all right and my world dropped out from under me.

Suddenly, all of my enhanced senses could focus on nothing but her. I was hyper aware of Maribel’s beating heart, her body heat and her scent. The smell of her hot, racing blood was nearly enough to undo me and it was only at that point that I realized, to my gut-chilling horror, that my panting tongue could feel sharp points when it slid over my teeth. That disgusting realization was enough to make me stagger away from her and into the wall behind me.

That made Maribel turn away from the console and towards me. I didn’t look her in the eye; I didn’t even try to peek down her blouse when she came close to me, bending down low. Her chest held no appeal for me; it was all in her scent, in her breath, in her heat. I had thought I knew what a vampire’s urges were. They had come to me sometimes, as they had during the last few days before we reached that town. It was always a faint inclination, almost wistfulness, like having the aroma of a roasting steak drift past your nose. Tempting, sure, but nothing I couldn’t ignore with some effort.

Now I knew different and God, it was terrifying. This wasn’t a roasting steak three rooms away from a hungry boy; this was a five course, gourmet meal laid out in front of a starving man. This was water in the desert for a throat that had, somehow, become so parched I was feeling cracks in it. This was a drug that had my hands shaking to reach out and take it. There was nothing carnal about it. Maybe it would have been easier if it had sexual, because I’d been dealing with that since I was twelve, but this was different. There was older than sex, simpler than sex. What was desire compared to hunger?

“Dualarc, you’re bleeding,” Maribel said and reached for my face.

I knew then what was going to happen. I was going to bite her and feed on her. I was going to throw her body back into the isolation ward and blame it on the sucklings. I was going to walk out of the hospital bloated like a leech on this human girl’s blood. I knew it.

Her fingertips, so warm, brushed my jaw.

Time stopped.

I could see every pore on her face, every lash on her eyes. I could smell every inch of her, overpowering all the other scents in the hospital corridor. I could hear her heartbeat. Her living heartbeat.

In that single second, I was a vampire.

“Dualarc?”

I don’t know how I managed to look at her eyes and actually see them. I still don’t, not even to this day. I hope that it was my human half. I don’t know what else what would have made me remember my mother, bleeding from the neck on the floor of our defiled home.

“Go get help,” I whispered. Shaking, my hand clumsily knocked her fingers away.

“Go get help, now.”

For her sake and for my own.

The blond deputy from the gate was the one to come running into the hospital lobby. In the time between Maribel leaving me in the hallway and making the call over the radio, I had gotten a hold over myself once again. I was waiting with her and the receptionist, who had pulled a machine gun out of her desk. Even knowing that they had to have set up extra security with the vampire problem, it still surprised the hell out of me. How had she hidden it in there in the first place?

Blondie’s first reaction was to ask Maribel if I had done anything. It was logically understandable and emotionally irritating. Thankfully, Maribel’s annoyance at my earlier attitude had faded away in light of the fact that I had saved her life. She told him such and he got marginally politer after that. Once that was all straightened out, he and I both started back towards the isolation ward. Maribel was left waiting at the receptionist’s desk, while the desk lady herself and two of the on-duty doctors followed the deputy and me to provide cover. Maribel would keep track of our progress through the monitor and call for help from the last remaining deputy and the town militia if any of the victims slipped past us. Apparently the hospital did have monitoring equipment for that ward; it was just that they couldn’t wire it up inside the room, so all of the video feed came from the halls surrounding it. I don’t know why they couldn’t have gotten a camera in there when they had managed to do it with an intercom, but what the hell do I know about tech stuff?

It was a morbid party that trekked through the halls. The doctors were worried about the patients (bitten and otherwise), the receptionist kept fingering the safety on her machine gun, the deputy was giving me sidelong glances that just screamed do not want and I was a nervous wreck, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. I did not want to go back there.

During my wait with Maribel, I had had a few minutes to puzzle out my reaction to her presence after the scuffle. I had never – and I mean never – reacted like that to someone before. The only thing I could think of that may have triggered it was the fight. My adrenaline had shot up and I was scared, angry and exhilarated all at once. My body had kicked into overdrive to deal with the threat, the same thing any human’s body would do in the same situation. The problem was that I wasn’t entirely human, a fact that I was still having trouble accepting. Though I couldn’t say I regretted the ten years of normalcy the serum had given me, after so many years of using it I simply had no idea how to be a dhampir.

If I had lived my life with my vampire half as nature intended, maybe I would have handled the come down from the combat high better. As it was, I had found myself alone with over stimulated senses and a very tempting piece of meat that just happened to be alive and sentient. I had damn near killed Maribel in that hallway, not ten seconds after saving her from death. Now I was going back to it, possibly to fight again, and I had with me not one, but four antsy humans who were giving off enough fear to make my nose sting.

I knew what could happen, so I told myself that I would handle the hunger if it came again.

When we stopped in front of the vault door and the deputy punched in the command code to unlock, I was still telling myself that.

Also, I was still not believing it.

But if I ran away nothing would get better and someone might die if I wasn’t around to help. I had known this life would be hard when I left Birch. I had thought I had known, at least. Now I was learning it might be harder than I could handle.

Not like I wasn’t going to try anyway.

The heavy door slowly groaned open. I heard nothing coming from behind it, though there was certainly enough noise from the people behind me. The receptionist and the two doctors, both armed with laser pistols, had taken up position at the end of the hall and were ready to start blasting away if anything jumped at the deputy or me. I hoped that their aim was good enough to avoid hitting either of us.

A few seconds later, the massive door was opened and I stepped inside the isolation ward. There was the smell of blood (human, with the faint tinge of vampire), but no noise. Nothing overt, anyway. Concentrating, I could faintly hear the heartbeats of the patients, but they were slow and steady again. My hunch was confirmed when I looked behind the door and saw the man who had tried to grab Maribel curled up on the floor. The vampire victims had all gone back to sleep.

“They aren’t awake,” I called back to the deputy, who was courageously ready to charge in to save me if something was ready to attack. At least, that was what his face said. “It looks like they’ve all gone back to sleep.”

After all the tension we had felt walking through the hallway, this was kind of a letdown. Not that I was going to complain.

We bundled the patients back into their beds and the doctors set restraints on them. Needless to say, the visiting hours for this part of the hospital were out indefinitely. If the vampire was strong enough to control even one of his minions from a distance, to say nothing of all of them, then they were going to be treated as though they were full-fledged vampires until they were either cured or killed. That meant armed guards and no sympathetic relatives.

After that, the deputy had Maribel and I give our statements in the lobby with the receptionist taking down our words for the record. The only thing we both unanimously (though silently) agreed to leave out was the chair throwing business. There were just some things that never needed to be mentioned.

He seemed very interested to learn that it wasn’t until after I had arrived that the victims had gotten unruly. I say fuck him; it was coincidence and nothing else. If it was because of my presence, then it was my fault only through sheer accident. They hadn’t gone wild when I went into the isolation ward with Deputy Suspicious, so I was pretty sure that it really wasn’t my fault.

And of course D and the sheriff had to come through the double sliding doors just as I was getting ready to leave.

The sheriff immediately went to his niece. D didn’t give any of us so much as a look. He just listened to what Maribel was saying to her uncle and then, very calmly, asked her to tell him what happened. What, I couldn’t have done it? So the whole story got out again and when it was over with, I was following D back out into the night.

D didn’t say anything at all while we walked. Not a word about me going away or my version of what had happened or why he had told the two deputies to be quiet about his trip to Skethagen. I was invisible again. I don’t know why it was starting to grate on me like that. It wasn’t like anything had changed from the last two weeks. Still, as I stared at the back of his black coat there was an undeniable urge to punch him.

While I walked, I thought about what I was going to do next. I could find Skethagen on my own (I mean, he couldn’t have told everyone in the entire town to keep their mouths shut), but what would I do when I got there? The entire area was still in another dimension and there was a high chance that the vampire could be somewhere around there looking for the rest of displacement units. I may have wanted to learn how to kill vampires, but that didn't mean I had to charge into it. Conversely, I could stay in town, but, again, what would I do? The only people I knew connected to this mess were the sheriff and Maribel. She might have been willing to help me out, but what would I ask of her? Fuck, I didn’t have a clue what to do!

D wasn’t going to be any help. My escapade in the hospital hadn’t done anything to raise my status in his eyes. This sucked because there were things I wanted – no, needed to ask him. Was there any way to control the hunger? Was it always that powerful? How could I stop my senses from swamping me with information? How far could I push my vampire strength before I hurt a human? None of it made any difference, because his turned back said that I was still that shaking kid on the mountain slopes to him. A useless child who should go home.

I had been revisiting my earlier impression of him over the past few weeks. It had to be wrong. Not the ‘I never want to piss this guy off’ impression (that had only been reinforced), but the other one. I mean, if it were true then he would have noticed it too, right? He would have said something, because not even the coldest son of a bitch could ignore their own -

“Why are you still here?”

My heart jumped into my throat.

You never really forget that D is around; the guy stands out too much for that. It is just that he is so damn quiet. When he finally speaks, it feels like someone grabbed a megaphone and screamed into your ear. You get struck dumb and flounder around for a few painful seconds before you remember what to do.

“You know why,” I said sullenly and then wished I hadn’t. Hell, he had called me a child and now I was acting like one! “I’m not leaving until I’ve learned how to hunt vampires.”

“I am not going to teach you,” D answered. “If you stay in this area when things get bad you will likely be injured or killed, if only because of your false association with me. Far more likely, one of the locals will go after you for some reason or another.”

…What?

“Don’t be dumb. Why the hell would they do that?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I wanted to swallow them back up. I had just called D stupid. Fuck me.

The look he sent back at me suggested I was the idiot.

“This a tense time and they are afraid. They seek a release for that fear. You are a stranger, someone they will not feel remorse for hurting.”

There was a certain amount of truth to it, but I still didn’t believe him. No one had acted that way back home, no matter how bad the monster attacks from the forest had gotten. No one tried to blame anything on the peddlers and Hunters who came through. I told him such.

“You’re telling me this is different because the problem is a vampire?” I asked.

That was when he stopped.

We had cut through a small alley to save time getting to wherever D was going. Through sheer chance or careful planning on his part, I now found myself alone in a small space with a bigger, older, more frightening person than myself slowly turning around to give me a flat, unreadable look.

“It is different,” D said slowly, “because you are a dhampir.”

With our longest conversation to date ending with me not having an answer to a statement I couldn’t figure out, D returned to walking through the empty streets of the town. I started chasing after him as soon as I remembered I had legs.

It was different because I was a dhampir. What did that mean? I mean, no one would actually… well, okay, they would. I’d been lucky enough to pass for an extremely pale, handsome human for the most part of my travels, but every now and then someone had seen what I was and it had never ended well for me. I’d gotten the short end of the stick in some of my purchases, been forced to camp outside after being denied a room at an inn and once I’d run out of town not even a day after entering it because someone started saying they had seen me bite a woman. I knew I was going to be insulted, mistreated and ripped off for being a dhampir. It was just part of the deal and I was learning to live with it, however infuriating it was.

But for him to say that these people could kill me for it? Really kill me, just for being half vampire? I mean, I’d heard stories of things like that happening, but….

…Oh, shit.

What if he was right?

Everyone knew Vampire Hunter D was a dhampir and I shared enough similarities with him for people to put two and two together and realize that I was a dhampir as well. So, these people probably knew what I was. Maribel definitely did.

…Maribel….

When I asked D, just before he closed his room’s door shut in my face, what had happened with him and the sheriff, I realized that I did have some things I wanted to talk to her about. If I couldn’t get an idea of what was going on from Mr. Icicle, maybe her uncle would tell me. Better yet, maybe he could tell her and she would tell me. If his deputies knew that they weren’t supposed to help me, I was betting the sheriff had gotten that same memo. There went my Hunter’s apprentice façade. Thanks a lot D, you damn bitch.

With my vampire Hunter closeted up in his room for the rest of the night, I left his hotel and started tracking down Maribel’s scent.

Just what was D up to while Dualarc slept?

Also, commentary from the peanut gallery.