Chapter 6
HELLSING
Isat under the dim light of the Midnight Wytch, curled up in a corner chair while I waited for Hellsing to stop pacing.
“I need to call your father.”
“He’s hundreds of miles away, there’s no need to worry him.”
“What?” He gave me a hard, pointed glare.
“Not yet. Not until we know what we’re up against.”
“I know…”
“You know shit,” I cut him off. “We both know shit.”
“I know a lot more than you think, little girl…”
“Bullshit,” I cut him off again and watched in satisfaction as he narrowed his eyes on me.
“Careful…” he warned.
“If you call Virgil, he is going to rush over here for what exactly? To put him in harm's way again? This…” I ripped my tank top down, exposing the ink on the top of my breast, “this is supposed to protect us.”
I swallowed hard as Hellsing slowly closed the distance between us. His eyes were drawn to the symbol tattooed on my skin. I held my breath as he reached up, gently brushing my soft flesh with his fingertips, leaving a trail of heat behind his touch.
My mother had inked the rune into my skin when I turned sixteen. She’d said it was for protection from the demons my father fought. Unfortunately, those demons found me.
I pulled away, adjusting my top as I continued. “It didn’t protect me, what makes you think it will keep him and my mother hidden?”
“This is my fault,” he uttered, brushing his hands through those long locks of dark hair.
“It attached itself to me and I wasn’t careful.
I felt it, lurking in the shadows, waiting, watching, but I did nothing.
I thought I was just feeling residuals from that day.
PTSD shit. I should have known better. It was me. I brought it to your door.”
“You can’t blame yourself…”
“I do. Because of that symbol, I am what I am. A vocation is what the church called it, a calling is what your father had named it,” he grunted in fake amusement. “It’s a curse, Grace. There’s no other word for what I can do.”
“I…I don’t understand,” I shook my head.”
“I can walk in death’s shadows freely, Grace.” He raised his sleeve, showing me the rune on his forearm. “I can walk through hell, and because of this thing on my forearm, I can do it without being seen.”
I placed a hand over my mouth as I stared up at him. “And yet…I was spotted. Do you have any idea what that means?”
I shook my head slowly, somewhat in shock only because I had felt what he’d gone through only hours before. He closed the distance once again between us, crouching down before me and grabbed my knees.
“It means…somehow, when I allowed him to possess my body, that left a connection. One strong enough to bypass, this…” his fingers trailed back to my breast, and they lingered there for a moment, sending a shiver through me. One I held back until he pulled away.
“I need to make a call.” He turned and went toward the front door.
“To whom?” I asked.
He turned slightly to glance back at me. “To the only person I know who can offer some insight.”
I grabbed his sleeve. “Not my father?”
He didn’t look at me as he shook his head. “Not yet. But I will call him eventually, Grace. I get you're an independent woman and all that, but you can’t hide everything from him. Not this.”
I watched as he left the shop, the door shutting soundly behind him. I could see him pace on the other side of the shattered windows, his voice a low rumble, barely audible, as he spoke on the phone.
I kept thinking back on what had happened, on what he’d just confessed to me.
I could still see Peter convulsing on the floor, his body wracked by some force I couldn’t see.
His fists had clenched so tight his knuckles had turned white.
He looked scared and I couldn’t get that look of fear on his face out of my head.
In that moment, it was like something had torn him open from the inside, the way he gasped for air, and his eyes rolling back, a black film covering them, I thought I’d lost him.
My father had spoken of possessions, but I’d never seen anything like this, and sadly, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do but watch him suffer.
Or so I thought.
That’s when I remembered that spell. It was a faint memory and leaving him briefly I’d dropped to the floor, scrambling through the broken glass and the dust, shoving aside candle stubs, and scattered herbs, searching for that damn memory.
I just needed to see it, to remember. And out of the corner of my eye, peeking through the broken wood, I saw it.
My hand was shaking as I pulled it out, it was something I’d picked up years ago in a dusty shop off Chartres Street from a woman who claimed it had been “salvaged from the bayou fires.”
Its cover was a deep, cracked leather, with veins of gold threading that decorated the surface of the book. Across the front, embossed in tarnished brass letters barely clinging to the surface, read the title, The Grimorium.
Even saying the title out loud once had felt like it was wrong.
It felt heavy and ancient. I’d only skimmed through it once, half out of curiosity, half out of fear, because every page seemed to hum with something that wasn’t supposed to be awake.
The ink was rust-dark, uneven, as if it had been written in something thicker than ink.
The pages were edged in soot and smelled faintly of cedar, smoke, and old blood.
My fingers trembled as I flipped through it, my breath uneven. Each symbol I passed seemed to crawl beneath my skin, pressing like a pulse under the surface. My fingers found the spell I needed, “Requiem ad Cor Infernalis”, a ritual meant to reverse spiritual possession through a blood conduit.
It was madness to even try it. But Hellsing’s body was shaking on the floor, his breath rattling in his chest, and I didn’t have the luxury of fear.
I didn’t know if it would work. Hell, I didn’t even know if it was real.
But Peter was choking on whatever darkness had its claws in him, and I wasn’t about to just sit back and watch him get dragged into whatever hell that demon had in mind.
I found the page and snatched up a white candle and a blade, my heartbeat thundering as I lit the wick, feeling the urgency press against my ribs.
The spell was simple but dangerous; it was supposed to turn dark energy back on itself, but I’d never tried anything like this.
My fingers brushed over the candle, the last one in the box, and I struck a match, the flame flaring to life.
It felt fragile, that tiny light, but it was all I had.
I knelt beside him, murmuring the incantation as I slid the blade through the palm of my hand.
My voice shook as drops of blood dripped onto the burning candle, slowly growing stronger with each word.
I focused everything I had on the words, willing them to take hold, to latch onto whatever dark force was inside him and twist it back.
I could feel the shift almost instantly.
The air tightened, the pressure building in my chest as the energy began to move.
The shadows in the corners of the room thickened, pulsing as if they were alive.
A rush of heat crawled up my legs, searing through my veins, until I felt it climb my throat like fire.
As I continued to chant, every ounce of doubt and fear tried to claw its way up my throat.
But I fought it, kept my voice steady, whispering into the dim light of the candle.
I focused on him, on what he’d looked like when he wasn’t twisted up in pain.
The lines in his face, his quiet strength, that dangerous edge in his eyes.
Peter Hellsing, the man who refused to break, even when everything around him was trying to shatter him.
The dark energy in the room was almost visible, swirling around us, coiling like a serpent.
I could feel it, thick and suffocating, the raw malevolence seeping into the air.
I locked my gaze on the flame, willing it to cut through whatever was binding him, to take that darkness and throw it right back at whatever was hurting him.
I kept whispering, kept believing, even though part of me was terrified. I thought of him, my voice trembling with the weight of it, and I pushed everything I had into those words, feeling a pulse of heat slide up my arms and legs, crawling under my skin like a live wire.
I could hear it then, distant screams, muffled, filled with pain and fury and coming from behind a wall.
They weren’t mine or his. It was like being plunged into a well of suffering, the sound clawing at my mind, threatening to drown me in their agony.
But I held my ground, clinging to the only thing I knew: I had to believe. I had to hold on.
The power surged up from deep within me, slamming into me like a wave, and for a second, I felt weightless, like I was caught between two worlds.
Heat flared from my core, spreading through me until I thought I’d burn from the inside out, and then…
nothing. A violent, gut-wrenching silence.
The flame flared one last time, and the power hit like a freight train.
Hot, raw, and alive. My body lifted, slammed backward, and I hit the floor with a cry, the air knocked clean out of my lungs.
My head spun as I tried to regain my balance, feeling bruises bloom under my skin.
I looked up and saw Peter across the room, sprawled on the floor, breathing but still.
He looked like he’d been pulled out of a nightmare, his chest rising and falling with the jagged breaths of someone who’d just clawed his way back from the edge.
When I opened my eyes, the candle had gone cold. The air was thick with silence and both Peter and I looked like we’d just come out alive from a burning inferno.
I watched him pace past the window, his words barely audible.
“We’ll be there soon. I need to figure this shit out.”
I wanted to tell him what had truly happened.
Tell him that I’d felt it too, that surge of something so raw it could’ve ripped us both apart.
But I’d kept my mouth shut, swallowing back the truth.
I didn’t even know what had happened, or what kind of power I’d tapped into, and I wasn’t ready to admit that, not to him and definitely not to myself.
For now, I’d just let him think that he fought his way back. Until I got a grasp on the connection I just made and figured out what the hell I just dragged myself into.