Laura turned to the empty side of the bed. Four days without the vampire after the love night.

Something in the darkness had always piqued her interest. Maybe that explained her fascination with the vampire? The doorknob turned and hope smiled, but it was a dog with a letter in its mouth. A strong sigh, dismayed for not having the brunette in hand, sadly opened the folds of the paper and read:

'My dear,

we haven't caught the growlers yet, and until we catch them all, or those idiots in hat, think else about me bringing the monsters, I'll have to stay north. I asked Chlloe to make you company, and bite any gluteus that tries to do something stupid with you. I will do everything to return soon as possible. No more to speak through this one. A kiss on your cheek. Loving you more each day.

Your Carmilla.'

Laura could smell the vampire's scent in that letter, her fingertips at each curve of the letter along the smooth outline of her lips in red lipstick mark on the corner. Curse it was, her girlfriend know how to flirt, even talking about green beans. The journalist missing the few moments together like that night, or that day walking in the ruins, but something was missing besides Carmilla. A thing, or everything before, the rest of her memory about them, the forbid eyes of her lover.

Chlloe climbed into bed, licking her face.

"Will we never see each other?" Asked to the dog snuggling with her.

***

Morning at that the sound of a car going up the mountain, too military maneuvers for an ended up war. Danny entered the inn carrying firewood, followed by Kirsch and Guto exhausted, while the redhead seemed not tired to pile up and help unload the truck outside over ten times, if needed.

"Worked all winter, here, have some cocoa." They took a mug offered by the inn's owner.

"Hey Danny," said Laura, but the woodcutter gives the cold shoulder.

"Laura." Said Raphael, excited carrying a toolbox.

"Hey," said Laura, not so excited.

"Rise and shine, cutie, what's wrong?"

"Don't know, maybe ane more idiot, makes you want to die," said Danny, carrying a new door to Room 307.

"Poor girl, what lack of man doesn't do. Let's take a walk Laura?" said Raphael.

"And the door?!" scolded the inn's owner, remembering the morning that this brainless hunter smashed 307 door out of the window.

The blonde agreed to the sidewalk, but only after the doorbreaker repaired the damage. Meanwhile, Laura was trying to teach LaF how to read the letters from the other world. The books were clear to her, but the scientist found easier learn Greek than to understand the literary scrawl of the vampire's books.

"Seriously LaF? What are you not getting?" asked Laura, sitting beside her with the book in her hand.

"Everything. How you read this? What have you doing this half year gone, some guided meditation retreat, study camp? Where did you get these codes, Russian, with something that seems taken from Punkt's bathroom doors?"

"But I can't even speak Russian."

"Laura, ten travelers passed through here, and none of them spoke our language, and you spoke to everyone as if you came from the same place." Said LaF, about the polyglot travel agent.

"Me?" Nor was she fluent in another language, and she didn't know how LaF didn't understand the Winter adventures in the books.

Danny stomped down the stairs and slammed the door on her way out, the woodcutter more and more reminiscent of Carmilla. Chlloe barked upstairs, probably at the hunter.

"If she keeps like that, I don't know if we can keep her with us. It might bother someone." said Perry.

The blonde whistled, and the dog came to her.

"Its alright girl," said the blonde, scratching the dog's chin. The girls helped Perry, serving the travelers. Gathered in the kitchen, the inn's owner had fun doing a high flip with the pancakes.

"Not so high. I've cleaned the last pancakes off the ceiling last week," asked LaF behind her, which resulted in a beautiful smile between them crossing their eyes.

Laura siting at the table, smiled, thinking the same thing, but between her and the vampire.

When Carmilla returns, when they look at each other...

...but they couldn't look at each other...

She clutched the tray to her chest.

"Carm," muttered to herself.

Kirsch came into the kitchen carrying three empty glasses in each hand:

"Perry, the guy in 306 asked if they're going to change all the doors. He complained about strange noises at night."

"I talk to him, but what did he hear? Barks?" asked Perry, looking at the puppy owner..

"No, he said they were strange murmurs. He said: 'or was it someone with a stomachache, or someone very, very happy' then he said some stuff in Russian, and something else like 'very good, very good indeed'."

By now Laura had run out into the courtyard, looking for a hole where she could bury her head and never look at anyone with such a red face again. Embarrassed and smiling, she recalled the night with Carmilla, the touches, the blindfold and the warm body of her girlfriend.

"Miss you," said, wondering what the vampire was doing in that exact second, muttering of the hunters probably, or was she looking at the same sky as her? It was comforting. They were under the same sky, breathing the same air. They were physically distant, but did that part matter so much? No, somehow she knew they were together. Laura put her hand on her chest, took the blue crystal necklace from another world out of her clothes and smiled, feeling the closeness between them.

Thin layers of snow covered the yard, leaning in the corner against the mountain, the remains of her shattered door and bed. She sighed from the morning's bustle. Raphael was being what he set out to be, a stubborn, boring and stupid hunter.

Speaking of the devil, Raphael enter the courtyard, climbed till her window to hang three amulets.

"That'll keep those monsters away." He said of the three dream catchers and hanging stones.

How three sieves going to scare a vampire? Thought Laura.

They walked through the forest towards the city. At last she would be alone with Raphael, at least aware this time.

He ran after her in little hops, asking her lover to wait for him to walk together. Away from the inn, they stopped in a rocky part of the forest, both in silence.

"Right, stop with that voice, stop being such an imbecile, and talk straight away." Said her.

Raphael laughs right away, brushing his hair to the side.

"What? I remember, your voice always goes up a tone when you're pretending, or hiding that your mother spit on the soup she gave us for dinner."

"Your father had seconds. I can't believe you remember that." The hunter laughed, remembering. His voice didn't seem to change anything, but Laura noticed this change in him, and in the last few days, the differentiated tone was even clearer.

Then Raphael exhaled, changing his look and especially the words he would use. He couldn't fool the journalist. She was smarter than him.

"Sorry about all this, but I had to stay close as I could to the baron. Besides, I didn't know who I could trust, but it's easier when they think you're just an idiot, in angry they show themselves, even Carmilla, I still don't know if I can trust her, but if you trust, then I trust her too."

Laura matched the floor. His voice was normal. At least was her friend talking and not the asshole of the early days. He reached into his pockets and handed her a bottle of rum.

"From your father." told him, but Laura knew her father, even if she was 118 years old he wouldn't allow alcohol in the house, no way even as a gift.

"Did my father send this?" questioned Laura from the clear fib.

"Yeah, but doesn't open now. They're watching us." He said without almost moving his mouth. "Keep it. It was hard to get this from the post. I worked there for the Hitler investigation. They wanted to find traitors in the Reich." The last word must have been bitter, because his mouth turned an unhappy streak.

"Did you work for Hitler?" Nazi?! What poor joke was this?

"My job was to work for him, gain his confidence. You know that clichéd thing of sticking a knife in your back. That's why the blond hair, I had to look like them."

Strange though, Laura, he wasn't like that when little. He was telling how dangerous was in the Fuhrer in his last days. More and more, paranoid and crazy, was what they said about him, but with so many willing to kill him, including Raphael as an assistant to Hitler's closest generals, the Nazi leader was not so mad, he was right, surrounded by wolves in sheep's clothing.

They walked to Punkt, where they could talk without a hunter pretending to be a pigeon in a tree.

"I came here at the behest of the American government." said Raphael, loud enough just to Laura. "This war may be over, but the tension is greater at these bombs' shadows, and everyone is after Hitler's polls." Laura would have asked what they could want from a madman. "Something that created snipers capable of putting a bullet between the eyes of a squirrel ten kilometers away, whatever it was, had something to do with a plane that crashed two or four years ago. This plane carried a sarcophagus full of indecipherable inscriptions. The Fuhrer was very interested in it, but after we lost contact over the radio, we had no further news.

The story was too exciting, but if he was a double agent, these informations was top secret.

"Why you telling me this? It is not classified material." She questioned, pretending not to be more cheerful than a journalist finding bank accounts of a corrupt politician.

"You're my best chance. No immortal would trust a hunter, but a lover, yes. All governments in the world are after what Hitler was chasing. It's a puzzle, the Aryan race, radiation research." In this one, the blonde reminded him of the bomb in Japan, but according to Raphael, the Nazis would have discovered nuclear fission long time before Einstein's letter to Roosevelt. The secret research division Carbo, responsible for creating and studying the most outlandish interests of Hitler's occult leadership.

"But if they already had this knowledge, why didn't they use it? They could have had a bomb before, so," the journalist had asked the right question. "Why was Hitler not interested in the bomb? A device like that in a war is a decisive card, isn't it?"

"Perhaps he did not seek an end to the conflict."

"Why not? If he didn't want to win, what was he fighting for? Unless; it wasn't about defeating enemies, it wasn't about winning or losing,"

"Smart girl. It wasn't about the war itself, but what the war hid. Wars have always existed not for a greater good, but for a greater interest. Hitler was interested in something that the profit of war would not bring; I don't know what it was. There was a plane that he really wanted, but we don't know where it ended up. The only thing that's left of it, or that we have of it, are pictures from where they found it." Discreetly, Raphael pulled photographs of an excavation from his sleeve.

The carvings in the ruins, a coffin chained inside a crumpled grave of ancient magic inscriptions. It filled her mind with screams and violent flashes, blood and chains, fangs and flesh, the name Mircalla being called, being roared by throats raw with pain.

"Laura, are you okay?"

"I'm great, I, I, I'm just sick of the alcohol smell." Laura went to the door followed by Raphael, but a hunting companion of his approached them, and Raphael returned to the asshole from before.

"See you later, beauty" He blinked with the gesture of the revolver.

"She's already pregnant?"

"Another one?" said another hunter, but Laura was too far for hearing their blunder.

Laura ran into the forest clutching a tree, panting, almost as if she had been there beside Mircalla when it all happened.

"They're after you,"

***

From the author:

Hey soldiers, how it was the chapter?

After Carm? Or after something else?