Author's Note: As folks following my Dragonlance fic know, my computer is having some serious software issues. Said issues remain to be resolved, much to my frustration. And I'm officially out of funds to keep trying things to fix it. As such, I don't have my computer available for writing, and won't until I can scrounge up more money.

But a few weeks not writing is driving me crazy. That fic's chapters tend to be huge, and Fanfic has this nasty habit of giving me trouble when I try to write out large chapters on the site via my cell, even if I frequently save. So I'm shifting focus to Hellsing for now. To avoid Fanfic resetting my work and not saving chapters properly, these will need to be done in a couple thousand word parts, instead of my usual 5-8k entries. So, apologies for the brevity and splitting chapters up, but I'm working with what I've got. And you guys get new content. So still a win?

DarkMessiah- As always, I'm glad to hear from you; and have no fear, there will be more on that front! I told you guys I would be delving into all incarnations of Alucard and connecting the different storylines, and that was only the first skirmish into prying his past from him. Haha! Whirly-Birb- I'm happy to have a new follower, and sorry for screwing with your sleep for a few days! Hope you'll stick around and continue enjoying the story as it unfolds. (And rest at ease, while I'll write the occasional perilous situation for children, I try not to kill main cast kids, cuz that's just freaking depressing. So love all you want, you're safe on that front.) Hope the rest of you have been well, and that you'll enjoy part 1 of this chapter. I'm off to do the excruciatingly slow process of writing the next part via tapping at my cell's screen and combating frequent autocorrect fails cuz my smart phone hates letting me write in the intended tense. If a primal scream of frustration echoes through your soul tonight, that'd be me, and I'm sorry, but only kinda. Lol!

Chapter 42

Falling Inside The Black- Part 1

It was the sixth evening of their stay at the remote cottage in the woods when Alucard had another abrupt awakening from his rest. This early Friday evening's disturbance, however, wasn't caused by one of his servants or the two magically inclined humans.

A sense of urgency pierced into his sleep, echoing a furious hissing directly in front of his face.

The child's familiar, Shadowsnake, had pushed open the coffin of the progenitor of vampires and hellfire gazes met as the vampire jerked awake. Before Alucard could reach out and grab the familiar for the invasion of his personal domain, the serpent was darting away from the coffin. Alucard sat up and saw the snake coil near the seer's head, then look over at the Vampire King in obvious demand for some sort of action. The seer's hellhound, Artemis, had been sitting on the end of the bed and staring at her mistress with her ears drooping, and she gave a whine to the vampire.

Alucard's gaze went to the seer, then the hospital equipment by her bed. The readouts for her pulse and oxygen levels looked normal, and her breathing pattern was unchanged.

What the hell was the familiars riled up over? The serpent had hardly shown itself since leaving Philadelphia, letting the child have time playing with the more sociable hellhound. It only seemed to cross over into this plane of existence late at night, when its master was sound asleep and was on the verge of having a nightmare from the stress of having been uprooted from the life they had up until a week ago.

That's when the Vampire King noticed something else. The magical brand on his chest was glowing and issuing a faint aching sensation. Something he had started to become accustomed to; except this time it wasn't being caused by him trying to move outside the radius allowed from the seer.

Understanding began to creep in on Alucard as his gaze went between the familiars and the human on the bed. Shadowsnake was a demon who fed on negative thoughts and energy to keep his little master's state of mind balanced and healthy. That meant it had the innate power to reach into a person's mind and sense its activity, however it decided to use that gift based on what its master desired.

They didn't have a machine on hand to monitor the seer's brain activity, to alert them if something was wrong. But something of that nature might be sensed by the hellhound connected to the seer, and better sensed by the serpent if the hellhound had gotten its attention and drawn it into the bedroom away from the child. Something of a nature that was beginning to trigger the blood ward that was meant to alert him when something was endangering the seer.

Alucard's attention focused in on Mercedes... and he realized while everything seemed the same as when he went to sleep... she was too quiet. Her breathing was too peaceful and even. As he watched her for nearly a minute, there wasn't even a flicker of involuntary movement behind her eyelids, no signs of being in some deep dream state.

The vampire reached out with his telepathy during that minute, trying to sense some fleeting sense of the seer's consciousness, and he felt nothing. It wasn't that there were wards protecting her mind from him; it was that it was like reaching into a void and finding no hint of the woman within it.

Alucard felt comprehension grow to a dread whose icy claws sank into his chest next to the glowing sigil, and his normally busy mind went silent save for one coherent thought: He couldn't sense even a flicker of the priestess's soul inside her physical body. Mercedes was slipping out of a healing rest and into something even worse than a coma, and they were going to lose her if something wasn't done, immediately, to pull her back.

.

.

.

Seras was playing with Xander down the hall when her master's voice suddenly entered her mind. "Seras, cancel whatever plans you had for making dinner. Take Xander and Valarie for a drive somewhere a good distance from here and find a restaurant where you can shapeshift to pick up a takeout meal. Bring them someplace quiet to eat outside, away from other people."

Seras's hand froze on the train's remote control, blinking rapidly in surprise and trying to make sense of the fact her master was awake early and issuing such a strange change to their routine. "Master," she asked back telepathically, "is something the matter?"

"Just do as you're told," Alucard snapped back before cutting off their mental connection.

Seras's brows pulled together in confusion, but didn't dare disobey her master when he spoke to her like that. Her gaze turned down to the child, who was making little sound effects for the story they had been making up for a runaway train situation.

And her gaze turning down caused her to notice the faintest glow starting to form under her shirt, where that weird sigil was. That realization came at the same moment as the one where Seras noticed she could sense her master shadowing about the seer's room at an unusually hurried pace. Something was amiss in there with the seer, and he was trying to keep it from the child's notice before whatever it was became worse than whatever it was right now.

"Xander," she said quickly, forcing levity into her voice and causing him to break off the noises. "I just had a fun thought to kick off the weekend. I don't know how to make pizza dough, but I've seen some pizza places while I've been out. Why don't we go pick up a pizza from a few of them and have a contest to see which one makes the best so we know who to order from again while we're here?"

The child's face lit up at that suggestion. "Really?! Can I come with you to pick them up?"

Seras nodded. "Of course, silly. Otherwise the pizzas will get cold and we won't be able to judge them properly. Get your shoes on, and I'll go get your Auntie Val so we have someone to help judge and eat the pizzas. Whatever's left we can have for the weekend and decide who makes the better leftovers."

Xander cheered at that announcement and rushed about to get ready to leave as Seras crossed the hall to knock on Valarie's door.

Valarie was more perceptive than her nephew and, after one look at the young vampire's face and the glowing sigil on the ample chest in front of her, asked quietly, "What's wrong?"

Seras gave a strained smile and shook her head as she glanced toward's the child's room. She said quietly as she made a thicker sports jacket manifest over her shirt to help hide the glow, "I'm not certain, but Master asked me to take you two out of the house and out for dinner. Please get your shoes on, we need to leave."

A long, quiet whine from a hellhound could be heard from the next room.

Valarie's gaze darted towards Mercedes's room, then towards the front of the house. "Is he evacuating her separately?"

Seras shook her head and said, "I'm not under orders to hide you two somewhere, so I think we're coming back when Master says it's okay."

Valarie froze as understanding washed over her. She murmured, even quieter than before, "Is she okay?"

"She's alive, so please, just get your shoes on," Seras whispered, another worried gaze flicking to the child's direction. "We're taking Xander out for pizza, and that's all that needs to be said right now. Hopefully things will be fine when we get back and he won't need to know there was a problem."

Valarie's jaw set with a clack of teeth, but she gave a tight nod and disappeared into the room to do as asked. A few minutes later, both women were herding the excited child out the door with feigned enthusiasm to match his. Valarie assured the child that yes, if he was still in the mood after trying out different pizzas, they could find someplace to grab ice cream from as a chilly treat to end the sweltering day that today was.

As Seras was pulling out of the driveway, she could sense Walter had been awakened by their master and was speeding his way out the back of the house under some silent order given to him. The ward on her chest was beginning to ache uncomfortably. Seras's shaky smile slipped, not knowing just what was happening, or what they'd be coming back to. She spared a few seconds to say a little mental prayer that whatever her master had picked up on with the seer, it was something he and Walter could handle; then she did what she could to keep her attention on driving these backwards American streets and keeping her thoughts in order so the child would hopefully not pick up anything was amiss.

It was fortunate for the states of mind of those in the vehicle that they weren't able to sense the moment when Artemis's increasingly frantic efforts to remain present in their world as commanded were rendered impossible. The familiar's mistress's life force was rapidly flickering out; and with it, the hellhound lost that needed anchor to the world.

.

.

.

Alucard was shadowing around the room at superhuman speeds to gather emergency medical equipment when Artemis issued a sudden panicked snarl. A snarl that was abruptly caught off.

Vampiric hellfire gaze darted to the now vacant spot in the bed, attention momentarily pulled from his task by the discordant shift of energy and silence.

A moment later, the silence was shattered by the EKG machine's alarm, warning the seer's heartbeat was suddenly plummeting, stuttering once or twice and then stopping again.

If Alucard's heart still beat, the instinctive terror that lanced through him in that moment would have stopped it. He looked at the sealed packages in his hands, and then the EKG machine's erratic readout. Though the threat didn't need to be impressed on the Vampire King any further, as the priestess's heartrate crashed, the sigil on his chest flared with searing intensity. It felt both a mercy and curse that the enchantment didn't set him ablaze in that moment.

There was no noise from Mercedes as her chest stilled; no subconscious gasps for air or reactive wheezing and seizures as her lungs stopped. Her body was rapidly shutting down without a soul present to sustain it; unable to muster even a primal response to try and save itself.

There wasn't time to wait for Walter to return with outside equipment. And the crash kit, the adrenaline, the defibrillator- he already knew all those would be useless. They might get a momentary chemical response, but her body would continue shutting down if it didn't have even the basest of consciousnesses and energy to instruct it to animate.

The body before Alucard was nothing more than an empty vessel. A fleshy puppet with its strings cut.

And her soul had slipped somewhere into the void, moving further from his reach with every passing second.

A guttural growl of furious denial resounded over teeth morphing to razor points. As most of the instruments that had been in hand clattered to the floor on one side of the room, the shadowy form of the Vampire King was already by the head of the bed. "No!" Alucard's voice snarled out over the noise of flatlining EKG as he reformed. Ebon sleeping shirt disappeared from a lifeless torso. "This one's soul isn't yours!" There was a flash of metal as needle pierced into chilled flesh, and cold, viscous blood began to fill a large syringe. Hellfire eyes glared straight ahead as more blood was pulled, bit by bit without a beating heart to help the flow and having been feeding so sporadically and lightly. "I swore to her I'd annihilate any who jeopardized her rest. You'll give me her soul back, you sadistic, faithless bastard; or you better hope I don't come across you as I chase after what's mine!"