As the baron gnawed at his lip, Miska focused a gaze on him that was beyond description, but suddenly she let out a low laugh.
“What is it?”
“I was—my dear baron, I have no desire to become an exquisite link joining the Nobility to the human race.”
“But you—”
“I saved those two merely on impulse—or to be more accurate, from the same kind of sentiment as someone who won’t abandon their pet dog to be killed by someone else. But they aren’t even my pets. While I cannot say that I don’t care for them more than the average human, still, they are naught but a burden to me. I will thank you to return me to my old self as swiftly as possible,” she said in a gelid tone.
The baron stared at Miska, but then he shook his head and said, “You make a poor liar.”
“Ridiculous.”
“No. Your eyes are too soft. Now that you know what it’s like to save a human life, you can’t return to your cold ways. And it’s best that you don’t. Kindly wait at Lagoon’s place. You may not get to go to the Promised Land, but you might become someone of great promise yourself. I will dispose of the Guide without fail.”
“But . . .” Miska began, but she broke off there.
It was just as the baron said. The instinctive scorn and hatred of human beings no longer existed in her psyche. The boy and girl were doing everything they could, trying their best to survive—and she loved those two kids.
“Let me help you down,” the baron said, stepping away from the control panel and walking over to Miska before offering her one hand.
It was just then that the operating table gave off a glow. An unseen force suddenly laid Miska flat on the table. A spasm rocked her body, and she arched her back like a bow.
Turning in amazement, the baron couldn’t believe who he saw standing before the control panel, and he shouted, “de Carriole?!”
“It would seem this old fool has given you too much credit, my good baron. What a foolish, pathetic mind I fostered in you. What a Noble needs is a psyche of ice and steel to make the lowly humans kneel, and to feel no remorse about drinking their lifeblood down to the very last drop. If not, then why did your mother have such regrets? Baron—kindly leave this to me. I, Jean de Carriole, will take that power from Lady Miska and transfer it to you, milord.”
“De Carriole, you mustn’t!”
The baron advanced two steps. A band of light flew from the interior of his cape, splitting open de Carriole’s left shoulder.
Though the aged scholar spilled bright blood everywhere, his madness didn’t waver in the slightest.
“Master of the dark skies, immortal Sacred Ancestor! In your name, I now offer Baron Byron Balazs the most powerful Destroyer.”
He prepared to slam his right hand down on a switch on the display. but it stopped in midair. The old man turned in shock. There was no one behind him stopping him.
“Give it up, boss.”
Sai Fung stood in the doorway.
“You—you wretch! Are you trying to interfere, you miserable traitor?!”
Madly thrashing his arms and legs all the while, de Carriole was pulled away from the device.
“Why don’t you act your age and wither away already? You’ve still got too much interest in romance.”
“Why do you interfere?” the old man asked.
“Let me tell you a little story. My mother got bitten by a Noble, too. But even though she hadn’t gone over to the Nobility herself yet, she wound up having a stake shoved through her heart by the same villagers who’d been her friends. Now, I don’t know who was right and who was wrong, but if the Nobility and humans could get along, there’d probably be a whole lot fewer kids that’d have to go through something like I did. I was only nine at the time.”
The building shook unexpectedly. Ripples passed through the floor and walls as if they’d been turned to liquid, and a second later, the area around the door rose in a point like the head of a squid and rocks and earth were thrown aside as a colossal caterpillar-like device wriggled into the room.
Sai Fung immediately shoved de Carriole away as a few thousand tons of rock rained down on him, but they all halted three feet above him. However, having all his attention focused on that load proved to be the undoing of the grinning Sai Fung.
The great scythes whooshed out of the caterpillar before any of those thousand limbs could react—no, actually it felt like a number of those unseen arms and legs were severed as Sai Fung’s torso was bisected horizontally.
“That’s a just reward for interfering with me—that’s what you get for being a traitor,” a voice called down from atop the green caterpillar.
Though he’d been cut in half, Sai Fung’s superhuman tenacity allowed him to open his eyes and turn, at which point the man gasped out loud.
The misshapen figure standing on the mountain folk tank was de Carriole. The other one—the de Carriole Sai Fung had hampered—had been buried beneath rocks and dirt by the caterpillar. Undoubtedly his death had been instantaneous. In which case—who was this?
“My lord knows better than anyone the results of my research. Kindly come out here.”
As de Carriole spoke, Vlad arose from somewhere in the caterpillar. There could be no mistaking that the young woman he cradled in his arms was Taki.
Then whom had D defeated?
Without even glancing at Sai Fung or the remains of the other de Carriole, Vlad glared at his son on the floor.
“Why do you think I’ve come? Fear not, it isn’t to dispose of you. As punishment for betraying me, I have come to send you into even deeper despair. Look at the girl who was hidden in Lagoon’s basement, yet I took possession of her oh so easily. Tomorrow night, I shall make her my bride. What’s more—oh, is that the young Noblewoman who came seeking Shangri-la? The Guide has told me all about that.”
The grin that skimmed across his lips was that of a good-natured old man—something rarely seen from him.
“Don’t!” the baron exclaimed as a white flash shot from his cape.
Deflecting it in flight, the scepter pierced Miska’s chest as she lay on the operating table, running through the table and into the floor below.
“Miska?”
As the baron was about to dash over, his body was knocked away by a blast of light from the side of the scepter. Flames engulfed his cape, but he quickly returned to his feet. His hair was singed, his flesh melted and dripping.
“Oh, as defiant as ever, I see. Very well, Byron. I won’t run, and I won’t hide. If you still intend to get me, come to the Field of Bones at midnight tomorrow evening—that nostalgic spot where I walked with you nestled in my arms. Come alone if you wish, or bring assistance if you will. However, keep in mind that if you are even a second late, I shall sink my fangs into this young lady’s throat. Give up, Byron! Forget about me and everything else and leave the village. You have but to go to some distant backwoods Nobility and introduce yourself and you’ll not want for human blood for the rest of your days. However, the name you should give them is mine.”
Once again a streak of light flew from the baron’s chest, but Lord Vlad had already disappeared into the caterpillar, and de Carriole had also vanished.
When the massive vehicle caused the ground to rumble and began to return to the depths of the earth, the baron raced over to Miska. Her frail form was pinned to the operating table like an insect. Just like the baron’s mother.
“Baron . . .” Miska said, opening her eyes.
Byron must’ve wanted to plug his ears. Because he now had to listen to the final words of another woman he loved dying in exactly the same manner as the last.
“Please . . . go,” Miska rasped in a thread-thin voice. “Leave the village . . . as your father said . . . You must not . . . be destroyed. If Nobles and humans . . . can reach some understanding . . . that will be your task in the future . . . I wish . . . I could’ve helped, too . . .”
Miska’s body suddenly grew heavy.
“My
dear baron . . . just before I was stabbed . . . I restrained the Destroyer. No more blood should be spilled . . . I beg of you . . . Just leave the village.”
The baron made no effort to look at the beautiful woman as she rotted away. Seizing the scepter, he pulled it out with one jerk. And then he slowly headed toward the control panel, saying, “You have made a mistake, Father.”
He had changed the way that he referred to Vlad. But could anyone in this world ever give the word “father” such a ghastly and mournful ring?
“Tomorrow I shall slay you. Father, you shall see with your own two eyes the power of Nobility and humans.”
And then he calmly walked back to a device he had apparently renounced—the control panel for transferring the Destroyer.
-
II
-
The sun rose, the sun set.
Tonight the lights burned once more at Lagoon’s sleepless pleasure quarter, and D awoke just as its halls were being festooned with the coquettish laughter of women and the murmur of bumpkins in their best clothes. At the end of their underwater battle, he’d dispatched Vlad. In return he’d been seriously injured as well, and his wounded form lay in a woodshed in one corner of the courtyard. Although Lagoon had been rather insistent about finding someplace more comfortable and having a doctor examine him, D had already fallen asleep.
The Hunter was aware that the massive subterranean tank-like creature had broken into the underground isolation chamber and that Taki had been abducted. No matter how badly wounded, this young man would bravely go off to rescue her. The reason he hadn’t was because of something odd Vlad had said underwater in his death throes: I may be destroyed, but tomorrow at midnight I shall wait at the Field of Bones. With the girl who’s underground. If you’re even a second late, I shall make her my bride.
As he’d finished speaking, D’s blade had taken off his head. However, astounding was the only way to describe the sight of D heading back to the surface after seeing to it that Vlad had disintegrated underwater. Vlad’s scepter had cut halfway through the Hunter’s neck.
Turning his back to the astonished Lagoon, D had gone into the woodshed and closed the door.
Lagoon had peeked in through a gap in the frame. And what he witnessed was a sight weirder than anything even he’d ever seen.
Lying on the floor, D held his shredded neck closed with his right hand and pressed his left hand to the wound. Blood still gushed from it. But none of it was spilled. Every last drop of it was being sucked up by the palm of his left hand—the giant realized that was the source of the slurping sounds the left hand was making.
Lagoon was fully aware that D was a dhampir. But could anything in the world be more loathsome than a creature that drunk its own blood?
And that wasn’t the only thing that astonished him. When the left hand came away, the Hunter’s neck was partially healed. And then the left hand—clearly of its own volition, not D’s—dropped to the ground, clawing up dirt with all of its fingers and spitting the blood it’d just drank out on the loosened soil. At that point the palm was turned toward him, and the eyes, nose, and mouth that’d distinctly formed on its surface made Lagoon rigid as a corpse beyond the door. It was a miracle he didn’t suffer a heart attack.
The left hand’s bizarre ritual continued, with the hand being thrust into the muddy blood that the pile of dirt had become, and the soil instantly being wolfed down by its tiny mouth. When it’d stuffed the last mouthful into its cheeks, Lagoon saw a pale blue flame blazing in the depths of its mouth. It was clearly the burning of an overwhelmingly mystic and powerful force. The wound on the neck of soundly slumbering D vanished in less than a second.
And now, as D stepped out of the woodshed with the coming of evening, Lagoon alone was there to greet him.
“At any rate, what do you say we have a drink?” the giant said, and even he thought his voice sounded funny. After all, he’d seen what D—or his left hand—had consumed.
“Why didn’t you run me through?” D asked.
“Huh?!”
“There was murderous intent in your eyes as you looked at me. Orders from Vlad? Were you to be compensated with the power of the Nobility?”
“You’ve got me!” Lagoon said, slapping his forehead. “That’s what I’d planned on doing until I saw you fight, and then I gave it up. With a guy like you after me, I’d have to live in fear for the rest of my days. Plus, I never was very fond of Vlad.”
While it was unclear whether D believed him or not, he changed the topic, asking, “Where’s the Field of Bones?”
“Oh, that’s the plain that lies to the west of Vlad’s castle. Bang a left just in front of the castle and you’ll be there in a snap. But who’s gonna be waiting there? You slew Vlad, right?”
“One of them.”
“Huh?!”
“There are two of him.”
Lagoon only grew more and more confused.
“What was de Carriole researching?”
After thinking for a while, the giant smacked his fist into his hand.
“Now that you mention it, he did order a weird text from the Capital. Some book about doppelgangers, I believe. Hey, you don’t mean to tell me there are two freaking Vlads, do you?”
D said nothing as he straddled the horse tethered there. Then, in a terribly blunt manner, he said, “Thanks for everything.”
“I didn’t do much. But—Godspeed to you. Even I couldn’t live the way you do.”
As the Hunter began to ride away, the giant called out from behind him, “I suppose there’s no sense saying this, but if you ever get tired, stop by anytime. You’re always welcome. I’ll even set you up with a good woman.”
D raised one hand. His left.
On seeing the grinning face that formed on palm of that hand, Lagoon almost fell over.
-
From the windows of a lab in the lord’s manor de Carriole gazed out at the twilight tinting the western sky. His decrepit form—heavily-wrinkled face and stooped-over silhouette—was bathed in the red glow, looking like it might melt away entirely. In reality, he was already an empty shell. The second Cordelia was impaled before his very eyes, the fires of enthusiasm that’d burned in that elderly body of his had been snuffed. Now, he intended to die. The cane he held in his right hand had a knife built into its handle. One thrust of it into his aged, feebly beating heart, and he could bid farewell to his pointless life.
When he turned that blade toward himself without any great determination, a voice called out his name behind him.
De Carriole turned, and his eyes bulged in their sockets.
Standing about ten feet away was a woman in white with water dripping from every inch of her. Although he couldn’t see her face for some reason, he knew at first glance who she was.
“Madam—is that you, Lady Cordelia?”
“Indeed, it is,” the woman nodded in reply.
In the same voice with which he’d addressed D early in the afternoon the previous day, the old man said, “If that’s the case, then it actually worked. Ah, and I never knew it for this last decade . . .”
“And with good reason. I didn’t appear until a year after you believed you’d failed.”
A doppelganger—de Carriole had been so obsessed with the idea of creating one because Vlad’s wife was hopelessly condemned to a life drifting underwater. He wanted to make another Cordelia and give her a different life. The fervor born of his longing only grew more obsessive with each passing day, until the genius succeeded in animal tests and his brain turned to making a copy of the valiant Cordelia. And that ended in failure.
De Carriole wasn’t discouraged, though. After all, he’d succeeded with Vlad and himself. Of course, in Vlad’s case, it’d manifested as merely a voice at first, becoming a complete physical entity only after news had reached them that the baron would return home, and it was at about that time de Carriole conducted similar experiments on himself. Naturally, every time he’d made a new breakthrough
he’d asked the woman in the water if he might attempt the experiment again, but he’d always met with the same calm refusal.
However, it seemed impossible that the failed experiment he’d conducted for the one he loved most had actually succeeded.
“Cordelia,” the old man said, forgetting the ironclad rules of master and servant and addressing her solely by her first name. “Why didn’t you tell me? If you had, I might’ve escaped much of this pain. The pain of making you live underwater.”
Perhaps that was the very reason why Cordelia hadn’t told him.
“You mustn’t die, de Carriole,” the woman from the water said. Neither cold nor kind, her voice was like the water itself. “There’s one thing you must still do. A creator must take responsibility for his creations up to the bitter end. Destroy the doppelganger of him.”
De Carriole shook. He had guessed what the woman would want. Still, hearing someone actually say it now, he couldn’t help but shudder.
Dispose of Lord Vlad’s doppelganger—
“For the longest time, I was unable to leave that underworld. But it became possible after my other self met that gorgeous young man. I went outside with him. If I so desire, I can make it so no one at all can detect my presence. De Carriole, your experiments have proven more successful than you ever imagined. I rode with him on a horse out in the sunlight. And on returning to the manor, I saw and heard everything that you and my husband undertook.”
De Carriole was speechless.
“I have nothing to say regarding that. Except this—de Carriole, you must destroy the copies you created of my husband and myself.”
The old man swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple was a horrible sight, bobbing up and down.
“But that’s . . . Milady . . . I cannot do that. Nay, I mustn’t. To start, even I don’t know if the Vlad that remains is the doppelganger or not. Milady, it might well be that you alone would disappear . . . and that would only serve to subject this old fool to the pain of having his soul torn asunder once more.”
“Do it, de Carriole.”
The old man turned his back on the dripping wet woman. It was soon afterward that a pale hand touched his shoulder gently. Perhaps the woman who’d drifted underwater had the devilish nature of the Nobility after all. As that hand slowly groped his neck and stroked his chest, the color returned to the old man’s cheeks, and his breathing became as ragged as a beast’s.
Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four Page 27