Lesson for Monsters

Dracula left his castle shortly after his son, the dhampir child who would come to be known as Alucard, was born. Though the infant was practically a unique monster -- despite the romantic tales that humans swapped among each other on dark nights, liasons between the living and the unquiet dead were practically unheard of -- he was conceived and born in the ordinary mortal fashion. A wretched crone who practiced black magic had been his midwife, and an animate skeleton had tended mother and infant, and Dracula had found the blood and ferocity of the process charming. The castle had been smaller then, more rooted in time and space -- you could climb downwards and find the catacombs where the fish-men swam through their lightless lakes, and climb up and eventually find the wolf-haunted roof.

It had been, once upon a time, almost like a home and not a fortress.

Dracula left his castle to wander the world and learn the ways of mankind at the behest of his wife. He could never deny anything that she asked. Lisa, for all that she loved her monster husband, was human still and would never be truly comfortable in the palace he had opened to her -- and besides, she yearned to help her fellow man, and could do little enough of that locked away in a tower. So she would often go down to travel Wallachia, healing the sick and teaching the ignorant; she would take her son with her when he was small, but soon enough he grew from a beautiful child into a strange, fey boy. The peasants already crossed themselves when she passed, for all that they took her medicines and advice, but when they saw Alucard's hypnotic moonlight eyes and snowy hair, they started to whisper. Maybe she really had wedded the Devil himself, for a child like that could only be an angel or a demon, and God's favor had abandoned the world long ago.

So more and more often, Lisa would leave for some time, and Alucard was by default the castle's master. The place had a perverse will of its own, and showed obeisance like a servant from time to time -- stairs would shift themselves at his feet, the candles bend their flames when he passed so that he could warm his hands against the cold, and the serpents and skeletons and haunted statues that guarded the spacious halls would kneel down if he so much as glanced in their direction. There were things that lived in Dracula's castle that were not part of it, either -- the hooded reaper that stood grim guard over the little prince's dreams, the demoness who came to revel with the alraunes in the garden, and the frozen shadows in the catacombs that would do nothing but weep no matter who approached -- but they too treated him like royalty, of their own will or out of fear of his father.

All, save Lord Olrox. He never knelt before Alucard, prince or no.

The only other true-blood vampire to inhabit Dracula's castle besides the Lord of Darkness himself, Olrox was a grim-faced creature with the blue-purple flesh of a frozen corpse who lived alone in the castle's highest spire. What relationship he held to his father, Alucard was never sure -- there must be SOME reason why Dracula let him live in that lonely belfry, but Alucard was never sure what it was. He had the vague suspicion he was a relative. Alucard had many lessons to learn -- of philosophy and medicine from his mother, of black magic from the reaper, of swordplay from the reaper's henchmen Slogra and Gaibon -- but Olrox seemed to spend his days in indolent luxury and never wanted to have much to do with educating Dracula's only child. Instead, he would sometimes extend invitations to the young prince to come to his tower and indulge himself with food and drink and idle gossip, and encouraged him to develop a taste for fine brocades and rich velvet clothes.

Olrox had a richly portioned ballroom that was always empty, complete with an enormous banquet table that could seat a small army, which seemed especially ridiculous given that he ate nothing himself and, as far as he knew, Alucard was the only visitor he ever entertained.

One particular night, when Alucard was nearly fourteen years old (give or take), Olrox took the liberty of laying out a meal for him.

"Ah, welcome," the vampire said, gesturing expansively at the table. Olrox's appearance was far less human than even the Count's, who had always retained a certain amount of his living vanity; Olrox, by contrast, had a smooth and hairless bat-eared face with a long tongue that lapped the air like a snake's and massive animal fangs that he never bothered to conceal. It made even the softest words come out as a harsh, spitting whisper. "Finished your lessons, have you? I do hope those demons did not tire you overmuch."

As per usual Olrox had laid out the entire table setting, silver plates and knives and crystal goblets and all, but most of it was empty. The centerpiece of the table was an enormous cut-glass decanter, filled near to the brim with scarlet liquid.

Just above the decanter, hanging from the gold-gilded chandelier by a hook shoved through its booted foot, was a corpse in armor, twitching in half-animate distress. Blood welled up in its empty eye sockets, dripped from its lolling tongue, and seeped between the edges of its archaic plate mail, but it seemed to have little left inside it to bleed. The rest had collected in the decanter below in a gruesome imitation of fine wine.

Alucard licked his lips. He'd never tasted human blood. The thing hanging from the ceiling wasn't human, quite -- it might have been once, long ago judging from its garb, but now it was one of the staggering zombies that Olrox kept caged in the lower floors of his private tower. Alucard had walked past them on occasion, sniffing the air and listening to the slow slosh of blood in their dead veins as they flailed against the bars of their cells, blind and suffering.

Olrox took a seat at the other end of the table. "Mmm, and don't be shy," he added, gesturing towards the table. "It's not as though I'll go hungry if you take a drink from one of my kine. Plenty more where that came from." He laughed, a rough sound closer to a bark than anything human.

"I mean, I'm not...I'm not worried about that," Alucard said. Almost unconsciously, he leaned closer to the decanter. The scent of all that blood was warm and heady in the air, and he wondered if he could get drunk on the smell alone.

Still, Alucard hesitated. Olrox took the liberty of pouring the boy a glass of the blood himself. A few heavy, thick drops landed on the table from the zombie's throat before the decanter was returned to its place. "Yes, well. Clearly something's holding you back, little prince." That was what Olrox would call him -- "little prince", a touch dismissively, as though it were a doting nickname bestowed by an overbearing parent and not his true title. "Is it something your mother told you? Does she not want you to have even a taste?"

"I..." Alucard began, but was distracted by the scent of the blood before the words left his tongue. Carefully, he dipped one finger into the goblet, to see how it differed from water. Thicker, just slightly. The color clung to the edge of his nails.

"You're not going to turn into a slavering ghoul after just one drink, you know," Olrox drawled. "I worry about you, I really do. You might be half human but you're as unnatural a beast as they come, you know, and no amount of wishing and telling stories is going to turn you into a mortal boy like the dullards in the villages below."

"Unnatural?" Alucard asked, and Olrox laughed again.

"Vampires weren't meant to have wives and children, little prince. What's more unnatural than a vampire in love?"

Just one taste couldn't hurt. Could it? Mother wouldn't have to know.

Alucard brought his fingers up to his lips and delicately stuck out his tongue to lap the blood from his hand.

He had never tasted anything so sweet in his life.

Olrox kept talking -- something about learning to be a vampire -- but Alucard was barely listening, the fire-hot sensation of blood, real warm just-drained blood, pounding through his head and roaring in his veins. With both hands he seized the goblet and drained it like a dying man in the desert and crawled up on the table towards the decanter for more. He felt wonderful -- alive -- powerful.

The taste, in fact, was so transporting, so transcendent, that he barely recalled the rest of the evening, and it did not occur to him to wonder what Olrox WANTED until they were both standing on the edge of the tower's roof, the wind howling and whipping Alucard's fine hair into knots.

"Have you ever changed your shape, little prince?" Alucard, who could barely hear over the noise of the wind, shook his head. "Did you even know you could? Did they keep that from you, little prince? Now that you've fed, you can have wings, you know." And with a dramatic, 'after you' sort of bow, Lord Olrox shoved Alucard effortlessly off the edge of the roof.

Alucard was too startled even to scream. For one brief moment terror obliterated all thought, all sense, as Alucard felt himself pitching head-over-heels through empty air, hurtling towards the rocky valley, and then...

And then gut-churning noise of bones snapping painlessly and reshaping themselves, and the sensation of wind beneath leathery wings. His fall slowed, then stopped, turned, became a whirling glide. Alucard opened his mouth to scream again and it came out a shriek far higher than human hearing, echoing off the barren trees and castle walls.

A long moment of circling and catching his breath, such as it was, and Alucard the bat alighted upon the roof of Olrox's tower. The vampire himself was sitting with his too-long legs dangling over the edge of the precipice and grinning.

Too angry to shift back, Alucard lunged at Olrox with claws outstretched, landing with his hands around the vampire lord's throat as a creature somewhere halfway between boy and bat. Olrox waved away Alucard's snarling protest as the boy's hands wound around his throat; the threat of a throttling was mild enough when one was already long dead.

"Now, now...Your mother wouldn't want you to tear my throat out, would she?" the vampire drawled, the pressure on his windpipe barely impacting his speech at all. "Get hold of yourself, little prince. It was just a little demonstration."

"...demonstration," Alucard repeated, his grip slackening. He looked down at himself as though just noticing his strange appearance -- taut black membrane stretched along the outside of his arm, black fur, fangs far too big for his jutting jaw. He backed up, staggering on his feet, and when he finally sank to the roof tiles he was fully a boy again, exhausted.

"You don't think I'd let Lord Dracula's only son fall to his death, did you? I'd have caught you if you hadn't changed," Olrox sat down across from Alucard on the roof, his long limbs folding up like an insect. "But I knew you could, once you'd had a drink. You can fly, my boy, and much more besides that, as long as you feed." Alucard struggled to catch his breath, not knowing what to say. Olrox patted him on the head. "You'll be glad of it one day. That I can promise you."

Well, Lord Olrox was right about one thing, Alucard thought, as he pinned the vampire to his shattered dining table with a greatsword straight through the monster's ribcage. Outside the door, a hoard of zombies loosed from their prison howled in hunger -- zombies that had once been men and women, with lives and hopes, Alucard understood now better than he once had. Well, they'd have flesh in a moment if they wanted it. A fitting end, maybe, for Olrox's corpse to feed the tormented dead he had dismissively called his kine, like they were farm animals raised for slaughter.

Olrox snarled like an animal, writhing in agony, slicing his hands and forearms open on the blade in his attempt to pull free. His fancy coat, the one Alucard had once envied and imitated, was shredded by the battle and the vampire's own shapeshifting.

Nothing but a monster, in the end, but he had been right about one thing -- Alucard was glad of the ability to fly.

"Come to your senses, little prince," Olrox hissed with the last of his breath. "Maybe your father will let you live if you stop this...this foolishness. This pandering to mortal pride." He coughed, spat black blood, and gasped. "The road you're on...only death awaits you there. Dracula will tear you limb from limb."

"I've never been afraid of death," Alucard said coolly, as he pulled his blade free. Lord Olrox, who had taught him much about being a vampire, thrashed one last time even as his limbs began to crumble into ancient dust. "After all...he worked for my father, you know."