For the briefest of moments Toma had a scary look, but he soon broke into a grin.
“Oh, that’s right. Good question. See, I wasn’t actually out looking for you. Old Kapsch and Hadira were bellyaching about how hungry they were. I thought maybe I’d find some night hares or something.”
Hadira was the far-from-old Kapsch’s third son. It was little wonder a three-year-old would complain about an empty belly.
“I see. Sorry.”
Meg made a move to throw her arms around Toma, but he pushed her back.
“Let’s save the hugging and kissing till I know for sure we’re safe.”
“What, are you mad at me?”
“Nope. It’s just with everyone else to worry about, I’m not really in the mood for that stuff.”
Meg recalled how the strapping young man was the very picture of consideration. With only thin planks between them and hell, fishermen had rough dispositions. They had to be hard, or they couldn’t do the job. And while they recognized that Toma was as rough as any of them, the way he listened so attentively to the pearls of wisdom from an old minstrel who drifted into town, and his kindness in not only paying the man too generously for his services but also giving him some medicine because he was old had touched Meg’s heart.
“I guess you’re right,” the girl conceded. “Lead the way.”
As they headed west through the woods, Meg told Toma all about what’d happened up to that point.
“I wonder why I was the only one who suddenly went from being in the tunnel to out here?” she said.
“This island’s kinda funny. Sometimes you mean to go right and end up turning left. It’s like space is all twisted around. Like, you walk due north, but you wind up in the south.”
“That bites. I wonder if Wesley and the bounty hunter are still in the tunnel? Or did they wind up somewhere else, like me?”
“Who knows,” Toma replied, heaving a sigh.
After about thirty minutes, they came to a rough, rocky place. There was the sound of waves nearby. The sea must’ve been right ahead of them.
A number of figures appeared from behind the grotesquely shaped rocks. Each and every face was one Meg recognized.
“Mr. Kemp. And Miss Hardy.”
They were all villagers she’d watched walk off across the foggy bay.
“So, you’re all okay. That’s great!”
Perhaps they knew Meg’s cry of joy came from the bottom of her heart, because everyone in the group smiled in unison.
Meg stopped in her tracks. She’d just caught a glimpse of something. The thought it might’ve been those made everyone’s smiles vanish.
“What’s the matter?” Toma asked from behind her.
Meg shook her head wildly. Gripping a harpoon, she said, “Toma, let’s get out of here.”
“What?”
“Let’s go. Say goodbye to everybody.”
“But why?” he asked, a stunned look in his eyes.
“It’s nothing.”
“Oh, I get it. Is it these?” Miriam Hardy said with a smile, pointing to the corners of her lips.
The pair of fangs didn’t suit the lovely widow. Nor did they look good on Mr. Kemp. Or on his family, who stepped out behind him. The moonlight seemed to focus solely on their fangs.
“They got all of you, didn’t they?” Meg said, tears spilling from her eyes.
“It happened before we even knew it, and we couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Meg,” she heard Toma’s voice say from behind her, and he sounded at a loss.
His position became clear. As she turned around, Meg raised her wooden harpoon and let it fly.
Toma stared in astonishment at the long, long stake that’d gone clean through his back. His expression seemed to say he didn’t understand what’d happened.
“You always were pretty perverted, you know that?” Meg said, making no motion to wipe at her streaming tears. “Every time you saw me, you’d always kiss me, try to touch me. But now, you didn’t try to lay a finger on me. I thought that was odd. And another thing—you said you were out hunting hares, but you didn’t have any gear for the job.”
“If I’d let you touch me, you’d have known what happened to me . . . My body’s as cold as ice.”
Staggering to and fro, Toma opened his mouth and spat out a stream of blood, revealing a pair of gory fangs.
“But . . . it’s not like we wanted . . . to be like this . . . I’m sorry . . . Meg!”
“Who was it? Who did this to you?”
“A pale woman . . . and an old man dressed like a servant. They said . . . we’d be . . . test subjects.”
“Test subjects? For what kind of experiments?”
“I don’t know . . . It’s just . . . the people who were here before . . . made human and Noble . . .”
With a pop, Toma’s head flew into the air.
Eddying blood splattered at Meg’s feet, and she backed away shrieking. Behind her, she heard a succession of pops. All the girl could do was watch as the heads of one villager after another shot into the air. Every last one of them fell back to earth with a stream of blood trailing after it. A little head rolled to Meg’s feet, its face looking up at her reproachfully. The head of Kemp’s son. He was only six, as she recalled.
“What the hell?! Who did that?”
Meg’s body quaked. Whether it was from anger or grief she didn’t know. She felt terribly cold.
The moonlight dimmed. It wasn’t that a cloud had moved across it. Another shadow had fallen on Meg.
What the girl saw was a man in black armor floating in midair with his back to the moon. The four cylinders around his body seemed part of some device that gave him the power to disregard gravity.
“As expected, our impromptu puppets didn’t work out too well. We were more concerned about someone else and had to leave this to the puppets, and that’s where we went wrong,” the man said, his voice falling from a height of about ten feet. “Lord Danae says the more test subjects the better, and I had intended to bring you back to the lab, but it seems such a bother. I shall dispose of you here.”
Within a helmet that seemed to be steel burned crimson eyes that made Meg’s blood run cold.
Something cold touched her neck. Squeezing tight, it pressed into her flesh.
The girl thought, That’s what made their heads fly off.
Oddly enough, she was neither scared nor in pain. The moon alone was burned starkly into her retinas.
Off in the distance, a voice rang out. She didn’t realize it was a cry of surprise until after the world turned upside down.
Meg fell to her knees on the rocky ground and stared at the pair of figures squaring off some fifteen to twenty feet ahead of her. The armored knight came down a bit to just over six feet off the ground, where he gazed in amazement at a figure in black raiment standing on the rocks.
“When the island came back to life, the first thing we did was to send out the fog. That bit of white deviltry renders all in the world blind and powerless as it drains them of both life and will. However, now there is a wind from across the waves that could scatter it.”
The knight’s right hand slowly but with overpowering awe took aim at the figure in black.
“It gusts from you.”
The figure didn’t move. The collar of his black coat and the brim of his traveler’s hat hid his profile from Meg’s eyes. And the incredible eldritch aura blustering from the area surrounding the pair chilled Meg to the marrow of her bones. And yet, the girl’s heart beat faster and her ears could hear the sound of her hot blood racing. Within it, a voice wept with uncontrollable joy, It’s him. The gorgeous man I saw back at the cape.
“I am Baron Gildea, the chief of security for this experimental island. I would have the name of the man who menaces our very fog.”
The reply was succinct.
“D.”
Meeting a Century Later
chapter 4
I
Wha
t brings you to this island?” the black knight—Baron Gildea—inquired in almost a groan. “We took humans from the mainland. Someone with nerve might come and try to take them back. But that matters little to us. Giants pay no heed to swarming ants. Yet a man such as you mingles with those ants. Why is that, D?”
“Who reactivated the facilities on the island?” His voice was like night-forged steel. “And is Duchess Mizuki Dandorian still at rest?”
Silence descended. Before long, the knight replied in a properly stunned tone, “How do you know Her Grace’s name? Who . . . who in the hell are you?”
“A Hunter.”
His voice became an arc of silver. Baron Gildea jumped back ten feet in a single go. As soon as the Nobleman touched down on the ground, black blood gushed from his face. Though Meg had noticed that D’s right hand was extended before him, she had no idea when he’d actually drawn or how he’d cut his opponent. Wasn’t the baron’s face supposedly covered by armor?
Meg thought this had to be a nightmare. The scene before her eyes was a battle between a pair of demons far removed from humanity.
D went right up to the baron. A mellifluous ching! split the night air. The baron had parried D’s blade with the back of one steel gauntlet. At the same time the other hand made a horizontal swipe at D’s face. Meg saw the footlong claws at the end of the baron’s fingers tear through the pale and beautiful visage. However, D remained as he was, while the baron staggered. This was because D had stepped back with ungodly speed, leaving the claws to slash through empty space. What Meg had seen ripped apart was an afterimage left by the incredible speed of the Hunter’s movements.
Having taken one step back and another forward, D delivered a new blow from the high position.
Beneath his armor, the baron had laughter in his eyes. The same hand as before came up and parried the blade. Though sparks flew, the blade didn’t stop, and the baron’s arm was lopped off at the elbow.
The baron had glimpsed the crimson light that glowed in the depth of D’s eyes.
“You—you’re a dhampir?!” he asked, leaving a bloody waterfall in his wake as his body rose into the air. The four cylinders were indeed an antigravity device. “We shall meet—”
The Nobleman was about to say again when a diagonal flash of silver pierced his voice box. A dagger hurled by D.
“Gaaah!” he groaned.
For vampires, any wound save a blow to the heart or decapitation would heal almost instantly. However, the foe Gildea faced now was something that surpassed all imagining. He had an ominous feeling the agony that should’ve vanished in a second would continue forever, and the dagger that should’ve come out of him naturally due to internal pressure wouldn’t budge at all, as if it were stuck in stone. Grabbing hold of it, the baron applied additional power. Hellish pain ravaged his brain cells, and he passed out.
His body continued to rise and was swallowed by the night sky.
“You finish him?” inquired a hoarse voice from the vicinity of the Hunter’s left hand, but the young man in black didn’t respond, turning instead toward the depths of the forest.
“Wait!”
Meg ran like a girl possessed, circling around in front of him. Looking down, as if to avoid seeing his face, she said, “I saw you back at the cape. I don’t know who you are, but please, help me.”
It was an entreaty.
Not halting, the young man responded, “No.”
Meg didn’t relent. She couldn’t give up.
“I’m pretty sure you must’ve seen it. But those people that jerk just decapitated were from the same village as me. I don’t know where everyone else who walked off into the fog went. Please, help me look for ’em.”
There was no reply, and the figure in black walked away through the grass.
Meg circled around in front of him once more. Pointing to the corpses, she said, “Even the little kids from my neighborhood got turned into servants of the Nobility. You had to have seen it. Somebody’s gotta save the rest of ’em. Joining the Nobility’s a fate worse than death! Help me before that happens.”
“Everyone’s probably already got a taste of the same,” said a hoarse voice.
Thinking, Why’s a gorgeous guy like him got a voice like that? Meg shook her head violently.
“No, that’s not the way it is! The rest are all still alive, waiting to be rescued. We can’t just pretend they don’t exist! I’m begging you, please help me with this.”
He halted.
Met by a countenance so exquisite it rivaled the moon, Meg almost felt like she, too, was glowing. Yet she was chilled to the very bone.
“You have parents or siblings among them?” the young man inquired in a tone befitting that face.
Meg swooned. “I do,” she replied, her own voice sounding distant to her.
“What about a boyfriend?”
The girl returned to her senses. The second voice had been one of lecherous curiosity. Suddenly tears spilled from her. She was so sad it hurt.
“He died. Just a little while ago. I ran him through with a harpoon.”
“I’m a Hunter,” the young man said, his voice returning to normal. “I came to the island on a personal matter, but do you want to hire me?”
Meg wiped at her tears. “Ye-ye-ye-yes, I do!” she exclaimed, suddenly adding, “Er, about the money—is it okay if I pay you later?”
“Yes, but I don’t come cheap.”
“I’ll pay whatever it takes. I’ll break into the vault in the mayor’s office if need be. Hell, I’ll sell my body to make the money if it comes to that.”
Somewhere, the hoarse voice laughed. Meg had to wonder if that wasn’t his real voice after all. Actually, a smile did cross D’s lips.
“Good enough.”
“Yes!” she cried, jumping for joy. She couldn’t be certain whether it was purely a reaction to being able to save everybody now, or from her happiness at being able to stay with this man.
“From here on out, you’re to do exactly as I say. Any resistance, and our contract will immediately be void.”
“Understood,” she said, and then she thought with surprise, Was that actually me? “So, what do we do now?”
“The Nobility have a facility in center of the island. That’s where the villagers should be.”
If that’s what he says, it must be so, she thought. “Why’d they bring everybody out to the island, anyway?”
“It’s where they conduct their experiments.”
“Experiments? What kind?”
“Stay here,” D said.
“Answer the question. What kind of experiments are they doing?”
“Dietary ones,” the other voice suddenly said.
The remark was so cheeky, it made the blood rush to the girl’s head.
“What’s with that voice? Is it ventriloquism? Are you screwing around with me? I’ll remind you, I’m your employer!”
“We have a contract.”
For a heartbeat Meg was stuck for an answer, but a second later she exploded. “It’s canceled! Null and void! Null and void! Who’d hire a snooty Hunter like you? Fine! I’ll rescue ’em all on my own, just you wait and see!”
She gnashed her teeth at him before walking off, but with her third step her knees buckled. Limply collapsing, she then clutched both hands to her abdomen and murmured dolefully, “So hungry.”
Meg hadn’t had anything to eat since leaving the village. Her throat was parched, too. She couldn’t even stand like this, let alone fight.
There was the sound of hoof beats coming up behind her. As the cyborg horse passed by Meg, a pack of portable rations like travelers carried landed in her lap. She looked up in astonishment to find D astride the steed and already a good fifteen feet away. He must’ve brought the horse over in his boat.
However, she cried out, “Wait just a minute!” and got to her feet.
The cyborg horse had already broken into a gallop.
“Come on, wait! Take me with you. You’d just
leave a woman in a place like this? And you call yourself a man!”
Her words bounced in vain off the black back of the rider, and his raiment melted into the inky darkness. An intense feeling of regret churned in the girl’s heart.
“Was I supposed to wait here? No, that won’t do. I’ll find everybody and save ’em, sure as I live. But first—”
The stouthearted girl who’d wiped away her regret with resolve sat down on the spot and tugged the string on the ration pack. In three seconds, a chemical heat pack warmed the entire thing. Taking off the cover and setting it down, she found the tray-shaped compartments filled with steaming stew, fruit and vegetable pastes, and bread. Though it might not exactly be delicious, it was guaranteed to be nutritious and filling.
Before taking a mouthful of stew from the included spoon, Meg gazed off into the depths of the darkness where the exquisite rider and his steed had vanished and stuck out her tongue. Or she intended to, but then she stopped. She would never dishonor him. He was the very embodiment of teenage dreams, something that would always evade her grasp no matter how hard she might try to catch it, but even knowing that she couldn’t help wanting it.
II
When Meg awoke the sun was already high, and she sprinted through the forest. An almost imperceptible fog went with her. D had said everybody was being held in a Noble facility, and that it was at the center of the island.
“D—! D—! D—! Oh, you pain!”
Try as she might to forget him, the detestable Hunter had planted himself firmly in the girl’s head and didn’t show the slightest signs of leaving. Even worse, he had the nerve to make her blood run hot.
“Would you just stop it?!”
“I’ll stab you!”
“You’re nobody. You’re nothing, you know that?”
If anyone else had heard her running soliloquy they’d have wondered if she were right in the head, but in the end it was he who brought Meg back to her senses. She halted and her eyes blurred with tears at the memory of Toma, and in her heart the thought that she’d forgotten him so long made her so sick with herself she wanted to die.
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