Jack Smack hadn't always been a monster. Once, he was just a boy, privileged, a little spoiled maybe, but not evil. Not yet. He grew up in a house with polished floors and high ceilings, where Alucard servants glided through the halls like shadows and everything always smelled faintly of lavender and money.
Back then, he didn't question any of it.
Why would he? His parents were respected, admired, and powerful. They hosted dinner parties that made the society pages. They donated to churches and anti-Alucard committees. They played the part of good citizens with unsettling ease.
And then, one night, when he was twelve, it all fell apart.
He woke up to the silence first. Not the good kind, either. Not the peaceful hush of a well-run house, but the wrong kind. The heavy, stifling kind that pressed down on your chest and made you instinctively hold your breath.
Then came the smell.
It wasn't just blood, though that was there, thick and sharp. It was something worse underneath. Burnt hair. Rotten meat. Ozone. The faintest trace of something floral, like a silk dress going up in flames.
Jack sat up in bed, heart hammering.
"Mom?" he called out, already knowing he wouldn't get an answer. "Dad?"
No footsteps. No clinking dishes. Not even the low shuffle of a servant trying not to wake him.
Just the steady, echoing tick of the grandfather clock downstairs, marking time like it was mocking him.
He crept down the stairs barefoot, every step too loud. Too deliberate. The foyer lights were still on—bright and clinical, like they were trying to overcompensate for the wrongness in the air. His mother's high heel sat tipped sideways by the umbrella stand.
Just one.
Weird.
He stepped forward.
Squish.
The rug was wet.
He looked down.
Blood. Thick and soaking through the antique pattern in a sluggish smear. It looked unreal, like someone had spilled paint, then halfheartedly tried to clean it.
The trail led into the kitchen.
"Mom?" His voice cracked halfway through.
She was there. Draped over the kitchen island like someone had dropped her from the sky. Her spine arched grotesquely, her eyes wide and glassy, lips parted like she'd died mid-scream. Her throat, God, her throat, it wasn't cut, it wasn't stabbed. It had been ripped. Torn open like paper. Ribbons of flesh dangled from the wound, obscene and delicate.
Jack reeled back, hand clamping over his mouth. He slipped on the tile and hit the floor hard, the cold biting through his shirt.
Lucy.
He scrambled up and ran.
The staircase stretched before him like a tunnel. He took it two steps at a time, ignoring the red smear across the banister. His palms stuck to the wood.
Her door slammed open under his weight.
She looked like she was sleeping.
Neat. Too neat. The covers were pulled to her chin like she'd tucked herself in. But her neck, neck was wrong. Bent sideways like a broken doll. Her eyes stared straight up at the ceiling, unblinking.
A sound escaped him, half scream, half sob, full of pain. It tore loose from somewhere deep and broke everything on its way out.
Then...
A voice behind him.
"You're not supposed to be home yet."
Jack spun.
Sam Swanson.
The steward. The quiet one. The guy who used to tie Lucy's braids when she was late for school.
Now he was soaked in blood. Head to toe. His shirt was speckled in red mist. His hands dripped red like paintbrushes. His eyes weren't angry or sad. Just… open. Too wide. Too calm.
"Sam?" Jack's voice wobbled. "What—what did you…Whyy?"
Sam tilted his head, smiling faintly. "Do you remember the stories I used to tell Lucy? The ones about wolves?"
Jack couldn't speak. Couldn't move.
Everything in him screamed: run.
"She always loved the twist endings." Sam smiled, but it was wrong, tight, humorless, a thing he wore like a mask. "Here's one for you: the wolf lives inside the house."
He took a step forward. Bare feet, wet and red, left ghostly prints on the polished hardwood.
"Your father thought he could chain us," Sam said, voice low and almost conversational. "Filled our heads with rules. Neural locks. Tranquilizers. Loyalty programming."
His fingers flexed with a sickening pop. The sound echoed.
"But I was from the first generation. No inhibitors. No leash."
Jack's lungs forgot how to breathe. He backed up a step, the hallway spinning slightly, heart pounding hard enough to hurt.
"You killed them," he said, like naming it would make it less real.
"I freed them," Sam snapped. His voice dropped into something feral. "Freed them from the illusion. They wanted kindness. A pet. A butler in the shape of a man."
His face twisted with contempt.
"But we were never made to serve. We were made to dominate. That's what they bred into us first. They just buried it. Covered it up with manners and house rules. And then... they forgot."
Jack ran.
He didn't think, just turned and bolted, crashing down the hallway, shoulder slamming into the rail. His breath hitched in his chest, shallow and raw. The portraits on the wall blurred past him, eyes watching. One shattered as he clipped the edge of the glass and frame, clattering behind him.
He didn't care. Not about the mess. Not about the dead silence behind him.
He just ran.
Behind him, Sam didn't shout or rage. He just laughed.
Calm and feral.
He heard the dragging before he saw it: the dull scrape of limbs against marble, wet fabric, and something heavy being moved across the floor.
Jack turned and froze.
The other servants were there.
His nanny. The maids who used to sneak him sweets. The quiet old butler taught him how to tie a tie. All of them, together, lifting and dragging his family like trash bags. His mother's arm flopped loosely from a clear plastic wrap, her engagement ring catching the kitchen light for one nauseating second before slipping out of view.
"What are you doing to my parents!?"
Jack's scream broke like glass. The sound bounced off the high ceilings, raw and panicked, but no one looked at him with pity. No one even paused.
They had all been his world, their faces as familiar as his own, the ones who had smiled at him in hallways, tended to his scraped knees, brought him cocoa on stormy nights.
Now they stood over his family's corpses like grave diggers, shoveling the bodies into thick plastic like garbage. No reverence. No grief. Just efficiency.
He didn't, couldn't understand.
Not yet.
He didn't know what his parents had done. How they'd treated these servants, these Alucards, behind the curtain of wealth and prestige. Behind the opera music and tea parties, there were cages. Branding irons. Experiments. That his mother laughed while pulling out their teeth. That his father had rewritten minds like code and called it "discipline."
The New Christian Church had labeled Alucard's demons.
His parents had called them pets.
But none of that had touched Jack. He had been protected, insulated by tailored suits and gifted drones, too young to ask the wrong questions. He had never seen the broken wings in the basement. Never smelled the antiseptic tang of cruelty in the air.
All he knew was that he loved them.
And now he watched them die again.
Out the window they went. One after another, unceremoniously tossed into the night like meat from a slaughterhouse. His sister's tiny pajama-clad form was last. The sound of her body hitting the ground below didn't echo, but he felt it anyway.
Jack's knees buckled. His breath caught on something sharp. "Stop," he begged, "please..."
A hand came down fast, hard, across the back of his neck.
The world cracked and went dark.
When Jack awoke, pain bloomed across his neck like a bruise set on fire. It throbbed with every heartbeat, as if someone had dropped a brick on his spine and walked away.
He groaned, rolling to one side. The sheets were too clean. Too quiet.
Then the memories slammed back into him.
The blood. The plastic. Lucy's face.
He sat up too fast, and the world tilted. His stomach lurched. But even through the dizziness, his fingers clawed for the phone beside the bed. He dialed with hands that wouldn't stop shaking.
"Emergency services," came the voice on the other end.
Jack's throat was dry. "They're dead. My family, there was blood, there was..."
But by the time the police arrived at the house, it was spotless.
No blood. No bodies. No Alucards. Not even a smear of red on the banister.
Nothing.
Just an eerie, echoing silence, and one hysterical teenage boy they gently, awkwardly sedated.
He never saw his parents again.
The official report called it a "psychotic break." Trauma-induced delusion. A fabricated memory stitched together by grief and shock. After all, there was no evidence of foul play. No intruders. No footage. Just a missing girl, two absentee parents, and a boy with a wild story.
They didn't even hold a funeral. Just a formal statement of death, signed and filed away.
Jack was shipped off to his grandparents, a pair of cold philanthropists who donated more money to animal shelters than they spent speaking to him. They kept him in a guest room. Gave him a tutor. Left him alone.
And in that vacuum, the rage grew.
He didn't cry. Not anymore. He studied.
He memorized every word the Church had ever said about Alucards. He read the white papers on control tech, blood triggers, and loyalty programs. He watched grainy footage of human families torn apart. But none of it answered the real question:
Why had they let him live?
He asked himself that every night, and every morning, he woke up a little harder, a little colder.
Now, at thirty years old, Jack Smack stood as the leader of the White Angels. The soft, confused boy was long gone. What remained was a man built entirely out of sharpened memory and weaponized grief.
He didn't care which Alucards had done it. He didn't care if they were young or old, bred or born. He didn't care if they begged.
They were all the same as him now.
They had taken everything.
And he was going to take it all back.
"Sir?"
The voice jarred him. Jack blinked. His vision cleared. He was at the podium, gripping the edge so tightly that blood welled from under his fingernails. The metal dented under his hands.
But the pain grounded him.
He exhaled. Straightened his back.
The memory was a curse, but it was also his fuel. It reminded him of what he was fighting for. Why could there be no forgiveness, and no compromise?
Just retribution.