Chapter 5

     I wasn't in love with her yet. She had only been my mission for about five months. I still saw her as my mission. But there are three parts to a mission: insertion, gaining of trust, and then… Well, you can guess what the last part is. I had already inserted myself into her life. We had been "dating" for four months. Now I had to gain her trust. One of the tactics we are taught is to initiate a memory. The nostalgia attached to that memory will cause them to believe that you truly care about them and they will trust you.
     It was her grandfather's would-have-been-eightieth birthday. I took her to the House of Wolves and we looked at all of the plaques and even went to the underground level and read all of the Werewolf history books that had been saved from the Great Fire. It was when we came across Lindsey Ann Ballato-Way on our way out that I fell in love with Helena.
     "Oh, wow. I remember reading her plaque when I was a kid. She was the first one I read when I was a kid." Helena looked over the name again. "Her last name is the same as yours, Gerard. Any relation?" Her big, green eyes stared at me.
     She was my wife. "She was my great-grandmother. Her child was my grandmother," I lied. I was usually a good liar, but not when it came to Lyn-Z and Bandit. They were fighters until the end.
     "Are you okay?" Helena asked, looking right through me. She could tell I was lying.
     "It's just… I never knew her," I lied again. I knew her better than anyone could ever know another person. And she was gone.
     Helena stared at me as I tried to keep from crying. "I know it's something more than that." She held my hand and squeezed. "But you don't have to tell me." She kissed me on the cheek. "It'll be okay, okay?" She smiled at me.
     I looked down at her hand holding mine. I said, "Yeah. It will."
     We could hear people clamoring towards the street outside. It was just in time.
     "Is that the Black Parade?" Helena asked, her entire body tensing up as the sound of a snare drum could be heard from outside.
     "Yeah," I replied. "Come on, let's go."
     "I know what you're doing," Helena said as I started to make my way for the door. "Let's not. We should go to that play you've been wanting to see, the one that's been showing at the Grand Theater."
     She had been listening to me. All this time, I was trying to infiltrate her life and she ended up infiltrating mine.
     "Let's go," she said happily, taking me to the car. "I actually already got us tickets."
     I told her to go ahead of me and she gave my hand one last squeeze before departing from the House of Wolves. I stared at Lyn-Z, my wife.
     "I don't know if I have these feelings for this girl, Lyn. I know I shouldn't. But I you know that I'll always love you," I said quietly. I rubbed my thumb on the part of the plaque that said "married and had a child."
     "Tell Bandit I said hi," I told Lyn-Z. I wiped my eyes and walked out of the House of Wolves.
     At the play, Helena watched wholeheartedly. She gasped at all the appropriate parts. She laughed at all the things I did. She was so engrossed with the play, that she was surprised when there was a short break in the play.
     "Whoa. Why are they setting up something else?" she asked. She was always full of questions.
     "It's an interlude," I quietly explained. "The play is too long, so while the actors recover, those teenagers on stage will show their own short play."
     "I wonder what their skit is about," Helena wondered aloud.
     We soon found out. It was a short skit about Vampires and Vampire Hunters. I watched uncomfortably as the teenagers set up a fake gallows on the stage.
     Three teenagers with fake fangs stood on boxes with nooses around their neck. One teenager was dressed as a priest and there were a few more teenagers dressed like an angry mob from the days of Frankenstein. And there was one more teenager, dressed like a modern-day teenager except with a gun and a syringe of what I was hoping was fake serum.
     The priest had the first line. "For acts against the good people of this town, we ask God to punish these three heathen creatures. Heaven help us and heaven help them." Cries of approval came from the mob.
     "No!" the modern teenager said. "These creatures have killed us out of revenge. So now we will kill them out of revenge."
     The priest looked at the teenager, pretending to be confused. "And what do you suggest, sir?"
     "We do exactly what you are doing. Hang 'em high, father. We will be doing far worse centuries from now," the teenager explained. He turned to the mob, "Three cheers for sweet revenge! We want blood!"
     "Blood!" shouted the mob. One of the fake-Vampire teenagers had the box pulled out from under them.
     "Blood!" they repeated. Another Vampire was hung.
     "Blood!" All three Vampires were dead.
     And then all of the actors broke character. The three teens were let down from their noose and the teenagers all lined up at the front of the stage.
     "We did not mean to offend anyone today," the priest said. "This skit was a take on the war from our point of view."
     "We are treating Vampires the same way we treated witches back in 1692," said one of the Vampires.
     "We are sick of the way that Hunters treat Vampires," said one member of the angry mob. "It's inhumane and barbaric."
     "Take a stand with us today and go against the serum that causes pain and suffering to the innocent," said the Hunter, motioning to his syringe. "After the play, there will be a petition in the lobby and we encourage you to sign it."
     Those teenagers never did get their way, if that wasn't already abundantly clear. I didn't sign the petition because I knew those kids were dead before they got off the stage. And I knew that Helena wouldn't sign it. But she did say a polite, "No, thank you" when the Hunter teenager offered the petition to her. Those teenagers were found hanged a few weeks after the play stopped running at the Grand Theater. The newspapers said they were part of a suicide cult, but Helena and I looked at it and agreed that some dangerous Hunters must have gotten a hold of them and silenced them for good.
     The night of the play, Helena and I were sleeping in her bed on Cemetery Drive. It must have been two in the morning, because I was starting to nod off.
     "Hey, Gerard?" Helena asked, her head on my chest and her hand on my stomach.
     "Yes, love?" I replied. By this point, I was already in love with her.
     "I had a lot of fun today," she said quietly.
     "I did, too," I said, trying to stay awake. "What was your favorite part of the play?"
     "Oh," Helena said like she was caught off guard by the question. "I liked the final scene. Where the two demolition lovers go out and bury the bodies out in the desert."
     "Oh, yeah. The desert song was good," I said, not all the way conscious. But Helena must have been awake, because what she said next must've been keeping her that way.
     "Gerard, I never told you what I do for a living," she blurted out. She took her head off of my chest and had her arm propped on the bed as she looked down at me. "Gerard, I'm a Hunter." She bit her lip and her eyebrows scrunched up in worry. "Please say something."
     "Helena, it doesn't matter," I said to her, still not entirely there. But what I said next was the truth. "I love you, and it doesn't matter if you're a Hunter."
     That statement completely caught her off guard. "You… you love me?" she asked in disbelief.
     "Yeah. Of course I do. Don't you love me?" I asked her, about ready to pass out.
     She looked down at me with her big, beautiful, green eyes. The corner of her mouth started to pull up and so did the other one. "Yeah," she said, with a small laugh. "I do love you."
     She leaned down and kissed me and I smiled and said, "I'm glad. And your lips taste good." Yeah. At that point, I wasn't really aware of what was coming out of my mouth. I'm just lucky I never told her that I'm a Vampire. But I do remember when she did find out. The day I found out she was a Hunter, it was one of the best days of her life. The day she found out I was a Vampire, it was one of the worst days of mine.

     It was just another day. I woke up in Helena's bed and she was doing her make up in the mirror. How could I have made such a bone head move? Why did I think that it would be okay to do that? I couldn't tell you now and I probably can never tell you why I decided to start kissing Helena while she was looking in the mirror.
     Her mirror was a small mirror, meant for only her to look in. That would explain why it hadn't given me troubles before. When I started kissing her from behind, she was surprised.
     "Oh. Wow, I didn't see you in the mirror, there, Gerard." I should've stopped kissing her. I should've just stopped myself right then and there and walked away. I shouldn't have ever fallen in love with her.
     I kissed her some more and made my way in front of her, kissing her in front of the mirror.
     She laughed, kissing me back. "Honey, this mirror isn't big enough for the two of us. I have to fix my hair." She kissed me, so sweet and innocent. Why didn't I just leave her to put on her make up?
     Just as it was starting to get good, Helena broke away from me and smiled at me, and in the process, she saw her mirror. She saw me in front of her, between her and the mirror. But as she looked past me, the only thing she saw in the mirror was herself. And I could see it in her face, the exact moment when she saw that it was only her in the mirror. Her face changed into a face of complete horror. All I could think was, "Oh, fuck."
     "You're a Vampire," she said breathlessly, staring at the mirror, at herself all alone. Then she looked back at me. "You're a Vampire!" she shouted. She pointed her hair brush at me. "I trusted you! I trusted you and it turns out you're a Vampire spy. You were gonna kill me."
     "Helena, I—" I tried to explain, my arms out reaching for her. There it was. My life was like a perfect diamond. And something stronger than it had broken it into a million little pieces in one blow.
     "No. You shut up!" she screamed at me, the hair brush still pointed at me like it was her red pistol. Gosh, it broke my heart. "I trusted you! I told you I loved you."
     "You still love me. And I still—" I tried again.
     "I don't love you!" she spat. It was like a huge knife had just cut me in half. "You've just been using me. How didn't I see this before?"
     "Helena, listen to me," I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. "I still love you. You used to be my mission, but now you're not. Run away with me, and we'll be okay—"
     I could see hot tears forming in her big, green eyes. "I'm not okay. I promise you that. You meant to hurt me from the moment you met me. Now all the Vampires will come looking for me and you and they'll kill us. You know that they'll kill us." The tears started falling down her face and they landed on the ground.
     "No," I said, shaking my head. "I'll get rid of your file. I'll say that I killed you by accident. It happens all the time. And no other Vampire will spy on you, you hear me?" I looked her straight in the eye. "Vampires will never hurt you, Helena. I won't let them."
     She was crying and shaking her head. "Gerard, leave. Just leave."
     "I won't leave, Helena—"
     "Get out!" she screamed, crying. I hated to leave her like this, but I took my hands off her and I watched as she crumpled to the ground. "Get out," she repeated quietly, sobbing.
     Seeing her like that made me want to cry with her, but knowing that I would probably never see her again made me want to cry even harder. But I did what she wanted. I Flew out of her house on Cemetery Drive without looking back.
     This might seem like the end of the story for me and Helena besides me sitting here watching her spend her last moments pouring out her life story. But it wasn't. She and I met again after that, very soon after that, in fact.
     It was about a month after Helena and I had a nasty split up. To clear my head, I went to New York and just stayed there, drowning my sorrows in blood, the Vampire's version of booze. I was just sitting on the curb, outside of a subway station. I was staring at the Manhattan skyline.
     I remembered how, so many years ago, I was on the ferry to my job in New York and all of a sudden I see the World Trade Center on fire. A plane had crashed into it and there was ash everywhere. It was all burning and everyone thought it was the end of the world because we were under terrorist attack. Nearly a century later, a couple burning buildings and a busted up plane seemed like nothing in comparison to what's happened since. Terrorists could go inject themselves with serum for all I cared.
     And there I was, with my flask of blood booze when an old man came out of the tunnel that lead to the subway and he saw me. That idiot decided to talk to me.
     "How do you like New York, young man?" I stared up at him with angry, blood-driven silence. And he just kept talking.
     "It's really beautiful, isn't it? I was barely a year old when 9/11 happened. Yeah, my parents told me all about it and how the country was united against terrorists." Then he sat down next to me and just sighed as he looked at the skyscrapers with me.
     "It's been almost a hundred years since that happened. And New York is still the same with its skylines and turnstiles. It's odd how this place used to be so full of life. And now, it looks the same it did nearly a hundred years ago." He looked up at the sky with a look of peace on his face. "Yeah, it sure is beautiful." He nodded and then turned to me.
     "What do you have in that flask, son?"
     I glared at this old man, so stupid and ignorant. The world had changed a lot since he was a baby, and I just had to get in his face about it.
     "It's AB positive," I said, extending my fangs. "It's my favorite. What do you have? You smell like an O negative."
    The old man almost stumbled backwards in fear as he got up and started running. His eyes were large as he stared at me. "V-V-V-Vampire!" he yelled as he started to run away.
     People just coming out of the subway stopped and stared in horror. I saw several of them reach into the trench coats for their serum-shooting guns. I was just waiting for them to shoot me. It's not like I had anything to live for anymore. Yeah, I had destroyed Helena's file and told the other Vampires I killed her and that I was taking vacation. But it didn't change the fact that I still loved her and couldn't ever be with her.
     "Everyone calm down. I'm a Hunter." I must've been going crazy. I was hearing Helena's voice.
     I turned around. I was seeing her, too, and she was pointing a red pistol at me. I was definitely crazy. But no, she was actually there. It turns out Helena thought it would be a good idea to go to New York, too. And as soon as she heard the old man call Vampire, she sprung into action, ready to kill again. But then she saw it was me. The two of us stood there, everyone staring at us and a cocked pistol between us, pointing at me. She stared at me.
     She blinked before she lowered her gun. I could hear at least a dozen more guns cock and aim directly at me.
     Still staring at me, she announced, "Like I said, everyone calm down. I know him. He's just a drunk that pretends to be a Vampire. Don't go on the word of an old, confused man."
     Everyone looked towards the old man staring at us in fear. There seemed to be a collective shrug and everyone went on their way.
     "Helena, you're here," I said, dumbfounded.
     "No shit, Sherlock," she replied, her voice full of spite. "Look, don't think this means anything between us. You didn't kill me, so I won't kill you. Now get out of here before I break that promise."
     "That's it?" I asked exasperatedly, my words probably slurring together. "We break up, and then we meet again and all you can say is 'Get out' again? That's all you can say?"
     Helena glared at me. "Fine. One more thing. Lay off the blood, Gerard." With that, she turned and walked away from me. And I wouldn't see her again until that day in the conference room… Wait a minute. Why is the conference door opening? Who is that? Is that…? No, it can't be. What the hell is Vlad doing back here?