Alex dreamed of blood and fire. Unconsciousness should have been an escape, but hell followed her even there.

  She was walking through the ruins, limping. She was vaguely aware that it was just a dream, though it felt painfully real. She noticed the kind of details the human mind usually overlooked in dreams—for example, that she wasn’t even in the same city where she had fallen unconscious.

  After a few steps, the scenery shifted from city to city, country to country. Everywhere she went, there was nothing but blood and fire. Well, why was she surprised? She was acting as if it hadn’t been like that from the very beginning.

  Alex woke with a jolt, like someone breaking the surface after almost drowning. The light, the colors, the air. Everything hit her like a punch to the stomach, a sudden shock that left her feeling more unsteady than the nightmare, which was already fading at the edges of her memory.

  She was alive. Alive, though not exactly well. And, of course, she wasn’t in that damned city—the ruin filled with corpses—because otherwise, she would have been just another body before she had time to open her eyes again.

  She had no idea where she was, but it wasn’t hard to guess. She must have been picked up and brought back to one of the Watchtower’s bases. The healing mages must have treated her like some kind of heroine.

  But what had she done? She’d fulfilled her mission, hadn’t she? Defeated the monster? Cut off the serpent’s head? But it had been too late to save anything she cared about. Not Daniela, nor the billions of people who had died horrible deaths, even before she set foot in the castle.

  The massacre had already been unimaginable. She didn’t feel like a hero, didn’t even feel like a victor. Above all, she felt empty. Just empty.

  Alex closed her eyes and took a deep breath. After a moment, she opened them suddenly, sensing another presence in the room.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  Before the person could say something foolish, Alex noticed the uniform. It was a healing mage. The woman was a redhead, but what stood out most were her violet eyes. Even in her part of the world, that wasn’t something you saw often.

  “You’re in the Watchtower. Not just any base, but the Watchtower itself,” she said, as if reading Alex’s mind.

  Alex nodded. Well, it didn’t really matter where she was. One place was the same as another.

  She remembered the explosion, the moment Daniela disappeared forever. She barely recalled landing the final blow on Dracula. That simply wasn’t what mattered.

  “How long…?” she tried to ask, How long have I been here?

  The last words got caught in her throat. She had a coughing fit, feeling weaker than ever before in her life.

  Of course, the mage understood perfectly.

  “Three days,” she answered bluntly, without sugarcoating anything.

  Good. That was better. Because the answer to her next question would undoubtedly be worse.

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  “What’s the situation?”

  “I don’t know if I should…”

  Predictable, Alex thought.

  “Just tell me. That’s an order. Whatever your name is.”

  “Bad.” She summed it up in one word. "Terribly bad. Now that the masquerade is gone, everything’s chaos. Many countries have declared martial law, trying to find ways to detect supernatural beings, to drag them out of the shadows and crush them before it’s too late. Before another tragedy like this can happen again. But it already has. The Red Cross caused a nuclear bomb to be dropped on New York. Rumors say they’ve started mutating with the radioactive energy."

  For a moment, Alex, disoriented and not fully awake, wondered how on earth the Red Cross could have been involved in that. But, of course, it wasn’t the charity organization. It was the vampire sect, one of the few organized groups of that damned plague of a species still standing as a front.

  A rather stupid name, but they hadn’t exactly had a choice, branding a red cross onto their chests.

  “Great,” Alex said finally. “I’m not sure I want to hear the rest.”

  “I understand,” the nurse said slowly after a moment. “You and your comrades sacrificed so much to stop Dracula, but in the end, the worst came after. We wasted that precious opportunity. All of humanity.”

  Alex sighed.

  “You look like you want to ask me something. Go ahead.”

  The healing mage bit her lower lip.

  “Is it true? Did you… did you kill Dracula?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I killed him; maybe I just put him to sleep. Either way, it’ll be a long time before he’s a problem again.”

  She could have lied to her, but Alex couldn’t muster enough sympathy to care about the woman’s reaction. The way her shoulders sagged, the faint hope on her face extinguished.

  No, there was no reason for her to care. No reason to keep fighting for strangers, giving everything for a life that no one would ever thank her for. A mission that couldn’t end. A goal without reward. That wasn’t anything more than a chimera pursued by fools.

  And yet…

  “What are you going to do now?” the woman asked. “You’re not going to give up, are you?”

  Why the hell do you care? she thought. That was her first instinct, but in the end, she didn’t voice it.

  “Fight, of course.”

  Alex stood up, using the nightstand for support. It took some effort, like everything in life, but she did it. She truly did. Standing included.

  She was weakened, but far from out of the fight. She reminded herself of kneeling on the rubble, reaching toward the horizon, toward the fading light of the sun.

  “I’ll fight until it’s just me and the monsters left standing on the ruins of the world if I have to.”

  Because she’d sworn it: to be a tireless warrior who held back the darkness.

  And because this was the life Daniela had saved, sacrificing everything.

  THE END