Disclaimer: Carmilla the web series was created by Jordan Hall and Ellen Simpson, and is based on the novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Hellboy was created by Mike Mignola. This odd little blending of the two, however, was created by me. Here's hoping it works...

Author's Note: Since, as best I'm able to tell (at the time this chapter was completed), no actual fighting took place in Styria (so I honestly have no idea where Carmilla's coffin was supposed to have been buried, canonically... surprising me not at all, the showrunners again didn't think things all the way through), there will be some discrepancies between what happens in this chapter and the actual events of the war. Of course, since I don't think the Nazis ever summoned an infant demon to Earth in late 1944, we'd kind of already left those events behind. Still, I felt it best to acknowledge that and other, minor changes, should any history buffs be reading. Those minor issues (such as the availability of hand-held radio transceivers for servicemen) aside, I'll do my best to keep the combat grounded in reality, otherwise. (Vampires notwithstanding, of course. ;) )

December 27th, 1944

Styria, Austria

Something had changed.

She couldn't have said just what that something was, however. She'd been locked away in her prison under the earth for so long, she'd completely lost track of time. Even when she was awake, she drifted off into a catatonic stupor. The relentless monotony of her unchanging environment, the total lack of any sensory input, the almost total inability to move...

They'd started getting to her a while ago.

She sometimes wondered, in her more lucid moments, just how long she'd been entombed. Weeks? Months? Years? She'd tried keeping track, in the beginning, but that hadn't lasted long, especially given her need for sleep. Mother had never said how long she planned on leaving her 'daughter' imprisoned thusly, making her often wonder if she was ever coming back. Had she been forgotten? Left to rot away her eternity in the coffin? The blood that had filled it previously was gone, consumed in her seemingly pointless efforts to stay healthy and sane. How long had it been gone? She couldn't say for sure, but hunger had long ago begun gnawing at her insides, shredding her sanity, bringing with it entirely new problems.

The hungrier and weaker she got, the longer and more frequent her stupors became. There was only thing she was sure of: Elle was long since dead. She had to be. And oh, did that hurt to realize. Every time she forgot, then remembered, it felt like the first time, all over again.

She shouldn't think of Elle. She knew that. Remembering their last meeting only brought pain. But her mental discipline had worn down to the point where she couldn't help it. Once her love came to mind, it was never long before she saw those hate-filled eyes, heard the voice dripping venom as it called her a monster.

Was she? Was the voice right? She hadn't thought so, but... How many girls had she delivered to Mother, over the years? None of them were ever seen again, once she did, but that had never bothered her until Elle - and that was only because she wanted to keep Elle for herself. During the hunts - the feasts - that Mother took her on, how many had died? She hadn't cared then, either.

Oh, God... Elle had been right. She was a monster. Little wonder Mother had never come back for her; she deserved to be locked away forever.

As her mind drifted along in a self-recriminatory haze, a dim, almost forgotten memory surfaced.

She wasn't the only one of Mother's "children". In the early 1800s, Mother had turned a young French man named... Jacques? Jean-Pierre? It started with a 'J', she was pretty sure. She hadn't been there for it, but Mother had later commented that he hadn't turned out quite the way she'd hoped, so she'd had to make some "revisions". When she had met him, he hadn't seemed all that different than any of the others she'd known since her rebirth, so she hadn't thought anything of it at the time - she hadn't paid nearly enough attention to what Mother said and did over the years, and bitterly regretted that, now - but thinking back on it, the implication was that she'd somehow... manipulated him, how he thought and acted. She wanted to believe that Mother had done that to her, too... But couldn't, quite. It just seemed too much like an easy way out, like an excuse.

And even if Mother had altered her mind in such a fashion... So what? Whether she'd originally been cold and callous toward humans or not, whether she'd always been a monster or not... she was one now. She had been ever since her rebirth in 1698. Slightly over one hundred and seventy-four years between then and being buried... It wouldn't matter even if her bloodthirsty desires had been implanted within her; they were still there, one way or another.

Caught up in self-loathing, she almost didn't notice the walls of the coffin vibrating.

Again, she realized a short time later. That same sort of vibration was what had disturbed her before, too. As deeply as she'd been buried - to prevent anyone from accidentally uncovering her - there hadn't really been any outside stimulus since the dirt had been hitting the coffin lid, sealing her away. This had felt almost like... She strained, trying to fully awaken her mind for the first time in ages (possibly literally), and the term finally came to her:

An impact tremor.

But what could possibly be striking the earth hard enough for her to feel it as deep down as she was?

There was another tremor, this one actually shaking the coffin, bouncing her off the lid. As much as she might have appreciated the new sensations and break from the mind-crushing nothing she'd been enduring, she had no idea what was happening, and was growing alarmed.

Another, this time much closer, and she could actually hear an odd roaring sound. It almost sounded like canon fire, but... not. An explosion of some kind? She didn't know, and was becoming frightened as it continued, explosion after earth-shaking explosion. Was this some new kind of torture Mother had devised? It would certainly be in keeping the cruelty lurking within the woman (which she'd actually kind of enjoyed when it was aimed at someone else... God, she was horrid, she decided). How long was this-?

Her world was abruptly shattered as another series of explosions erupted, with the closest being almost directly above her coffin.

Private First Class Lawrence "Hutch" Hutchinson surveyed the charred, smoking Austrian countryside. The B-17 boys had certainly done a number on the place, he had to admit. Once pristine forests had been reduced to kindling in many places, fields and plains had massive holes blasted in them, and the nearby railway - their actual target - had been wrecked.

Still, as awe-inspiring - or, alternately, horrifying, depending on one's mood - as the destruction might be, he couldn't afford to get distracted. He and three other servicemen from the 8th Infantry Division's Reconnaissance Troop had been assigned to this particular part of the battlefield to identify any possible unexploded ordinance or Nazi survivors from the train that had been making passing through, packed with supplies that Uncle Sam was determined not to let the Germans have. They'd spread out to cover more ground, keeping in constant contact with each other and their base via the new hand-held two-way radios they'd just received last month. (They weren't as powerful as the SCR-536 'handie talkies' and had a much smaller range, but they were perfect for this sort of operation.) The bombing had covered far too much of the countryside to follow their S.O.P. - the other five members of the squad were about a mile away, and two other squads were circling around to approach the area from the east and the west. (As they converged, they would make their way north.)

He was supposedly 'in command' of his team, the other three members only being privates, but unless something came up that deviated from their orders, that was fairly well meaningless. If all went smoothly - and given the sheer tonnage of bombs that had been dropped, it seemed likely that it would - their troop would be able to pronounce the target area secure without firing a shot.

It was funny. When he'd first been shipped overseas in March, he'd been all too eager to see some action... then he had. 'Be careful what you wish for', indeed, he mused. It had simultaneously been everything he'd hoped it would be, and nothing at all like he'd expected. The Recon Troop wasn't really supposed to be involved in the fighting, but commanders needed bodies in uniform more than they needed battlefield intel, and the Infantry tended to take heavy losses. They were frequently assigned to defensive missions or special operations, sometimes even to security missions or offensive actions, making their current mission notable in that they were doing their actual job, for once. Hopefully, their usual reinforcements wouldn't get too bored, sitting this one out.

When he came upon one bomb crater in particular, he found himself wishing they'd been assigned those reinforcements, after all. His hopes of things going smoothly had just taken a severe nosedive.

Retrieving his radio from his pack - as small as they were, it was still too cumbersome and heavy to attach to his belt - he hit the 'transmit' button. "Base Camp, this is Hutchinson, over."

The crackling reply, laced with the occasional burst of static, made it clear he was still within range of the camp, but was getting near the outer edge of that. "This is Base. What've you got, Hutch?" He recognized the voice of Coropral Reynolds, the unit's main radio operator. Good, then he wouldn't have to repeat himself later; Reynolds was very good at making sure the appropriate people were listening; and if they weren't, he had a memory like a steel trap, and would be able to fill them in on exactly what they'd missed.

"Still no sign of survivors from the train," he reported. "But I have found something... odd."

"Are we really expecting any survivors?" Private Logan's voice broke in. That was the major disadvantage of the radios: if you had a suitable receiver, and tuned into the right frequency, you could hear everything that everyone using one was saying. As far as anyone knew, the Germans weren't eavesdropping on their conversations, but it was always possible. They weren't really supposed to use them unless they had to, but in situations like this, command was rather lax in enforcing that regulation.

Making a fuss about it wouldn't help anything, so he simply ignored the interruption. So did Reynolds. "Define odd."

"At the bottom of a crater there's what looks like it used to be a coffin. No tracks leading toward it, but there's a set of bloody footprints leading away."

"...yeah, that's odd, alright," Logan agreed. He must have been bored with his own patrol to keep butting in during an official report. Hutch was pretty sure he wouldn't have been getting away with it if Staff Sargent Harris - their squad's actual commander, who was leading the other fireteam - was able to listen in, and wondered just when they'd moved out of range.

"Who knows? Maybe the Nazis decided to try something different with one of the local Jews," Reynolds suggested. "If so, there could be an injured and disoriented civilian wandering through the combat zone."

Would the Nazis really...? Oh, who was he kidding? Of course they would. "Bastards," he ground out. "Right. I'll follow them, see if I can't catch up with whoever was making 'em." He didn't expect it to take long. After all, how far could someone who'd been buried alive and survived a bombing make it before collapsing?

Surprisingly far, as it turned out.

The blood tapered off quickly enough, until he was just following a trail of footprints. Hopefully, that was a good sign, since nobody who'd lost so much blood they didn't have any left to spill could possibly be walking. He did see signs that whoever was making them was periodically staggering, and dropping to one knee now and then, but they just got up and kept going. He was a little impressed, truth be told.

A little impressed, and a lot uneasy.

The Nazis' Jewish prisoners, as he understood it, were rarely in anything resembling good shape. He'd heard stories about liberated 'concentration camps', as they called them. Admittedly, it was possible this was a new prisoner that they hadn't had time to mistreat, yet...

Finally, over a mile away from the crater, he caught sight of something up ahead: the German train, which had run off the broken rails, but seemed to be otherwise mostly intact. The lack of bomb damage to the train itself told him that something else must have been responsible for the torn apart Nazi soldiers scattered around the clearing.

Coincidentally, the footprints he'd been following headed straight into the carnage.

"Yeah, that can't be good," he muttered under his breath. Definitely time to call in some backup. "I found the train," he said into his radio. When he didn't recieve a reply, he stopped in his tracks, frowning, and tried again. "Base, this is Hutchinson. Please respond, over." Still nothing. "Logan, can you still hear me?" If the guy wanted to be involved in the conversation, he could act as a relay back to base camp, then.

Unfortunately, that nothing kept right on coming.

Well... great. So, what were his options? Investigate the scene on his own and just hope that whatever had slaughtered the German soldiers wouldn't be too much for one American G.I. to handle on his own? Or pull back to a point where he was able to raise base camp, almost certainly allowing whatever had done this to escape, and possibly find its way behind American lines?

Hell with it. He was a scout, wasn't he? Time to do some damned scouting.

The scene didn't look any better up close. Whatever had happened had been chaotic enough to disturb the dirt near the train to the point where he couldn't readily tell what had happened. (He was a recon scout, sure, but it wasn't like he was Tonto from that Lone Ranger radio program he'd used to listen to, or something.) There were shell casings all over the place, indicating the Germans hadn't gone quietly. When had this happened, he wondered, for them not to have heard any of it, even as far away as their camp was?

The bodies were another matter. Whatever had attacked them, it clearly hadn't been someone with guns or knives. Claws and teeth, maybe, though he spotted at least one soldier who looked like his skull had been bashed in.

He was painfully aware that his only weapon, aside from his combat knife, was a M1911 pistol. Of course, the Germans had been armed with rifles and machine guns, and that clearly hadn't helped them much. He did have a Very pistol - a flare gun named after Edward Wilson Very, the American naval officer invented them - and getting it out of his pack was seeming like a better and better idea by the minute.

He'd just slipped the pack from his shoulders when he heard the distinct sound of a rifle cartridge being chambered behind him.

Great. Recon scout gets ambushed. If I survive, I'm never hearing the end of this. He turned, slowly and being sure to make no sudden moves. Standing about ten feet behind him was a visibly terrified German soldier. His rifle was shaking so badly Hutch wasn't sure the Nazi would be able to hit him even from such close range. And maybe he shouldn't feel too bad about missing this guy, if whatever had killed the others had, too.

The German said... something to him, speaking so quickly it might not have mattered if Hutch actually had spoken German. He didn't - they were there to shoot the Nazis, not have polite chats with them - and he shook his head. "Yeah, I'm... I'm not getting a word of that."

The German said something else, stressing the words blutsauger and vampir, looking around in panic as he did. He still wasn't making much sense, though vampir sounded like it was supposed to be vampire. Which... made even less sense. Yes, what had happened here was bad, but it wasn't like-

The German soldier abruptly vanished in a blur.

It took a moment for Hutch's mind to catch up with his eyes and tell him what had just happened. Something had lunged out of one of the train cars, grabbed the Nazi, and yanked him back with it in the blink of an eye. Vampires were just something Hollywood had made up, but something had killed these men, so...

He fished the flare gun from his pack, pointed it straight up, and fired.

Okay. Hopefully, help would be incoming fairly quickly. His job, now, became making sure the whatever didn't get away and start picking his men off, too. Which meant... going into the train.

The things I do for God and country.

There were a few passenger cars - where the soldiers must have been - but it was largely a freight train... and the Nazi had been dragged into one of those cars. The poor bastard hadn't even had time to scream - he hadn't made any noise at all, in fact - and was almost certainly dead by now. He debated pulling his gun, but decided against it. While he might feel better with a weapon in his hand, guns clearly weren't very effective against... whatever it was. And given that it had targeted the one of them with a weapon in his hands, while leaving the unarmed one alone, it obviously understood what guns were.

Who knew? Maybe the diplomatic approach might work. Stranger things had happened, right?

Maybe not.

He got out his flashlight, shouldered his pack, and approached the door to the freight car. A rumbling, warning growl hit his ears as he climbed up into the car, shining the light around. This particular car was full of foodstuffs, which would be a welcome addition to their own camp's somewhat diminished food supply. It wasn't hard to find the source of the noise, and the growl got louder as the light fell upon it - upon her, rather.

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it hadn't been a girl that looked like she was in her late teens.

She was wearing the tattered remains of a dress, which seemed about five seconds from falling apart. Whatever color it had once been, it was now the reddish brown of dried blood, with dark, damp splotches all over it where new blood had been sprayed far more recently. Her hair was dark, filthy and matted, hanging nearly to her legs, and pushed off to the side from where she was crouched over a surprisingly still alive German soldier. The look in her eyes was wild, almost feral, and the blood on and around her mouth couldn't hide the fangs peeking out from lips that were slowly peeling back.

Intellectually, he knew approaching someone - something? - in such a state would be a terrible idea. Practically suicide. But the German had also seen him, and was shooting him a panicked, pleading look, silently begging for help. (He likely would have been doing so audibly, too, if she hadn't had a hand clamped over his mouth. At least that explained why he hadn't made any noise at any point since being grabbed.)

What kind of person would he be if he just left?

He sighed quietly, took one step closer to get to a clean spot on the floor, then sat down - both to appear as non-threatening as he could and to be able to look her in the eyes - and waited.

As he'd hoped, she didn't quite seem to know how to react to that. A couple of tense minutes went by she shook her head and said something to him in German. Her voice sounded hoarse from disuse, making him again wonder just who this girl was.

When she didn't get a reply - he hadn't exactly spontaneously learned to speak German in the past ten minutes, somehow - she frowned, then repeated herself. "Wer bist du? Wo bin ich?" There was a slight glint of intelligence showing through in her eyes, now, the effort of speaking breaking through whatever madness had been seizing her. "Qui es-tu? Où suis-je?" she tried. That sounded like French, but he didn't know any of that, either, not having been part of that campaign.

"Um... right. Look, lady, I'm not sure what-"

"English?" she interrupted, a faint but definite accent in her voice. "Fine. Who are you? Where am I?"

Okay. They were making progress. "My name is Lawrence Hutchinson. I'm a Private First Class with the 8th Infantry of the US Army. We're somewhere in rural Austria. Styria, I think, but don't quote me on that."

"US Army...?" She puzzled over that for several moments. "The... United States? What are you doing involved in a conflict here?"

"That's... something of a long story. Now, I told you who I was. Who are you?"

"My name...?" She frowned uncertainly. "My name is... I..."

Did she not know? What had happened to this girl? "That's okay," he said soothingly. "We can come back to that later."

Her eyes narrowed at him, as if she thought he was patronizing her. "You presume you'll have a later?"

He shrugged. "You haven't killed me, yet."

"The others were more interested in shooting me than talking to me. They recognized what I was." Her eyes darted briefly to his gun in its holster.

"Lady, you saved my life, back there. I'm not gonna shoot you for it."

She seemed to be considering that. "And this?" She gestured toward her bloody mouth.

He thought about it... and came to what he supposed was technically a command decision. "I really don't care what you are, as long as you keep pointing that-" He also gestured toward her fangs. "-toward the bad guys."

Her expression turned skeptical. "Sure. And would that make you the 'good guys'?"

"Compared to the people actively engaging in genocide, sending countless numbers of men, women, and children to gas chambers or just burning them alive? Yeah, I think we are."

She jerked, startled. "What?"

"Ask your buddy there what his superiors are up to, if you don't believe me."

She looked uncertain, then upset, then angry, and shifted her glare to the German she was holding immobile with one hand on his chest. She removed the other from his mouth and fired off a series of increasingly angry questions. He stammered out answers as best he could, and even having no idea exactly what was being said, Hutch could tell the mystery woman didn't like his answers. "Kinder?" she repeated, a note of horror breaking through her anger.

He didn't know German, but he could make a pretty good guess about that one. "So?" he prompted, because she was starting to look pretty homicidal, so it seemed like a good idea to get her attention before she went on another killing spree.

"He doesn't have a lot of details," she said, voice full of restrained fury, blazing eyes still locked on the terrified German. "He's only been a member of his country's armed forces for three months. But what he does know agrees with what you said."

She wasn't looking any less homicidal. Not exactly a good sign. "Good to know. Tell him he's officially a prisoner of war."

"You want to let him live?"

"We don't just murder helpless individuals. That's why we're the good guys, remember?"

She raised an eyebrow at that. "'We'?"

"You have something better to be doing? he challenged. "I meant what I said, before."

"I... I don't even know what the date is."

"December 27th, 1944." Her expression turned to one of shock. "Not the date you were expecting?" he guessed.

"That... would be putting it mildly."

"You should at least come back to camp with us, get yourself cleaned up. Not sure if we have any clothes your size, but we'll see what we can do."

She was slowly working through her shock. If she'd come from that coffin, and was this shocked by learning the date... How long had she been down there?

That was probably a question best saved for later.

"And your superiors would be... accepting... of that?"

"You took out an entire German platoon and captured a trainful of supplies by yourself," he replied, allowing himself a slight smile. "They'll love you."

She tentatively smiled back, just a little. "Well... At least I'd be doing something good, for once." Her head tilted, as if listening to something. "I think your friends are coming," she reported.

He didn't hear anything, but it had been long enough for some of them to reach their location. "Oh, they are really going to love you." At her inquisitive look, he added, "We're a reconnaissance unit."

"That sounds promising," she murmured. Something seemed to occur to her, and her attention snapped back to him. "I don't want a lot of people knowing about me," she said firmly. "I can't... I can't risk word getting back to... her... that I'm free." She shuddered. "I won't go back. Not ever."

"i think we can work something out." Never specifically mention her in reports, don't use the V-word... They'd figure something out. He wanted to ask who she was talking about, but something told him that was one topic she was not open to discussing just then. He stood up. "So, what do we call you, anyway?" She seemed to consider that, then came to some kind of decision.

"Carmilla. Call me Carmilla."