The Van Helsing Legacy: We Shall Not Sleep [SAMPLE]

FIVE

The boy lay beside it.

A smudge of dried blood and paint dragged from the door to where he had collapsed, face-down on the cold floor. Beneath the paint, between the bloody splits in his skin, his previously-white body was a solid mass of bruises.

Hannibal's gut lurched. There was none of that morbid beauty left, only sadness. He hung back a moment, wary of a trick, but the limp form did not move. In the gloom, he was not sure it even breathed.

'Light,' he ordered.

Garner muttered angrily, but did not move. Fine.

He hobbled into the cell. Closer, he could barely see that the boy's sides moved almost imperceptibly in and out. His skin was bunched into gooseflesh where it was not stretched by swelling.

Hannibal lowered himself to his knees and pulled on the gauntlets. Pity could not be allowed to override common sense. Even a decapitated snake can still bite.

'Can you hear me?' he asked quietly.

The patient did not move.

Making sure there was no gap between the cuffs of the gauntlets and the sleeves of his cardigan, he rolled the boy onto his back. His face was green and blue and misshapen from his mad escape attempt. Evil was smarter than that. It was fear that made men foolish enough to take on a solid wall. The kind of fear that ate a man from within.

Hannibal understood why. The things he had called down into that room were more than he could bear to remember, and he had been expecting them. The boy had not been warned. Before he was a patient, he had been a prisoner, and one does not give that kind of prisoner time to plan his defence. But he was a sorcerer as well as a monster. Surely, he called on demons and devils regularly as he did his wicked work.

What had frightened him, then?

Was it being surrounded by evil he could not control?

Or having the evil wrenched out of him like a bad tooth? Had he changed enough to be driven mad by the very thought of his former self?

Hannibal clucked his tongue. That was absurdly optimistic. He had not known what to expect when he designed the experiment, but he had no illusions that it would be easy or painless.

He pulled the blanket from the cot and wrapped it firmly around the blotchy torso, pinning the arms in case the patient regained consciousness.

A bowl and a pitcher of water appeared, and a stack of bleached flannels.

'Green's gone into town,' Martin whispered. 'I've sent someone to find him. Not likely wise to send for another doctor in the meantime, though.'

Hannibal agreed. Another doctor would not understand why he was not allowed to touch the patient.

He wet a cloth and cleaned the crusted blood away from the boy's nose and lips. His nose looked broken, dark and swollen. The blood had flowed down his face to cover his chest. It caked his hair. He had done this to himself.

Hannibal's hands tightened. What if he had done more harm than good? What if the experiment itself was crueller than letting the monster exist as a victim of his rotten heritage? Was the murderer more vicious, or the one who inadvertently committed acts of torture?

Fixing this would be even more gruelling than spiritual warfare, he feared.

He lifted the boy against his knee. He was breathing through his mouth, and it fell further open as his head fell back, lips dry and parched. Hannibal took a clean cloth, soaked it, and squeezed two drops onto the boy's tongue. He waited. Two more. And two more. When choking began to become a risk, he massaged the boy's throat until he managed to trigger the swallowing reflex, and he began again.