D began to ride away without saying a word.
Behind him, Lyle waved one arm and shouted, “Thank you. I’ll never forget that you saved her. Your face might be an iron mask, but you’re a good enough guy.”
Then the boy sighed, “I may not be crazy about my father, but he is the mayor. Guess I should call a meeting with him.”
__
III
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“Where are you going?” the reins seemed to ask. The section gripped by his left hand, to be precise.
Getting no reply, the voice continued, “The pond? With your eyes, underwater at night would still be bright as day, I suppose. Was there some lead on the Nobility inside what you found yesterday?”
D didn’t answer—his elegant visage merely stared into the darkness ahead. The wind stroked his hair and fluttered the hem of his coat.
“That woman—she must’ve been the one responsible for what happened last night,” his left hand continued. “In which case, I guess she’s not your run-of-the-mill Nobility. Looks like we’ve got a real pain in the ass on our hands. You figure going down into the pond is gonna solve this mystery? Granted, there seems like there’d be some connection between this and the Nobility’s ‘research.’”
Holding its tongue for a while, the voice then said, “The wind is cold. And it smells like apples and plums. It sure is fall. This is just the sort of season that’d rouse a romantic Noble. You have to wonder if the timing is a coincidence or—huh?”
Just before the voice let out that final cry of surprise, D had pulled tight on the reins.
The road left the forest and ran off across the plains. Up ahead the ground rose, and at the very crest of the hill there suddenly stood a pale figure. At the moment, the moon was right over her head.
If the age most befitting this season was seventeen or eighteen, then that’s how old the girl in the white dress must’ve been. If the color most appropriate to this season was a muted green, then that was the color of her hair. And if fallen leaves were the most appropriate thing in this season, then that’s what danced at her feet.
“She’s a Noble, right?” the left hand asked, conviction in its voice.
Had more than one Noble been lured out by the fall night?
A second later, D charged forward on his cyborg horse.
Though it was the sort of fierce gallop that would’ve prompted even a good-sized man to leap out of the way, the girl stood and waited without so much as twitching. Eyes the same color as her hair reflected D, and her expression suggested she was lost in contemplation, spinning a eulogy for D and the fall.
From up on his mount, D brought his right hand around. Just as it had back in the swamp when it sliced through those surrounding him, the flash out of his scabbard painted an impossibly long arc. But D’s blade gave him no indication it’d made contact.
D saw a white mist moving away, driven by the wind his naked steel had stirred. Soundlessly drifting dozens of feet, it collected at the base of a grove off to the left and took the form of the girl.
As she turned to flutter away, D raised his right hand. The blade of his sword was now grasped between his teeth.
A yellowish hue zipped across his field of view.
Barely missing the girl’s back, his needle sank into the tree trunk beside her.
“We’ve got all kinds of things popping up,” a hoarse voice remarked. It didn’t sound like it was teasing him now.
Moonlight swathed the black rider and white mount as if to further ornament the autumn night. D turned his gaze to his left hand. His fingers now clutched a yellowed leaf. When he put his strength into his fist, fragments of the withered leaf scattered in the wind.
“Did that leaf get in your way?” the mouth that’d formed in his palm muttered. “It finally makes sense why they’d wake up now—these Nobles have the fall for an ally, don’t they? That could present a bit of a problem.”
Naturally, there was no reply. It almost seemed as if the warrior in black with his heaven-sent beauty was a captive of autumn thoughts.
__
That night, there were more strange occurrences than had ever happened in the history of the village. At the time the Vampire Hunter was facing the girl in white out among the fields, dozing old Helga suddenly woke in her little house and tried with almost no success to fathom the dream she’d just had. At about the same time, a couple that’d been in a neighboring village on business returned home to find their daughter sitting in a chair in the living room instead of sleeping. On shaking her by the shoulder, they suddenly found that she was dead. Shortly after that, Mayor Murtock was pulled back to reality and his bed by an argument between one of his servants and his son, who’d forced his way into the house in the middle of the night.
“Since you’ve been disowned, you’re not his son any longer. It’ll simply have to wait until tomorrow.”
“In the eyes of the law, we’re still father and son. And this is urgent,” Lyle blustered back, and then he laughed aloud at the sight of his father with bandages wrapped around his nose.
“This is probably the happiest I’ve ever been to see you,” said the boy.
“State your business.”
“I want you to give the guards the following orders: Look for the Noble’s hideout by day, patrol around each and every house in town by night, and if they see a Noblewoman in a blue dress, they’re to get in touch with us.”
The mayor gazed at his son in disbelief.
“So, you’ve seen a Noble, have you? Then I guess you went out to Cecile after all. Tell me it isn’t so—you couldn’t possibly have gone and interfered with the Nobility!”
Though the mayor’s surpassing rage made him cringe, Lyle didn’t back away.
“It wasn’t interfering. At any rate, Cecile safely made it through her first night. Did you understand everything I just told you? You robbed me of my mother. The least you could do is try and make up for it.”
“She died because of those damned bandits. Instead of acting like a good son, you’ve been nothing but trouble up till now. So don’t try playing the victim.”
“When those bandits attacked your wagon, mom would’ve survived if you hadn’t cut the horse free and taken off with them on your own. Don’t let anyone else die now.”
“. . . So, Cecile is fine. And this proposal of yours—I take it you didn’t come up with that on your own. That Hunter’s in on this, isn’t he? Well, he hasn’t heard the end of this yet!”
“Before you make any crazy plans about revenge, we should take care of the Nobility first. I’ll protect Cecile. All the rest of you have to do is find the Noble. And then the pretty boy will do the rest. You’ve seen what he can do, I’m sure.”
The mayor fell silent. Lyle’s words had gone right through the bull’s-eye. When the mayor lost the tip of his nose, his heart was filled with fear and anger—and a hope that was almost a prayer that maybe this young man would be the one.
“Okay, that’s all you have to do. There’s no need for your people to battle the Nobility. All we need is enough manpower to find the thing,” Lyle said, pressing the issue now that he saw the promise in his father’s reaction.
“Oh, we’ve got the manpower—to kill D, that is,” Bazura said as he pushed his way through the doors. In his arms he held a girl with death sealed on her paraffin pale face.
“What’s all this?”
To the mayor, who’d just risen from his chair, he said, “It looks like your kid has really gone and screwed things up for us. This is Shakero’s daughter. Her parents got back from the neighboring village a little while ago and found her like this.”
“It can’t be . . .”
Two stern gazes poured down on the stupefied Lyle like boiling water.
“It appears it’s the Hunter we’ll be searching for. And you won’t be getting off scot-free either, Lyle. Where is he?” the mayor asked, once again in the well-practiced role of the obstinate old man free from even a shadow of a doubt.
CHAPTER 3
I
__
After awakening from her strange dream, old Helga hadn’t been able to go back to sleep, and seeing D as he returned before dawn, she gasped, “Well, I’ll be . . .”
Even in the darkness the Hunter seemed to gleam like steel, but every inch of him was soaked. Droplets of water rained incessantly onto the floor.
“Went for another swim, did you? You’ve been having a devil of a time, too,” she said intently as she rubbed the bandaged wrist that Bazura and the others had injured during the day.
“Are you hurt badly?” D inquired.
“Funny you should ask. They took a whip to me and split the flesh right open.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Huh?” said the crone, adding in a somewhat unsettled tone, “Well, you sure do have some strange interests, don’t you? Wanting to see somebody else’s wounds . . . Did you find anything in the pond?”
“I want to check on something.”
“Okay. You know what’s best.”
With a deftness hardly befitting her age, Helga began to spiral the bandages off her wrist.
“Look at that, would you.”
The forearm she presented had nearly four inches of freshly broken skin that left the flesh below exposed. The orange tint to the wound must’ve been due to some ointment. When D had returned there during the day, the old woman had already finished patching herself up.
“Thank you for showing me,” D said softly.
“So, what in blazes did you find? Are there Noble ruins at the bottom of that pond after all?”
“There are.”
The old woman bugged her eyes, and then, as if suddenly realizing something, she asked, “Did you learn anything? About what they were working on out there, I mean.”
“A world.”
“What?” said the crone.
“Did the Nobility here have any children?”
“Now that you mention it, I do believe there was one . . . though this is simply going by the legends . . . I believe they had a daughter.”
“What was their daughter like?”
The Hunter’s rapid-fire questions left the old woman’s head spinning.
“Well, this is just what I’ve heard. They say she was a great beauty. Only the girl was every bit as cruel as her father, and every night she’d go into the village, choosing only little boys and sucking the blood from them until they were dead. As for her appearance . . . they say she had pale green hair and always wore a white dress,” the crone said, training a searching gaze on D. His countenance was so exquisite she thought she might lose herself if she continued to stare, but the Hunter didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.
“Did they have any other children?” he asked.
“Nope. Never heard any mention of anyone else. Oh, that’s right,” the old woman said, clapping her hands together. “I don’t know anything more about the girl, but apparently there was a lady-in-waiting who was always with her, practically like her shadow. And that compared to her master and his daughter, she was even more—”
“She was about eighteen or nineteen. Black hair and a blue dress.”
“That’s right . . . You mean to tell me she’s the one who’s been running around?”
“She’s the one who went after the sacrifice, at any rate.”
“You don’t say! Seems like the strangest thing has popped up. She sounds like real trouble. If you don’t hurry up and find her hiding spot so you can pound a stake through her heart, we’ll have a lot more victims on our hands.”
“One of my stakes did go through her heart.”
Silence descended—a fearful silence.
“One of your stakes . . . stuck in her chest . . . and you mean to tell me she still got away?”
“So it seems.”
“It can’t be. She can’t be indestructible . . . can she?”
“I’ll do my job.”
The crone let out a long sigh and relaxed her body. “I get the feeling I’ve lived this long just to hear you say those words. I’m counting on you, D.”
Sluggishly rising to her feet, the old woman turned toward the window. Her curtains weren’t drawn. A watery light colored the eastern sky.
“The colors sure are different on a fall morning. Stay in the village a little longer, D. If you do, you’ll see every leaf in the forest ablaze with red. And then when they start to yellow, the village will be the most beautiful place on earth.”
“I can’t let my work go that long,” said D.
The old woman gazed at the black rider. His elegant profile faced the windows. Old Helga realized this young man would never look upon the blazing trees of fall. He wouldn’t be in the village that long. If he was still here at that time, it would undoubtedly be because the villagers had discovered the corpse not of a Noble, but of the Vampire Hunter “D.”
A detailed scene abruptly formed in the old woman’s brain. D’s back. As golden leaves fell in a wild dance, the young man in black was silently walking away. That was probably the whole reason he’d come.
Faint grief filled the crone’s heart. She reflected on her hundred years. The endless cycle of joy and anger and suffering and sadness had left her a withered branch. But now what flowed through her was a thought more dire than anything she’d ever felt before. What could cause her more distress than this? No matter how old they might grow, human beings lived on, repeating the same pains over and over again.
To the old woman’s side, the autumn night was giving way to daybreak.
“. . . There is something we can do,” the old woman said to D. “Long ago, I learned a spell from a conjurer who came to town. It can locate a vampire’s hiding place. Since it’s rather taxing, I didn’t want to do it at my age, but I suppose I really should give it a go.”
Perhaps prompted by her decision, a hand so beautiful it gave people goosebumps gently came to rest on her stiffened shoulder.
“If my employer winds up dead, there wouldn’t have been much point in calling me here.”
“Don’t worry about that. Part of the blame rests with me. If only I’d gotten in touch with you earlier—as soon as I noticed something wrong with the apples.”
“I won’t try to stop you.”
“I know, I know. That’s fine, because I’m doing this on my own. But at least I’ll hold off until I’m not quite so drowsy.”
D turned to the door without saying a word. Even with the superhuman endurance of a dhampir, he still required sleep. Especially during the day.
__
†
She intended to get right up again, but three hours passed. After drinking a hot cup of tea, old Helga set about making her preparations and, an hour later, when she’d finished scribing magical wards on the floor, she heard the sound of something snapping through the air. It repeated time after time, and upon realizing that it came from out by the barn, she was just about to run out there when a man’s hands covered her nose and mouth from behind.
Bazura and his men had unlocked the back door and slipped in with silent footsteps.
As the gasping, struggling crone witnessed the smoke and flames rising from the barn, she went pale. Out in the garden, bowmen with flaming arrows had the tiny shack surrounded.
“Don’t make a sound, granny,” Bazura said in an intimidating tone.
He had an artificial voice box buried under the bandages that swathed his throat–one of the more useful items the Nobility’s civilization had left the world.
“Daybreak is when a dhampir’s metabolism is at its slowest. And there’s nothing worse at that point than an attack with fire. Even the renowned Vampire Hunter ‘D’ won’t be able to get out of there. I’d like to see him try. He’ll wind up target practice for a score of bowmen who can get off three shots a second. Don’t take it so hard, granny. Because he went and saved Cecile last night, someone else was victimized right away. So now he’s just getting what he�
�s got coming. Hell, even the mayor knows what we’re doing.”
Seeing that the strength had drained from the old woman, Bazura ordered his men to release her.
“How could you do this . . .” she groaned like a patient at death’s door as she feebly collapsed into a chair. “The Hunter was our last hope. That young man might’ve saved the lives of hundreds or even thousands here in the future.”
“Relax. We’ll look out for the village. All of us are gonna go out and turn over every last rock and pebble searching for the Nobility. So instead of worrying yourself to death, old-timer, go brew some herbs or something.”
“What about the sacrifice?”
“If you mean Cecile, we put her back in the same place. Only this time we took her folks into custody. They won’t be giving us any more trouble. And we threw the mayor’s little rascal behind bars, too.”
“You still don’t get it, do you? This isn’t the sort of Noble the likes of you can destroy!”
“Watch you mouth!” the second-in-command bellowed, ready to give the crone a taste of the back of his hand when suddenly there was a commotion outside that sounded like a mix of surprise and terror.
“Is he out?” Bazura shouted as he dashed over to the window, a crossbow clutched in his hand.
Suddenly D was standing in front of the howling inferno the barn had become.
“Run for it, D!” the old woman cried. “They’re gonna kill you and put Cecile back out at the same place as a sacrifice!”
“What are you doing?! Shoot him!”
The shoulders of the bowmen trembled at the harsh order from the second-in-command, and their bodies were so tense it was as if they’d been turned to stone. Yet not one of the arrows aimed at D was released. While flames leapt from parts of his black raiment, he stood there quietly—and his beauty and intensity touched all of them strangely, leaving them completely frozen.
“Damn, we’ve gotta do something!” their leader shouted angrily as something twanged from his fingers.
Vampire Hunter D: Dark Nocturne Page 10