THOSE WHO DESIRE DARKNESS

CHAPTER 3

-

The pale rays of the sun had melted most of the light snow on the slope. Young sprouts raised their heads from the ground, diligently drawing to themselves the energy they would need to send out shoots in the season to come.

Like a pastoral painting, green already covered the gently rolling terrain, and off in the distance a young Adonis stood in stark relief against the blue sky, walking as the wind fluttered the hem of his coat.

One only had to draw a step closer, however, to be struck by the ineffable eldritch aura swelling from that tall, black-clad form to realize he was an otherworldly entity thoroughly in keeping with that perfectly preserved beauty.

Vampire Hunter D—in spring, in summer, his emotionless eyes reflected a demon-haunted darkness.

Halfway up the slope D stopped.

A wagon was approaching from town. It was Lina, with her black manelike hair streaming out behind her. Realizing that D had caught sight of her, a smile suffused her face and she waved.

While he didn’t wave back, it was still unlike the youth to wait while Lina halted the wagon, gathered up her long, blue skirt, and climbed up the hill to him. It seemed not just humans, but all living creatures had difficulty traversing the hill.

“What brings you out here?” he asked with a dour look.

“Oh, aren’t you Mister Personality. It just so happens I was going to ask you the very same thing. But the least I can do is keep you company. After all, you were kind enough to wait for me and all.”

Though her breath was ragged, an untroubled grin rose on Lina’s lips.

It wasn’t just that the young man was so gorgeous he gave her gooseflesh, but also that she found standing by his side fun—or if “fun” wasn’t exactly the right term, standing by him was certainly intriguing. Lina had no way of knowing what a mighty Hunter he was, or how the roughest characters on the Frontier cringed at the mere mention of his name. She was seventeen—girls at that stage tended to view boys their own age as punk kids, which is probably how Lina saw D. But, appearances to the contrary, who could really say just how old the Hunter was, springing as he did from the ageless and undying blood of the Nobility?

“I wasn’t exactly waiting for you,” D said frostily. “I was going to tell you to turn around. You should go home.”

“Not a chance,” Lina pouted. “I’m a lot safer with you than I’d be back in town.”

That was certainly true.

“Have it your way.”

D turned without another word. Though his leisurely yet deliberate pace remained unchanged, no matter how Lina scrambled she could not close the gap between them. On reaching the summit of the hill she collapsed in the shade of the ramparts. Cruel as it may seem, D immediately slipped into the ruins without so much as a backward glance, and was gone.

“I don’t believe this! Of all the cold-blooded— ” Lina was shouting and stomping her feet when something white fell from her breast. Hurriedly snatching it up, she brushed it off gently and slipped it into the front of her blouse. And then, with a cry of, “Wait for me, you cold-hearted ninny,” she slipped through a breach into the ruins.

Humans remained afraid to enter the castles of the Nobility. Their owners having disappeared for reasons unknown, the homes and the untended grounds were usually overrun by weeds and rats. In some cases automated maintenance devices had broken down, in others the Nobility had disconnected them before they vanished. Such actions seemed to state that these were still places no human hand should ever touch. Seeing these ruins with that in mind was enough to send chills climbing the viewer’s spine.

Ramparts not withstanding, the main gate and tabernacle, which had once been the principal edifices here, were all blown from their foundations. Even the pitiful figure of the belfry, top half now lost, glared at the blue empyrean vault. Stony heaps of rubble and the remains of buildings formed from mysterious materials were scattered throughout the snow-covered central courtyard. The courtyard also barely retained its original shape, though it did an excellent job now of slowing Lina’s pace.

Of course, Lina didn’t know when the castle had been reduced to this state, or by whose hand. All that was shrouded by the dark veil of history, and, aside from the tentacles of unknown terror it sent out, this place had no relation to the humans’ existence.

Even within, the history of these ruins remained elusive. Every part of it was a mystery.

A great many castles had been built by the Nobility in the Frontier region, all of them for the express purpose of providing a base from which they could rule over the mortals. The Nobility usually chose a spot on high ground to build their castles, so they might look down and see the humans toiling at their feet. Consequently, descriptions of those castles, and tales of their tenants, became part of the oral tradition of the humans who worked below. The stories were inevitably passed down through the ages, but nothing like that had happened in the village of Tepes.

How the Nobility had lived, and what work they had undertaken in this valley locked in by snow and darkness, were questions the villagers did not want to consider.

D was in the darkness of the same hall where Lina first met him. At the sight of him silently studying something on the wall, Lina got the distinct impression the pale blue stream of time had ceased to flow.

“One of those pictures strike your fancy?” she called out as she approached. D, who hadn’t answered no matter how she’d shouted, turned toward her. At last she could relax a bit.

“Oh, yes, I have to remember you can climb up here normally. You come here often, do you?”

“Uh-huh,” she said with an affirming nod. “When it comes to the castle here, I’d have to say I’m the best-informed person in town. You know, I’m not sure what you came here for, but why don’t we look at some of these together?”

For the briefest instant, D scanned the face of the innocuously grinning girl, then nodded.

The two of them played their gaze across one piece after another in the prodigious collection of paintings set in the walls.

As she looked at these paintings, all made sufficiently mysterious by the mere fact they’d been left behind, Lina felt the same profound emotion as the first time she’d seen them. Her breast flooded with heat as she looked at them anew.

Lovers, wrapped in the gossamer wings of some flying machine, gliding through the pale shadows of a moonlit grove.

A wan Noblewoman laughing as she chases a glowing, moonlike orb through the thick fog of a lakeshore.

A black-clad Noble spurring on the unearthly beast that draws his hover-carriage, while flashes of lightning from the eddying pitch-dark sky bathe them both.

Moonlight glinting off the horn of a unicorn, prismatic dancing girls scattering flower petals, the land is transformed to a garden of luminescent grasses in those paintings, which showed shadow and light, symphonies of light and shadow . . .

“Nobles painted all of these?”

Lina did not address this question to anyone in particular, but it felt like a song ringing from her mouth.

“The setting is always darkness and blackness, night and moonlight and mist—so why do they look so gorgeous? How could they paint that world so softly, so surreal, when we can’t set foot outside the village without getting so scared we collapse in a heap? Is the Nobility’s night somehow different from ours?”

D watched the girl silently. Her eyes were big and bright and sparkling with an abounding curiosity that stripped away the veil of innocuousness—this girl of seventeen who would learn about the future in the Capital.

“From the time we’re little kids we all grow up hearing about how fierce the Nobility are, how frightening,” Lina continued, forgetting that D stood by her side. “Civilization doesn’t produce anything that isn’t fit to serve it. That’s why the evil Nobility have died off, they say. And yet, when I look at these paintings, my heart races. The first time I saw them I even thought, ‘If this is what they can paint, then make me a Noble any day.’ After that, I studied up on them on the sly. Mr. Meyer, who was missing with me way back when, well, he’s interested in the Nobility, too, and since he’s collected all sorts of literature he’s loaned me a couple of books—though lately he’s been telling me to just buckle down on the math and he won’t let me have any more. For the most part, they’re all things humans have recorded about Nobility and pretty much all of them were from the same point of view the grownups in town have, but there was this one volume, a book about the history of the Nobility. Oh, what was it called now . . . ”

“Dawn of the Nobility, by J. Sangster. It was banned as soon as it saw print, and the author was exiled to the Frontier.”

“I’m impressed. That’s exactly the one I meant!”

Lina snapped her fingers sharply, not so much surprised that a drifting Hunter would know such an arcane tidbit as she was delighted to find a thread for conversation.

“As I recall, it analyzed art the Nobility had left behind—paintings and holographic images and three-dimensional music of some sort—and brought some of their civilization’s finer points to light. I read it and reread it till it was falling apart. I wanted to learn about the other world, the night civilization, and the Nobility of course. About the knowledge they had and their beauty. And I . . . ”

At this point the girl’s words died as if she were returning to her senses, and she turned again to face D.

“It’s already been decided I’m to study mathematics in the Capital. But what I’d really like to get into is the history of the Nobility.”

-

For a while, the pair stood studying each other’s faces as they felt the crush of the darkness.

“Just kidding,” Lina laughed suddenly, like the gust that snuffs a candle. “Oh, it’s true I want to study their history, but as a candidate I have to get up in front of a panel from the Capital and state for the record just what I intend to major in. Math, physics, music, art—hell, I could even choose gymnastics and they’d be fine with it. But if I ever said anything about the history of the Nobility . . . ”

Lina didn’t have to say that it would mean the end of her hopes for the future. History had been penned in the blood of those crushed by an unbearable weight of fear, and the oppressed would never forgive that.

“Well,” D began, “I hear policies in the Capital are gradually changing. It seems the director of the Ministry of Education is a man with some appreciation of the Nobility’s heritage.”

“Not a chance,” Lina laughed mischievously, flitting behind D like a butterfly. “I’m not about to lose my only ticket out of this town. The final decision rests on the feelings of the panel, you know. I’m going to tell them ‘mathematics,’ and that’s that.”

D said nothing in reply, but turned to face a painting several yards distant.

It was a picture Lina herself had always wondered about. Of all the paintings left behind, only this one had had its entire ten-foot-high, six-and-a-half-foot-wide surface painted over pitch-black. It seemed to radiate the most sinister intent.

“I recall seeing this sort of thing a couple of times in my travels. Out of tens of thousands of paintings, hundreds of thousands of pieces of art, I’ve found an oddity like this mixed in from time to time. Some have been completely destroyed, some have been burned. Of them all, only one had ever been restored again.”

Though Lina was unaware that having this youth relate his personal experiences was not only unparalleled but bordered on the miraculous, her eyes sparkled nonetheless.

“Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the painting of?”

“Nobles rising from their coffins, their hands reaching for the sun.”

The most fruitless of dreams.

Who could’ve painted it, Lina wondered.

Who painted it, who ruined it, who restored it? Could this painting here be another? Did the Nobility really want to be like us?

There were no answers.

Unbeknownst to her, the hem of her skirt had begun to flutter. There was a breeze coming in from somewhere.

“Why did you tell me that, D?” Lina inquired softly. “You say I’m strange, but if so I guess that makes you plain loony. No matter what I ask you, I know you won’t give me an answer, but there’s one thing I’d like to know just the same. When I first met you, mister big bad Vampire Hunter, you were here looking at the paintings, weren’t you? Are you sure you really hate the Nobility?”

D looked back into the darkness.

“I’ve wasted more time than I intended. Time for me to get back to work, so wait outside.”

“Not on your life. Not after coming this far. I’m going with you—it’s as simple as that.”

“You’re on your own if anything happens. I won’t bail you out.”

“No, you’ll save my bacon sure enough. I’m your valued assistant, after all.”

“Hey, don’t fool yourself,” D shot back with agitation. Lina was something of an expert at causing miracles.

“For the time being, kindly tell me what brings you to these ruins, Boss,” she said with a grave face. D heaved a sigh. Once again, it looked like a mere slip of a girl had him right where she wanted him.

“To find out just what happened here ten years ago.”

“Knew it,” Lina said with a heavy-hearted nod. “No matter how you look at it, there’s something strange about us. There’s no way Nobles are walking around in broad daylight. And then there’s the shape Cuore’s in.”

While the boy had regained consciousness that morning, his physical strength was depleted to a phenomenal degree, and he hadn’t responded to questioning by the mayor and sheriff.

It was extremely difficult to believe he’d just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during that incident the night before. Even if he’d heard about the attack on the woman, which was unlikely—everyone involved in the case had been urged to keep silent—he’d still been the object of a manhunt by the entire Youth Brigade. Well, it went without saying they’d thoroughly searched the area surrounding the house. And, the creature that for lack of a better name could be called a “spirit-beast,” had appeared on one other occasion when Cuore was also present.

“Even now everyone still suspects us. It’s common knowledge me and Cuore can climb the hill normally, and I bet Mr. Meyer wouldn’t have any trouble, either. And you know, all three of us have been attacked by goons from the local Youth Brigade, just because they think we might be the Nobles who walk by daylight.”

“You’re lucky you haven’t been hurt.”

“That’s on account of the mayor. He’s the big wheel in this town, no doubt about it. He’s good at getting resources from the Capital, and he gives a lot of thought to keeping us protected from monsters. If it weren’t for him, the village would’ve been wiped out a long, long time ago—though I think that would’ve been for the best.”

Perhaps realizing the harshness of her words, Lina cast her eyes down. The mayor was her adopted father, after all.

“Even he couldn’t prove we’re not connected to these attacks. You see, there hasn’t been anyone around us during past incidents.”

That fact, along with the list the mayor had handed him a night earlier, had been duly filed in D’s memory.

Mr. Meyer was single and living on his own, Cuore of course lived alone in an otherwise deserted house in town, and Lina was in the habit of holing up in her room just after sundown.

All strong-arm tactics by the mayor aside, the real reason the trio had been unharmed thus far was that nearly a decade had passed since their disappearance.

“You’ve climbed the hill before. Has anything else out of the ordinary happened?” D asked as he held his right hand up by his face.

As she wondered at this curious gesture, this apparent testing of the wind flow, Lina shook her head. It was an honest response.

D gave a nod and muttered, “Over here, I’d say.” It was unclear whether the nod was related to Lina’s response or not.

They angled swiftly through the darkness. An elaborately carved door appeared before the pair soon enough. While she knew of its existence, Lina had never been beyond it. She wasn’t quite to the age where curiosity could get the better of her fear.

Though the girl was prepared to be told once more to go home, D promptly pushed his way through the doorway and melted into an even greater darkness. Following frantically, Lina was amazed when she brushed past the door. It was a four-inch-thick slab of a renowned supersteel alloy. Twenty strapping men would probably have a hard time budging it. For the first time, Lina sensed what an uncanny individual the youth who’d gone before her into the darkness was.

She took a step forward, even as the terror of being swallowed by the blackness of an unimaginable world sank ice into the nape of her neck.

-

The woods brimmed with life. Light subdued the aura given off by the leaf-bare trees, spreading from Bess Fern’s lungs to her whole body and adding a cheery spring to her step.

Leaving the path, she found that the air had abruptly assumed a certain dampness. Though it was still winter, this corner of the woods was strangely warm. On the trunks of trees clung mosses and fungi in every shade from blue, green, and purple down to tones that were patently nauseating.

Bess made her way in, taking care not to slip, and at last she dropped to her knees at the roots of a colossal trunk.

Word from the sheriff’s office that no one should be out wandering around alone for the next day or two hadn’t reached her house until after she’d left.

A smile spread across her plump, boyish face.

Just as anticipated, the edible moss that had supposedly been plucked clean three days earlier tightly packed the space between the snaking roots. She hadn’t slept for fear someone might’ve harvested it already, but she’d been right to come check.

In the villages and hamlets of the Frontier, this moss was a valuable food substitute, used in practically any kind of cooking, from steaks to soups and jams. When sun dried, the moss was good for six months to a year. What’s more, the essence of the moss could be extracted using a centrifugal separator. Wounds plastered with this salve closed up almost instantly, and its usefulness in counteracting the venom of poisonous moth men made it an indispensable item for travelers and others afield.

Bess planned on swapping the moss she harvested with the trader, due to come to the village in the first of spring, for some fashionable apparel from the Capital. The teen’s eyes swam with images of herself in her new finery.

Cautiously slipping a shovel in where moss met soil, she put the green spoils in her basket in such a way as not to crumble the friable surface. After ten minutes, the basket was filled to the brim.

There was still a fair patch left. And she was pretty sure those things her father kept must have a sweet tooth for moss, too.

Maybe she’d take just a little bit more—but the hands she extended with that intent stopped halfway to the mark. A cloud had moved across the sun. No, it was no cloud—the inky blackness blanketing Bess was clearly the shadow of something humanoid.

The scream she unleashed was her last act of defiance before losing her seventeen years.

Cyrus Fern immediately recognized the cry rising to echo in the treetops as his daughter’s. On hearing the sheriff’s broadcast, and realizing his daughter had gone out alone, he’d set out after her with a strong hunch she’d be in the mossy woods she talked about so much. His whole body quivered with anger and despair.

Calling his daughter’s name as he dashed onward, he laid his hands to the lids of the fair-sized baskets he had hitched on either hip and unlatched them. The things inside grew ever more restless, and, from the opening of the basket on the right, a base, brutal growl escaped.

Suddenly, violet sparks shot from the mouth of the basket on the left, and Fern wasted no time in pulling his hand away. You’d think he’d be used to it, but these things were always tough to handle. The fingertips of the nonconductive glove he had on his left hand were scorched, and bluish smoke wafted skyward.

The instant he sprinted into the place he sought, Fern’s eyes went wide with outrage.

Cradled in the arms of a figure in ash-colored cloth, Bess vapidly stared into the heavens, as twin streams of lifeblood coursed down her throat. Her skin faded to paraffin. Despair became a torrent of rage that flooded every fiber of Cyrus Fern’s being. He forgot any chance of saving his daughter and he flung open the basket lids.

The ashen figure turned in his direction.

With the thud of Bess’ body falling to the mossy carpet, monstrous things in Fern’s baskets came to rest on the ground.

There was a pair of them, and yet they were hardly a matched pair.

Checked by their master’s monumental anger, a titanic spider, whose octet of firmly planted legs were easily ten feet in length, and a cloud of scintillant purple both glowered at the ashen figure.

Anyone who knew Fern’s line of work would sorely regret ever laying a hand on his daughter. Those who did a lot of traveling needed something to defend themselves against merciless bandits and Nobility-spawned demons, and more often than not it made sense to purchase a supernatural creature of like power—a guard beast. And it so happened Fern, the head of the Vigilance Committee, trained and sold them.

Though the guard beasts descended from the original demons and magical monstrosities propagated by the Nobility, as generations passed, numerous mutations and new species had been born. About two thousand years earlier, some extreme rarities, able to be domesticated by the humans, appeared. As far as the beasts’ training went, they were taught from birth to be strictly inactive until some sort of sonic wave or magic formula was used to trigger them—something no one else would understand.

And what monsters Fern had.

If it seemed incomprehensible that the massive arachnid had been shut up in a basket the size of a bird cage, the adjacent purple cloud presented an even stranger sight. The smoky mass boiling up from the heart of the cloud formed a perimeter more than a foot and a half wide, and, every time a light of some sort pulsed in the central portion, violet-hued sparks flew from all over the cloud.

It was one of the most bizarre forms of life on earth—an electricity beast.

Fern let fly an arcane and indecipherable cry—a harsh command to attack.

With speed belying its size, the spider advanced. The coruscating cloud rose in the air.

The ashen figure crouched just a bit.

Silver flashed, and then violet sparks fanned out like touch-me-nots, blending darkness and light in a corner of the woods.

An arachnid leg, severed at the second joint, sailed through the air.

As the figure sheared off the leg of the approaching spider with a single flourish of his longsword, he had also parried an electrical assault by the cloud with one of his sleeves.

Amazement suffused the face of ever-watchful Fern. The cloud’s sparks carried more than half a million volts.

The longsword whirled, fending off the electricity beast’s next two attacks and driving for the beast’s body. The figure’s sleeve was ablaze.

The sword tip came to an abrupt halt.

Though the shadowy figure put all his strength behind it, the blade didn’t quiver in the least, as if it was imbedded in solid stone.

Abandoning his weapon, the figure bounded from the ground in a great leap. Above its head, something like flimsy white threads drifted down to earth, fixing the figure in midair.

Just above the figure’s wildly craning head was the supposedly earthbound spider. But in light of how the thread was expelled from between the massive mandibles rather than from the abdomen, it seemed likely that the monster was actually a mutant that merely resembled a spider. By a single thread—thinner than a true spider’s and of fiercely adhesive mucus—the pseudo-arachnid hung itself from a huge branch on an equally cyclopean trunk. The strength of that silken line was evident; the spider easily dangled the massive form of the figure beneath it, steadily drawing its prey up toward its fearsome giant mandibles.

Perhaps the shadowy figure had already given up, for his motionless body was struck by a number of violet lightning bolts and flames. Black smoke rose from the outline of the form.

“Take that, you freaky son of a bitch. Piece of shit born-again bloodsucker. Either them blasts will burn you to a crisp or my spider’ll crush the life out of you with his big old pincers.” A hatred-filled laugh echoed up from Fern. “But before they do, I’ll have me a look at your face, you little bastard. Who the hell are you? Cuore? Lina? That schoolmarm Meyer? Or are you—”

Another thread fastened itself to the mask hiding the features of the shadowy figure and deftly stripped it off.

“But you’re—?!”

What was it that made his cry of shock die half-uttered? Was it the sight of the burning vermilion shafts of light blazing from the middle of that bared face? Perhaps it was caused by the gentle laying of hands as cold as ice to both his shoulders.

“Oh, Papa . . . ”

The lilting words of his daughter crept across the nape of his neck just ahead of her fangs.

-

From the cover of a titanic tree a short distance away, someone saw the denouement. Having slipped out of bed, Cuore stood with his normally leaden eyes gleaming in his wasted, haggard face, straining with all his might to suppress a scream.

-

When her eyes became accustomed to the dark, Lina found that she and D were descending a wide passageway. The walls and ceiling were stonework, though the corridor was strangely bereft of the usual sense of crushing claustrophobia felt in tight tunnels. To the contrary, Lina got the feeling there were great, spacious chambers just beyond the walls they passed.

At various points on the walls and ceiling, the gleams of what seemed to be intruder sensors and radiation-containing devices could be seen.

“You know, it’s pretty hard to believe there are still underground chambers so big. We must be, like, a hundred yards underground by now,” Lina said in disgust to D, who walked a few paces ahead. They had been walking for about a half an hour, and she was no longer amused by the adventure.

“We haven’t even gone down ten.”

“You’ve got to be joking!”

“You can relax. We’ll reach the end of the line in a minute.”

Just as he said, less than sixty seconds later the pair came to a shutter made out of what seemed to be steel.

D pointed the pendant from his chest at the computerized identification device.

The shutter vanished instantly and the pair went in.

Silence like the blue embrace of dusk awaited them.

Lina’s jaw dropped.

It looked like an enormous laboratory, but there could never be another place of research to match this.

Like the corridor, the walls were stonework, boulder-fashioned ramparts rising to a height of thirty feet. The desks, laid in rows across the floor, were made of sturdy hardwood and adorned with flasks, beakers, and vials of unsettling colored liquids—it looked for all the world like the lab of a medieval alchemist. Here and there, ghastly things appropriate to such a place jutted up, mixing with the bluish light to create a mood that beggared description. But positioned perfectly among that old-fashioned apparatus was what could only be a positron brain, an electro-analyzer, a matter-converter—the very embodiment of superscientific technology. Here was a perfect example of the ambivalence that epitomized the world of the Nobility.

“I can’t believe this place is still intact,” Lina said, scanning the surroundings. “Looks like it was some sort of research center, doesn’t it? Can you tell what they were working on, D?”

Receiving no answer, she looked back over to D, who stood before a bench, intently scrutinizing the flasks and bizarre globes that were heaped atop it. He stepped up to a nearby control panel and his hands began to glide across the myriad keys.

“Don’t tell me you do computers, too . . . ”

Before Lina had finished saying the words, the air began to hum, and all about the room machines began springing to life.

The strangest imaginable designs, unintelligible symbols, and numerical expressions—none in the least bit familiar to Lina—shot in a riotous race across the computer’s screen. D stared at the screen for no more than a second or two before he quickly toggled off the switch and started across the spacious chamber without so much as glancing at the girl.

“Hey, wait for me. You’re being such a jerk. Can’t very well leave your assistant behind, can you?!”

But, just as she was about to scamper after him, her foot slipped and, squealing and clutching a rack of half-filled beakers, she tumbled to the floor with an impressive noise and no small amount of breakage.

“That hurt . . . ”

Luckily, she hadn’t bashed her head open, but, as she kneaded her sharply throbbing backside, she glared at the unavoidably returning D with the deepest loathing.

Her eyes suddenly narrowed.

There. Where the tendril-like splashes of liquid intermingled, wasn’t a wall of mysterious color forming? Wasn’t it rising from the floor in what was neither fog nor smoke? Yes, and it seemed that something was wriggling within the vapor. Struggling. As if bitter and cursing.

As something round and fat suddenly slashed out of the smoke and caught hold of her ankle, Lina screamed.

Crisscrossed with dark red tendons and blood vessels, drenched in some unknown slime, it was the gigantic arm of a baby. But it had only three fingers.

Lina tore herself loose with wild abandon, and the fingers vainly clutched at the air before curling powerlessly on the floor.

As she watched in a daze as the arm liquefied to a goo, D caught hold of her and effortlessly hoisted her to her feet.

“That’s a homunculus,” he said. “An artificial life-form spawned by lightning and congealed ether.”

“Yeah? Well, what’s one doing here? What the hell was this place?”

“Better come with me. If that’s all it takes to scare you, you really should go home, but I suppose it’s too late for that.”

“You seriously think there’s any chance of getting me to go home?”

Unruffled, D scanned the laboratory. Without warning he said, “I hear there was another kid lost with you who didn’t come back. Do you recall if anything happened to you here?”

“No. And I’ve tried to remember hundreds of times before. I’ve tried, Mr. Meyer’s tried, even Cuore has.”

“Even Cuore?”

Lina looked up at D. He stood a head taller than she did. Her expression was so disturbed, it made one wonder where it could’ve lurked so long in this young woman.

“Right after we got back, you see, they took us away from our parents and put us in an asylum. For a full week the sheriff and Vigilance Committee examined us. When they realized the drugs and hypnotism weren’t working, they stripped us naked and stuck us with needles. See, that’s a method of finding Nobles unique to our very own village. They put silver needles in your nipples and backside and depending on how the blood comes out they divine whether you’re one of the Nobility or not.”

D said nothing.

“In the case of a girl, ordinarily the wife of someone on the vigilance committee will do it, but no one but men examined me. They were taking turns, trading off—when they stuck me they’d change people. Old Man Gaston from the mill was there, and the boys from the slaughterhouse, and the mayor. I suppose he must’ve taken me in to make amends for that.”

Suddenly Lina smiled brightly and took aim at D’s face with her forefinger.

“Goodness, don’t make such a puss. I’m the kind to forgive and forget, after all. When I look at your face, I don’t think back on old grudges. So why don’t you try smiling for a change?”

“I was born like this.”

“Wow! That’s the first time you’ve said anything about yourself.” She giggled. “Do you feel sympathy for me? That’s not like you at all.”

“Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

When D said this, the bluish light filling the room was extinguished abruptly.

Without even time to think that somebody had done that on purpose, Lina was grabbed from behind with great force and dragged toward the wall.

“D!”

Something like a strangely sticky, cold palm stopped her shout-widened mouth, but the instant she saw a silvery flash race through her field of vision, a thunk like the sound of bone being severed resounded and she was set free.

A wail arose that made her want to slap her hands over her ears, and every time D’s longsword sheared through the air there was the sound of something being cleaved and falling to the ground—a sound that was to be heard over and over again.

At last it dawned on Lina that she was encircled by unknown creatures.

A dusky conjecture choked her heart. What she’d just felt touching her was beyond doubt a human hand. And that would mean, it had to be—Tajeel. But there was certainly more than one of them out there in the dark.

Dreamily, Lina sifted her memory for some recollection of Tajeel as he had been in his boyhood. She remembered the look of his swarthy face trying to appear sullen, as he handed her flower necklaces he crafted more skillfully than she could, though he still griped about how boring it was picking flowers. And it was Tajeel who had come running with nails in one hand and an arc welder in the other when the roof of her house blew off in a gale, then worked half the day to fix it. It was only natural that the thought of him doing these things out of love for her made her hold both pride and conceit in her little seven-year-old heart. More than even his own parents, it was Lina who had grieved over the loss of him.

“Stop it, D! Stop it!”

As if waiting for just that shout, a blue light threw Lina’s shadow onto the stone floor.

A few paces ahead, D was putting his longsword away. In place of the grotesque figures she expected to see, there was a profusion of deep red fluid spread across the stones of the floor. Blood. When she strained her eyes, a number of the thin, red streams ran to a rock wall to one side of the chamber. Instinctively racing closer, she asked, “What is it, D? You must’ve got a good look at it.”

D didn’t answer, but as he locked his gaze on the rock wall in question he muttered, “Strange, it wasn’t alone.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The answers lie behind the stones of that wall. We could press forward, but now that we know something’s down here, I’d say for today our best bet is to go home. When these things get a hand chopped off they leave, carrying everything but the blood.”

“But what the blazes—it couldn’t be Tajeel . . . ”

She received no reply, but, looking askance at D as he turned his ever-frosty form toward the shutter, Lina was struck by a deep emotion more puzzling than dread. She continued to keep her eye on the rocky wall.

-

Without so much as exchanging a word, the pair made their way back down to the base of the hill.

The Hunter’s beautiful profile betrayed not a hint of a tremble at the eerie monstrosities they’d so recently encountered. Lina stole glimpses of D’s face, terrified by his implacable silence.

There were a million things she wanted to ask him: the reason why it had been so easy to find the subterranean laboratory; what he had noticed there; what those monsters really were; where Tajeel was; and, more than anything, what had been done to her and the others down there a decade ago.

As she gazed at the young Vampire Hunter’s profile—one some might call melancholy—her curiosity about all those things dwindled away and something warm covered her heart.

Was she really tagging along with D in an attempt to shed some light on the shadows of a decade earlier? She had her doubts.

“I’m going to take a ride around the village,” D said suddenly. Lina noticed they were standing by her wagon. Not far away, D’s horse was nibbling the grass, paying them no heed.

“Well then, I’ll go with you . . . ” Lina said reflexively, but disappointment slapped her heart.

“We part company here. And in the future, I’ll thank you not to interfere with my work.”

Neither his expression nor his tone differed in the least from the usual, but Lina felt the biting cold like a sudden frost. Out of habit, she started to refute him, only to have her voice vanish down her throat.

“Go to school or head home, but don’t make any stops along the way. And don’t let your guard down even with those you know,” D said from astride his mount.

Yeah, right. Meanie. What do you care how anyone else feels?

Suddenly trying to look sullen, her cheeks stiffened. She tried to say something back, but no words came. Making matters worse, the corners of her eyes grew hot. No, she couldn’t start bawling this early in the day.

At this point the air abruptly grew tense. It was due to the lurid aura D emanated. She could feel every inch of her skin rising in gooseflesh.

The sensation was so eerie Lina couldn’t even ask what was the matter, but could only turn her face in the direction D was now gazing.

A lone cyborg horse was coming down the trail from town. With its familiar chestnut hue and type ten energy tank slung from its abdomen, Lina saw it was the sheriff’s mount. Coming on at a full gallop, horse and rider came to a halt with a small shower of earthen clods.

“Thought I’d find you here. You’d better come with me.” The sheriff’s face and voice were tinged with impatience.

“How did you know where we were?” D asked softly.

“A farmer saw Lina’s wagon headed for the hill. Cuore’s run off.”

“I thought someone had been put in charge of watching him.”

“One of the guys from the Vigilance Committee dozed off while the kid was still asleep. Can’t help that. We’re only flesh and blood.”

“Maybe if you tell that to the next Noble to attack you they’ll just make their apologies and be on their merry way.”

The sheriff didn’t respond to the Hunter’s bitter sarcasm.

“Where did he go?” D asked.

“Don’t know. But I’m afraid if we don’t find him fast we’ll have a lynching on our hands. See, since Cuore was at the scene last night, the whole Vigilance Committee’s got the idea that he’s not the culprit but he’s still in cahoots with it. We’ve been keeping an eye on where Cuore lives, but it looks like he hasn’t been back there. Which would leave the forests. I’ll check in the north woods. I want you to take the south.”

Without giving a reply, D wheeled his mount around. All he knew of the local geography he’d learned in a single glance at a map the mayor had given him a day earlier.

“Hurry on home,” he said to the motionless Lina, just as he was about to gallop off. “You’ve got a date with the Capital.”

By the time the girl had raised her face in consternation, D was racing like a scythe through the wind.

The sheriff hastened after him.

As he gave pursuit, the lawman watched with disbelieving eyes. Despite his own speed, the gap between them rapidly grew. It wasn’t on account of D’s horse. Due to his line of work, one of the first things the sheriff noticed about any outsider was their mount. He’d found that if he had some idea what sort of beast everyone was riding, it made it that much easier to come up with some strategy in the event he had to chase them down. D’s horse was just the standard, run-of-the-mill type that could be picked up in any village. Even tuned up, it shouldn’t be able to match the sheriff’s custom grade steed, two miles per hour faster and twenty percent more durable than the average. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

What the blazes . . . Does this guy use magic or something? I thought I heard something about him being a dhampir . . .

Finally, some idea of the uncanny power of the Vampire Hunter—abilities he had only heard rumors of—began to seep into the lawman’s understanding.

Pulling far ahead of the sheriff, D entered the south woods. Halting his horse, he shut his eyes. A moment later, he pointed his mount at a grove of trees to his right. Had he heard the words of the wind, or caught some presence tingeing the air?

Before another minute had passed, he met some vigilantes with odd expressions running deeper into the forest.

“Watch it!” cried one.

“Whoa there!” shouted another.

The flinching, scattering men watched D’s rein-handling as he sharply halted his hitherto galloping steed.

“Where’s Cuore?” At the sound of the Hunter’s voice, which could rightly be called soft, nearly a dozen roughnecks froze as if stitched in place. D trained his gaze on the man heading the pack, their apparent leader—the one who had been at the site of the disturbance the night before.

“He…uh, he’s alright. We ain’t done nothing. Yeah, we was gonna knock him around a little bit I suppose, but when we found him Mr. Fern come by.”

“Fern? Was he out looking for Cuore, too?”

The man shook his head with uncomfortable haste.

They’d set out on a search for Cuore that Fern had no part in, and had found the former standing stupefied in the middle of the forest. Determined to make him spill his guts, they’d surrounded him and were just starting in on their threats when Fern showed up. A brute of a man who ordinarily would’ve been the first one in line to lay into Cuore with a whip, Fern had been like a changed man, sticking up for Cuore and leading him away to stay at his own house. Or so this man said. That certainly helped account for the bewilderment gracing the faces of the men.

“Did Fern have anyone else with him?”

“Nope.”

“How long ago did they leave? And where did you find Cuore?”

The man pointed back behind them.

“Go straight and you’ll know it when you get there. The spot’s got moss all over the place and there should be plenty of footprints. It couldn’t have been ten minutes ago.”

The ring of iron horseshoes mixed with the man’s words.

D first headed in the direction of Fern’s home. In less than five minutes his eyes lighted on a structure which looked like split logs set in the ground—the guard beast kennel. A wooden palisade rimmed the perimeter, and a pair of people—Cuore and Fern—stood before the oddly shaped gate.

“What’s your business?” Fern asked, even as his expression registered surprise at D’s sudden stop.

“What did you go into the woods for?” asked D from the back of his horse.

Fern grinned devilishly and put his hands to the baskets at either hip. “I take it you don’t know what line I’m in. Fact is, I went out to get some of the moss and bugs I feed my guard beasts. I don’t know what you’re trying to get at asking a question like that, but I’ve two of them right here. You wanna see if I’m telling the truth or not?”

Just then, Fern got the impression that an instantaneous white light flashed between him and D. Fern blinked his eyes.

D ignored the provocation. “I want the boy back.”

“Oh, you sure have a funny way of putting things. Here you are talking to me like I’m some sort of sneak-thief. Well, he’s a lot better off here at my house than with some half-assed attempt at a Hunter from who-the-blazes-knows-where. There’s a woman’s touch here, and I don’t think it would hurt him none to learn how civilized folks live.”

“Suddenly overcome with love for your fellow man?” D inquired, an eldritch aura condensing about him. In a low tone trenchant as the finest blade he asked, “What happened in the forest?”

Fern was silent. His face was solemn, brimming with murderous intent, and his bony fingers crept to the lids of the baskets. D didn’t move. But one had to wonder how he hoped to fend off a pair of beasts from atop his mount, restricted as his movements would be.

A large figure suddenly interrupted the ghastly flow of bloodlust between the men.

Cuore stood before D, blocking his way. Eyes pleading, he shook his head and pointed to the gate. Was he trying to say he wanted him to go?

Shortly thereafter, D wheeled his horse about.

“Heading home already? Next time you show up here, you’d better have that pig-sticker of yours drawn. See, I’ve got all kinds of ‘goods’ here of the scary-bad kind. Like these!”

Fern’s confidence-stoked voice faltered. The lids hadn’t come off his baskets.

The face he raised, now paled by the knowledge that tapered needles of unfinished wood skewered the lids and baskets, was pounded by the hearty laughter of hoofbeats.

-

Racing all the way back to the forest, D dismounted in the malice-shrouded bog. Just as the man from the Vigilance Committee said, there was a confusion of tracks. This was where they’d encountered Cuore, yes, and the place where just previous to that Fern and his daughter had met with the vampire’s baleful fangs.

It is debatable whether this youth, too, was apprehensive of the unpleasant heat, but D set foot into the kaleidoscopic world without so much as a knitted brow.

From D’s lightly clasped left hand a malicious, drifting voice suggested, “Things are starting to get interesting.”

“How so?”

“That Fern character—there’s something funny about the way he’s acting. Then there’s the kid, who must be seriously wet behind the ears. Why on earth would he want to go with that guy? Ol’ basket-pants is in charge of the guys who beat the stuffing out of him, ain’t he? So what’s the story? You seem like you’re on to something already.”

“That boy wanted to go with him more than anything.” A rare teasing tone had entered D’s voice. “Try to read my mind about the rest. Which reminds me—if you’ve got your strength back, I need your help with something.”

“Still far from recovered. Can’t you spare me another two or three days to recuperate at my own pace? When the time comes, I’ll have a hell of an interesting tale for your ears.”

“I can hardly wait.” Halting his stride, D terminated the conversation. Strangely, it was at just the spot where the ashen figure had attacked Fern’s daughter.

D looked to the ground before his feet.

A multicolored carpet already concealed all signs of the struggle. The growth rate of these fungi was remarkably swift.

His intently scanning eyes gradually gave off a red brilliance. The miasma around him eddied suspiciously, and his gorgeous visage became that of a vampire.

His vermilion gaze halted on a certain piece of ground. Drawing a translucent cylinder the size of his little finger from a pouch on his belt, D knelt on the ground.

What could he be searching for that would necessitate becoming a vampire? Putting what appeared to be a piece of ground into the tube, D slowly surveyed his surroundings. As if beckoned by that ominous gaze, a black cloud surged from the distant sky.

-