“What kind of measures?” the duke was prompted to ask, which in itself revealed his state of mind.
“It’s a secret,” Dr. Gretchen replied, true to form, and then she looked up at the rolling blue sky and stretched. “If D should fail to return, then there is someone already under my spell—and that spell is eating its way into them. Ah, the sunlight we cursed for so long feels so good today! There’s something to be said for the daytime, isn’t there?”
One might even say there was an innocent joy in her eyes, but then those same eyes abruptly narrowed as she said, “Oh, there goes a flock of birds. Winged psychopomps, I believe. They’re flying twice as high as the ones the grand duke struck down with his glance just now. Can you do the same to them, Grand Duke Mehmet?”
The man with the look that killed turned away in a snit. Not surprisingly, it was beyond his ability.
“And you, Duke of Xenon?”
As she asked him this, the traveler in red hauled back with his right arm as if to hurl a javelin. At some point, grotesque armor had come to sheathe him from the elbow down to the tips of his fingers. He swung his empty right hand. But the sound that ripped through the air wasn’t that of a hand.
It rose higher. And higher. And higher still.
“You scored a hit,” Dr. Gretchen said with squinted eyes.
About twenty seconds later, it became abundantly clear that a number of the avian shapes were falling. They dropped. Ignoring the rotation of the earth, they landed right in the center of a circle formed by the trio. Roughly a dozen winged psychopomps had been pierced through the breast and out the back by an unseen spear high above the earth.
“Remarkable,” Dr. Gretchen said with a smile. And remaining in Mayor Camus’s form, she said, “But that was only fifteen of them. From six miles away, the Duke of Xenon’s spear could do no better than fifteen birds out of a hundred.”
She punctuated this with a haughty laugh.
“You seriously intend to say you could do better, Dr. Gretchen?” the Duke of Xenon asked, flames of outrage covering him from head to foot like a suit.
“But of course, my good duke—allow me to demonstrate.”
The old woman raised her left hand. A golden ring set with a purple stone glittered on her ring finger. When she flicked the stone up, a mistlike strand rose from the setting and climbed into the air.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
Grand Duke Mehmet and Roland, the Duke of Xenon, exchanged despicable grins that hardly suited the vaunted Nobility. They knew what Dr. Gretchen was trying to do. However, there was no way any poison on earth could reach thirty thousand feet into the atmosphere without dispersing. Especially not when what had risen from her ring had been a gas.
The smiles of the pair vanished. For Dr. Gretchen had looked up at the heavens. And laughed.
As she laughed, she made an easy leap, and then a second—and had bounded thirty feet away.
“Stand back!” she told them.
Grand Duke Mehmet made a leap that carried him thirty feet as well.
And a second later, all over and around the Duke of Xenon—who’d been left behind—there was the successive thudding of impacts like the crashing of angry waves, and the Nobleman was shrouded in a crimson fog. The Duke of Xenon had been enveloped by his exoskeleton, but suddenly his shoulders and head were struck and countless chunks went flying everywhere. Beaks. Heads. Eyes. Talons. Wings. Feathers. They were birds. Having plummeted thirty thousand feet, the birds noisily thudded against the duke and the ground. The fog was blood.
“That’s all of them aside from your fifteen,” Dr. Gretchen said off in the distance. “I’ve also arranged to use this virulent poison against D—it’d been dispersed by the wind, dissolved into the air, and diluted to but a millionth of its normal strength when it reached those unfortunate birds.”
The doctor spun around.
“Run if you like. Hide under a rock somewhere. First I shall cover the ground for three miles with the corpses of anything that flies.”
And just as the old woman had said, for the next few seconds birds, insects, and reptiles—anything that flew—dropped by the tens of thousands to blanket the ground around them with their corpses.
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 written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan’s leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there were 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 Marvel Comics on Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer with best-selling author Greg Rucka.
Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Parts One and Two Page 30