It is an unusual privilege to attend your own funeral.

The coffin was, of course, empty. Weighed down with sandbags, or something else. It lay in a double grave, alongside the casket containing her husband, which was unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, very full. With information gathered from both the survivors of the massacre of the knights and documentation recovered in raids (It is amazing how incurably officious some can be, keeping even records that could serve only to damn them) it had not been too hard to locate the shallow grave to which his corpse had been buried, next to the corpse of his mistress. It had been a messy job, but quick. A silenced sub-machine gun whilst they lay in post coital slumber, then simply rolled up in the bloodied bed-sheets and driven out to a bit of industrial wasteland in North London. Quick but efficient. The room they had been in showed only the barest forensic evidence.

The priest finished his hollow words, and the first earth was dumped on top of the flowers. No mausoleum to commemorate Sir Integra Hellsing. She had been allowed that. No such glorious monument to her eternal damnation and shame. A simple stone. Names, dates, rest in peace. Maybe it should have said 'no rest for the wicked'?

She felt horrible, out here under the strong, spring sunshine. It seemed to shine straight through her, through her clothes and flesh, making her feel both light and fragile as glass, and yet immensely heavy. She felt like she should be sweating, but no sweat came, just itching that crawled all over her skin. The sunglasses she wore diminished the light to only just above the intensity at which humans viewed it. Despite feeding a mere hour before, weakness and hunger gnawed at her insides like cancer.

All this physical discomfort, however, was nothing compared to the mental anguish she was experiencing as she watched her son mourning her death. For him, there had been yet another lie. In his world, she had been put down by Hellsing officers acting under the Queens direct orders, the coffins weight her ashes mixed with salt and silver dust. Of course, a new vampire officer would be needed to take her place, for the psychological wellbeing of Seras if nothing else. She was out looking for a suitable candidate at this moment, and after a few months grace, she would find her. She would be Laura Harker, a lesbian trainee army officer with a fascination for the occult, about Integra's height, much younger, of fairer complexion, with short dark brown hair. (Hellsing's progressive alchemy department had some terrifying serums waiting for her). Seras would wile her, seduce her, transform her. The documents were already drawn up. Laura would die in a training accident (no-one would speak up for an investigation of course: the girl was an orphan of two only children, alone in the world, disowned by religious foster parents over her sexuality) and then Nosferatu Harker would be born. The power of the government was, in Integra's mind, far more arcane and potent than vampiric magic. They could kill and create people at will, erase others entirely from the annals of history, and all from the safety of an office in Whitehall. She had seen Laura Harker. Read the intricate details of her tragic past, and her gothic future. A potent combination of altered records and the inherent fallibility and suggestibility of the human mind. A person existing only as a name, grafted onto the bleak tale of a mother who had died in childbirth and a father who had descended into drug taking and death as a result: a name slipped into birth registers, hospital records, vaccination data, adoption lists, school registers, examination tables and a hundred other documents: and yet, Seras was sure that, confronted with such hard evidence and a vague description, there would be teachers, classmates, doctors, dentists, driving instructors and all the other countless ancillary personages on which every normal modern life infringes that would remember this statistical ghost. Some would probably even swear to the face, painstakingly reconstructed backwards by computer technicians, especially once it had been seamlessly grafted on to school, team and army photographs. Her task from now was to assume the manner and personality of this artificial being completely. There could be no recognition from anyone. Not even her own son.

The mourners filed away. She watched her son leave, shepherded by bodyguards to the family Rolls-Royce. When all had gone, she stepped forward quietly from the shadows where she had observed the proceedings, supposed behind her veil by all to be some distant cousin or Hellsing official. She gave a nod to the gravedigger, who nodded back gravely, manner befitting profession, as she laid a single dark red rose atop a bouquet of garish yellow flowers, sent in false triumphal victory from the Vatican.

Integra Hellsing may have been dead, but she would always have the last laugh.

THE END