Chương 13: Chapter 12 – It’s supposed to be awkward

My mother's emerald eyes shone with righteous wrath, same as pretty much every time we met. She marched straight up and leveled her glare at Ophelia.

"What are you doing with my son?" Ophelia giggled.

"What would you expect me to be doing with my boyfriend?" So, they knew each other. Fantastic. Then again, with my mother being a lifelong paladin of the Church, only having retired to have children, that shouldn't have been a surprise.

"Hey, Mom."

"And what are you doing here?" The glare swung at me. I knew this look. It had the good old I'm disappointed with you screaming behind the eyes. I had gotten it from her often, rarely without merit. I somehow always found a way to disappoint her.

"Getting initiated into the KSF. I'm here with my unit." That stopped her for a second. She knew I worked for Lucielle Legal, which to her was the organization founded and run by the antichrist herself. She wasn't necessarily wrong about that.

"Since when do you care about helping the world?"

"Now, Katherine, that's unfair," Ophelia said, the playfulness gone from her voice.

"You don't have to assume the worst straight off the bat. You'd give a complete stranger better than that. At least give him the benefit of doubt, if you must treat him worse than you would treat a stranger to begin with." I kept my face neutral, doing my best to not show how much this surprised me. People didn't take my side in arguments, like ever. Much less against my mother. Mother crossed her arms, visibly needing to recompose.

"He doesn't call me. He doesn't message me. Doesn't leave me so much as a sign that he's alive."

"Phones work both ways, Katherine." She rolled her eyes and pressed her hands together in front of her chest, as if in prayer.

"What is wrong with you, Peter? Why do you have to entangle yourself with one monster after another? Why can't you live even a fraction of a normal life? I pray for you every night. Every night, I ask God to bring you back to the light. And I'm starting to think you don't want to be saved." She walked away before I could answer. Ophelia leaned into me.

"Looks like we'll need something stronger than champagne." Yeah. I let her tow me to the drink tables. They had nothing stronger than champagne, so I emptied a few glasses in quick succession. She kept pace, though as far as I understood vampire biology, her stomach replacement was a black hole that disintegrated anything that wasn't blood, so that she could pretend to drink or to eat to fit among humans. I was working on glass number four when a man spoke beside me.

"A difficult night, I see." I glanced over. Jonathan Hellsing stood at my shoulder, looking exactly as he had when we met in El Salvador over a year ago. Silver-streaked hair, a heavy leather coat over a suit, and the expression of a man who'd seen too much and remembered all of it.

"Director Hellsing," I said, forcing out a smile.

"O'Connor." He didn't offer his hand.

"I was surprised to hear you'd joined up. I found myself pleasantly surprised, because even if your intentions might be dishonest, you will show up to the fight. I'll drink to that." He took a champagne glass, raised it in a small toast, and drained it. I stared at him, not sure what to do with any of that.

"And who is the lovely lady accompanying you?" he asked. Ophelia's mouth fell open.

"Ophelia," I said.

"My girlfriend."

"Delighted to make your acquaintance." He bowed slightly.

"Please, enjoy the party. You're both in excellent company." He turned on his heel and moved off into the crowd. She kept staring after him.

"Did he... not recognize me?" I swallowed the snort. He obviously recognized her. But he had enough experience to decide the best way to defuse a potential incident was to refuse to acknowledge one existed, and to treat her as a random plus-one. He also had the grace to pull it off smoothly. And I was not going to screw it up for him. I shrugged.

"I think he's terrible with faces."

"That's no bloody excuse. His entire organization was literally founded to try to deal with my mother. And I look a lot like her. And then there's my practically twin sister, who they've been trying to suppress for the past decade. And he's a lifelong vampire hunter himself. And I'm wearing a dress that would make a human look like a vampire. And I was introduced by my name. This is absurd." She also was written on the guest list with the full surname.

I did that to give them preparation time, which has proven to be used well.

"I'm sorry."

"That's inexcusable." She snatched two glasses of champagne and raised them to her lips. She bit her lip and bled into both glasses, and once the blood had mixed through the champagne, she drained them.

"When we arranged this, I wondered if I wouldn't cause a scene. I looked forward to all the ex-vampire hunters losing their shit because I just walked in. He has no right to not recognize me." A hand slipped over my shoulder. Another over Ophelia's. Lillith caught us from behind, leaning in between us with a vicious smirk. White suit, white tie, black shirt, tanned face youthful and pretty. Her usual look. Every family had a black sheep. This one was ours.

Adopted into the family, the only child that ever actually met our father, and also the inheritor of Lucifer's light, the de-facto leader of the Church, the largest of the secret societies, and the woman who caused the kaiju apocalypse. Intentionally. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. But right now, it was hunting season, and I was the trophy buck.

"It seems," Lillith said, "I've found the couple of the night."

"Let's not make this too awkward, sis," I said quietly.

"Oh no, I insist on maximum awkwardness." She gave me her best innocent smile, drawing her phone.

"I've got a mirrorless camera, so it's time for family pictures." She squeezed herself between us and took a selfie. Ophelia recomposed, and posed a bit for the next few selfies. I did too. Lillith then detached, and snapped like six different pictures of us, faster than I managed to protest. Ophelia sure bent nicely posing for them, though. Lillith checked the pictures.

"Perfect." She slipped back to us, showing us the pictures.

"You look perfect together." Ophelia looked perfect. I just happened to also be in the picture.

"Why are you at the initiation ceremony for the military organization made to combat the very kaiju apocalypse you've caused?"

"To uplift their morale, obviously." She chuckled.

"Nothing brings people to faith like an external threat. Look around the world. All the regional conflicts are gone. Christianity's up in fashion more than it was in the Middle Ages. This part of my plan is working out perfectly."

"What if the kaiju win?"

"Then the mankind never deserved to survive anyway." She turned a notch more serious.

"I will admit it has gotten slightly out of hand, as I expected an occasional kaiju here and there, not a worldwide assault from the oceans, but there's no point in crying over spilled milk." That was the part of the plan that didn't exactly pan out.

"Can you stop it?"

"No. But I will join the fight personally if it ever becomes critical." Which wasn't a guarantee of any results. About a year and a half ago, Lillith summoned to Earth one of the demon princesses, a goddess of demons, worshipped as Light Alexandra. The demon princess created the kaiju, seemingly somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But apparently, her production wildly overperformed what Lillith had expected her to be able to do.

Instead of getting to occasionally aurafarm by spectacularly destroying a rare kaiju, Lillith now had a worldwide threat on her hands.

"So," Lillith said.

"Does Cassandra know about you two? Because she's going to love seeing you two together." Ophelia jumped in her skin. I slightly froze.

"Lillith, dear, don't you have a speech to give?" Ophelia said.

"Or a self-flagellation session to attend?"

"Oh, please, Ophelia, you didn't expect to get away with this unnoticed, did you?" I set down my empty glass and slapped my face with my palm.

"Do you have to participate in the drama?"

"Yes, I very much do. This is going to be absolutely delicious. The outrage, the screaming, all of it. I'll have your phone tapped, so I can listen live when she calls you." I narrowed my eyes.

"Why do you expect drama?"

"Because Casey's love life sucks. She wants to smash eight times a day while her husband wants to save the world from kaiju. But for as long as Ophelia was single, it was fine, because her sister was doing worse than her. A couple of good pictures that suggest Ophelia has gotten laid are going to make her blood boil. It'll be awesome." She patted my shoulder.

"Anyway, don't let me keep you. For the record, Peter, I approve of your relationship with Ophelia." She withdrew into the crowd. I needed a better family. Ophelia pulled herself closer. I got the message, banished the thought, and kissed her. She made that one extra passionate. Then, mercifully, the ceremony itself started. It ran for four hours. Speeches, especially Lillith's twenty minutes sermon about fighting in God's name to save the mankind from the test He had placed upon it.

In a way, I loved the whole hypocrisy of it. Medals for the KSF's top performers of the past year. Then the swearing-in of the new recruits, over two hundred of us, and that was just the East Coast ceremony. The West Coast and the other continents held their own, so old Hellsing had our coast as his own theater. Through all of it, Ophelia sat straight-backed beside me, extra touchy, extra kissy, and playing the devoted girlfriend to absolute perfection.

If she was acting, she deserved the medal more than anyone on that stage. When the ceremony ended and the music started, she practically dragged me to the dance floor. I didn't dance. That turned out not to be an excuse. And while I couldn't dance well, I could dance for a very long time, courtesy of my endurance. With Ophelia keeping our clothes immaterial to each other, the dancing steadily devolved into her sliding all over me like an anaconda measuring the calf it planned to swallow. I didn't mind.

If anything, I was looking forward to being swallowed. We retreated to a balcony at a later hour. Ophelia leaned against the railing, looking over the ball. I leaned next to her.

"That was survivable," I said.

"It was magnificent." A grin split Ophelia's face.

"I expected it to be fun, and it exceeded all my expectations. Especially the company, both personal and general." I raised an eyebrow.

"General?"

"I don't go among regular humans often." She swept the ballroom with lazy gaze.

"See over there." She motioned with her hand over the area where Lillith and the other higher ups were.

"The girls are all prettily packaged pillow princesses, and the boys are poshed up sissies. All the wealth and power and access made them lazy and comfortable. And when they do get to a fight, they're hiding behind shields, and run when the shields start weakening. It's so unexciting it makes me want to cry." I snorted.

"Aren't you a prettily packaged pillow princess?"

"But of course I am, the laziest one of them all. That's how I know. Lazy recognizes lazy at the first glance. But over there…" She motioned her hand over the recruits section.

"Both the boys and the girls are tough enough to go fight kaiju they have no business fighting. Most of them will end up eaten and crushed, and they know that. All the sweat and blood and determination are so intoxicatingly exciting." She licked her lips. How ironic. I understood her, in a way. Five hundred years old meant she had grown up in a very different world and lived in it a long time. She probably liked that one a whole lot more. But the world changed anyways, irrespective of whether she liked it or not.

She snaked up on me, phasing through both our clothes, pressing her chest against mine, pulling herself up to have her face before mine.

"And then there's you. The devil's son who inherited nothing of the spirit, so he can't even form basic shields, but who also got everything of the body. Don't think I don't see all the scars and burns and old wounds that are mapped all over your skin. I do. And I love them." She kissed me, deeper this time. After it, we retreated to my car. The party started winding down, anyway.

"My place," she said the moment I got behind the wheel. I'd figured as much. I started driving.

"You know," she said, "this was actually a lot of fun. You attract all the right kinds of attention." I smiled.

"Yeah. I had fun too."

"We should do it again. There's a high-level Vatican Inquisition event coming up. Would you like to be my plus-one?" Well. Would I? Kallisto was busy digging to the Earth's core, and if she wasn't willing to come to this event, then she wasn't coming to any other. We weren't really in a relationship, anyway. And Ophelia seemed to genuinely enjoy my company. Or she faked it so well she slipped nothing in six hours. I smiled.

"Yes. I'd be delighted to." I drove to her place. The cow was ready to be swallowed by the anaconda.