Stopping dead in his tracks, Rei-Ginsei turned around. The look in his eyes riveted Greco. “The next time we meet, consider your life over.”
And then he left.
“Sheesh, you’re pretty damn full of yourself,” Greco muttered with all the venom he could muster, and then he too headed for the exit. His legs froze. He turned around, looking scared out of his wits. “I must be imagining things,” he mumbled, and then he wasted little time getting back out through the gate.
He thought he’d heard what sounded like chuckling. And it hadn’t come from D’s corpse, but from the dark bushes where his severed left hand had been discarded ...
..
“Ha ha ha ... Everything has gone exactly as planned. It’s unfortunate I had to wait an additional day, but I suppose that has only increased my ardor all the more.”
Standing on the same hilltop where Greco had encountered Rei-Ginsei by day, the figure took the electronic binoculars from his eyes and laughed softly. With white fangs spilling over his red lips, it was none other than Count Magnus Lee.
A carriage was parked by a tree, and the moonlight illuminated the werewolf Garou standing beside it in his inverness. Naturally, he had his human face and form at the moment.
He asked, “So, what shall we do next?”
“That should go without saying. We force our way into that miserable little hamlet and take the girl. That damned mayor of theirs undoubtedly plans on locking her in the asylum while he negotiates with me, but I shall have none of that. For all the inconveniences they’ve caused me thus fur, I shall create more living-dead in their village tomorrow night, and still more the night after that. Their children and their children’s children shall have a tale to tell of the horror of the Nobility. Consider it a gift to commemorate my nuptials. Upon our return, order the robots to commence preparations for the ceremony immediately.”
“Yessir.”
Giving a magnanimous nod to his deeply bowing servitor, the Count was about to get into his carriage when he turned and asked, “How is Larmica?”
“As you instructed, sire, she was punished with Time-Bewitching Incense, and she appeared to be in severe pain as she was still lying on the floor of her room when I took my leave.”
“Is that so? Very well then. If this serves to keep her from harboring any further thoughts of disobeying her father then everything will once again be as it should. I merely wanted to take the human girl as my wife. To live forever, sucking the blood as it gushes from her pale-as-wax throat night after night. Transient guest? The words of our Sacred Ancestor do not apply to me, I dare say. The rest of my kind may face extinction, but the girl and I shall stay here forever and hold the humans down with power and fear. Just you watch!”
Once again Garou gave a deep nod.
The Count shut the carriage door firmly from the inside.
“Go! The dawn is nigh. Of course, I don’t believe there shall be any need to burn it, but I have Time-Bewitching Incense ready just in case.”
Neither the Count nor Garou had noticed that, soon after D had been felled by Rei-Ginsei’s stake, a carriage had come from the woods on the opposite side of the farm and headed toward town.
..
For some time after Greco left, only a refreshing breeze and the light of the moon held sway at the farm. The cattle were sleeping peacefully, but an unsettling chuckle suddenly arose in the otherwise silent, solemn darkness.
“Heh heh heh ... It’s been a while since I got to take center stage. Eating spiders and making baldy spill his guts is all well and good, but I want a little more time in the limelight—of course, he and I might both be happier if I left things the way they stand now, but there’s still things that need doing in this life. And I kinda like that firecracker and her squirt of a brother. I’m loathe to do this, but I guess I can bail him out once again.”
By “him” it meant D.
The voice came from within the bushes. At the same time, something seemed to be moving around in there. Oh, it was the hand. The fingers. As if it possessed a mind of its own, the left hand Rei-Ginsei had hacked from D and thrown away was now moving all five of its fingers.
The hand had its back to the ground and its palm pointed to the sky. The surface of the palm rippled, like a lump of muscle was being pushed to the surface from the inside. But the truly startling part was still to come. A few creases shot across the surface of the lump, depressions formed in the flesh in some places while other parts swelled up—forming at last a human face!
Two tiny nostrils opened on the slightly crooked, aquiline nose, and when the lips twisted in a sarcastic smile they exposed teeth like tiny grains of rice. The disturbing tumor with a face took a breath, and then its hitherto closed eyelids snapped open.
“Well, time to get started I suppose.”
With those words as a cue, the arm started to move. Though the nerves and tendons had been severed, the weird countenanced carbuncle had the ability to reanimate the arm portion and make it do its bidding. The fingers of the prone hand swam in the air and grabbed hold of a branch of the shrubbery directly overhead. Clinging to the branch and pulling itself up, the hand flopped back to the ground palm down. “Okay, time to take a little trip.” The five fingers curled like spider legs and the wrist arched into the air. Dragging the heavy forearm behind it, it cleverly wound its way through the bushes and inched toward D. When it came to the stump of his left arm, the fingers once again scurried around busily, turning to the right and matching both sides of the cut together perfectly.
D had fallen on his back, so the palm of his hand naturally faced the sky. The countenanced carbuncle’s bizarre visage was left naked in the moonlight. And this is when it—the hand—began to act truly strange. It inhaled for a long time, like it was taking a deep breath. Given the relatively small size of D’s palm, it seemed to have an incredible lung capacity. The wind whistled and howled as it coursed into the tiny mouth. After this amazing display of suctioning skill had gone on for a good ten seconds, it paused for a breath and repeated the same behavior three more times. And then the countenanced carbuncle did something even more wondrous.
Cleverly flipping over from the elbow so that the palm faced down, the fingers sank into the ground and began tearing up the soil.
Thanks most likely to D’s steely fingertips, they scooped up the hard ground like it was mud, and before long there was a sizable mound of dirt into which the palm proceeded to shove its own face. In the hush, an eerie munching sound could be heard. The tumor was eating the dirt! By the light of the moon this unearthly repast continued, and several minutes later the mound of dirt had vanished completely. Where had it gone? Right into the countenanced carbuncle’s maw. But where in the world could it put all that dirt? The shape of the arm hadn’t changed in the least. And yet, the severed hand had consumed both the air and the earth. But toward what end?
The down-turned palm let out a small burp.
“Without water and fire this may take a while, but there’s not much we can do about that,” it said to itself, and then the whole arm abruptly reached for D’s chest.
It couldn’t be! The two sides of the slice along D’s arm were together again, even though reattaching the arm after both sides had bled dry should’ve been impossible. But the arm rose nonetheless.
Then the countenanced carbuncle said simply, “This should be a lot faster than using my fingers.”
With that it opened its mouth wide and bit down on the end of the stake jutting from D’s chest.
“Oof!”
With a weird grunt it pulled the stake right out.
Disposing of the wooden implement with a flick of the wrist, the palm once again turned to the sky.
The air howled. Once more it was being savagely sucked in, though it was now clear it was being consumed just as the earth had been. Pale blue flames could be seen flickering deep in the cheeks of the countenanced carbuncle every time it inhaled. With its third such breath, flames spouted from its mou
th and nose. Earth, wind, fire, and water were commonly known as the four elements. Having consumed only two of them—earth and wind—the countenanced carbuncle had turned them into heat within itself, and then into life force, and now it was pumping life itself back into D’s body.
This gorgeous youth—the great Vampire Hunter D—had a life-force generator living in the palm of his hand!
At some point the wind died down, and the tranquil farm was made all the more serene by the moon, but in one part of the farm the disturbing miracle continued. And the wound the stake had left in D’s heart—a wound that was certain death for all descendants of vampires—gradually closed.
FLASHING STEEL CUTS THE CEREMONY SHORT
CHAPTER 8
.
“Let us out of here, damn you! Let us out!”
“If you don’t let my brother out, I swear I’m gonna come looking for you every night once the Nobility make me one of their own!”
Wham!
Slamming the door shut with all his might and cutting off further bluster from the Langs, the man returned to his cramped office. Moments earlier, the mayor and other important members of the community had headed home. Here in the asylum, with no furniture save a battered desk and chair, their buzz still seemed to hang in the air.
“Those freaking kids. I figured at least one of ’em would be crying and pleading, but both of ’em go and threaten a grown man.”
As he grumbled to himself, the man pulled out the wooden chair and took his post in front of the steel door that separated the office from the lock-up area otherwise known as the cages. There were ten individual cells in the cages, each surrounded by bars of super-high-density steel. They’d been built to be a comfortable size, and Doris and Dan had been locked up together. Originally, a family had kindly volunteered to look after Dan while Doris was confined, since the boy wasn’t involved in this, but Dan had fought like a tiger and said he’d die without his sister. There was also a very good chance that, if left to his own devices, he’d have tried to spring Doris, which is how the current arrangement had been reached.
Victims of the Nobility were confined here regardless of the degree of their affliction; if the Noble responsible was destroyed then the curse on them would be lifted and all would be well. If not, the standard operating procedure was to release the victim after a given period and chase them out of town.
That “given period” was the number of days until the frustrated Noble attacked someone else, but this varied from village to village. In Ransylva it was approximately three weeks. The reason it was so long was because, based on past experience, it took an average of three attacks before the Count was done draining his victim, and there was usually an interval of three to five days between attacks.
Of course, because every village could expect their asylum to be stormed by the Nobility during the victim’s confinement, for the most part the asylums were guarded by well-armed men confident in their fighting abilities. Because they’d have the Nobility to contend with, no village ever skimped on buying armaments for the asylum. In fact, in addition to the five fully automated, steel-spear launchers and the ten remote-controlled catapults surrounding this thirty-foot-long, half-cylinder building, there were also three laser cannons to neutralize the vehicles of the Nobility, and a pair of flame-throwers from the Capital. The villagers wanted an electromagnetic barrier as well, but the Capital’s stores were running low, and they were hard to come by even for those willing to pay black-market prices.
The man guarding the cages was a member of the mob that stormed Doris’ farm. The reason the mayor left only one man on watch was because he’d decided that, after sucking the blood from three people tonight already, the Count wouldn’t be in quite such a hurry to attack Doris. But if it came to that, the guard could wake up the whole village with a single siren, and the weapons outside could be operated from the control panel on his desk. Most importantly, in four more hours the eastern sky would be growing light. The man wasn’t concerned.
Just as he was starting to doze off, there was a rap at the door. The man raced over to the video panel and struck a single key. Greco’s face showed on a small video monitor inside the asylum. “What do you want?” the man said to the intercom operating through the wall.
“Be a pal and open up. I came to see Doris.”
“No way. Your father told me specifically not to let you in.”
“Come on, don’t be a jerk. You must know how crazy I am about Doris, right? This is just between you and me, but when day breaks they’re gonna bring her up to old fang-face’s place on orders from my father. Meaning tonight’s my last chance to see the woman I love. And, as you can see, you stand to get a little something for your trouble.” Greco pulled a few gold coins out of his pocket and waved them in front of the camera. They weren’t the new dalas currency the revolutionary government started issuing five years ago. These were the “aristocrat coins” the Nobility had used. When the revolutionaries finally managed to take power, they destroyed vast quantities of these coins in order to get their new government’s economic policies off to a good start. One of them was worth at least a thousand dalas on the black market. That was enough to live off for half a year out on the Frontier.
After staring at the shiny gold for quite some time, the man hit a button without a word. The electronic lock on the door was disengaged, the handle spun around, and in sauntered Greco.
“Thanks, buddy. Here you go!”
Three gold coins clattered down on the desk. Forgetting to shut the door, the man snatched up one of the coins and busily bounced his gaze back and forth between it and Greco’s face before eventually nodding with satisfaction. As he dropped all three into his shirt pocket he said, “I suppose it’ll be all right—but you’ve only got three minutes to see her.”
“C’mon, make it five.”
“Four.”
“Okay—you drive a hard bargain.”
The man shrugged his shoulders, and then turned toward the door to the cages and reached for the key ring on his belt. The keys jingled together as he chose one and fit it into the lock. It wouldn’t do to have this door opening automatically.
“Say—” As the man turned around again, his eye caught Greco’s strangely bloodless countenance, and a flash of white light headed right for his own chest.
Killed instantly by a stab to the heart, the man’s body was laid out at one side of the room, and then Greco turned the key still jammed in the lock, opened the door, and went into the cages. His knife was already back in the case on his belt.
“Greco!”
There were cages to either side of the narrow corridor, and Doris’ cry came from the first one on the left. “You bastard, you come here to get your block knocked off or something?”
“Shut up.”
Doris fell silent. She got a bad feeling from Greco’s expression, which was more foreboding then she’d ever seen it. What the hell’s he up to?
“I’ll get you right out of there. You’re gonna run away with me.”
Beyond the iron bars, the Lang children looked at each other. In a low voice, Doris said, “Don’t tell me you ... you didn’t seriously kill Price ...”
“Oh, I killed him all right. And he’s not the only one. My father got his, too. That’s what he gets for trying to whip the shit out of me when I came home. The old bastard. I help make his job easier, and that’s how the ingrate repays me. But that don’t matter now. At any rate, I’ve got to get out of town tonight. Are you with me?” His eyes had an animalistic gleam to them, but his voice was like molasses.
The propriety of his actions aside, some might even go so far as to say the devotion he showed to the woman he loved was admirable, but Doris said flatly, “Sorry. I’d rather go up to the Count’s castle than run off with you.”
“What the hell do you mean? ...”
Tears sparkled in the girl’s eyes. Tears of hatred. “You teamed up with that butcher and ... and killed him of all people ... Just yo
u wait. I don’t care what happens to me, I’m personally gonna see to it you get sent to hell.”
She’d always been strong willed, but seeing in those beautiful eyes of hers a fundamentally different and desolate light, Greco abandoned all his schemes and dreams. “So that’s how it is? You’re saying you’d prefer the Nobility to me?”
When he looked up, all emotion had drained from his face, but the gleam in his eyes was unusually strong.
“If that’s the way it’s got to be, I guess when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go—and you’re about to go join that punk in the hereafter.” Taking a step back, he drew the ten-banger from his hip.
Dan shouted, “Sis!” and grabbed onto Doris’ neck for dear life while she tried to hide the boy behind her back.
“You’re out of your mind, Greco!”
“Say what you like. But I’d rather do this than have any other man take you—vampire or otherwise. You and that smart-mouthed little squirt get to check out of this life together.”
“Stop!”
That Doris’ cry had been to beg for her own life was the last coherent thought to go through Greco’s mind. Someone behind him grabbed the hand with the ten-banger by the wrist. Though whoever it was was just barely touching him, his finger lost the strength to finish pulling the trigger. An unearthly chill spread from his wrist to the rest of his body. Breath with the sweet scent of death tickled his nose, and frosty, dark words struck his earlobe.
“Better you had killed me when you had the chance.” Larmica’s pale face eclipsed the nape of Greco’s swarthy neck.
Frozen in horror, Doris and Dan watched as Greco’s face grew paler and paler, like he was disappearing into a fog. Seconds later, the young lady in the black dress pulled away from the man and approached their cage. With a thread of blood running from the pale corner of her mouth, this beauty that seemed to sparkle in the darkness could be likened to nothing save a vengeful wraith. Perhaps her thirst wasn’t sated yet, for a glance from her bright red eyes shook Doris and Dan to the bottom of their souls.
Vampire Hunter D Page 20