Chapter 19: Seeking the Assailant of Doom?

“You’re saying that Lina was your first girlfriend?” Lina asked Helsing.

“Yes,” Helsing replied. He adjusted his glasses as he continued to review the maps on his computer. “I would even go further to say that you resemble her.”

Lina looked around the lab and wine cellar. How many hours had it been? She lost track of time, but the discarded dishes at the end of the table reminded her that she had been well-fed. Instead, she remained intrigued with the man’s story.

“How so?” she asked him.

“Both of you have the same eyes and same colored hair. If I had a chance, I would like to learn more about your family past.”

“You think I might be related to her?”

“It’s possible, but even then, it won’t hold too much relevancy until this global event is resolved.”

Lina put her hands on her knees. “She must have been pretty special to you...”

“Which are you referring to?”

“Both ... Lina and Laura.”

“Lina was what you would call a crush. Childhood love being what it always is, nothing more.”

“I remember my first boyfriend. He was quite the romantic. But we were both so young. But I want to know more about Laura. You sounded so happy with her.”

He gave the hint of a smile on his face as he zeroed in on a map of Romania. “You want to know what happened at the end?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“Usually, individuals only want to know the ending when it’s at its peak, not when it truly ends for the storyteller that lived through it.”

“But what about the World Wars? And so forth?”

“I will make it simple for you. We avoided conflict, and I kept her safe. However, Lilith was partially correct. Mortals wither and die. It is a fact and nothing more. Laura remained my wife till she passed away in 1959. I gave the estate to her cousin and moved on.”

“It must be sad to outlive those that live so short.”

“Yes..., but it is the way of things. I can promise that Laura died peacefully in her sleep, but I won’t go any further than that.”

“I’m happy that you were happy.”

“Hmm...,” he nodded his head. Even if he was calm, the concept of the memory seemed to keep him at ease.

“It doesn’t look like things improved with your mother.”

“Do not look at the events that happened with Carmilla as the sole example of why things are as they are now. However...” He stopped talking and looked at the map.

“What?” she asked.

He put his gloved hand to his chin. “The discussion has had me thinking of things ... analyzing events that seemed obscure at first.”

“About ... Laura? Or Carmilla?”

“Carmilla...,” he paused as he thought about it more and more. “We never found her again after I fought her. She truly fell into hiding. While I believe she may have played a part in the events we’re going through now, I’ve never been able to figure out how. Anything past this point is just speculation. However,...”

He paused again as he refined his search. “There...” He typed up his search on various records. Helsing adjusted his glasses. “I’ve been looking into large-scale thefts involving missing blood but found nothing unusual. However, I’ve been looking at it incorrectly. If somebody was stealing blood, they were doing it quite discreetly. Humans started storing blood donations at blood banks only in the last eighty years. Fifteen years ago. I have a number of minor reports in various European medical hospitals. If I were to steal blood without anyone knowing it, it would be done in small increments. No doubt, if Carmilla were still alive and hiding, she would be far more careful not to attract the attention from us. Yes...”

“What does that mean?” Lina asked.

“I have over five small missing reports on record from five different hospitals in Romania, Poland, and Germany. Most are misplaced or marked as missing blood plasma. The events were considered so minor that no investigations were launched to find them. However, all of them occurred within thirty days. This would be similar to...”

“What?”

“Looking up events that occurred in 1872 ... trying to cross events that occurred at the time of the outbreak.” He paused as he typed up. “Assassinations, no ... natural events, yes. Cosmic events. There, the Carrington Event.”

“Carring ... ton?” Lina could see that Helsing was onto something.

“It’s a powerful solar flare that struck Earth in 1859. It was so great that it knocked out some of the telegraph stations. Another massive solar flare was reported ... in 1872 with a storm that might have been greater than 1859. Now, cross-referencing it to 2002 to 2011. The two biggest ones that I can see are an X9 that struck in December 2006 and another in... 2011, an X6.9.” Helsing turned to look at Lina. “Is it possible that Carmilla’s actions relate to solar flare activity?”

“2011? It’s the year of the outbreak.”

“Hmmm...”

Helsing stood out of his chair and began to pace the room, considering it. “There are no known abilities that reflect around solar flares, nothing that I or the Coalition of Deities knows about. With the exception of one.”

The doctor pulled out his crystal disk from his coat and slapped it onto the table. He held his hand over and said one word: “Lilith.”

Lina watched as a face began to magically appear from the disk. It was a projected image of Lilith. She looked in the direction of Helsing, where a two-way communication was established.

“Lilith,” Helsing asked her. “What is your report at the tomb?”

The woman seemed somewhat distraught. “We were fixing on returning in a few minutes. He’s ... not here,” she replied.

“You can confirm that Dracula’s body is not there?”

“I know where he’s buried here. It’s ... a false body.”

“It’s exactly what I thought. Return here. I have the next set of operations planned out.”

“Right...,” Lilith said. She left the projection, and the image ended abruptly. The man grabbed the disk and put it back into his coat. Lina gave a surprised look on her face.

“It’s what you thought it was,” Lina commented.

“I will need to contact the Greater Ones and notify them of everything. Follow me upstairs...”

“I don’t understand it!” Lilith exclaimed as she paced back and forth in the temple’s small main hall. Her hands were held out in frustration, and the hint of anger was on her face. “He’s dead. He’s supposed to be dead. I remember walking by his casket and seeing him, in the flesh, buried in his regalia. I remember it all!”

The other mythics were gathered in the main hall. Both Viktor and Moswen nodded their heads at what they had seen. Theo and Aritaaku looked at each other as they comprehended everything they were hearing. Lina sat down by the stairwell wall, resting her feet as she listened to the others speak. Lilith was debriefing what she had seen. There was also a projection in the room coming from one of the walls. A portal that showed that the Egyptian God Set was observing the conversation while remaining quiet.

“But, what does this really mean?” Theo asked. “Dracula was never buried at his tomb?”

“Correct,” Helsing commented.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Lilith had her hands to her face in disbelief. “I saw him dead. It ... he’s dead.”

“Perhaps that is exactly what he wanted you to think. Remember, Satan used you, and it was quite possible he made agreements with Dracula behind your back.”

There was a pause as Lilith really thought about it. Lina could see the frustration, the woman’s blood boiling at the very concept.

“I want to go down to that hell hole of a forge!” Lilith yelled. “Go and rip the devil’s heart out and shove it down his throat!”

“It’s what we should have always done,” Aritaaku added.

Theo looked away, almost as if she agreed with her friend. The others gave a strange look at the hare goddess.

“What?” the goddess of light replied. “You know that Lilith and I are right on this. Satan is evil, and yet we leave him to forge our weapons. Meanwhile, he plots and schemes as he hammers away. Theo, tell them...”

The minotaur woman shook her head. “No ... I’m not getting into this argument.”

“It’s irrelevant,” Helsing calmly said, waving his hand. “Satan is guarded and watched by us. Lilith, I believe that Dracula had his body moved to another site for reasons we don’t know. However, I think he may be the one responsible for everything that happened, as Galanthis implied. I want you to describe to me the wounds on his corpse.”

“He was stabbed in the back ... killed by a Turkish assassin,” Lilith explained. “It was always impossible. He was a vampire and yet some human and a magic dagger...” She paused as she continued to think about it.

“You don’t want it to make sense,” her son countered. “This happened when you were present with him.” Helsing gestured with his hand. “I believe he had exterior motives ... actions that didn’t need your expertise anymore.”

“No!” Lilith looked firmly at Helsing. “I was close to him. Vlad almost considered me as a sister. If he were scheming something ... planning something, he would have told me about it.”

“But how can Dracula be revived?” Theo asked, leaning onto the table. “Even our best healers can’t restore life to a corpse that’s been dead for hundreds of years, and that’s assuming he didn’t fall into some deep sleep.”

“It’s the truth,” Set spoke through the portal, almost silencing the conversation. “However, there are always ways to restore life even long after death.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“I doubt that it is,” Viktor countered.

“Very specific actions have to be met,” Helsing remarked. “Lilith, explain how you made a vampire.”

Lilith took a deep breath. “It requires the person to die.”

“What?” Moswen asked.

The winged woman gripped her hands. “It was a ritual. The person would have to be dead. They would be planted into a casket and buried. Then, sacrificed blood would be poured and drenched onto the corpse. Afterwards, I would state a ballad. Some would call it an incantation, where we would wait for three days.” She shook her head. “I thought it was nonsense at first, but it worked. The body was transformed.”

“Whose blood?” Helsing asked.

“Anyone, but I was told that the more variety of individuals, the more likelihood that it would work.”

“These were all directions given to you by the Devil?”

“Yes, of course. But, I didn’t know it was him at first.”

“Even if you committed to such actions,” Set explained. “It requires a lot of energy to succeed.”

“That,” Helsing pointed at Set. “Is the mystery that revolves around this. Somehow, Lilith was able to create vampires out of the dead. She was able to break a fundamental rule that not even you or the other Greater Ones could ever achieve.”

“Because we can’t combine our powers,” Theo added.

“Exactly. The energy required to restore life is so significant that not one of us can do it alone. A fire god can’t work with another fire god to amplify a set of flames, just to name an example. If we were able to do so, then our powers could be multiplied into a capability that could alter the cosmos. However, I have a theory that might have allowed Lilith to succeed ... something that she wasn’t aware of.”

Many of the others gave questioning looks at Helsing. The man waved his hand over the table, where it pulled up a series of charts, including a wave graph. One of the pictures showed that of the sun.

“In 1872, I stopped the known vampire, Carmilla, in the spree of the Ehrenhousen murders. At the time, Carmilla was collecting blood for what we thought at the time as just her saving food or possibly to create more vampires. But there was something else that happened shortly before I stopped her. An enormous solar flare struck the Earth at the time. The energy given off from one of these events is intense, perhaps even more than the Coalition could ever achieve. It’s enough to short out electrical equipment and even destroy electrical grids.”

“You think she was timing it?” Theo asked him.

“Yes,” Helsing looked at his mother. “Lilith, when did you perform these rituals?”

She seemed to think about it, but she shook her head. “I don’t remember when. But...” She continued to pause as she thought about it. “Now that I think about it. I remember being told that it was supposed to happen on certain days.”

“Were there any patterns to those days? Weekends, nighttime?”

Lilith shook her head. “I don’t remember. I just remember it having to occur at specific times, and it had to be one individual at a time.”

“So, there was no way you could make everyone a vampire all at once?”

Lilith shook her head again. “No.”

Helsing looked at everyone. “I now believe that Carmilla was using the blood for something else ... to revive Dracula. He staged his death, and his body was moved to a new location. Carmilla was going to conduct the ritual. And since Dracula had been dead for so long, it would require an enormous amount of energy.”

“She’s using the solar flares?” Theo asked.

“More like all the rituals use the solar flares. The sun constantly has CMEs, coronal mass ejections. During this time, these solar flares create a massive burst of energy and radiation. While most of them are sent hurdling into space, some of these flares will strike Earth. Essentially, it’s an idea that Doctor Frankenstein tested to a lesser degree.”

“Wait...,” Lina questioned, interrupting Helsing. All the mythics looked at her. “You mean that Doctor Frankenstein was real?”

“More like unsuccessful. He was on the right track and managed to create his monster to live several seconds before it perished. Not before it killed him in the process. But he wasn’t forgotten. It is theoretically possible to restore life, but sheer lightning bolts aren’t going to work. You need something greater. The energy generated from a solar flare, even the most minor ones, is almost that of billions of megatons of explosives. Earth becomes a giant lightning rod to channel this energy.”

“Damn,” Viktor remarked. “When our magics are reduced to scientific reasonings...”

“Wait a minute,” Theo questioned, pointing at the data. “According to this graph, the sun was actually at its calmest during the 1400s to 1600s. I’m looking at this ... Spörer Minimum where there was very little activity at all.”

“You’re correct,” Helsing waved his hand as a new set of wave data appeared. They formed jagged lines that regularly swept up and down like needles. “However, these are solar cycles. Around every 11 years, the sun will reach a peak of its highest activity. Even the calmer solar flares of the 15th century may be enough to restore life if the death was recent. However, events such as the Carrington Event and the solar flare of 1872 were much more powerful. It’s possible that Carmilla was going to use these more powerful flares to restore life to Dracula.”

“Hmmm...,” Set remarked. “An interesting... ‘hypothesis,’ as you would word it. According to the mortal’s data, the sun has been more and more active since the beginning of this century.”

“Yes, it’s only gotten stronger and serves as a valid threat to Earth’s satellite and electrical grid. A powerful enough strike can reduce the human race to the dark ages. It also works in Carmilla’s favor as well. Two of the most powerful strikes were in 2006 and 2011.”

“2011...,” Theo seemed to think about it.

“Hmmm...,” Set noted. “Lilith, what do you think?”

Lilith shrugged lightly. “I don’t have an explanation.” She looked at Helsing. “I’ve never heard of restoring life instead of just creating more vampires. I suppose it makes sense.”

“Have you determined whose blood was used as the catalyst for the outbreak?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Helsing said. “I’m unfamiliar with the taste, except that it is a vampire. What I do know is that after sampling the blood of the sister of the Impundulu brothers in Africa, I believe it wasn’t the Impundulu’s blood but another vampire. However, the samples of the mutagen in Liberia and now are two different vampires.”

“Hmmm...,” Lilith remarked. “I wish Ayida-Weddo were here to hear of this. It’s too bad that she’s busy helping her husband and Baron Samedi in saving the Haitians.”

“So that leaves us with the problem,” Theo explained. “We don’t know where Dracula’s body was moved to.”

“Yes,” Helsing continued. “Our entire mission to go back into the past is in jeopardy. We can stop the outbreak, but it will simply happen again. Dracula will find a new way to unleash an outbreak, and we will lose our opportunity now.”

“Shit,” Viktor cursed. The fox slapped the table and walked away. “So close and so far.”

“It might be easier than we think.” Helsing looked at the table and waved his hand over the crystal disk imager. The geographical map of Romania appeared, closing out the graphs of the sun. A series of red spots appeared throughout it, highlighting the names of locations. Helsing looked at Set.

“Now that we have found all the dispensaries,” the man continued. “We must find Dracula or Carmilla ... have them tell their locations of where they were a year ago so we can arrest them.”

“Where do we even start?”

“Most likely, the place of the most obvious, the Romanian castles.”

“Romania?” Lilith put her hands on her hips. “You think it would be that easy?”

“Dracula does not suspect that we are on to him. It was Galanthis who told us this. I trust her word. Vlad Tepes is a ruler, and he would go to the place he would be most comfortable to operate his home.”

“That’s a lot of dots to explore,” Viktor said.

“310, to be exact. Set, I want the Coalition of Deities to assemble all our teams, where we will thoroughly explore and most likely confront Dracula.”

“That would take up a large amount of our forces,” Set said. “And this is all going by your hunch that Dracula is supposed to be alive by the word of a rogue mythic.”

“We have to start somewhere. This is the best I can offer.”

“What about ... everywhere else?” Lina asked. “Without you guys to help, humanity is finished.”

“You already know that answer,” Helsing said, looking at her.

Lina could only see the glasses from Helsing. She knew he was right on this. The human race was sure to be doomed against the ogre menace. There was one last hurdle. Set, put his furry hand to his aardvark snout, contemplating it.

“I will pass this along to the others,” Set explained as he looked at Theo. “For now, Theo, Aritaaku, you will return to the great temple where Anubis and I will safeguard you. Theo, your importance to this mission falls upon you. Your life cannot be put into jeopardy in any way. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Theo replied.

“Helsing, this will be a unified move by the Coalition. I will give you the honor of choosing the first castle that you wish to explore as the other teams are sent elsewhere.”

Helsing pointed at the map. “I will go to the Poenari Castle near Brasov.”

“Poenari Castle, Vlad’s greatest fortress...,” Lilith said as she fidgeted with her fingers. “I should go with you...”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“It’s a place of underground tunnels and networks.”

“I know you do, but you’re too tied up in this.”

“I’m not!”

“Yes, you are,” Helsing remained calmly adamant. “If both Carmilla and Dracula are there, you will get caught up in it. They will use your emotions to...”

“Listen...” she interrupted him. “I should be there. I have to be there, especially if they are there. You can’t face them alone.”

“Helsing will not be alone,” Set explained. “Unfortunately, I can’t recommend both of you go to a dangerous location.”

Lilith showed anger as the other mythics watched Lilith point at Set. “I don’t care if you think it’s unsafe or not! I don’t care if you are more powerful than me or any of you! More and more ‘mythics’ are leaving this world and never coming back. Others leave this stupid unity that you call a Coalition. You want to see an example of Armageddon, then you’re looking at it. You want to save this Coalition, then you cut the head off the snake. If this is all true and Dracula is somehow alive, then I can tell you that he will be ready to face you ... all of you. He may not be more powerful than you, Set, but it won’t stop him from finding ways to do so.”