SLEEPER AGENT

SLEEPER AGENT

chapter 5

I

—

Just after daybreak, Old Man Roskingpan was questioned and a search was performed on the house belonging to Domon of the
Black Death gang—also known as the farmer Stejiban Toic. The reason for the search of Toic’s house was obvious enough; the old man was brought in because he was suspected of complicity with him. After all, Toic—a liquid human—had concealed himself in the bottle of champagne the old man brought.

“There’s no way I could stuff a grown man into a champagne bottle in the first place!” the drunk protested, which sounded reasonable enough. However, liquid humans could make tens of thousands of their particles fuse into one while still retaining their fluid state. Everyone knew that.

The old man, of course, maintained that he didn’t know anything about the incident. Though he could recall being in the saloon, having a few drinks, and overhearing that Rust and Lyra were in the watchtower, he said he didn’t remember going out there or leaving the bottle behind. About five minutes had elapsed from the moment when the old man called out to Rust to when the sheriff reached the bottom of the tower. After setting down the bottle, the old man had left immediately, and if Toic had opened the bottle, poured out the contents, and concealed himself in it, there was a very good chance that he’d been tailing the old man. However, Toic hadn’t been at the saloon, and the idea to go out to the tower—according to the old man’s account—had come from hearing in the saloon that Rust and Lyra were there. The chances that Toic just happened to spot the old man and then follow him were extremely remote. It was quite conceivable that this had been planned in advance.

Rust was handling the questioning, which had bogged down on that last point, when Lyra returned from Domon/Toic’s house.

“It seems Toic left his house last night, saying he was going to go have a drink. The time was—”

It was the same time Old Man Roskingpan was hanging around town; it wouldn’t have been at all strange if Toic had encountered the man before he went to the saloon. Lyra’s investigation had been thorough. On her way back from Toic’s house, she’d stopped by the old man’s place—which was less than two hundred yards from the farmer’s—and learned that the old man had passed another villager before going to the saloon.

“When this guy asked him, ‘Heading off to work now?’ the old man replied, ‘Yeah, I’m going off to give a little encouragement to the sheriff and his sweetheart,’ and he waved the bottle at him.”

Judging from the timing, it was possible that Toic might have been out spying when he was fortunate enough to overhear this exchange, only then formulating his plan to hide in the bottle. In other words, the old man had intended to give the bottle to Rust and Lyra from the very start.

“For the time being, we’ll let him go,” Rust decided. “The problem is, the possibility he was involved in the scheme remains. Have somebody keep an eye on him.”

“That works for me.”

Exhaling liquor-tinged breath and cursing the sheriff for a two-bit lawman, the old man was led out, and Rust moved on to his next problem.

Shortly before noon, he paid a visit to the mayor at the town hall. Two hours later, a mother and child were sent out through the main gates to the village. It was Toic’s wife and his son, who’d just turned three. The mayor of a village had the ultimate right to decide what was done with the family of a villager who’d broken the law. Discussing this was the purpose of Rust’s visit. The woman had met Toic four years earlier, when he first came to the village, and they’d had a child together. From that day until this, his wife had gone without knowing who or what he really was.

In Frontier villages, it wasn’t rare for people to do what Toic had done. Therefore, communities made their own distinct sets of laws intended to root out such people. In the case of Geneve, there was a strict clause that stated: Anyone married to someone from outside the village who has any reason to suspect their spouse of behavior unbecoming a villager, no matter how slight, should contact the sheriff. Toic’s wife was considered to have breached this rule. The mayor, the deputy mayor with his bandaged face, Rust, and Lyra were present as judgment was passed, but Toic’s wife refused to accept their decision, protesting that she hadn’t known anything.

“There’s no way that a person capable of turning into a liquid wouldn’t betray that with some sort of abnormal behavior. Even if the woman’s denials are to be believed, having lived with him without noticing it makes her an accomplice, and her actions are still considered suspect.”

That was the mayor’s decision. Though the deputy mayor tried to suggest that perhaps he was being a bit too hard on her, it was his habit to find fault with every little thing the mayor did, and as always his objection was ignored. Their deliberation proceeded smoothly, and it was decided that they would generously allow the mother and her son to go to a neighboring village while it was still light out. Toward that end, her neighbors loaded all her furniture and possessions into a wagon.

As the woman wept and pleaded with them to at least let her child remain, she heard the sound of the gates closing behind her. But the two of them remained. Though the mayor himself stood atop the gate, entreating her to hurry up and get going, the woman asserted that she wouldn’t leave the village. Even with no one answering her, the woman never stopped crying out mournfully.

The villagers were in the middle of their combat training, and they threw themselves into it more than usual. During martial-arts practice, the villagers fought like mad, as if trying to ignore something, and fighting against them, the professional mercenaries couldn’t help but get serious as well. One person after another got hurt, and it was decided to cancel practice while they still had some strength left for the actual fighting. The villagers guarding the gate, the farmers diligently tending their fields, the workers busy in the town hall, the mayor and the deputy mayor, and Rust and Lyra all heard the woman’s voice. It was almost enough to shake their callous rules. However, not one of them suggested letting her back in. The woman from next door who’d nursed Toic’s son when his mother was bedridden and who’d brought him to the doctor when he had a fever covered her ears, but even she didn’t ask that they not be driven away. For these people knew from the day they were born what it meant to live on the Frontier.

The sun went down. Everyone expected that the mother and child would leave.

The cries beyond the gates became curses. Taking her son in her arms, the woman shouted, “Look at this boy! What has he done?” There were no tears in her eyes. She’d long since cried herself dry. Not understanding what was happening, her doleful-looking child began to cry.

All the men just inside the gates had to cover their ears and grit their teeth. Some even burst into tears.

The village and the world were about to fade into blue. Finally, she had to give up. Staying there any longer would just make them prey for monsters. Laying curses on the lot of them, the woman took up the reins of her wagon. Wheels creaking, they rolled into the darkness.

“Hurry!” someone muttered.

Even after the wagon had vanished from sight, the cries of the child still trailed along after it. But his whimpering stopped abruptly.

All the villagers knew in an instant what that meant. Several people ran to the gates, climbing up them, but even before they’d finished, a guard in the watchtower shouted, “It’s Gil’s guys!”

The emergency siren began to wail across the sky above the village.

Just prior to this, Rust had suddenly noticed he was alone in the sheriff’s office. Villagers had been coming to ask about their stations in battle or how rations were going to be distributed, but since the mother and child had been exiled there’d been no sign of anyone. Rust wasn’t to blame, and everyone knew it. So no one gave him a hard time about it. But aside from the mayor, the sheriff was the other face of authority. At times like this, people always needed someone to be a sacrifice—the one they looked away from.

A figure in blue came in. It was Sheryl, carrying bread and a hunk of cheese.

“What’s all this?” Rust asked her.

“Daddy—er, the mayor—told me to bring you this. It’s the cheese they make out at Stephan’s place. It’s the best in the whole village.”

“Well, I’ll be. Give your father, the mayor, my regards.” At this point Rust noticed she was gazing intently at him, and so he asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Oh, nothing. Would it be okay if I had a seat?”

“Sure.”

Sitting down across the table from him, Sheryl set down her basket and said, “There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for some time now.”

This was the thing Rust feared the most. Nevertheless, he asked in return, “What’s that?”

“When your term’s up here, where will you go?”

“You mean, do I have somewhere special I’m headed?”

“Yes,” said Sheryl, never taking her eyes off his face.

Wishing he could escape her gaze, the lawman replied, “There never has been, and there never will be.”

Sheryl looked down at the floor. “Good,” she said. She seemed to savor the word. “In that case, you could stay here, couldn’t you?”

A terrible calm flowed into Rust’s heart. He’d earned the right to just soak in it. He was just about to tell her that was right, but then his ears caught something—the mother shouting out beyond the gates.

“No,” Rust said, shaking his head. That’d been a close call. “I don’t wanna seem rude, but I’m not like you people. I can’t live here like the rest of you do.”

“Why not?” Sheryl asked, leaning forward.

The intensity of this girl, who usually spent her days by her father’s side with eyes lowered, telling him his schedule or scribbling notes, left Rust more than a little surprised. Her earnest gaze was trained on him. Rust looked away, as if to escape it.

“A person’s path in life is set when they’re born. It’s a legacy from their fathers. Step off that path, and there’s no getting back on it again. The next thing you know, you’re lost in a fog. Out there, there’s a cliff called ruin, but you never know it till you’ve fallen from it.”

“And you—you’ve fallen, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, just once. And ever since, I’ve been lost.”

Closing her eyes, Sheryl said, “Maybe your path led you here. Isn’t that conceivable?”

Rust was going to say no, but instead he told her, “Thank you.”

“Wouldn’t you be good enough to give me a straight answer? The mayor wants to know, too.”

“Someday I will.”

“When might that be?”

“Don’t look at me that way. I don’t know what to do when you look at me like that.”

“I just want an answer.”

“You’ll get it when this business is settled. Judging from the size of last night’s explosion, the enemy will be delayed a few days in getting here. But that’s all. They’ll be coming for sure. Since D, Gil, and the others haven’t come back, you could say we’ve lost more of our strength than the enemy has. Still, the villagers and I have to fight them—and you do, too.”

Sheryl gazed at him softly. She didn’t see the face of a sheriff gripped by anxiety. It was the face of a hard man who seemed chiseled from stone. “You’re right. I got a little ahead of myself. I’m sorry.”

As Sheryl was leaving, Lyra came back in. Following her out the door with her eyes, the warrior woman told Rust, “Sorry, but I could hear you from outside. That girl could be in some danger—the danger being that she likes you.”

The sheriff said nothing.

“If I were your enemy and I saw how tough you were, I’d use someone important to you to get some leverage.”

“You’re right.”

“What do you intend to do?” Lyra asked bluntly.

“It’s obvious. Once this job is finished, we move on. My path is already set.”

Lyra nodded. “I’ll be the one that puts you down. Don’t worry about that.”

“See that you do.”

The two looked at each other and laughed for the first time in ages.

Just then, the siren that alerted villagers when an emergency had occurred resounded through the night sky.

—

II

—

When the pair dashed outside, a guard from the main gates who’d raced there on horseback informed them that Josh and Palau had been spotted. He also said Gil and D weren’t with them.

“What could’ve taken them a full day?” Lyra mused, her lovely features becoming those of an intrepid combatant.

It was clear what she wasn’t saying. A party that had gone off to fight a pseudo vampire had returned a day later under darkness of night. It would be odd to think that they were still okay.

Hopping onto the horse tethered in front of his office and speeding to the main gates, Rust inquired, “What about the woman and her child?”

“Apparently she gave in, since she left just five minutes ago.”

“Bad luck. She’ll run right into them, won’t she?”

“That’s right,” the guard replied as they scrambled up to the top of the gates.

The highway had been twisted to run not fifty yards from the gates, and a road thirty feet wide connected it to the village. There were three lights atop the gates that illuminated the ground forty to fifty feet away. It looked like the pair had just stepped from the darkness into the enormous circle of light. No, not a pair—there were four people. Palau had Toic’s wife in his arms, while Josh held the three-year-old boy.

When the four of them had closed to about thirty feet, Rust put a megaphone to his mouth and ordered, “Hold it right there!”

The villagers and mercenaries lined up to either side of him were already drawing a bead on the hearts of the four with bows and firearms.

Palau and Josh halted. Squinting his eyes as if blinded by the light, Josh said, “This is a fine welcome we get! You must’ve seen the damage we managed to do last night. Is this how you greet your heroes?”

“What have you been doing all this time?”

“My horse got taken out,” Palau said, shrugging his shoulders. “The wilderness is crawling with all kinds of monsters. We had to fight our way through them the whole way back. It wouldn’t kill you folks to show us a tad more kindness.”

“You guys know the rules of the Frontier. We’ve gotta check you for wounds. Set those two down first.”

Rust had been able to read the mother’s and child’s expressions. Shivering as if with an ague, they had faces slick with sweat and taut with fear. They looked like death warmed over. They could tell. They knew what the two men with them were now. They knew because the men’s bodies were cold as ice. They weren’t breathing. When the bright light bleached their faces, their lips alone were strangely red, with stark fangs peeking from between them.

“Set those two down and submit to a check. If everything’s fine, you’ll be drinking like fish tonight.”

The two pale warriors looked at each other.

“Did you hear that, Josh?”

“That’s mighty cold of ’em, Palau.”

“So, we gonna do like they say?”

“It ain’t like we’ve got a choice.”

Palau nodded. “We’re setting ’em down now. Get ready to give us that once-over.”

A collective sigh of relief escaped the group on top of the gates. And then, the horror started all over again. Palau’s eyes gave off a red gleam, and the warrior bit down hard on the neck of the trembling woman. It was clear from Josh’s startled expression that his compatriot’s action was unexpected.

Later, examination of the mother’s remains would reveal that she’d badly hurt both hands while pounding on the main gates and trying to get back into the village. Her skin had broken, exposing the raw flesh beneath. Fresh blood had seeped from the wounds as well. Perhaps Palau had been fighting the urges brought on by the red hue of blood from the mother’s hand and the scent that lingered in the air, until finally he’d reached a point where he could restrain himself no longer.

The woman’s shouts pierced the night, her far-from-slim body twitching in her death throes. The people watching from the gates were frozen. For the first time ever, they were witness to the legendary terror. The Nobility’s hegemony over the Frontier had long since ended, and though people saw the victims they left behind, no one but the very eldest had ever witnessed anyone being drained of their blood. But was this how a Noble would feed? No, they drove their fangs in and drank up the lifeblood that spilled out—Palau, however, gave his head a shake that helped him bite halfway through the woman’s neck. Bright blood spurted out.

Letting out screams that left the others wanting to cover their ears, the mother flailed her arms. Blood splashed wildly in the brightly lit circle. Palau’s face was a nightmare—eyes crimson, fangs stained with blood, cheeks trembling with rapture. Spitting out a chunk of the woman’s flesh, he once again drove his face into the gaping, bloody wound.

A gunshot rang out. A small hole opened in the middle of Palau’s forehead, and half his face blew off.

Up on the gate, a woman named Miriam shouted, “Got him!”

However, Palau didn’t fall. What remained of his mouth twisted into a smile. Flesh swelled in the devastated section, and bone formed. A new eyeball gleamed. Such were the regenerative powers of a vampire.

His fangs once more sank into the woman’s neck. They could all hear the sound of him gulping down mouthful after mouthful.

Josh had been standing there looking at his compatriot as if he were an idiot for betraying himself, but at this point his eyes also began to give off a demonic gleam. The face of a carnivore leered at the child. Fangs thirsty for fresh blood went for the pale throat of the boy, who was so completely terrified he couldn’t make a sound.

Something whistled through the air and impacted the man’s right shoulder. It was a short wooden arrow that sent Josh spinning. He let go of the child, who fell to the ground. Howling, the man prepared to leap, but a second arrow took him through the back of the neck, poking out through his chest. Even writhing on the ground, he still seemed like a wild beast. Though the plain wooden arrow hadn’t fatally wounded him, it could hurt Nobility and their ilk ten times worse than conventional weapons.

“Stay up here,” Rust told those around him before jumping. As soon as he landed, he nocked a third arrow and trained it on Palau. Suddenly, Palau lifted the mother’s body up to use as a shield. Though he knew she was beyond saving, Rust didn’t fire.

“Out of the way,” the sheriff heard a familiar voice call out behind him. For a woman to speak in such a tone, she must’ve had a heart of stone, muscles of steel, and nerves of ice.

“What are you here for?” Rust asked.

“If you’re not gonna shoot, take the kid and get out of the way,” Lyra, the warrior woman, told him.

Before he could stop her, her lithe figure calmly moved forward like a blossom swaying in the breeze. Not so much as glancing at Josh, she made directly for Palau.

Firing his third shot into the writhing Josh, Rust dashed over to the child, scooped him up, and fell back to the gates.

Lyra bounded. With a mocking laugh, Palau lifted the still-twitching mother over his head. He stared in amazement as a blade pierced the woman through the heart and sank into his forehead. Lyra was a woman who was willing to stab even an innocent victim to get at the enemy.

“That hurts!” Palau groaned. With his words, bloody foam spilled from his mouth. “It hurts so bad. That’s not right! I’m a Noble now!”

With the longsword impaling both of them still in hand, Lyra landed in front of the man. Her right index finger went for her left hip—and the little gold ring that jutted from it.

Still holding the mother’s corpse, Palau spread his arms as if posing a query. It was an overly dramatic gesture. “Hey, bitch—I’m a Noble. I even drank this woman’s blood. It was sweet. I didn’t think anything could ever taste so good! That’s proof I’m a Noble, right? So why does plain ol’ steel hurt so bad?”

“Because it’s been baptized,” Lyra said coldly, “in the church back in my hometown, wherever that was. Grade-thirteen berenith steel soaked in holy water and hammered ten million times by the swordsmith. Now consider yourself honored and beg for your life.”

Palau charged her. His mouth snapped open wide, his lips and maw both stained bright red.

Something whistled through the air. Lyra had stepped out of the way, and Palau ran by her on the left. But he was running only from the waist down. During five or six more steps, there was an explosion of blood, as if the legs had just splattered against a rock, and then they fell over. The upper body had fallen by Lyra’s side. Its eyes were wide open, looking up at her as if she were beyond belief, but death quickly spread across the face. In the beam of the searchlight, it looked as if a line the color of blood arced into the woman’s hand, but it quickly disappeared.

Lyra turned around. Crawling on all fours like a dog, Josh seemed to take note of his foe, because he lifted the upper half he could barely support.

“Dooooiii?”

“Dooooiii,” Lyra mimicked. Gory blade in hand, she walked over to Josh. Her gait made it clear she was free of hesitation or any hint of mercy for this person who’d been a colleague until a day earlier. “Are you going to fight me, too?” she asked.

“Of course—as sure as I’m a Noble,” he declared, his face glowing with bliss.

“You’re a fake,” was all Lyra said, and she swung her sword down.

Josh wasn’t poised to dodge it. The keen sound that rang out didn’t seem to be that of cleaving flesh.

“I’ll be damned.”

Josh hadn’t fled. Still down on his knees, he’d merely let his upper body fall again. Lyra’s blade had been parried by the rifle across his back. As the warrior woman took a new stance, he swung the weapon around to point its barrel at her torso.

“I didn’t wanna have to take you out this way,” Josh said, as if apologizing to her.

“Then don’t,” Lyra replied, ducking down. Her left hand went for the toe of her left boot.

The barrel of the gun followed the movement.

“Nighty-night, warrior woman!”

“Nighty-night, faker.”

A long, long stream of fire angled down toward the ground. Rust alone noticed that there were actually two streams, not one. Not only did the forty-millimeter antitank round split in two directly in front of Lyra, but the halves also changed direction, striking the ground in the distance. A ferocious pair of fiery pillars soared up to the heavens. Devoid of noxious flames or black smoke, they were rather lovely.

The people who’d turned to look at them turned back again at the sound of dying screams. Standing bolt upright, Josh had taken Lyra’s blessed sword through the throat, with the blade running clean through the crown of his head.

“Adaa . . . adaa . . . adaa . . .”

Managing to sputter something that was not actual words, the giant of a man was slowly being lifted. Who would’ve thought the woman could achieve such a thing with one slim arm?

Bending her fully extended arm ever so slightly, Lyra gave the massive form a push. As all of Josh’s 450 pounds lay suspended over the ground, Lyra swept out with both hands. The traitor was reduced to four chunks of flesh in midair, which fell to the ground with a torrential downpour of blood.

Giving her longsword a single flick to clean off the gore before returning it to its sheath, Lyra walked back toward the gates. When the great doors opened, the space behind them was filled with villagers. Rust was there, as was Sheryl, who held Toic’s son. Halting in front of them, Lyra brushed her hand against the child’s cheek.

“Miss,” the boy said, breaking into a smile.

Lyra had no idea what sort of expression she wore. Immediately bringing her hand away again, she turned to Rust and told him, “Once dawn comes, exile him to a neighboring village.” Her expression was that of a stern and callous warrior.

—

III

—

No matter where they looked, they saw the Grim Reaper spreading his wings across the wasteland.

“Oh, it hurts!”

“Gimme some water!”

“I’m so hot . . . I’m burning up, I tell ya, burning up! Please, help me . . .”

“Boss . . . you gotta do something . . .”

As the underlings’ pleas and cries of pain blanketed the earth, those wings slowly and gently bore Death to those most gravely wounded. Thirty-two of the sixty were dead on the ground, seven severely wounded, and eighteen slightly injured, plus three more had been killed earlier at the farmhouse—in other words, every member of the Black Death gang was dead or wounded.

There was only one unscathed—one who wasn’t counted in that sixty. It wasn’t for the sake of the wounded that he was still hanging around. You could tell by the way he took a much deeper breath than normal and blew it out again through pursed lips.

“Boss!” the man tending to an injured outlaw on top of a mound of dirt called out. He was, in a manner of speaking, Toma’s right-hand man—Garance “Bad Hand” Borden. His left arm was an artificial limb. “You can’t be coming over here. The scent of blood is everywhere, and these guys—”

It was too late. Just the word boss had been enough to stir up activity among the hitherto-motionless figures around him. Crawling across blankets, digging their fingers into the earth, and staring up at the heavens, they came to Toma.

A bloodied hand missing its pinky finger grabbed the cuff of his trousers.

“Please . . . help me . . . Boss . . .”

Another latched onto him.

“Me too . . . Don’t leave me here . . . I’ll do anything . . . I’d kill my own mother. Just . . . save me!”

Another said, “I’m getting cold. And I can’t feel my legs no more. I’m begging you, Boss—save me!”

And then they suddenly became a chorus.

“Drink our blood. We don’t care if we’re not the real thing. Please, just make us Nobles.”

“Now there’s a heartwarming refrain,” Toma said, grinning wryly.

“Sorry,” Garance said, his head hung low. “But you can’t really blame ’em. None of these slobs ever imagined getting messed up this badly.”

Toma looked down at the underlings who groveled at his feet. He was like a god looking down upon humanity.

“Okay, get back over here. I’m not finished working on you boys yet,” Garance informed them.

However, the men ignored him. They remained crowded at Toma’s feet. No matter how reckless they were, they couldn’t help but be concerned as death drew near. It was only natural that they were afraid. But there was a chance for them to escape it. And it was very close at hand. Their leader was a pseudo vampire, and anyone he bit would become a pseudo vampire too. That was a promise of eternal life.

“I’m begging you, Boss, drink my blood.”

“Mine, too! Mine, too!”

“I don’t wanna fucking die! Please, save me!”

Though miserable beyond belief, their supplications carried a certain raw desire that needled Toma. And how would he respond to his poor underlings? Staring intently at the men inching in around his feet, he finally said, “Okay, you’ve made your point. I swear by the darkest god, I’ll grant you your wish.” His eyes were aglow as he looked over the whole group. It was blood light they gave off. “But listen well. Know this: death is security. It’s the only peace a human being’s allowed. Call it true release, pleasure, or rapture, if you like. And you’ll be throwing all that away! All for the worthless, base, slobbering pains of the flesh. Just suck it up. Hold it in. Keep fighting. If you can’t do that, go ahead and die. That’s what it is to be human. But if you really can’t take it anymore, if you’re afraid of unknowable death and the darkness it invites, then fine.”

Bending down, he grabbed one of them by the chin and hauled him up.

“Swear to me, Sumatro. Swear you’ll never complain about this.”

“Boss . . .”

“Swear it, Sumatro. You won’t last two minutes more.”

“Save me . . . I swear it. No matter what happens . . . I’ll never . . . complain.”

“Good. Very good. The rest of you, swear it too. Swear it by the eternally unending dark, by the pitch-black solitude, by the devil of the void.”

“I swear it.”

“I swear.”

“You’ll get no complaints here.”

“I’ll never complain.”

“I swear to you.”

“No complaints.”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Toma said, puffing out his chest. “Then I’ll grant your wish. The loftiest and most ignorant thing a person can wish for in this world. First, Sumatro and Dacia.”

Garance saw their leader reach down, grab his men by the throat, and lift them up. He heard a beastly growl. Toma bit into Sumatro’s neck.

“Shiiiiiiiiit!”

Was this the cry that usually escaped the pitiable victim of a Noble? No. In fog-shrouded forests, on night highways bright with moonlight, or in bedrooms serenaded by a gypsy violin’s doleful nocturnes, victims who felt ivory fangs drive into their blue veins let out the sweet moans of sexual climax. But this was a scream. It was the voice of the damned tasting the agonies of hell. This positively wasn’t the sort of initiation one should have into the Nobility.

Tossing the twitching body of his underling to the ground like it was a dishrag, he said, “Dacia’s next.”

The figures around Toma began to inch away. In the moonlight, their faces were as pale and expressionless as Noh masks. They were afraid. A fear that surpassed the hellish torment had taken root in them. In other words, dying would be better than this.

“Where are you going?” asked Toma. He’d lifted Dacia up high, his grip tearing open the man’s throat, and now he drank the lifeblood that spilled out as if it were beer. The dripping blood spattered his pale face and stained his body with something like a map of insanity. “Where are you going?”

“Help, Boss!” his followers cried. The wording of their plea was exactly the same, but the meaning completely the opposite.

“We don’t mind dying now. Spare us!”

“I don’t want my stinkin’ life!”

“I wanna die human!”

Each mouth spouted words that were very human in perspective.

One man’s face burst like a watermelon. Blobs of a substance more viscous than blood went flying in all directions, like a scream. As another man turned in amazement, his face smashed like a tomato. And another—this one like a pomegranate. And another. And another.

Before long, a gunshot echoed in the moonlight. Those trying to flee looked toward the sound and halted. They saw what they had desired. Sumatro stood framed against the disk of the moon. As he loaded a fresh round into his smoking rifle, the man who’d risen from the dead stated proudly, “Look at me. The rest of you want to be like this, don’t you? And you can be. You don’t have to die now. Just look at me. I used to be lucky to hit anything two times out of ten with this rifle, and now I can hit the mark every damned time. Hey, Garance—take that gun of yours you’re so fond of and try shooting me.”

A dark tinge of anger colored the face of the second in command. Sumatro had occupied the very lowest position among all the gang members. “My gun was made for better things than shooting some asshole that just got made into a second-rate Noble.”

“What are you talking about? Don’t be so full of yourself, Mr. Second in Command. You’re just a normal human now. And me? I’m an heir to the Nobility!”

“Don’t make me laugh, you lousy fake.”

As luck would have it, at the very same time, Lyra was saying almost exactly the same thing at the main gates to the village.

“Come again?” Sumatro snarled, eyes burning deep in his skull.

But behind him, someone called out, “Hey!”

When he turned, gleaming black steel slashed through him at an angle, entering at the left nape of his neck and exiting again at his right hip.

“Gaaaaaaaah!”

Dropping his rifle, he reeled backward, his top half sliding down along the diagonal slice.

“Boss—why’d you do that?” Sumatro wailed, teeth bared.

Sheathing his sword on his back, Toma asked him, “Does that hurt? Are you in pain?”

“Of course. Of course it does. Hey!”

The man held both arms out in front of himself. The upper half of his body slid down the slope of the diagonal slash, then halted. Sumatro pushed it back, heaving a heavy sigh once he finally had it where it belonged. His whole body was covered with blood and sweat. It was a harsh price to pay for proof of indestructibility.

“Don’t you all get it? This is how I am now. I’m one of the Nobility! This is the power of a vampire. If I get wounded, it still hurts. But I won’t die. I won’t grow old, either. Come on, everybody. Have the boss make Nobles out of you!”

The receding tide once again changed direction.

“Boss, drink my blood!”

“Drink mine!”

“Make me a Noble, too!”

“And me!”

Life and death were the only proof a human being had that they were human. Now, they were trying to evade the laws of the universe.

Looking down at the bloodied faces of the wriggling mass of men at his feet, the leader said, “Okay. Leave it to me.” After this masterful remark, none of them caught Toma’s next words: “Throw away your humanity like idiots.”

Ten minutes later, his underlings’ wishes had been granted, and that was all that was required. A huge smile on his face, Toma slapped his hands together. “Let’s go! Get a move on, you fakes! Fakes, just like me! We’ll test your new strength with a night attack. I sent three along ahead of us. After disposing of them, the village of Geneve will have their guard down—so let’s get over there!”

There was a battle cry that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth. “Yeeeeeeeeah!” they shouted as one. All eleven of them.