Disclaimer: Hermione's complete animal/creature bait (troll, basilisk, werewolf, giant, etc.), didja think I could have resisted this idea? And I can't be the first to parallel the stuff pureblood spouts as very vampire-y. If I owned Alucard… I'm just glad the temptation's not there. In other words, I do not own Harry Potter or Hellsing.

Bite To Eat

It was quiet throughout Hogwart's Castle, the dead of the night, when even ghosts and villains were idle. In one of its towers, where the Gryffindor dormitories were located, the sandman had no hold on one individual.

Empty of light other than a faint glow whose origins remained mysterious but was obviously done through magic, the girls' communal bathroom was equally silent except for the slow drip-drop of a recently used sink.

A damp hand remained on the cold water tap, its owner staring at her reflection as the squeak of the metal echoed in her ear. Stiffly, her fingers unlatched themselves and moved to tuck an errant curl out of recently dampened face.

The reflection of Hermione Granger, muggle-born witch stared back. English rose complexion forever marred by unruly curls that tended to frizz because she had an incurable habit of touching her hair; her lower lip didn't look irritated from biting (another bad habit she had managed to beat out of necessity), her eyebrows thick and well-arched, and her eyes were a plain, nondescript brown.

Hermione let out a shaky breath, ducking her head down and hands gripping the lip of the sink.

A minute passed where the fourteen year old seemed to have a fight within herself before stilling.

Loosening her hold on the white ceramic before altogether letting her arms drop outside the sink, Hermione slowly looked into the mirror again and reached her hands up, toward her face.

Her left hand kept her right eye open while her other hand plucked off the lens with thumb and forefinger before depositing it on the waiting container on the shelf above the taps. Repeating the procedure with her other eye, Hermione didn't look at her reflection until the container was closed and her hands rinsed off.

A stranger stared back.

A monster's image reflected.

For Hermione Granger, muggle-born witch, never had blood-red eyes.

The monster shuddered the same time she did, a bitter smile appeared on their face – her face – as she finally acknowledged her permanent condition.

"Happy birthday, Hermione," she muttered, "You're fourteen forever."

August 21st, 1994

Hermione thought divination was rubbish and had doubts of fate and destiny even though she had witnessed Trelawney's prophecy coming true that night a few months ago, but the girl had a gut feeling she had very bad luck today. Luck, chance, fate, destiny…

The fourteen year old witch just knew that Walden Macnair had forcefully side-along apparated her to this dank alleyway to kill her like he had been unable to do to Buckbeak when an armed mugger appeared to rob them.

Her head was still reeling, the girl having an unfortunate habit of freezing in critical situations. She had been literally grabbed as soon as she left Diagon Alley with a bag of books from Flourish and Blotts, somehow losing her purchase along the way to some corner of London she hadn't been to before.

Macnair had revealed himself as her kidnapper, along with telling her why he did so, which could be summarily contained in a sentence: he knew Hermione was the reason Buckbeak became freed so she could stand in the hippogriff's place since a 'mudblood' was no better than a 'bloody stupid beast'.

He had just ended his tirade of calling her demeaning and beyond insulting words and phrases when the mugger came and demanded their money and valuables.

She hated to think it but this didn't happen to her! Harry was the one who got into life-threatening situations. The younger Weasleys were the ones who got nabbed. Hermione was the one who solved riddles and became a tempting target of a dangerous magical monster (twice)!

Now, neither Macnair nor the mugger looked like a basilisk or werewolf, did they?

"Oi, tha' means give me y'r purse. NOW. Y'stupid bint!"

The man made to tear her bag off her shoulder but the last person Hermione expected to interfere did, the Ministry Executioner casting the Body-Bind Curse on the mugger with a sneer.

"I actually wanted to cut you up a bit – see if you'd bleed mud or not – but this filthy muggle ruined my plans," Macnair stood in silence for a moment, "Maybe I should just Imperius him to bludgeon you to death or rape you, though that's more Mulciber's thing and you'd probably enjoy it, the filthy mudblood whore that you are."

Dark eyes looked at her and Macnair seemed to change his mind when he realized the terror his off-hand comment wrought.

"On the other hand," he sneered, "maybe I should see why this would be Mulciber's favorite method of torture and killing."

He lifted his wand and pointed at the mugger again.

Hermione, shocked out of her frozen state at the utterance of an Unforgivable spell being cast, scrambled for her wand.

"Expelliarmus!" she aimed at the muscular wizard.

Macnair was shoved against the wall of the alley but kept a tight grip on his wand, gaining a glint of actual murder in his eyes. "How dare a mudblood bitch—"

Hermione took a step back, a breathless gasp of fear escaping – not even able to properly whimper – as the fight or flight instinct finally decided on flight. She twisted toward the only way she could run in the alley, the side unblocked by the mugger.

"SECTUMSEMPRA!"

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The fourteen year old cried out as the force of the spell clipped her shoulder and spun her to slam against the side of a wall. Momentum brought her to face the men again and a shell-shocked Hermione could only witness what happened next, barely able to comprehend the situation with the burning pain down her arm and mid-back.

Macnair looked slightly shocked, staring down at his chest, his free hand delicately touching one of the splotches that bloomed across the black robes. He staggered as he turned around, leaning against a wall of the alleyway, revealing the mugger with his still smoking pistol aimed at Macnair.

The dark wizard raised his wand…

"Avada Kedavra!"

BANG!

The green of the Killing Curse and the pistol slide moving – the spent case of the bullet falling to the dirty floor the same time as the body of the mugger and the jerking of Macnair's head before he slumped against the wall to slowly slide down the floor.

All was silent except for Hermione's heart beats that echoed in her ears as she breathed harshly.

She was stupefied for a moment before realizing she had been really lucky, a small sob escaping her in quiet relief of not dying or being left to a fate worse than death. Hermione turned her head and delicately assessed the damage of what she mentally translated to be a flesh-cutting curse of some type, calming down some more when she saw the thick strap of her sling bag blunted the potential damage. Still, the cut was deep enough to need stitches and her bag was another victim of this entire debacle.

Hermione stood up – a bit of a difficulty without the aid of her arms – with a plan of retrieving her bag and finding a way out of wherever nook and cranny she was taking up her entire thoughts. She was still in denial over seeing two men kill each other in front of her and that there were two fresh corpses barely meters away.

A deep chuckle echoed around the dark alley, causing bushy ash-brown hair to whip around as the girl reflexively sought out its source. Mentally, she let out a few epithets as the deep shadows that had made it difficult for her to find her bag in the moonlight gave her the same difficulty finding the origins of the laughter.

It was the sound of moving liquid that made Hermione turn her toward the corpses with dread, despite every part of her telling her not to and to just forget her bag and run away.

He was a tall man dressed in Victorian period fashion – automatically making him magical – except he wore a wide-brimmed fedora instead of a top hat, and round safety goggles with yellow-shaded lenses that Elton John would be proud of and a pureblood wouldn't be caught dead in.

Her eyes trailed downwards, to the source of the noise and saw the pool of blood he stood at the center of originating from the two dead men. It was as if the blood was being pulled out of the cadavers and being absorbed into the stranger.

As the observation hit her, Hermione ignored the pain in her right arm as she pointed her blood slicked wand at the newcomer. Blood, any magic that had to do with blood, well she could only think of vampires and extremely dark wizards that were myth and legend in the magical world itself.

"The full moon is bright tonight, isn't it?" his head tilted up and the mentioned moonlight revealed his wide grin.

And his prominent, sharp, canines.

Hermione whimpered, the roller coaster series of events she went through ringing her dry of that Gryffindor courage that got her into the House of Lions; she stumbled back blindly, opening her mouth in a silent cry of excruciating pain as her injured back hit a barrier, Hermione glancing back to see a stack of large crates blocking her.

She screamed when she looked back toward the dangerous male, not wanting to set her gaze away from such a predator for more than a moment, only to find him right before her.

The fourteen year old normally wouldn't panic (which was why her male friends thought her crazy – not just because of her studying ethics) but she was bleeding and she was female, which was more than enough to render vampires into an uncontrolled blood-frenzy. After Lupin this past school year, she had looked up extensively on vampires (for werewolves and vampires went hand-in-hand being mortal enemies with the same food source and similar origins) and found blood of the opposite sex – virgins even better – had the same effect as the full moon did to werewolves.

There would be no talking her way out of this, since the vampire wouldn't listen – if he was the type inclined to, in the first place.

"Hello little witch," his proximity only allowed her to better see his wide, toothy grin; his smile almost like a pearly white crescent in the darkness.

Her mouth opened and closed, unable to recall the Sunbeam Spell even when her life (and potentially chastity) truly, literally counted on it.

The shades slipped down, revealing mesmerizing, bright crimson eyes framed by long black eyelashes. Hermione felt the wand in her hand angling itself upwards, taking all her strength to look down and stare at the white-gloved hand shifting the wand away from him by the tip of the instrument.

She couldn't take her eyes away from the several-layered seal printed on the glove, not until he bent his head to the level of the wand and his tongue darted out to lick up its length, from her thumb till where his fingers held the wand.

"You're going to bleed to death if you don't fix yourself, witch, since there's dark magic in your wound that prevents healing," the vampire stated in an odd, not-accent with his ever-present smile.

His eyes went from her own to the seals she had been staring at.

"My master forbids me from feeding on humans…"

Hermione opened her mouth—

"…but Integral Hellsing is a rather religious young woman and the witch-hunts of the past suggests they don't consider us human…"

His grin darkened.

Hermione snapped, screaming and struggling to get away when she realized the implications of the surname and the mention of the witchcraft trials that managed to kill over fifty-thousand innocent muggles due to religious crusade and fanatics: his identity and that heretics weren't safe from him as prey.

"'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live', as the translation goes…"

And she sobbed as his teeth sank into the crook of her neck, his other hand having knotted into her hair and forced her head to one side. It was the most excruciatingly painful experience ever, feeling as if her soul was dragged out with her blood, like claws scraping her insides for every bit that made her living. Something she had never been aware of existing before seemed to unravel, utterly destroyed by his bite.

The girl was suddenly bereft from feeling, collapsing against the stacked crates before her legs crumpled and all the brunette could do was stare at the glowing orb in the sky, the Man in the Moon staring back at her; a numbness pervading her body and mind.

Someone was laughing.

Hermione blinked, the sound getting clearer as she concentrated on that instead of the ringing in her ears, some small part of her realizing that she was not dead and was still capable of higher thought.

The origin of the laugh was the red-clad vampire.

He abruptly stopped. "I should have known; the same hair… the eye shape…"

His stare unnerved her and, when he reached toward her with one of his gloved hands, it was the last straw; Hermione panicked, the power within her reacted, a spectacular display of emotionally-charged magic apparating the girl away from the alleyway to appear a block away from her house.

The brunette stumbled forward, hands on the pavement while her wand dug into her right hand. She was finally away from her Mast— no, from Him but his voice still echoed a name in her mind as she reappeared onto the thankfully empty residential street.

'Lisa…'

Was she, a fourteen year old Hogwart's student, able to keep the most infamous – dangerous – vampire that was over half a millenia old from catching her?

Is it even feasible to run away from Dracula?

End Notes: Some Castlevania mythos is meshed in, you can see, and this will eventually be Alucard/Hermione (still a far, far way to go) but there'd probably be some UST to tide one over throughout. Rating may or may not go up considering it's a Hellsing crossover and violence and gore is practically synonymous with the title.

Not beta'd; feel free to point out any mistakes I missed.