“I won’t,” D replied.
Pointing to Elena, the Black knight said, “’It’ll take time to defeat me, even for you. And that girl will likely die in the meantime. Of course, if she has no connection to you, that won’t matter much, but a woman of her caliber deserves better than to die pitifully out in the wilderness.”
Without waiting for D’s reply, the knight walked off toward the woods. His black charger awaited him. Apparently it’d weathered the attack by the forest dweller.
D came over to the woman.
Turning her face away, Elena said, “I’m sorry. I’ve gone and got in your way. If this hadn’t happened to me, you’d have killed him just now.”
D’s left hand came to rest on her forehead. Elena turned and looked at D in spite of herself. Her pain had suddenly faded. Their eyes met. Feeling as if the sheer depth of the Hunter’s eyes would swallow her, Elena was actually scared and tried her best to shut her eyelids.
D backed away from her. He didn’t tell her to get up, or ask if she could stand. He didn’t even offer to help her.
Elena got up on her own.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, wondering if he’d say he was worried and came to check up on her.
“I was teleported from the castle all the way to the border. I was just on my way back.”
That’s about as short and sweet as can be, she thought. That was just like him, too.
The two of them started over to his horse and her bike.
“So, aren’t you even gonna ask me what I’m doing out here?” Elena said, voicing all the discontent that filled her heart.
Naturally, there was no reply.
Although she tried to restrain it, the girl let a sigh escape.
“You really don’t give a rat’s ass about me, do you? I suppose I did take it upon myself to go up to the castle, after all. But for what it’s worth, we’ve fought on the same side, you know. It’d be nice if you’d at least ask me if I was okay or tell me I did a good job or something,” she said, not aloud, but in her heart of hearts.
D straddled his steed. The cyborg horse was one he’d acquired from a farmer on the way back, as was the sword he now wore. Elena got on Stahl’s bike. When she started its engine, D turned to her and said, “Were your friends killed?”
“Yeah. And I’m the one who invited them out here,” Elena replied, shutting her eyes. How was she going to tell their families?
For a heartbeat she was sure he’d say something to console her now, but D galloped off in a gust of wind, as if to leave the girl alone with her bitter sentiments.
—
II
—
The gates to the village were shut, and shouts arose from inside. The cries came from both men and women. And it sounded like the angry bellows were exceeded by the wails of pain.
“Open up!” the girl cried, but there was no response.
Something was going on. It was easy enough to imagine what that could be, but Elena tried her best to keep such thoughts from flooding her consciousness. Her heart was horribly cold.
The gates were over ten feet tall. As the girl stood there powerless, an arm like steel wrapped around her waist. But her cry of astonishment wasn’t prompted by its grasp, but because she then went sailing high over the gate. Even their landing was quiet.
“The square’s over that way, isn’t it?” asked D.
For those who didn’t know the power that lurked in the blood of a dhampir, his leap would’ve been unbelievable.
“That’s right!” Elena cried.
Her head was killing her—it pounded with the excitement that always spilled from hope. On the way back to the village, she’d told the Hunter about what had transpired the night before. Although she had no problem with his lack of reaction, she had to wonder if her tale had done the trick.
There was no sign of anyone on the streets. But as the pair approached the square, the shouting grew louder.
Turning the corner, Elena had the wind knocked out of her.
The tent was ablaze. The flames burnt their image into her eyes. Around the fire, mobs of villagers lingered with the four hues of roses blooming from their bodies. The form of a knight raced by them, and a long, straight shaft pierced the chests of the villagers at an angle. Killed instantly, they were easily lifted on the lance with one hand before the knight then cast their bodies into the flames.
“The Blue Knight,” Elena growled, feeling every drop of blood in her body come to a boil. She even forgot all about D.
Near the tent, the people still milling around were outnumbered by those now heaped motionless on the ground by several to one. Occasionally there was the crack of a gunshot, and the Blue Knight would reel as sparks danced on his chest or abdomen. His charger would then race to the shooter with incredible speed, and the perpetrator would loose their dying screams from the end of the knight’s lance.
Someone shouted at him to stop.
A child could be heard crying out for his father.
“That lousy murderer . . . ,” Elena muttered, and she was just about to dash forward when a black shape passed her.
As the man in the long coat headed toward the flames, he looked like some gorgeous idol of a god of war trimmed in crimson lotus blossoms.
Engaged in butchery some forty feet ahead of the young man, the blue figure whirled around on his steed as if he’d been struck by a bolt of unseen lightning.
“Where have you been?” he asked with pleasure when he saw D. “I came down here because the Black Knight told me to dispose of these scum, but my heart was actually set on doing battle with you. I’ve already killed forty or fifty of them. Are you going to try and stop me, D?”
“That’s my job,” D replied as his blade whined from the sheath on his back.
The Blue Knight adjusted his grip on his lance.
Both the hues and the crackling of the raging flames seemed to freeze solid from the lethal intent that billowed between the two men.
D sprinted; his sword streamed along behind him. As the blade painted a silvery arc aimed at the legs of the horse, the blue mount and rider leapt toward the moon. The knight’s lance was aimed by turns at D’s chest and his back. While he held but a single weapon, it looked for all the world like he had two.
Blocking both thrusts, D made a leap and blocked the second blow in midair. Surely, even the Blue Knight had never considered the possibility of anyone human coming at him from above while he was galloping along on his horse.
As the end of D’s blade was coming down, it suddenly changed direction. The sword swung to the right in a parrying blow, and was assailed by a horizontal arc of black. The Blue Knight had brought a second lance holstered on his horse’s flank into play.
D’s blade shattered, and the Hunter was thrown through the air. Amid the flames, his coat danced like nightmare-shrouded wings.
A split second lay between life and death. As Elena watched the flying Hunter, her brain burned with a feeling that was almost rapture.
This was precisely the moment the Blue Knight had been waiting for. In midair, no target whatsoever would be able to avoid his lance. At least, so long as it was human.
With ample time to take aim, the Blue Knight hurled his weapon. And his aim was true—run through from the belly to the back, D tumbled head over heels to the ground.
Reining his steed to a halt, the Blue Knight adjusted his grip on his remaining lance. Thirty feet from him, D was down on one knee.
“Now it ends. Wait for me in the hereafter, D!”
With the thunder of iron-shod hooves, the steely knight charged. But before the rider could ever bring his lance to bear, D would surely be trampled beneath the hooves of his steed. As the Blue Knight swung his weapon around, he never took his eyes off his target for an instant. But he couldn’t believe what he saw. Still impaled on the other lance, the young man in black rose steadily to his feet. The knight’s exclamation was louder than even the roar of hooves pounding the e
arth, but was it a cry of surprise or a grunt of deadly determination?
Just as the rider passed the man, there was a sharp sound and a lance went sailing into the air. Wheeling his horse around in front of one of the locals’ houses with the skill of an expert horseman, the Blue Knight was about to embark on another attack when he was dumbstruck. There was no lance in his hands. The instant he noticed this, D appeared before him like some guardian demon with the very same lance that’d previously impaled him in his right hand. The weapon in question scorched through the air to punch through both the knight’s armor and his chest.
“You did it, D! You really did it!” Elena shouted.
But her jubilant cries were cut short by the sound of hoofbeats. Incredibly, the horse had started to gallop off still bearing the Blue Knight, who’d clearly been pierced right through the heart.
“Stop that thing!” someone shouted.
“Don’t let it get back to the castle!” cried another villager who’d apparently seen what’d happened and feared the princess’s retribution.
With poles and spade-like implements they struck at the beast, but the horse shrugged off the blows and dashed toward the rear gate to the village.
“D!” Elena exclaimed as she made a single-minded dash for him. But the Vampire Hunter simply adjusted the brim of his traveler’s hat as if nothing at all had transpired. “You got run through . . . Are you hurt bad?”
Seeing his bloodstained abdomen, Elena shuddered for the first time at the thought of what this gorgeous young man was.
“Seems we’ve got a hell of a man in town now,” said a hoarse female voice. Mama Kipsch. “The first time I laid eyes on you, I thought you were far too pretty,” she continued. “And now that I see how fast you heal—I’d say you’re a dhampir, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” the Hunter replied.
Elena was speechless.
“No second-rate warrior would ever think of getting their opponent’s lance to replace their own broken sword. And seeing where you let yourself be impaled to do so, I don’t suppose you’re an average dhampir, either. You did say your name was D, didn’t you?” the old woman asked, staring at him with glittering eyes.
“That’s right,” D again replied softly.
Shifting her gaze from him, Mama Kipsch turned to the tent where the flames were almost under control and saw the corpses littering the area. “From the very start, those fiends never intended to let all of us get through this, I’d say. But using that moss you’ve got poking out of your pocket, we’ll have everyone back to normal in two or three days. Elena, you’d best come back to my place tonight.”
“I’ll help out any way I can, Mama Kipsch.”
“That’s not quite what I was talking about,” the crone said, her wise old eyes narrowing sorrowfully. “The real thing we have to worry about is what the people who’ve been put through all this will do, you see.” Turning to D, she said, “I’m sure you’d know all about that.”
The leisurely nod of the Hunter seemed to satisfy the old woman.
“In that case, you’d best stick close to this girl,” she told him. “The real trouble will start once the sun begins to shower its blessings on us again.”
—
Mama Kipsch’s prediction was right on the mark. The next day, every villager who’d been spared the Noble transformation came storming out to the witch doctor’s house to find Elena. As Elena snorted that she’d go out and give them a piece of her mind, Mama Kipsch physically stopped her and tried to talk to them in her place. However, she made no progress, and the crowd remained emphatic that she send Elena out, until the biker finally appeared in the doorway.
“This is your fault! All of it!” shouted the leader of the pack—Gary, the guard from the tent. “Yeah, all because of you and that young feller! Send him on out, too!”
“He’s not here,” Elena shot back, and a pain spread through her heart—D had ignored her and gone back to village outskirts. “But, don’t you get it yet? He’s the only one who can destroy those bastards. His strength will free us from the oppression of the Nobility!”
“Who in the world asked him to do that?” one of the women shouted.
That was the very question Elena had dreaded.
“We’ve had it pretty good so far, haven’t we? We’ve always managed to coexist somehow with the princess up in the castle and her knights, right? Sure, there’s been some ugliness. But if we just grit our teeth through it, there’s always peace again later, isn’t there? There’s a hell of a lot more ugliness in this world we live in. We’re lucky we don’t have to see most of it.”
“Sure, just as long as we obey all their rules,” Elena snapped back. “We can’t leave the village now. They carry off husbands and wives, children and lovers, and we can’t say a thing about it. What the hell is so lucky about a life where all our loved ones can be taken away on one of their whims?!”
“Well, people die from famine or fires all the time,” someone else cried out. “They’re just like that—a natural calamity us mortals can’t do a thing about. Come what may, we’ve got no choice but to just keep our heads bowed and our voices low, right? When you think of it—”
“You talk like a fucking slave!” Elena groaned in the bottom of her throat as the weighted end of her chain whistled out.
Although she shouldn’t have been able to see him very well from her location, the man who flipped backward with a cry of pain was the very same person who’d just been talking. His nose was now broken.
The crowd backed away, leaving a semicircular clearing just in front of the door.
As Elena hauled back on her chain for another blow, Mama Kipsch caught hold of her arm. “Stop it,” the old woman told her. “Don’t do anything more to distance them.”
“I knew that crazy bitch would show her true colors!” Gary the tent guard howled. “As far as we’re concerned, we’re in a lot more danger from you down here in the village than we are from the Noble in the castle. Hey, take a good look at this!”
The crowd split down the middle, leaving a single figure between Elena and the others.
Seeing the feeble individual crawling across the ground, Elena exclaimed, “McCay!”
It was one of her compatriots.
“Take a good look at him. He was one of last night’s survivors,” Gary said with revulsion. “But his right shoulder is broken, his left ear’s been torn off, and his left eye popped. And I think you know who did all that.”
Elena stood stunned, as if she’d just been struck by lightning.
Her rose-cursed compatriot had one hand raised to ward off the sunlight as he writhed on the ground. But his fingers were all bent in impossible directions.
“You did this. Back in the tent, you beat the shit out of one of your own. Yeah, you talk a good game, but when someone winds up one of the Nobility, you don’t know a friend from a piece of garbage. There are others that made it through the night, but they’re all beat to hell thanks to you. So before you go acting like you’re something special, take a good, hard look at what you’ve done. And he’s not the only one who’s been through hell. Just how do you and that young feller plan on taking responsibility for the forty people who died?”
It was a heartbeat later that the coup de grace was delivered to the dazed and speechless Elena.
“Give me back my Yohan!” a matronly voice cried. It was that of Mrs. Kaiser, a woman who’d often given Elena milk when she was young. “They killed him yesterday. You used to bounce my son on your knee. Oh, he was only eight years old!”
“I lost my Frida, too,” said old Mr. Bangs, who kept a herd of cows on the outskirts of the village. Frida was the same age as Elena, and she’d been an excellent seamstress.
“I just want my Chauve!”
“Give back Pelt!”
Elena covered her ears. She didn’t even have Stahl or Nichou or Tan there anymore. McCay writhed at her feet. She wished she were a million miles away, and a keen longing f
or the forest or the plains of the previous night came over her.
“Give ’er what she’s got coming!” someone shouted, but to the girl, the cry seemed to reverberate in another world.
“Throw her in the stocks on the edge of town. Better yet, leave her chained out by the castle for three days and nights!”
As one, the villagers grunted their approval. In that instant, the group became a bloodthirsty mob.
Elena didn’t have the strength left to stop the people with bloodshot eyes bearing down on her in a crushing wave. But a single bolt of lightning did it in her place. It’d skimmed by the end of the lead vengeance seeker’s nose and imbedded itself in the black soil. The man gasped in terror and the mob halted its advance.
The bolt of lightning had become a blue lance. But the reason the people remained paralyzed like lambs before a two-headed wolf wasn’t because they recognized it as the weapon the Blue Knight had left in town. Rather, they’d been frozen by the whistle of it dropping from the sky and the thunder of it sinking into the earth. Not a single one of them dared to turn in the direction from which it’d flown. The crowd froze there in the swelling sunlight as they listened to the approaching hoofbeats.
“I just knew he’d come,” said Mama Kipsch.
At last, the people turned and saw the gorgeous young man on the horse. Before him on the saddle sat a boy of about five, while a burly man with gray hairs scattered among the black stood beside the mount.
“Blasko!”
“And that’s his boy Cusca up on the horse. What are they doing with . . .”
“They’re here because I had need of a blacksmith,” said D.
This was the first time the villagers had ever heard D’s voice. The cheeks of every last woman flushed, while the men grew dazed and even enthralled.
Glancing up at D out of the corner of his eye, Blasko the smith said, “When I heard you’d all headed off to string up Elena, I was gonna come out here and stop you. But then this fella came by—” Swallowing hard, the smith continued, “My boy had one of those roses blooming out of him, too. But drinking the medicine Mama Kipsch whipped up last night cured him. Just look at him—sure, he’s still got a little trouble with the sun, but at least we don’t have to keep him shut away in darkness. I’m sure some of your kin have been saved, too. This feller told me what happened. It seems it was Elena who went out and got the blue moss to make that medicine. So don’t go doing anything crazy.”
The Rose Princess Page 12