“Do you think there are Nobles who can walk with their victims in the light of day?”
At this softly spoken query the mayor clamped his lips shut. It was the very question he’d posed to D earlier. Suddenly the mayor donned a perplexed expression and turned his eyes toward D’s waist. However faintly, he could’ve sworn he’d heard a strange voice laughing.
“Sometime tomorrow, I need all the information you have on how the victims were attacked, their condition following it, and how they were handled,” D said without particular concern. His voice was callous, completely devoid of any emotion concerning the work he was about to undertake. Apparently this Vampire Hunter knew no fear, even when confronted with a foe the likes of which the world had never known: demons who could walk in the light of day. With an entirely different kind of terror than he felt toward the Nobility the mayor focused his gaze on the young man’s stunningly beautiful visage. “Also, I’d like to pay a visit to the three surviving abductees. If it’s any great distance, I’ll need a map to their homes.”
“You won’t need a map,” a feminine voice cooed.
Suddenly the door swung open and a smiling face like a veritable blossom drew the eyes of both men.
Eyes that shone with curiosity returned D’s gaze as she said, “Not the least bit surprised, are you? You knew I was standing out there listening in the whole time, I’m sure. I’ll tell you all you need to know. Lukas Meyer will be at the school. After classes I can take you to where Cuore lives. And you needn’t look far for the third. So, we meet again, D.”
Farmer Belan’s daughter, now the mayor’s adopted child, made a slight curtsy to D.
..
“Say, are you sure this is okay?” Lina asked the next morning, gripping the reins to the two-horse buggy she drove toward the school.
“Sure what’s okay?”
“Going out like this first thing in the morning and all. Dhampirs don’t like the daytime, right, on account of having part Noble blood in them.”
“Just full of weird tidbits, aren’t you?” D muttered as he looked over the backs of the six-legged mutant equines. If a telepath had been there, they might’ve caught a whisper of a grin deep in the recesses of his coldly shuttered but human consciousness.
Inheriting characteristics of both their human and vampire parents, dhampirs were also physiologically influenced by both sides in different respects.
Humans slept by night and were awake by day, while the opposite was true for the Nobility. When the genes of the respective races came into conflict, it was generally the physiological traits of the Noble half—the vampire parent—that proved dominant. A dhampir’s body craved sleep by day, and wanted to be awake at night.
However, just as a left-handed person could learn to use either hand equally well through practice, it was entirely possible for dhampirs to follow the tendencies of their human genes and live just as mortals did. And while they might have nearly half the strength, sight, hearing, and other physical advantages of a true vampire, it was that adaptability that was their greatest asset. With that fifty percent, they had a measure of power within them no human being could hope to attain, allowing them to cross swords with the Nobility by day or night.
Still, while it was true they could resist their fundamental biological urges, it was also undeniable that operating in daylight severely degraded a dhampir’s condition. Their biorhythms fell off sharply after midnight, reaching their nadir at noon. Direct sunlight could burn their skin to the point where even the gentlest breeze was pure agony, like needles being driven into each and every cell in their body. In some cases, their skin might even blister like a third-degree burn.
Ebbing biorhythms brought with them fatigue, nausea, thirst, and numbing exhaustion from the slightest activity. The proportion of dhampirs that could withstand the onslaught of midday without experiencing those tortures was said to be less than one in ten.
“Still, it looks like you don’t have any problems at all. That’s no fun.” Lina pursed her lips, then quickly hauled back on the reins. The horses whinnied, and the braking board hanging from the bottom of the buggy gouged into the earth.
“What’s wrong?” D asked, not sounding the least bit surprised.
Lina pointed straight ahead. “It’s those jerks again. And Cuore’s with them. Yesterday was bad enough, but now what the hell are they up to?”
Some thirty feet ahead of them, a group of men walked past a crumbling stone wall and was just turning the corner. There were seven of them. Three of them, most notably Haig, they’d met in the ruins the day before.
Walking ahead of the group as the others pushed and shoved him was a young man of seventeen or eighteen dressed in tattered rags. He was huge. He must’ve been six-foot-four and weighed over two hundred pounds. His gaze completely vacant, he continued down the little path pushed along by a man who barely came up to his shoulder.
“Perfect timing. We were just going to see him anyway. What’s down that way?”
“The remains of a pixie-breeding facility. It hasn’t been used in ages, but rumor has it there’s still some dangerous things in there,” Lina said. “You don’t think those bastards would bring Cuore in there?”
“Get to school.”
By the time the last word reached Lina’s ears, D was headed for the narrow path, the hem of his coat fluttering out around him.
As soon as he rounded the corner of the stone wall, the breeding facility buildings came into view. Although “buildings” wasn’t really the word for them. It appeared the owner had removed all the usable lumber and plastic joists, leaving nothing more than a few desperately listing, hole-riddled wooden shacks on the edge of collapse. The winter sun glinted whitely on this barren lot and on the naked trees frosted with the last crusts of snow.
The men slipped into one of the straighter structures. They seemed fairly confident that few people passed this way, as they never even looked back the way they’d come.
Perhaps thirty seconds passed.
Shouting exploded from within the building. There were screams. Lots of screams. And not simply the kinds of sounds someone makes when they run into something that scares them. Startled, perhaps, by the ghastly cries, the branches of a tree that grew beside the building threw down their snowy covering. Inside, a cacophony of something enormous shattering to pieces could be heard.
Just seconds after the reverberations died away, D entered the building.
The screaming had ceased.
D’s eyes got the faintest tinge of red to them. The thick smell of blood had found its way to his nostrils.
Every last man was laid out on the stone floor. Aside from a few steel cages along one wall that evoked the pixie breeding facility’s past, the rest of the vast interior was filled with the stink of blood and cries of agony. For something that had been accomplished in the half minute the men had been inside with Cuore, the job was entirely too thorough. There could be no doubt that some sort of otherworldly force had completely run amuck.
Two things caught D’s eye as the thugs convulsed in their own puddled blood.
One was Cuore’s massive frame, sprawled now in front of the cages. The other was a gaping hole in the stone wall. Six feet or more in diameter, the jagged opening let the morning sunlight fall on the dark floor. Whatever had left the eight strapping men soaking in a sea of blood had gone out that way.
Without sparing a glance to the other young men, D walked over to Cuore. Crouching gracefully, the Hunter said, “They call me D. What happened?”
Muddy blue eyes were painfully slow to focus on D. The boy’s madness was no act; his right hand rose slowly and pointed to the fresh hole in the wall. His parched lips disgorged a tiny knot of words.
“The blood ... ”
“What?”
“The blood ... Not me ... ”
Perhaps he was trying to lay the blame for this massive bloodshed.
D’s left hand touched the young man’s sweaty brow.
&nb
sp; Cuore’s eyelids drooped closed.
“What did you see in the castle?” D’s voice sounded totally unaffected by the carnage surrounding them. He didn’t even ask who was responsible for this bloodbath.
However, could even his left hand pull the truth from the mind of a madman?
A certain amount of “will” seemed to sprout up in Cuore’s disjointed expression.
The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, preparing to spill a few words.
“What did you see?” D asked once again. As he posed the question, his reached over his shoulder with his right hand and turned.
The half-dead men were just getting up.
“Possessed, eh?” D’s gaze skimmed along the men’s feet. The gangly shadows stretching from their boots weren’t those of any human. The silhouette of the body was oddly reminiscent of a caterpillar, while the wiry, thin arms and legs were a grotesque mismatch for the torso. Those were pixie shadows!
A single evil pixie who’d been kept here must’ve escaped and remained hidden somewhere in the factory all this time. Unlike the vast majority of the artificially created beasts the Nobility had sown across the earth, most varieties of pixies were exceptionally amiable. But other varieties, based on goblins, pookas, and imps from ancient pre-holocaust Ireland kept the people of the Frontier terrified with their sheer savagery. The redcap variety of pookas lopped off travelers’ heads with the ax they were born holding, then used their victims’ blood to dye the headgear that gave them their name. Few types possessed the ability to manipulate half-dead humans, but with proper handling they could help make otherwise untamable unicorns clear vast tracts of land or boost the uranium pellet production of Grimm hens from one lump every three days to three lumps a day. In light of this, some of the more impoverished Frontier villages were willing to assume the risks of breeding these sorts of creatures. The blood-spattered and still unconscious men were being animated by an individual of the most atrocious species.
The shadow held an ax in its hands.
Smoothly the weapon rose.
The men each raised a pair of empty hands over their heads.
As the non-existent axes whirred through the space D’s head had occupied, the Hunter was leaping to the side of the room with Cuore cradled in his arms.
With mechanical steps the shadow’s marionettes went after him.
Unseen blades sank into the wall and dented the roof of an iron cage. Cutting only thin air, one of the men fell face-first and set off a shower of sparks a yard ahead of him.
This was a battle for control of the shadows.
A stream of silvery light splashed up from D’s back, then mowed straight ahead at the invisible ax one of the unconscious men raised against him.
There was no jarring contact, but a breeze skimmed by D’s cheek and something got imbedded in the wall.
These weapons weren’t invisible, they were nonexistent.
Three howling swings closed on the Hunter, all from different directions. The blades clashed together, but D and Cuore flew above the shower of sparks that resulted.
Twin streaks of white light coursed toward the floor.
The men went rigid and clutched their wrists. Thud after thud rang out in what sounded like one great weight after another hitting the floor. Actually, it was the men dropping their weapons.
Having already sheathed his longsword, D headed over to one of the men who’d collapsed in a spray of blood.
Going down on one knee by the man’s side, he asked, “Can you hear me?”
As the man’s feeble gaze filled with the sight of D, his eyes snapped wide open. The fallen man was none other than Haig.
“Dirty bastard ... ” Haig said. “How the hell did you—?”
His pitiful voice, which hardly matched his rough face, ground to a halt when he noticed something on the floor.
Now pinned to the stone floor by two stark needles, the unearthly shadow stretching from Haig’s feet was rapidly fading from view. Stranger still, it wasn’t just the twice-pierced shadow that was affected. The shadows of the other men contorted and writhed in the throes of intense pain. And yet the movements of all remained perfectly synchronized!
It must’ve taken incredible skill to hurl those needles from midair and nail the shadow precisely through the wrist and heart, but it seemed doubtful someone like Haig could manage the amount of focus needed to perfect such a technique.
Because, amazingly enough, the needles stuck in the stone were made of wood.
Soon enough the disquieting shadows vanished and those of the men returned.
“I’m hurting ... Damn, it hurts! Hurry up, call the doctor ... please ... ”
“When you’ve answered my question.” D’s tone conjured images of ice. Not surprising, when he was dealing with the same guys who’d already tried to gang-rape an innocent girl. “What happened after you got Cuore in here?”
“I don’t know ... We was thinking one of them’s to blame ... So we planned on taking ’em one by one, smacking ’em around a little to see if we was right ... And then ... ”
The light in Haig’s eyes rapidly dimmed.
“And then what?”
“How the hell should I know ... Get me a doctor ... Quick ... As soon as we got in here and had him surrounded ... all I could see was blood red ... like something was hiding in there ... ”
The last word out of Haig’s mouth became a leaden rasp of breath that rolled across the ground. He wasn’t dead. Just unconscious. As the rest of them undoubtedly were. Though thin trails of fresh blood leaked from their ears, noses, and mouths, their condition was quite bizarre given they showed no signs of external injuries.
D turned around.
Cuore stood groggily in the doorway, but much further outside there was the sound of numerous footsteps getting closer. Either Lina or one of the villagers who’d seen the Youth Brigade with Cuore must’ve summoned the law. Apparently the bullying these young men did was far from appreciated in these parts.
D glanced at Cuore, then quickly spun to face the hole blown through the wall.
“What’s wrong? Aren’t you gonna keep grilling him? You’ll never get to the bottom of this mess if you’re afraid of stepping on the sheriff’s toes,” chided a villager.
Naturally, this didn’t faze D in the least as he and his black coat melted into the morning sun.
..
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hideyuki Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel Demon City Shinjuku in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has authored numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan’s leading horror masters, writing novels in the tradition of occidental horror authors like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there are seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi’s novels.
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ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Yoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well known as a manga and anime artist and is the famed designer for the Final Fantasy game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions’ greatest cartoons, including Gatchaman (released in the U.S. as G-Force and Battle of the Planets). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel Sandman: The Dream Hunters with Neil Gaiman and Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer with bestselling author Greg Rucka for Marvel Comics.
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Vampire Hunter D Page 25