Rhapsody in “Blood”

chapter 8

I

Blistering heat skimmed past Meg’s waist and chest. The girl turned around. Standing there was a woman dressed in Auntie Mabel’s clothes. The reason her identity couldn’t be absolutely confirmed was because everything from the neck up was missing. A massive hole also gaped in the left side of her chest.

Not even glancing at the body as it fell like dead wood, Meg turned once more toward d’Argent. Wearing a wonderful smile like she’d never seen on him, he lowered the hand of destruction. Meg didn’t say anything.

“Hear that?” d’Argent asked in a hushed tone.

Meg nodded.

Countless footfalls were drawing closer from behind the man. There had been more than two vampires on those tables, after all.

“Hurry up . . . Go! Leave them to me . . . I’ll hold them. Got enough energy left . . . for that.”

It was unclear if the former teacher was referring to himself or his weapon.

D’Argent sluggishly swung around so that he was facing the direction of the footsteps.

“This time, for real—good-bye.”

His voice was bursting with a firmness and righteousness the girl hadn’t heard from him before.

This was no longer the place for Meg.

“Good-bye,” Meg said, starting to walk toward the doorway. After she’d gone a short distance, she turned back and shouted as loudly as she could, “Good-bye, teacher!”

It was unclear whether or not her words reached d’Argent’s ears. Nothing came in return from that world, already sealed away in milky whiteness.

Stepping out into the corridor, the girl shouted, “To the front hall!”

The scene around her didn’t shift.

“What’s wrong?! Take me to the first-floor lobby!”

Though Meg stomped her feet, the world maintained its motionless silence. Some force was at work, halting all energy-based transportation in the enormous facility.

Countless corridors up ahead ascended, descended, and intersected, all of them being drawn into the depths of the blue light. No matter which one she chose, Meg got the feeling she, too, had no choice but to become a part of that blue world.

“In that case, I’ll take this one!”

Planting her first foot in a corridor continuing in a straight line, Meg started running. Because just then, she’d noticed a strange presence approaching from up ahead.

Reaching for her hip, Meg clucked her tongue in disappointment. She wanted to look for a place to hide, but even the black wall of the room she’d just escaped had vanished. She was like someone who’d been abandoned naked in a wilderness teeming with wolves.

Before the girl could start to think about what she should do, the presence took shape. It was quite a few figures who formed a circle as they headed that way. One of them sailed into the air, lashing out with a stark blade in midflight. A cry of pain rang out—and was gone. Falling to the floor in a bizarre pose, the figure instantly disappeared.

Several more figures charged into the center of the circle, reeled backward, and vanished. But now Meg saw the cause. The edge of the ring had closed to about fifteen feet from Meg, but from part of it that’d broken she got a full-length glimpse of the foe they challenged, who was destroying all comers. He was dressed in black, and his looks were so gorgeous he seemed to glow like a jewel in this world of blue.

“D?!”

Shadowy figures leapt from all sides. From what Meg saw, their incredible bounds were every bit as skilled as they were powerful, yet artless swipes of D’s sword left their heads sailing helplessly through the air and crashing to the floor with sprays of blood, playing out the poetry of death.

Meg counted seventeen foes reduced to dust, and then D sheathed his bloody blade and stood before her, but the girl remained there stiff as a statue. The fight had been so fiercely one-sided it’d left her stunned. Even wounded, a dhampir would be able to slay his foes. However, to all appearances D hadn’t suffered so much as a scratch.

Since the girl said nothing, the Hunter asked, “What are you doing?”

The instant that icy voice entered Meg’s ears, the spell over her was broken.

“Actually—” the girl began, not really telling him the situation so much as rattling on about it. The instant she finished her account, a terrible shame swept over Meg and she turned bright red. She was embarrassed to have exposed so much about herself to this exquisite man.

For all the girl’s wondering what he’d say to her, it ended up being, “Get out.”

“What?”

“I’m going to destroy this facility,” D told her. “Hurry up and get out of here.”

“No! Folks from my village might still be here.”

“It’s too late for them.”

“Th-th-that’s not for you to decide! H-h-how do you know that?!”

“Because that’s the nature of the Nobility, and I reviewed the operational data for the facility. There are no longer any regular humans here.”

“That can’t be,” Meg murmured, and her ears caught the sounds of several sets of footsteps. She didn’t know whether or not it was same ones off the tables, but a number of people were running that way.

“All the facility contains is former humans,” D said.

Meg got goosebumps. She knew what he had to mean by that.

“Go, or you’ll see things you’ll wish you hadn’t,” D said, his eyes no longer trained on Meg but rather gazing past her head and into the darkness behind her.

“No, I’m staying here!”

D stepped forward without a word.

The events of the next few seconds were a nightmare for Meg. The figures came running, each with a sword or beam cannon in hand, but they were reduced to stains on D’s blade without ever landing even a single hit on the Hunter. Meg knew a number of them. The rest were probably members of the party of settlers. He wasn’t the sort of opponent newly changed Nobles could handle.

As D sheathed his blade, he saw the girl sobbing, one corpse cradled in her arms while she clasped two others by the hands.

“Your family?” he asked.

“Dad . . . and Mom . . . and my little sister!” Meg clamped her jaws together. Nevertheless, her voice forced its way through her teeth. “You killed them . . . You left me . . . all alone in the world . . . What are you gonna tell me they did?”

“It’s what they would’ve done next. They’d have become bloodthirsty demons and attacked humans. Just as you saw.”

“Yeah,” Meg said, squeezing the word out in a mournful tone.

Her father, mother, and sister had all sported fangs when they attacked D. They had been nothing but beasts starved for blood. And that wasn’t all—on noticing Meg, her mother and sister had closed in on her, and even now they had their hands out in front of their chest as if to pounce. They seemed to say, We want your blood, Meg.

“If they’re allowed to reach the human world, the number of pseudo-Nobles will increase geometrically,” D explained. “Their line must end here.”

“Oh . . . just do whatever you want,” Meg said in a dazed tone. “But I’m bringing the bodies of my family back with me. I’ll take ’em back to the village and bury ’em there. Don’t try to stop me.”

D stepped forward without a word.

The door there was still open. Slipping in quietly, D looked all around. Beyond a doubt, this was one of the Nobility’s labs. Once upon a time, tens of thousands of humans had been sacrificed there in bizarre experiments. On learning that, the Hunter had crossed over to the island and destroyed all its facilities. Nobility and humans alike had been relegated to the flames. But all that had been resurrected. Toward what end, Mizuki Dandorian? Why did you and your staff have to rise from the dead now?

No, there was more to it. Behind D’s eyelids, there floated a ridiculously large figure in black. Was it you? he asked. Are you the one behind these resurrections? Do you intend to make the same stupid mistakes all over again?

D pressed on to the back of the laboratory, coming to the control panel for the energy furnace 6,200 miles below.

When D came back out less than a minute later, the scene that greeted him was one of gray dust dancing vainly in the breeze, and nothing more. Both Meg and her family’s bodies had vanished. Saying nothing, D went back down to the first floor—the same as the lobby.

II

That wasn’t where Meg had come in. D had probably entered the building without encountering Lord Danae. When they went outside and saw the view, it was indeed different. Meg couldn’t begin to guess where in that vast site Danae might be.

“Tired?”

The sudden question made her flinch. Even if heaven and earth switched places, the gorgeous young man didn’t seem likely to say such a thing. Looking at this young man, you could tell that beauty and humanity were absolutely incompatible. Meg immediately felt a trembling building within her.

“Not at all,” she replied. Though the girl wanted to show his concern was appreciated, the truth was she actually didn’t feel the slightest bit fatigued.

Next, D asked, “What’ll you do?”

Does he mean what I think? Meg thought, a thrill racing through her.

“What’ll I do? You mean if I said I’m going with you, you’d bring me along?” she asked curtly, an undisguised expectation in her voice. Not that she ever thought he’d grant her wish.

“Sure,” D said, his arm looping around Meg’s waist.

“What are you doing?!”

“We need to hurry.”

As he’d said, he began to knife through the wind, his speed so great it made the average person’s sprint look like a turtle’s pace.

Five minutes after they plunged into the forest, waves of blue light closed on the pair from behind. That was the end of the accursed facility.

“Dad . . . Mom . . . Ida . . .”

Meg said their names, intending to recite a requiem for them.

The two of them decided to spend the rest of the night in a clearing that lay in the middle of the forest. Meg had her suspicions something was wrong, but they were swallowed up by the waves of joy rippling through her heart and the fog that lingered in the area.

Since Meg had already recounted her journey thus far back by the laboratory, D didn’t ask her anything further about that, though he did inquire about the machinery the strange woman had appeared from before the girl had met d’Argent, such as the size and shape of it. He asked it so casually, Meg herself soon forgot all about it.

Unexpectedly, the Hunter said to her, “Your business here should be finished now. You can go back to your village. I’ll see you to the bay. You can go back on the boat I used to come over.”

“What, you won’t bring me all the way back to the village?” she asked, knowing fully well she was being unreasonable.

“I’m in a hurry. You can wait at the bay if you like, but there’s no guarantee I’ll make it back.”

That was how every day must’ve been for him. Meg actually flinched at the thought of how hard and fierce those days would be.

“No, I’ll go with you,” she responded, but not because of her competitive nature.

“Why?”

“I—well, I didn’t come over here just for my family. I was here to save everybody. I’ve had some pretty scary experiences, and I could do without having any more, but as long as somebody might be left, I can’t go home.”

Meg said that fully prepared to be mocked as an idiot. Such conventional resolve was no more than the babbling of a little girl in light of the shocking reality of this island.

Who would’ve believed D would say to her, “Okay. Come with me. But you’ll be risking your life.”

The warning he’d appended seemed like little more than futile whispers to Meg’s ears.

Earlier, she’d noticed that D had his saddlebags over his shoulder. He’d pulled an atomic torch out of them and switched it on, providing Meg with light and warmth. After watching him get it out, there was something she wanted to ask him. At first she’d thought she really shouldn’t and had held her tongue, but on seeing that he indeed used his right hand to undo the flap of the bag, she finally said, “What happened to your left hand?”

“It’s resting,” D replied.

“Huh?”

“Food poisoning.”

Still, that was enough for Meg to follow.

“I see. From its voice, it sure sounded like a glutton. So, resting as in rest in peace?”

“Not yet.”

“Too bad,” Meg said, and then she suddenly seemed to remember something and stood up with a gasp. “I’ve felt so safe with you around I forgot something. I’ve gotta make some harpoons. I’m gonna go see if I can find some promising branches.”

“Stay in the light,” D told her.

“Okay.”

Meg went over to a nearby stand of trees and looked for some nice straight branches, but she didn’t fare well as most were too short or crooked, Still, she managed to cut nearly a dozen and thought to herself, These should do, when in the stand of trees off to her right she spotted the perfect branch about eight or nine feet off the ground. Though she couldn’t jump up and grab it, fortunately there were other branches growing about three feet below it. If she were to grab hold of one, then use it as a step, it looked like this might just work.

After a quick glance over to confirm D was there in the torchlight, Meg grabbed hold of the lower branch. Kicking off the tree trunk and climbing, she got to where the desired branch was right in front of her. Taking the knife she’d held between her teeth, she pressed the blade into the base of the branch, but at that instant there was a rustling overhead.

Looking up, Meg bugged her eyes. Not eight inches away, a man’s face was peering down at her through the fog. From Meg’s perspective, it was upside down. More surprising still, it was a face she recognized.

“Bo?!”

A heartbeat later, the young bounty hunter twisted his lips into a grin and was sucked into the darkness overhead, as if jerked back by some incredible force.

“What’s Bo doing here?” the girl said to herself.

The encounter was so bizarre, it was strange Meg hadn’t fallen right out of the tree. However, she made it safely back down to the ground. It came as little surprise she showed no intention of chasing after the bounty hunter.

“Be careful, D! I just saw—” she shouted, but on turning she gasped in astonishment.

There was no sign of D by the glow of the torch.

She called out his name in spite of herself.

The night grew deeper and deeper, with fog creeping across the ground and snaring on the trees. But Meg ran through night and fog. Not out of fear. Rather, she was concerned about D.

“Oh?!”

She was in a copse of trees about a hundred feet west of where D had vanished. In the center of a grassy area surrounded by enormous trees, D stood with both his sword and his right arm extending from his side.

“D!”

A split second before she called out to him, Meg caught sight of an object knifing through the air at him from his right. What jabbed into the ground a good ten feet shy of D was none other than a short spear.

“That’s Lancer’s spear. Is he here, too?!”

If he was, it was a sloppy throw. Meg couldn’t believe a seasoned professional would have his weapon fall so short of the mark. However, Meg’s thoughts abruptly changed. Professionals don’t miss—which could only mean it was thrown there on purpose.

The ground suddenly shook. The grassland and enormous trees were being swallowed by a massive subsidence a hundred feet in diameter.

“D?!”

Meg’s eyes bulged in their sockets. She’d just spotted the black-garbed vision of beauty floating in the air over the subsidence. No, he wasn’t actually floating. From where he’d stood he was headed in a beeline to his right—in a leap for the far edge of the sinkhole.

While the powerful arc of the Hunter’s leap was impressive, the sight of him sailing through the air was exquisite—and Meg got the feeling that beauty alone was enough to execute such a great bound. However, just then D’s movement went into disarray. The leap had been just a bit short, and he hung from the brink of the hole by one hand. Though he’d narrowly managed to grip his sword between his teeth, he was in no position to use it. This was truly a do-or-die situation—and the girl was left wondering if a child with a toy bow and arrow couldn’t shoot D through the heart and finish him off.

The wind whistled. Something skimmed by the girl’s cheek. Unconsciously, she reached out with her right hand. The hard, sharp feel of it in her grip told Meg it was an arrow, which took her breath away.

On account of that, the girl wasn’t able to stop the other two arrows whistling through the air in flight. They pierced D’s upper body as he hung there like a bagworm.

“D?!” Meg shouted, and she was just about to run toward him when something hard and blisteringly hot sank into both her thighs. Tumbling forward onto the ground, the girl twisted herself around and saw the person who stood behind her. He fixed a fresh arrow into his undersized bow and pointed it at Meg. It was Bo.

“Don’t go making trouble, Meg.”

How ugly and mean his endearing smile had become. Perhaps the fault lay in the pair of fangs peeking from his curved lips.

“Bo—not you, too?”

“Well, I did get turned into one of the Nobility, and I don’t think I was the only one,” he said. “But now that I am one, it’s pretty damn good. I don’t have to chase my prey through deserts in summer like I used to, blood nearly boiling and always dehydrated. I don’t have to freeze myself to the bone at the water’s edge in the icy seas up north, shooting a hundred arrows just to bag a lousy target who’s hiding behind a North Sea beast. Those old wounds in my right arm and left leg don’t bother me no more, and new ones heal up lickety-split, no matter how bad they are. You know, Meg, I really wanna be a Hunter now!”

“You traitor!” Meg groaned. Though she knew Bo couldn’t help it, his betrayal still came like a knife to the belly, making anger roil up within her.

“Traitor? That’s a new one on me. The old me and the new me are like two whole different people. As different as a man is from a woman, Meg! To be a traitor, you have to know what it is you’re doing, right? Well, I didn’t get no time to hash it out before I was made one of the Nobility—a vampire. And when I saw what I’d become, I was pleased as punch! How about it, Meg? You gonna join us? I see the way you’re eyeballing me now, but once you’re one, we’ll be bosom buddies. What say we swear our loyalty to one another and drink a toast in blood when we have ourselves a ceremony?”

“What kind of ceremony?” Meg asked, and her body shook. More than anger, it was out of repulsion.

“A wedding ceremony, of course! Now you’ve got me all bashful, making me come right out and say it. But that conversation will keep till later. Hey, Lancer, I’m about to put three arrows through the heart of our little bagworm. Once I do, bury him good with that ‘avalanche spear’ of yours. A proper burial and everything! Are we conscientious Hunters or what?”

Bo cocked an ear in Meg’s direction. His vampire hearing had caught something she’d mumbled.

“What was that?”

“I said you talk too much!” Meg shouted, spitting the words out like they were filth. “A real man keeps his mouth shut and drinks Noparra Beer!”

A long time ago, a troupe of puppeteers traveling the Frontier had come to the village by the sea. Their activities were sponsored by a beer company located in the higher latitudes. And aside from that line of commercial endorsement before, during, and after the show, the puppets had done the entire performance in pantomime.

Meg screamed. And that wasn’t all. Seemingly having forgotten the pain of being shot through both thighs, she rose, braced her lower half properly, and hurled one of the branches she held.

III

Bo wasn’t paying attention. Even after Meg got up, he still had his guard down. His mind didn’t grasp what was happening until the instant he took Meg’s branch right through the heart. The terrific impact pushed the end through his back, but as Bo was knocked back fifteen feet, he unleashed three arrows simultaneously.

Meg bounded, a branch in her right hand, and though she managed to strike down two of them, she missed the third arrow.

“D?!”

At that moment, the brink of the enormous hole D was clinging to gave way with stupefying ease, plummeting along with the gorgeous figure to the bottom of a new thirty-foot-wide subsidence.

“D?! D?!” Meg cried, her body quavering as if she were suffering some kind of fit. It wasn’t that she held him dear. But a thing of beauty had been destroyed—and she found that unforgivable.

Spinning around, she dashed over to Bo. The pseudo-vampire lay on his back, and she straddled him, savagely jabbing his own arrows into his chest and face. Eyes and nose, lips and teeth all melted into a bloody morass, and the geysering blood deflated his shredded heart. His spine and skull, ribs and collarbones were all smashed to powder, like seasoning for the pulpy soup of flesh and blood.

Somewhere, the night cried out. Its voice took the form of a gunshot.

Meg twisted her upper body around, and it was a second later that she returned to her senses. The direction she’d turned wasn’t that of the gunshot, but rather that of the subsequent scream.

“Cowboy . . . you son of a bitch. How could you do that to one of your own . . .”

The voice was one she knew. Lancer’s. The moonlight, fog, and trees had all kept him hidden from Meg’s view. Lancer had been shot. And there was only one person it could’ve been!

“Don’t make me laugh, servant of the Nobility, scum of the earth. The least you can do is let one of my bullets show you the way to hell.”

She still couldn’t see the source of that wild voice. But Meg felt like she had a million friends now.

“You’re okay, eh, Meg?!” the rifleman called out, Lancer forgotten for the moment. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m fit as a fiddle. Hold on and I’ll be right there as soon as I’m done with him.”

“The hell you say, human!” Lancer snarled. The anger just seemed to boil up in him, and Meg felt a little panicky. But his anger dissipated in no time. “I’ve known where you were for a good long time,” he continued calmly. “You can follow after D!”

Something knifed through the wind, and a few seconds later the ground quaked. The roar of the natural disaster sent the fog rolling back, then rushing in again.

“Cowboy!” Meg shouted, standing rooted in place. She wasn’t afraid of Lancer. For she’d heard the crack of a rifle a split second before his short spear had created another massive subsidence in the ground. And immediately after it, Lancer’s scream.

“Cowboy! Lancer!”

There was no answer.

Who had won? She didn’t know. Who had lost? She couldn’t tell.

Once again the tears streamed from the girl. Then she murmured D’s name and began walking along the brink of the double sinkhole.

It was about forty minutes later that, choosing a massive tree with a solid-looking trunk, roots, and branches, Meg undid a reel of wire taken from Bo’s belt, wrapped one end around the tree trunk, and descended into the hole. For weapons, she had ten of Bo’s arrows tucked through her belt.

The jumble of dirt, rocks, and trees had stopped at a depth of about seventy feet. The ground was a dangerous minefield of holes covered in dirt which Meg skillfully navigated, but on coming to the center of the subsidence, she groaned, “Oh, God!”

The top of one of the trees had snapped off at an angle, and the young man in black was impaled on the tip of it. His body was bowed like a crescent moon, with three of Bo’s arrows imbedded in his chest and the top of the tree trunk piercing him just above the waist. Despite the horrific sight he presented, the young man’s chest still rose and fell, and Meg was chilled to see that his right hand grasped his sword.

Before the girl could call out his name, D moved his right hand under himself—longsword still in its grip—and grabbed hold of the trunk that pierced him. As the girl watched, he lifted his body up with the strength of one arm, and a moment later he rolled at Meg’s feet. The sound of that wooden stake tearing free of his flesh echoed in Meg’s ears.

With the same hand the Hunter grabbed all three arrows at once, pulled them out, and discarded them.

Meg was speechless.

“You . . . okay?” she asked, but naturally that was only after D had caught his breath.

“More or less.”

“To survive that . . . you dhampirs must be something else.”

“What happened to the bowman?” D asked.

“He’s dead. I . . .”

At that point she followed D’s line of sight and noticed that she was covered in gore from chest to waist. She’d been spattered with Bo’s blood.

“How’s your condition?”

“Awful—or that’s what I’d tell you, but pretty good. It’s like I never run out of stamina.”

“If we stay here, Nobles will be coming soon,” said D. “But when I’m punctured by wood, it’s slow to heal. Give me blood.”

He said it so matter-of-factly.

“Okay,” the girl promptly replied, and then she went pale, “What am I saying?! Not a chance!”

“It doesn’t matter where, just make a light cut somewhere. A mouthful will do.”

“No, that’s disgusting. It’s like some kind of Noble ritual. I don’t wanna see you drinking blood!”

“There’s no time. Any minute now . . .”

“I said ‘no,’ and I mean, ‘NO!’” Meg exclaimed, her body quaking.

Nobles and blood are just the worst things imaginable. All I ever wanted was a life fishing.

Just then, something like a wire came down from overhead and wrapped around Meg’s waist.

A needle of rough wood flew from D’s right hand, but from a far greater height a voice remarked, “It’s no use, D. I’m up in the stratosphere. If you want the girl, come to the castle. That is, supposing you manage to hack your way through the failures I’ve sent out here for you.”

Gildea’s voice had rained down, and in no time at all Meg had been hauled away into the air.

D followed for a while, but he soon turned his eyes to his feet. He’d just noticed that when he’d hurled the needle at his lofty foe, his left hand had fallen out of the coat pocket where he’d stashed it. His moon-shaming beauty and his intrepid figure showed neither hesitation nor fear. But after taking three arrows and a tree trunk through his upper body, how would D get through this without the left hand, an energy supply of sorts for him?

Look. Up on the rim of the subsidence, ephemeral figures shrouded in murderous intent jostled against each other. Crimson was the color of hunger. With two points of that hue set in their pale faces, the undead panted and waited to see who would be on the receiving end of the coming slaughter.