Chapter Two: The Shadow of Betrayal

"Daemon!"

An echoing pound came at the door. The inhabitant of the room groaned, turning his back against the huge oak doors and using one of his pillows to cover his head to block out the noise.

"Daemon!!!" the voice behind the door called again, more impatiently this time. The pounding of the door continued. "Brother!! Come on! Wake up! We've got to go to school!"

"I don't want to..." Daemon mumbled back underneath his pillows and blankets, though he doubted that his sister could hear him. "God damn, Annie, let me sleep..."

After a few minutes, the pounding stopped. For a moment, the teenager had hoped that his younger twin sister had given up and he tried to fall back to sleep. But then he heard the lock on his door twist open. Daemon mentally cursed to himself that he had forgotten to place a seal on the lock. In a normal household, one simple lock on the doorknob was sufficient enough to block out any outside interference from your room.

However, in the Hellsing family, locking the door just wasn't enough. Especially when you had some family who could literally poke through the wall or use telepathy like you.

His sister's footsteps lightly echoed on the wooden floor. They headed towards him, his bed in the middle of the extravagantly large bedroom. The young man contemplated underneath the mass of pillows and blankets what to do. The psychic waves his sister was sending him were not good. His sister was mad.

"Bro--the---r" her voice addressed him testily.

He could hear that she was clicking her tongue, one foot lightly tapping the ground. Underneath the covers, he could just imagine her staring down at him with the piercing cold eyes they inherited from their mother, hands on her hips.

Yep, she's pissed, he thought.

With a resignated sigh, Daemon stuck out his hand from the blankets that amassed on top of him.

"Give me five minutes, Anastasia, okay?"

Anastasia Victoria Hellsing stared at her brother's hand, her lips pursed in concentration. She wasn't sure if he meant to give him five more minutes of sleep before getting ready or give five minutes to get dressed. Staring at his hand wasn't going to help her any.

"....Fine," she finally said to the hand. "But it's 6:15 already. Grandfather's taken Sophie to school already, Auntie Seras and Uncle Max went to bed, and Mum's pretty pissed off that you're not awake yet because our breakfast is getting cold."

"Okay, okay," the hand shooed her away. "I'll be down in five." The hand turned, palm facing upward. "Just hand me the serum, will you?"

Anastasia stared at his hand again and then looked around the room. There was no black box, where the serum was usually inside, in sight.

"...Where is it?" she asked.

The hand pointed left. "It should be on my desk. Underneath the acceptance papers."

His sister began to walk towards the steel desk, carefully avoiding the clutter that covered his floor.

"Mum's going to be pissed when she goes into your room," she muttered, reaching her destination without incident and began sifting through his equally cluttered desk top.

The hand in bed waved behind her. "She isn't going to know it's this messy."

"That's true..."

Her brother had the unusual knack to make his room spotless in a matter of minutes whenever he sensed their mother approaching the room. She managed to find the box underneath a pile of history notes that were no longer useful.

"Here!" She tossed the box at the lump on the bed.

Unbeknownst to her, the object hit Daemon square in the chest -- the area that was least cushioned by his blanket and pillow barrier. He cringed in pain as the edge of the metal box hit him in the sternum.

"Ow."

"Serves you right, idiot," Anastasia said as she walked towards the door to leave. "And hurry up and get downstairs. I'm hungry!"

The oak doors of his room slammed shut, and after hearing her footsteps fade away did Daemon finally emerge from the blankets. The reason why he stayed underneath the covers was because he didn't want his sister to see how sickly he looked every time he woke up in the morning. Although she knew what everyone in the family (and some close friends in the Hellsing organization) knew why he had to take a shot of blood serum every day, twice a day, he felt embarrassed to look so weak when he was fairly healthy.

Daemon quietly opened the box and stared back at the syringe and vial of blood inside. Red. He hated that color. The color of blood looked too much like his eyes, eyes that were supposed to be light blue like his sisters' but because of a recessive gene he inherited that made him crave for blood they instead were crimson red. He despised this craving, this thirst for blood that made him look so sick every morning. He may be half vampire but that did not mean he wanted to drink blood as a staple diet like his father and his "aunt" and "uncle", who had no choice.

He stuck the syringe into the vial and held both objects upside down as the syringe and needle drew the red liquid to his usual amount of blood that suppressed the craving -- 5 c.c.s. He tossed the vial back into the box and took the leather roll that was in the box and stuck it in his mouth. He was following a routine he had done for the past eighteen years of his life, and possibly for the rest of his life until a cure was found.

After tying the elastic band around his bicep, he quickly found the artery and stuck the needle in. Without hesitation, he injected the serum and a surge of the familiar pain of unwanted blood seared through his body like fire. His teeth sank deep into the leather roll, his fangs piercing through the material as if it was nothing but a nuisance.

Another minute passed before the pain subsided and Daemon took out the syringe, tossing it and the needle into a nearby trash can. Then he meticulously pried the leather roll out of his mouth. When his fingers brushed against his fangs as they always had, he froze.

They were getting longer.

"Okay, he's up," Anastasia said as she entered the dining room.

The dining room, or also known as the eating area by the twins, was one of three areas that the Hellsing family frequented the most -- the other two being the briefing room and the library for missions.

The Hellsing twins had a peculiar hobby for food, Anastasia especially, and they would often use the dining room to "experiment" on various dishes. The room showed their abuse. The walls were covered with dark oak but if a guest would look closely, scattered around some of the walls were its "scars". Daemon and Anastasia as children often fought amongst one another as they "experimented" and as a result sometimes got out of hand. Both were unusually strong, a direct result of their odd bloodline, and would more than occasionally use physical and telepathic attacks against each other. Parts of the walls were replaced by new ones and lighter damages were covered by a variety of paintings which brightened up the room considerably. Anything else that did not need much repair or could not be covered by random objects were just left to be seen -- a memory that the twins always had to remember. There were also three doors: the entrance from the foyer, the door leading to the kitchen, and the sliding glass that led outside.

The sliding glass was the only door that filtered in sunlight and was often partially covered by its thick, maroon curtains; and it was where Alucard stood behind from, sipping a medical pouch of blood.

Anastasia, from her position near the entrance, glared at her father on the opposite side of the room. "He didn't set up a seal, so you could've woken him up yourself easily, Father."

Alucard glanced at his beautiful raven-haired, blue-eyed daughter before grinning.

"It's more fun if you do it."

"Ha ha ha, very funny," Anastasia retorted, her voice dripped with sarcasm. "Are you really five hundred something years old or are you fifteen?"

Alucard stopped drinking, acting as if he had been wounded. "It pains your father to hear his own daughter say that, Annie. Your constant sarcasm will send me to my grave."

Anastasia just looked at him. "Aren't you already dead?"

A question like that was unheard of in a normal family, but it was a common joke among the Hellsing children.

Alucard simply shrugged, "Hmm...that's true."

Anastasia finally looked away from her father to notice the great assortment of dishes on the dining table that sat along the middle of the room. The table, like the walls, were of dark oak and capable of seating twenty people. The food looked like it was enough to feed more than twenty. Aesthetic-wise, it looked like a chef's artistic nightmare.

"...Did...Mum make breakfast?" came the half-vampire's hesitant question.

Her father nodded, throwing away the pouch he finished. Without his signature coat, hat, and sunglasses, Alucard looked very much like a wise, thoughtful, and a bit conniving father. He took a seat at the head of the table, his smile getting wider as his daughter's facial expression became more fearful.

"Your mother spent a great deal of time this morning to make all of this," he said. "And I assure you that she's gotten better."

"Really, Father?" came Daemon's voice behind Anastasia. She turned around to see her brother in their high school uniform, leaning against the doorway in bored fashion.

"That was fast," Anastasia remarked, eyeing her twin's sense of dress code. Warning bells immediately rang in her head that the way he looked now was going against many rules of dress code. Again.

"Well, why don't you sit and try, my sleepyhead son?" Alucard offered with a smile.

"Bah, whatever."

Daemon casually sauntered over to the middle of the room, pulling out a random chair and took his seat. It was clear to both father and sister that the immediate heir to the Hellsing organization was still very tired. Letting out an inward sigh, Anastasia followed her brother and took a seat across from him, waiting for a better moment to nag him about violating the school's dress code. Alucard continued to watch them with an amused look on his face.

Daemon randomly grabbed a piece of pastry, slightly deformed, and took a bite. Anastasia did the same, but instead of eating the burnt fruit tart, she set it down on her plate and observed her brother to see if he would have any bad reaction. She, unfortunately no matter how much she loved food, did not have an iron cast stomach like her older twin brother did, so she didn't want to risk her health if anything was wrong.

A minute passed before Alucard asked, "So?"

"Hm...pretty good," came his son's muffled response as he took his fork and began to take some more random food items from the other dishes in front of him. He looked at his sister. "You can eat them, Annie."

Anastasia gingerly poked at the tart, replying, "You know, the dean's going to be angry at you again if you go like that." Mustering up the courage, she took a bite at her fruit tart and was surprised by its delicious taste despite how horrible and deformed it look.

"Well, he can just kiss my ass," Daemon said and swallowed his food. "It's not going to kill the old man, especially if it will be the last time he'll see me."

Anastasia frowned. Bad timing again. "My, you're awfully Mr. Sunshine today."

"We just finished a problem a few hours ago," Alucard explained to her. "Daemon has only had two hours of sleep, Annie."

"So that's why you told me to wake him up," she murmured. "What problem? How come I wasn't informed?"

"You're as computer literate as a plant, Annie," Daemon told her, continuing to eat. "Just a simple hack that I had to cut off, that's all. Nothing for you to help out on."

"You were on that for quite a while, though," Alucard remarked.

Daemon swallowed, finally losing his temper from a combination of lack of sleep and newly injected serum. "Because that bastard was a bitch to trace! Knocking him off line was easy, but locating his position was easier said than done. And why the hell is SPAWN denying the fact that the hacker was theirs in the first place? What the hell are they planning to do??"

"I'm not a plant! I can at least type and turn the thing on and off!" Anastasia exclaimed. "And who is SPAWN?"

"Scientists in the Production of Asyphalating Weapons and Nuclei," her mother's voice answered as she entered from the kitchen. Integra's platinum blond hair was tied back and held up by a clip and over her white blouse and navy blue slacks was a white apron.

"Scientists in the Production of Asyphalating Weapons and Nuclei?" Anastasia repeated in confusion. Is asyphalating even a word? "What the..."

"They're a bunch of psychos who --" Daemon began.

"Daemon," their mother cut him off. Daemon looked at her and sighed, gesturing that she explain. Integra looked back at Anastasia. "They're an independent group of scientists who are researching for different ways of creating weapons and are researching the genome project." She paused to let the information sink in. "King Charles recently put the organization under our care because they had been attacked by intruders a few weeks ago."

Anastasia slowly nodded as the information began to comprehend in her mind. Then another warning signal dawned on her.

"Why is an independent organization, no matter how large or small, under our protection? Isn't that endangering our status to the world if anything is leaked out? And...why wasn't I notified of this organization?"

Her parents glanced at one another and at Daemon, who opted to look angrily out the sliding glass, and then back at Anastasia.

"They...they've been asking for you to help them."

Author's Notes: Ah, sorry for being so late on the update. My second year in college is coming to a close, which also means that many projects were due this month and the month previous, giving me less time to actually write. But...updating late is better than not updating at all, isn't it?

Some notes that I have to add. As you can tell, yes, I'm going back in time with this chapter. Six years from the first chapter to be exact. Which is why Daemon is 18 years old and not 24, why he's a bit different than the first chapter, and why this sounds so...."family" like. This is probably going to last about two more chapters. The reason why I'm doing this? You'll see.

Another note is the 5 c.c.s. part. Sometimes liquid medication comes in c.c.s. instead of mililiters (mml) and cups. It's another medical term, to put it simply, for liquid medication or injections. I learned that from my brother and going to the vet for my cat ^^.

Anyway, til next chapter! (And hopefully it'll come out sooner, I really do apologize for that).