He had sealed off the infirmary just after killing the good doctor. He didn’t want any armored arrivals to interrupt his taking of the girl. Strangely, no one had come, and when he pried the door back open, using the awesome strength gifted to him after feeding, there were still no Guardsmen to be found. He expected a battalion to greet him, armed and ready to contain him. Instead there was no one.

“Fuckin’ scaredy cats…” he muttered as he cautiously stalked down the hallway.

He appeared as a charred husk, lumbering along with a stride that moved faster with every step as his body began to nourish on the fresh blood in his veins. Normally he would have a main of white hair and facial hair to match, but that had been burned away by the fire witch.

He remembered how he was as a mortal, slow and weak. Unable to avoid the shadowy specter of Death as she approached closer to him with every passing day. He feared Death, more than anything. It was that fear that drove him to seek an answer to that eternal question: how could one escape Death?

The result of his jinxed experiment was for him to become an unnatural vampire. He was not a pure blood, as the bats would call it. He was a miscalculation of science. A mistake. But that did not make him any less dangerous. He had proven that time and again against the likes of Blade, Hannibal King, and even Dracula himself.

Other than the thirst there was something else buzzing in the back of his head, something that had bothered him for as long as he could remember. He had attributed it to the change, of his becoming one of the Undead, but recently he was unsure. Comments spoken in passing by others, such as the warden and a few of the visitors the warden had traipsed in front of him. They looked at him like he wasn’t the man he was supposed to be. Less like a lab rat and more like an abomination. Usually he attributed that behavior to his being a monster, but something that the warden had said made him think otherwise.

“And this monkey right here, this is our prize possession. It doesn’t even know how different it is, considering who it came from.”

At the time Deacon had dismissed the comment. Given his physical state at the time, malnourished and living on the weak supply of donated blood, he wasn’t even sure if he had heard correctly.

“It’s more aggressive than its sire…but we’re not sure if that is characteristic of its nature.”

His sire? He had no sire. He was unique amongst the vampire brethren. There were none like him as far as he knew.

Deacon shook the thoughts from his head, instead keeping his mind focused. He had to be careful. Even though the hallway was empty there had to be someone else in the facility. Unless there was a massive jailbreak that he was left out of, sooner or later he would encounter someone in the Vault.

With more than a little concentration, Deacon shifted his physical form from corporeal to mist. It was a vampire’s strength that allowed him to alter his form in such a way. Only the higher and more aged vampires could melt away into mist, or change into an animal like a wolf or bat. As far as he knew only Dracula had mastered all three forms. While he would never admit it aloud, Deacon had only been able to shift into mist almost effortlessly. The other forms, while not beyond him, were much more difficult, especially in his current condition.

His putrid black flesh, still crispy from the burns, faded away into the body of smoke that he became. The residual pain from his burns subsided with the change, as did the noise of his footsteps.

The hallway was still well lit, but the fluorescent lights gave everything a stale appearance. The stainless steel floor and the walls that looked more like they had been poured into place, rebuilt thanks to the devastation caused by Super Adaptoid, appeared stronger and more sealed off than ever. He would not be able to slip away between the cracks. He was stuck roaming the halls as a formless void.

He drifted down the hallway, passing several offices and repositories for things he had no interest in. He only possessed a skeleton understanding of how the Vault was laid out and that was before the reconstruction. The warden had to be somewhere. He just had to look long enough.

He rounded a corner and his disembodied consciousness witnessed a sight he never expected to see: a red-haired woman scraping away at skin on her forearm.

“Piece of shit,” she said under her breath. “Held me down and practically raped me…”

He recognized her and was beginning to wonder if God, whom he had forgotten long ago, had not forgotten him. How else could he be so lucky to have stumbled across the same woman that he nearly killed him?

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary.”

The woman stopped scraping at her arm and looked up, noticing the fog that was Deacon Frost for the first time. She tilted her head, unsure of what she was looking at, and wrinkled the bridge of her nose slightly. She let her arm drop down to her side, resting on the cool floor. She was sitting on the floor and leaning back against the wall, and she looked like she was half dead.

Or perhaps it was blood slowly dribbling out of her forearm that gave her a semblance of Death.

“Who’s there?” she asked meekly.

“Typhoid Mary, I admit I never thought I would see you again.”

Deacon, remaining in his mist form, allowed himself to drift closer to the huddled Mary. She looked startled, frightened, and worried. He relished her frail body, her tender and quivering lips, and the way she looked almost out of control of her faculties.

“Who are you? Why can’t I see you?” she demanded to know.

“Who am I? You mean you’ve forgotten how you very nearly cooked me alive? How you almost ended the life of a vampire that rivaled the Lord of the Undead himself?”

“Deacon…”

“Yes.” Like a whip crack, Frost reformed his body merely inches from Typhoid Mary’s face, causing her to let out a humble shriek of surprise. He gripped the back of her head by the hair and slammed her back against the wall, pinning her. “I’m still alive, you pyro bitch.”

“But how? I…I remember…”

“What’s the matter, Mary? That fucked up brain of yours getting in the way? Can’t seem to remember what happened?” Deacon slammed her against the wall again, shaking her. “It doesn’t matter how. All you need to know is that it did. Now tell me…how is it that Lady Luck has smiled upon me and brought us together again?”

She kept her mouth shut for a moment but another shove by Deacon opened her lips. “All the Guardsmen were called away. They left us all alone in our cells, even the warden. I managed to sever the implant in my arm…”

Deacon again looked at Mary’s arm, noticing the rigid scratches from her fingernails. It appeared as if she had actually been digging into her own flesh. Blood drooled out of the fresh wounds like water from a leaky faucet.

“They implanted us with the power dampeners instead of relying on them in the walls,” she continued. “We’ve all got them now. It was part of the rebuild that the warden did. But mine shut off for some reason and I broke out of my cell. I expected Guardsmen—”

“But none came. So, it would appear that you have a benefactor that wishes you free and the guards are otherwise occupied. Interesting.”

Deacon picked her up by the throat and smiled, his charred face contorting in a morbid facsimile of a grin. “Whatever, whoever, helped you get out…they will have done it all for nothing. I’m going to enjoy biting you, fire witch.”

Typhoid Mary squirmed in his grip but he was much too strong. She slapped her hands against his forearm, ripping away layers of blackened skin as she did so. Deacon smiled wider, showing his fangs.

“No!” she screamed as a tiny flame flickered to life in her pupil.

Deacon’s arm ignited again from the firecasting that Mary rudimentarily controlled. He dropped her on instinct, batting at the lick of flames that were quickly crawling up his arms. The burning elicited memories of the first time she had scorched him and it suddenly felt like his mind was on fire, too.

Mary dropped to a crouch and kicked out Deacon’s legs. Before he had hit the floor she was up again and running down the hall, desperate to get away, even back to her cell. She heard him call her name behind her but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Not when she was so close to escaping. She didn’t even want to risk looking over her shoulder.

As the fire crept up his arm, Deacon rolled onto his side, finally extinguishing the burning pain. Smoke rose from his skin and he smelled like he had been through a kiln. He looked up to see Mary’s foot disappear around a corner in the corridor and was overwhelmed with anger.

He bounded to his feet with inhuman speed, almost flying through the air as he sprinted after her. He was down the hallway in just a few seconds and rounding the corner when he abruptly stopped short from the shock of what he saw.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

“You’re already in Hell,” someone to his right replied.

A metal fist smashed against his face. He slumped against the wall, more from the shock of being struck than the actual act of it. He swiped his charred wrist across his jaw, rubbing away the black ooze and puss that had squirted out from the strike. He flashed his sharp teeth, ready to sink them deep into the flesh of whoever had dared touch him.

“I would have come sooner,” Jim Rhodes said from inside his new War Machine armor, “but I was a little tied up.”

The Guardsmen, six in all, surrounded Deacon and pinned him against the wall of the corridor. The vampire glared behind them at Typhoid Mary, who was being held in place by one seventh guard. His hatred spilled over and bored into her mind.

“You little fucking pigs,” the vampire said. “Death can’t stop me. It can never stop me! You can lock me up for as long as you want, but Death will never claim me.”

The electronically filtered voice of Rhodes said, “Death? But you’re not even the real Deacon Frost.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

War Machine stepped directly behind the Guardsmen holding Deacon at bay. “I read over the warden’s files just a little while ago. He had some red-flagged and yours was at the top of the stack. You’re not the real Deacon Frost. You never were. You’re a copy, a clone, an imitation.”

Deacon laughed. “Please! How would something as ridiculous as that even be feasible.”

“Think about it. Your personality is vastly different than I’m sure you remember it being just a few years ago. You’re more aggressive. More primal. The real Deacon Frost was refined. The base instincts you’ve succumbed to are a result of what you really are.”

“What I really am? And what the fuck is that?”

“A doppelganger.”

Suddenly images pelted Frost’s mind, flashing in front of his vision like frames from a film. He saw himself standing over him, white hair and wrinkles. There was a woman in the background, astonished and afraid. He remembered that day, only he thought it had been from another perspective. The shock of that fateful day’s events must have been blocked out of his immediate memory. The version of himself standing over him, barely paying attention to him, was the real Deacon Frost, newly christened vampire.

But what did that make him?

A copy. An imitation. An artificial vampire.

One of the powers that Deacon had gained when he had fist accidentally become a vampire was that whoever he tried to turn with his bite would also form a doppelganger, or a lesser copy. Those doppelgangers would be under his thrall and would do whatever his wish was. Often times he referred to those copies as his “blood clones.”

It had never occurred to him that when he had first turned that perhaps a doppelganger had been made of himself.

“That’s impossible,” he said unconvincingly.

“It’s true,” Rhodes replied. “Take him back to a cell where he can think about it.”

The Guardsmen grabbed him by the arms and began to drag him away. Deacon, if that was what he could truly call himself, was too amazed at the information presented to fight back. He now had so many questions, such as why hadn’t he realized this sooner? How had he avoided the truth for so long? Where was the real Deacon Frost, and was he aware of his existence?

As the Guardsmen dragged him down the hallway, he finally realized what the warden had meant when he had referred to Deacon as his “prize possession.” He truly was a rare specimen on this planet.

But he was sure that his hunger would return. He would find answers to his questions. Even if he was a doppelganger, he had time.

For a vampire, time was on his side.

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