Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four

by Pale Fallen Angel (Parts 3

  And saying that, Ming smirked.

  “But I . . . It’s really . . . I mean, right off the bat like this . . .”

  “You must be pretty stupid, kid. You came here to sign yourself on, didn’t you? Then show a little more gumption. If all goes well, you could be rolling in loot a hundred times faster than the other girls. Both of us could.”

  Turning away as she said the last part, she then glared at Paige from the corner of her eye.

  That was when Lagoon came back. Looking them both over from head to toe in a way that gave them chills, he said, “You girls aren’t snot-nosed little kids. You know this is the kind of chance that only comes once in a lifetime. What you make of it is up to you. Come with me, one at a time.”

  “Both at the same time wouldn’t be bad either,” Ming said in a husky voice.

  “No way,” Paige said, her cheeks flushing as she turned her face away.

  “I’ll start with you,” Lagoon said, tossing his jaw to where Ming stood with a broad smile. After spending some “quality time” with her, he then led the reluctant Paige into his bedroom without any break at all. And on seeing his expression when he came out again a short time later, the smile was wiped from Ming’s face.

  “Go get to work,” Lagoon ordered Ming frostily, and after she’d left in indignation, he came up behind Paige where she still stood and hugged her from behind.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Of me? Well, you were still pretty intense.”

  “No. Of the woman just now—Ms. Ming. She gave me such a look!”

  “Just a jealous woman. Not much you can do about that. But all that aside—”

  Lagoon must’ve been quite taken with this slender, innocent-looking girl, because his eyes were filled with a lecherous gleam as his rough fingers closed around a waist so thin it looked like he could snap her in two.

  “No, I’m just not in the mood. This is all too fast,” Paige said, madly tearing free of the man’s hands to escape him.

  She stopped in front of the door, and when Lagoon embraced her from behind once more, his hands were more forceful and more feverish than before.

  “You’ve got nothing at all to fear. You’re so cute. So long as we’re in my place, I am king. I won’t let anyone lay a finger on you.”

  “Really?” she asked, her face stiffening as she turned to stare at him with tears welling up. With huge, limpid eyes that seemed right off the cover of a fashion magazine, long eyelashes, a cute little nose, and lips like flower petals, the woman had such an unbelievable air of allure about her that Lagoon knew he just had to make her his own, and he seemed half-drunk as he pressed his lips to hers.

  “You’re going to look out for me, then?” she asked.

  “Of course so.”

  “In that case, tell me everything about yourself. As proof that you’re my man.”

  “No problem.”

  You’re getting a little too big for your britches, miss, Lagoon thought, but he was surprised to find he was quite serious about her.

  “But that’s gonna cost you—okay?”

  Without waiting for her reply, he swept her delicate form into his arms and carried her through the doorway to the bedroom, where the starting pistol for a manly endeavor was about to go off.

  Letting out a sad little cry as she was tossed down on the bed, Paige smirked so that Lagoon wouldn’t see it. For a second, a man’s expression rose in the cute face of the cute young lady.

  The girl who’d sold herself into service in the pleasure quarter was actually one of Chlomo the Makeup Lover’s disguises. Only he hadn’t applied the cosmetics to himself, but rather to Sai Fung of the Thousand Limbs. He’d snuck into the place on orders from de Carriole. Based on what the lord had told him, the aged scientist decided Fisher Lagoon was plotting treachery, and he ordered his two henchmen to get him irrefutable proof of that charge. The reason Sai Fung alone had been disguised was because Chlomo had been given an additional command: “Find Lady Miska!” And with that, the two of them had gone off to their respective tasks. The matter of who would handle each had been decided by a game of rock-paper-scissors.

  In the same warehouse hideout where Chlomo had made up the Baron, Sai Fung was made up at dawn before making his way on foot to Fisher Lagoon’s. As he was leaving, he saw Chlomo out in front of the warehouse looking around as if searching for something. He asked in a perfectly ladylike manner, “Whatever’s the problem?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that when we took the baron and that Hunter that got in our way out of here last night, the bastard’s horse was tied up. It was too much trouble at the time, so I figured I’d deal with it later, but now it’s gone. Can’t help feeling like I probably lost out on that one.”

  “Someone must’ve taken it,” Sai Fung—or rather, the country girl by the name of Paige—replied promptly. When Chlomo’s makeup worked its magic, Sai Fung’s basic will and personality remained the same even as his voice and physical characteristics were transformed into those of the woman he was modeled after.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Chlomo agreed, gazing steadily at the compatriot whose very gender he’d altered. “I was sort of curious as to what his horse was carrying, but it’s too late to do anything about that now. Okay, go give ’em hell.”

  All of this had transpired as the dawn began to be tinged with blue.

  In the bedroom, Lagoon was totally under the thrall of Paige/Sai Fung. The woman Chlomo based his makeup on was a rare temptress—cute and a born nymphomaniac. She captivated hundreds of men and robbed them of their fortunes before she was eventually stabbed to death by the wife of one of the men.

  “Stay with me,” he ordered her, and as Paige/Sai Fung smiled joyfully, she cursed her luck in her heart of hearts.

  From what Chlomo had said, anyone who went to bed with this temptress—male or female—had their brain dissolve while going mad and becoming a slave who would blindly follow her bidding. Needless to say, she quickly realized that Lagoon’s incredible toughness was to blame for their miscalculations, but she/he didn’t have the strength left to pull him back into bed once again.

  Pawing Paige/Sai Fung’s hair somewhat roughly, Lagoon said in a voice like stone, “From what I’ve seen, you’ve got even greater gifts than appearances would’ve led me to believe. At any rate, being my favorite, why don’t we take a stroll around the whole place. If you happen to notice anything out there, tell me about it later, and I’ll try to come up with the appropriate recompense.”

  And then, with the most dangerous of women/men by his side, he set out on a tour of his establishment. She was introduced to the people who ran things, and she also met the girls. The eyes of the younger ones burned with flames of jealousy and repulsion, and while those of the old hands should’ve burned several times more ferociously, they were calm instead. They knew in an instant the position any girl in Lagoon’s company occupied. Once the personal introductions had been dispensed with, Lagoon showed the girl all the rooms in his establishment and explained how they were used. From the bordello to the casino, from the arcade to the offices and power center, Paige simply followed along meekly with her mouth agape. However, the one exception to this came in a bend in one of the corridors in the southern wing, where Lagoon would’ve been expected to keep going straight but instead made an awkward turn to the left.

  “Um . . . What’s down there?” Paige started to inquire.

  She was speared by an intense look, but his eyes soon returned to a milder hue.

  “It’s under construction. Robot dogs are guarding it. Get too close and they’ll tear you to pieces,” he told her.

  “I see.”

  As Lagoon turned his broad back to her and she continued to walk after him, Paige’s lips twisted. But Lagoon didn’t notice.

  -

  II

  -

  As they were galloping toward the mountain stronghold, D prepared to open the glider wings once more. But he was stopped by a crisp, clear v
oice that issued from the mountain stronghold.

  “The gate is open. There is nothing to hinder you, Hunter! Once you’ve entered the castle, find my immobilized form. However, you shall have to do it while you have the daylight as your ally. The evening will be long and dark, and for you, this night shall be your last.”

  The voice had told the truth, and D held onto the wings as the great gates opened to either side and ushered him to a staircase connecting the castle to the ground below. Seen from below, the stairs seemed to dwindle to a fine thread as they ran up to the castle.

  “There are three thousand steps,” the woman informed him.

  D opened the wings above his head.

  “Farewell,” the woman’s voice said, and the Hunter sensed the presence behind him departing.

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “No. There are a million things I should like to see, but your corpse isn’t one of them.”

  “Thanks for getting me this far.”

  His words were suddenly thrown to the four winds. D rode that gust up the entire staircase, and at the head of it, the castle gate was open. The wind had been sent by Lord Vlad—he knew exactly what the Hunter was up to. It would’ve been easy enough to resist, but D played right into the enemy’s hands.

  Cutting across a front garden so small it couldn’t begin to compare to those of the castle down on level ground, he was drawn into a hall. Suddenly the wind died and he dropped straight down to the floor. At the moment he landed, he trained a trenchant gaze straight ahead.

  An old man hunched at the waist was just coming through a rough wooden door. Once the door had closed, he bowed his head deeply—so deeply, in fact, that it actually looked as if it had come free of his torso.

  “I am a physician in the service of Lord Vlad; Jean de Carriole by name. I have been waiting for you . . . for the Hunter who was friendly with him.”

  His face rose sharply. Red light glittered in it–it was the same mysterious cat’s eyes that’d made Miska and Vince his slaves. As they reflected the Hunter, D’s eyes were tinged with red as well, and both men stopped dead.

  Two streaks of red light stretched through the space between the old man and the gorgeous youth, and in the center of that a terrific battle of wills gave rise to unseen flames.

  “That’s an odd little trick you have,” a hoarse voice chuckled. “But it won’t work on my friend here.”

  As D kicked off the ground, de Carriole clutched his eyes and reeled. D’s blade flew down at the top of his head—or started to, and then the Hunter turned around.

  In front of the entrance doors stood someone he recognized.

  “If it isn’t the baron!” the hoarse voice exclaimed suspiciously. “He’s acting funny. Better be careful.”

  Before the voice had even finished speaking, de Carriole shouted, “Kill him!”

  The baron didn’t move, and D also halted where he was.

  Had one of them been immobilized by the murderous intent of the other? The intense concentration of ghastly emanations transformed even de Carriole into an icy sculpture.

  A gap opened smoothly down the middle of the figure in blue. The instant the dazzling light burst from his cape and sailed toward D, the figure in black kicked off the floor. The light changed direction after slicing through D’s afterimage, and fifteen feet still lay between the baron and where D hung in the air with his sword raised high.

  “Gah!” the figure in blue groaned. Lowering his prim and proper face, he looked down at the blade that’d sliced him from the left side of his neck down through all of his thoracic vertebrae and even now still pierced him.

  Before the baron dropped, D approached him with powerful strides and reached for the hilt of his sword. As the baron fell, the weight of his body left the sword in D’s hand.

  Without making a sound, D took his sword and pointed it behind himself.

  As the tip of the weapon jabbed against de Carriole’s throat, a thin sigh escaped him.

  “I knew it . . . I just knew it . . .”

  The tip sank into his wrinkly neck, drawing red blood. This young man wasn’t the kind to pull punches simply because someone was old.

  “Where is he?” D asked, strangely enough.

  He wasn’t talking about the lord—he wouldn’t have referred to him as “he.” And the baron was now the inhabitant of a bright bloody world colored by the fluid spouting from his body.

  “You saw through that as well? The baron is in a different location,” de Carriole replied.

  The old man who seemed like he’d wear the same cold smile no matter what happened to him was now scared to the pit of his soul.

  “Where?”

  “A house . . . My house.”

  “That’s a weird little dummy you had there. Even though the principal ingredient looks to be ectoplasm, its fighting ability’s only a hair behind the baron’s.”

  De Carriole’s eyes shifted a tad toward D’s left hand, but froze when the blade jabbed in even further.

  “Doesn’t look like a plain old homunculus or skill-transplanted body,” the hoarse voice continued. “What is it, an artificially-made doppelganger?”

  “Where is Vlad?” D asked.

  “I don’t know. There are simply too many parts of the mountain stronghold unknown to me.”

  “Then I have no use for you.”

  “W—wait! There’s something I must tell you. I have information regarding the great one!”

  This was de Carriole’s ace in the hole. And he played it quickly because if he’d waited another tenth of a second, his head would’ve most likely been irrevocably parted from his body.

  “And who would this ‘great one’ be?”

  “The Sacred Ancestor.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Then you are interested, just as I suspected. It looks like my skin is saved. Come to my room. I shall share with you all that I know. Truth be told, I never had any intention of fighting you from the very start.”

  “You go first,” D commanded in a tone that made it clear he didn’t need to hear any excuses.

  Passing through the door at the far end of the hall, the pair traveled down a long corridor, presently arriving at de Carriole’s lab. Though it came as little surprise it was smaller than that in the castle down on the plain, it was every bit as well-equipped.

  “Just as I thought,” the Hunter’s left hand muttered in a tone no one would hear, having apparently spotted something that tied into the baron’s other self they’d just encountered.

  “Talk.”

  De Carriole nodded at D’s low and pointed instruction. Although they had returned to the lab that could be called his private sanctum, he didn’t appear a speck more relieved or relaxed. D’s unearthly aura wouldn’t allow him to feel either.

  “I doubt the man they call D would fail to notice something in his travels with Baron Byron Balazs. His father was not Lord Vlad. It was the Sacred Ancestor!”

  And saying this, he leaned back against one of the ropes that hung from the ceiling, wrapped one arm around it, and looked up toward the ceiling. There was a tinge of sadness in his eyes.

  D had heard the better part of the story that followed from the woman in the water—wife to Vlad and mother of the baron.

  “However, in the end, the lord could not love this son who’d been given something by the Sacred Ancestor. Or perhaps it would be better to say he wouldn’t tolerate him. The lord treated the baron cruelly, ultimately plotting to take his life. But the baron was saved by his mother—Lady Cordelia. Thanks to her, he was able to escape with his servants, and today he follows the road to vengeance. However, the punishment Cordelia was given is enough to make anyone want to hide their eyes. For the Nobility, the fear of water is second only to that of the sun. The lord had Lady Cordelia’s body surgically altered so that, while her fear of the water still remained, she would be strong enough to live forever submerged in it.”

  D saw that the aged scholar’s shoulders q
uaked. His shaking was neither from grief nor anger, but rather from both.

  “Who do you curse?” D asked.

  “Myself,” the aged scholar said, gnawing his lip.

  “Who performed the operation on the lord’s wife?”

  “Me. That was me as well.”

  De Carriole gave a pull on the arm wrapped around the rope. A strident clang echoed from somewhere in the ceiling—the sole expression of suffering this old man was allowed.

  “He wouldn’t permit me to use anesthetic during Lady Cordelia’s operation. Nobility or not, they still feel pain. Some of them even go mad from it. I swear to you, as I transformed her into a Noble that could live underwater, she surely tasted pain far worse than anything hell could hold for her. Moreover—”

  The aged scholar turned around. The expression that surfaced on his waxy face wasn’t that of any human.

  “Moreover—oh, D, have you ever met her? Lady Cordelia—ever calm, ever gentle. Even as my scalpel visited insanity on her, her face twisting in agony as she lost consciousness time and again, she never once blamed me, guilty as I was. Once the procedure concluded, I was weeping apologies to her when she took my hand. I can still recall the look in her eyes as she asked me to look after her husband. Alas . . . even now, the sweet Lady Cordelia remains in the water. Laden with pain and grief that shall know no end—and it is I that did it to her. I, Jean de Carriole. You shall pay for that, Vlad Balazs!”

  At that last flabbergasting comment, a cry of “Oh-ho!” rose from the vicinity of D’s hip, but de Carriole didn’t notice as his narrow, teary eyes bored into D’s face.

  “Lord Byron has returned. In all likelihood, he possesses the strength and skill of the Sacred Ancestor. The Sacred Ancestor has succeeded. But it will still take some time for his power to develop fully. And I shall buy him that time. However, before I do—”

  The old man’s wrinkled mouth moved sluggishly, like a cut of meat trying to speak.

  “D, kill Lord Vlad.”

  No sooner had those words entered the ears of the youth of unearthly beauty than de Carriole cried, “Lady Cordelia, for you I now slay this Hunter!”