FUGITIVES

CHAPTER 2

—

I

—

As Leila hit the brakes, a gorgeous figure in black greeted her.

“Very nicely done,” D said in his serene tone.

Weathering a sensation that was neither fever nor chills racing down her spine, Leila replied with bald-faced hostility. “You still kicking around? If you don’t make tracks and fast, I’m gonna have to run you down and kill you,” she warned.

Without acknowledging her threat, D said softly, “Someone should take a look at your wound.”

“And you’d best . . . mind your own business!” Pain spread through the last words Leila spat. Pressing a hand to her right breast, she toppled forward in the driver’s seat. She’d taken a hit in the chest from a hunk of shrapnel that’d punched through the battle car’s floorboards.

Walking over swiftly, D lifted Leila with ease and set her down in the shade of a nearby tree. Throwing a quick glance at the sky and the Shelter, D listened in the direction from which Leila had come.

“They’re not coming,” the palm of his left hand could be heard to say. “Her people are still a long way off. What are you planning on doing?”

“Can’t leave her like this.”

“You can play nursemaid to the mortally wounded later. Our target’s in that steel box right now, completely immobilized. I say finish him off as soon as possible, and deliver the girl. After all, even if she’s been bitten already, if we slay the Noble she’ll be back to normal. That should please her no end.”

Shrouded as always in an eerie aura, D’s beautiful visage clouded for an instant. “She’d be pleased? Because she was human again? Or because he was—”

“Don’t start harping on that again. Has this fine spring day knocked a few of your screws loose? We’re so close, and if you just go do it now you could kill him without working up a sweat. The sun’ll be setting soon, you know. I say let the competition rot.” As if to corroborate the voice’s growing impatience, the sky began to don a darker shade of blue. At this time of year, sunset came around five Night, which gave D fewer than two hours to finish his work.

Despite that, D pulled open the front of Leila’s coverall without a word. Evident even through her clothing, the pale fullness of her bosom was now laid bare. The flesh above her left breast burst outwards in a number of spots. Already the bloodied wounds had swollen black and blue. They were like so many eerie sarcomata growing from her white skin.

D stood up, lifted the emergency kit from his saddlebags, and returned. When he opened the lid of the kit, agitation surged into his eyes.

“Heh heh heh,” the voice cackled mockingly. “I was just trying to remember when you bought that set. You’ve been hauling it around all this time and never used it once. Well, the stuff inside became useless a long, long time ago. That’s the trouble with people who can’t die.”

“Too true,” D muttered in his usual monotone, doing a check of Leila’s battle car and pulling out a first-aid kit. Just to be safe, he set it on the floorboards to open it, then closed it again quickly.

“What is it?”

“There’s nothing in there. She’s pretty much out of everything.”

“So, didn’t restock it, eh? Never heard of such a cavalier Hunter.”

Wounds, you could say, were an occupational hazard for Hunters, and replacing medical supplies was every bit as important as procuring weapons. On arriving in a town or village, it was second nature for a Hunter to race to the arms merchant and pharmacy first, then hit the general store or saloon later.

But Leila had no medical supplies. And yet she was the youngest sister of the Marcus clan, whose five members ranked up there with a handful of veteran Hunters.

Once again D squatted by the girl’s side.

Her breathing was rather shallow. Though it seemed the fragments within her hadn’t damaged any internal organs, there was some danger of toxins from the shrapnel causing tetanus if the chunks of metal were left where they were. In fact, the entry and exit wounds were already swelling a deep, dirty red.

“What are you gonna do? You know I only work on you. Can’t do a thing for humans.”

“I know. There’s no choice but to deal with humans the human way.”

From the combat belt at his waist, D drew a caltrop. He brought one of the points to his left hand.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“If the girl dies, you and I are through.”

“Shit. Are you threatening me?” But before the voice had finished speaking, pale blue flames enveloped the tip of the caltrop.

The sharp point heated quickly and turned crimson. D brought his left hand closer to Leila’s brow. Her sizable eyes opened.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Cauterizing the wound. I’ll do it so it doesn’t hurt.”

“How kind of you,” she shot back sarcastically. “Don’t expect me to thank you.”

“Don’t talk.”

Leila jerked her face away from the approaching hand. “I don’t know what kind of hocus-pocus you can pull, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you play around with my body while I’m out. I’m gonna be awake to see this from start to finish. Try anything funny, and believe me, you’ll pay.”

Undeterred, D set his left hand on her.

“Don’t—” Leila’s words became a scream. “Stop, I’m begging you. Do it while I’m still awake. Please,” she pleaded.

Something glistening welled in her eyes as they gazed at D. It spoke of horrific memories.

Silently taking his hand away, D tore the sleeve of his coat and put a strip of cloth from it between Leila’s lips. They had no anesthesia. The cloth was to keep her from biting her tongue. This time she cooperated quietly. The little nod she made must’ve been an expression of gratitude.

D lowered the hot metal to her skin. Shortly thereafter, a pungent scent and a series of low moans began to permeate the darkening bower.

—

Dusk seemed to coalesce around him. He opened his eyes.

Nothing could replace this feeling, that the spell that imprisoned him to the very last cell was drawing away like the tide. This was his favorite time.

His eyes hastened to his side. Not far from him, a girl sat quietly on the edge of the bed. She gave the impression of not having moved a muscle since she’d sat down. Her pretty white blossom of a face turned to him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, still lying flat on a bed littered with silk cushions. He’d glimpsed the trail of a teardrop on the girl’s cheek.

“There’s someone outside.”

“Oh. Here already?” In the recesses of his tense voice lay unshakable self-confidence. Now matter how skilled the Vampire Hunter, nothing could match a Noble rising in darkness.

Stepping down lightly onto the steel floor, he glanced at the door and his eyes fairly shot out. Was that a threadlike silver line falling across the floor? Realizing that it was moonlight sneaking in through a crack carved above the door, he turned back to the girl.

“During the day, someone opened it with a sword,” she said. “Hunters hired by Father, no doubt . . . ”

Discerning a certain something on the blue dress that covered her down to the knees, he knit his brow. It was an elegant silver dirk. He’d been wearing it at his waist. What had she intended to use it for? For a brief while he focused on the weapon, then he made his way over to the video monitors on the wall to check on the situation outside.

—

By the time D had burned then carved away each wound, and had sterilized the damaged skin with a freshly heated caltrop, Leila finally passed out.

“For the most part her worries are over,” the voice said. “But bacteria have already set up shop in her body. She’ll be getting hit by some pretty intense chills soon. If she can get past that, she’ll be able to rest easy. You’ve gone this far, might as well do the next step. Keep treating her through the home stretch.”

With no sign of listening to the somewhat disgusted voice, D kept looking back and forth between the Shelter and the sky of ever-deepening blue. When the caltrop stuck in the ground had cooled he returned it to his belt and stood up, saying, “He should be coming out any minute now.”

“You’re so cold,” the voice said with resentment. “You mean to tell me when he does, you’ll just stop treating her? Don’t run off like some back-alley quack.” But then the voice stopped unexpectedly.

D took a step forward. Like stagnated blue light, the door to the Shelter retracted without a sound. Looking back, he saw Leila. The eyes that swiftly turned forward again held a lurid light. There he stood, the greatest Vampire Hunter of all. The hem of his coat fluttering in the night breeze, D came down the hill.

It wasn’t long before the six obsidian horses appeared one after another—followed, of course, by the black lacquered carriage. Machinery within the Shelter had successfully completed the necessary repairs to it during the day.

A young man clad in black peered silently down at D from the coachman’s perch. “Out of our way,” he said. His voice was strangely soft. “Scum though you are for the way you place a price on people’s lives, I still have no wish to engage in a pointless and lethal exchange.”

An odd hue of emotion flowed into D’s eyes, then swiftly vanished. “I’ll take the girl,” D said perfunctorily, his demeanor free from violence or exuberance.

The man’s eyes were gradually being dyed red. “I took her because I want her,” he said. “You should try to do the same. If you’re up to battling a Noble at night, that is.”

The darkness solidified. Though both the color and light remained the same there, the space between the two of them seemed to have suddenly frozen.

The crack of whipped flesh broke the stillness. Without even a whinny, two-dozen hooves began beating the earth. Whether their intent was to trample the insignificant Hunter or to make him get out of the way, those six madly charging horses unexpectedly came to a dead stop a few yards shy of D.

There was a startled cry of “Mayerling!”

The instant D realized the voice flew from a woman inside the carriage, his body soared into the air like a mystic bird. Still distracted by her plaintive cry, there was a split-second delay before D brought his silvery flash down at the youth’s head.

Sparks spilled into the darkness like scattered jewels, trailing a beautiful metallic ching behind them. The youth—Mayerling—had stopped D’s deadly stroke with the back of his left hand. That part of his hand was bound in steel armor.

Twisting his body out of the way of the three flashes of light roaring through the air toward his chest, D came silently back down to earth on the opposite side of the vehicle.

From the roof of the carriage down to D, the miasma flowed. And from D back up to the roof. At this intense exchange of unearthly auras, the horses whinnied, and the carriage rocked wildly.

Long claws grew from the fingers of the Noble’s right hand. But no, they were not simply nails—glittering blackly, they clearly had the lustrous sheen of steel. When danger was near, the vampire’s normal fingernails became murderous steel implements.

“Such a refined face, and such skill—I’ve heard your name before. The name that can make any Noble grow pale. So, you’re D—” Mayerling said, his voice a blend of admiration and fear.

“I’ve heard of you, too,” D responded softly. “I’ve heard there was a young lord praised for his virtue by his subjects, perhaps the only one among all the Nobility. His name was Mayerling, I’m quite certain.”

“I always wanted to meet you. One way or another.”

“Well, now you have,” the Hunter replied. “I’m right here.”

“Will you not let us go? I’ve done nothing to the humans.”

“Tell that to the father you made like yourself before you carried off his daughter.”

Distress filled Mayerling’s countenance.

The tension abruptly drained from D’s body.

With a shout of “Hyah!” from Mayerling, the horses pummeled the earth. Speeding by D’s side, they started to gallop up the earthen slope.

D raced like the wind.

The carriage was every bit a match for D’s speed.

At the summit of the hill, D came alongside the carriage. His right hand reached for the door handle. And then the golden handle just started pulling away. As he watched, the carriage dwindled in size, and D turned himself around and headed over to a stand of trees. That was where Leila lay.

“Heard a strange voice, didn’t you?” the usual strange voice said. “Kinda makes you think being hard of hearing might not be so bad. We might be wrapping up this job right about now otherwise.”

D squatted down and put a hand to Leila’s brow. She was as hot as fire. Her sweat-drenched face was twisted with pain. Both fever and pain were due to her infection. Relentless chills would soon follow.

Without a moment’s hesitation, D stripped off Leila’s clothes. When her beautiful naked body was stretched out on the green grass, a surprised “Wow!” came from his left hand. “By the looks of it, I’d say this little girl’s had a pretty hard life.”

From her round, firm breasts down to her thighs, and across her whole back, Leila’s skin was covered with the scars of numerous gashes and the stitches that had closed them. This was a girl who lived in the carnage that was the Frontier.

Without seeming to be harboring any strong emotion, D covered Leila with himself.

Crying out a little, Leila clung to his powerful chest. Her fever-swollen lips trembled, letting a mumbled word escape over and over again. A single word, but it was what had stayed D’s hand at the carriage door.

—

When Kyle Marcus’s mount crested the hill an hour later, there was no sign of anyone or anything in the vicinity, aside from his sister, who was wrapped in a blanket and resting peacefully in her seat in the battle car.

Another thirty minutes after that, the bus driven by Borgoff appeared, along with Nolt, who was riding point.

Kyle carried Leila into the vehicle in a great hurry. They must’ve been very close, because his expression had changed markedly. “She—she’s gonna be okay, won’t she, bro?” he stammered. “Give her something, I don’t care what.”

As Borgoff watched him struggle on the brink of tears, he wore a rancorous expression, but he took Leila’s pulse nonetheless, checked her fever, and before long gave a satisfied nod. “She’s all right. I’ll check out her internal organs and circulation with a CAT scan anyway, but there’s no need to worry.” Staring down at Kyle where he’d slumped to the floor in apparent relief, he added, “This kinda shit is what happens when you go behind my back and send Leila out alone.”

“I know. You can take the strap to me later for all I care. But which one of them you figure roughed Leila up so bad?”

Kyle’s face had reclaimed its original viciousness. Eyes staring firmly into space, he was so angry he didn’t notice the froth running from the corners of his mouth. His body shook.

“Well, probably not the one who treated her. Which means maybe it was neither of them. You wouldn’t think anyone as soft as all that could survive this long out here on the Frontier.”

“It don’t matter,” Kyle said, almost ranting deliriously. “It don’t matter which of ’em did it. I’ll find ’em both and cut ’em to pieces. Take their arms and legs off and put ’em back on where they don’t belong. Stuff their mouths with their own steaming guts.”

“Knock yourself out,” his older brother said. “Anyway, you’re sure there wasn’t anyone around Leila? From the look of her wounds, she got them three, maybe four hours ago.”

The door opened and Nolt stuck his head in. “We’ve got some tracks from a carriage passing this way. Still fresh. Maybe from an hour before we got here, tops. There’s something else, too—some prints from horseshoes.”

“If that’s the case, then the two of them must’ve gone at it here, too. And it looks like it didn’t get settled yet . . . ”

Nodding gravely at his own words, Borgoff ordered Nolt to take care of Leila and Groveck. He went to his room in the back, returning to the driver’s seat clutching a cloth-wrapped package of apparent significance.

“If I’ve seen D’s face, I can spot him,” he muttered, pulling from the cloth a silver disk about a foot and a half in diameter. Setting it up on a little stand almost in the center of the dashboard, Borgoff turned his heavily whiskered face to gaze out the window and up at the moon rising in the heavens. The moon was round and nearly full, but, thanks to the clouds obscuring part of it, it looked like it’d been nibbled here and there by bugs.

When he set his huge form down, the driver’s seat creaked and groaned. Then Borgoff crossed his hands in front of his chest, and began to stare fixedly at the propped-up silver platter with eyes that looked like they could bore right through it. A minute passed, then two.

Kyle wouldn’t leave Leila’s side as she lay in bed. As Nolt peered in through the door next to the driver’s seat sweat beaded his face just as profusely as Borgoff’s.

And then, as the silvery surface of the platter grew smoky, almost like clouds covered it, the figure of a young man in black astride a horse suddenly formed on its surface.

It was D. Turning their way and saying something, he pulled on the reins in his hands and disappeared into a thicket.

It was a replay of D from the previous night, talking with them after the battle with the vampiric villagers. If people or things looked a little different, it was probably because these images were taken from Borgoff’s memories. Here was a man who could project his own memories onto a silver platter. Yet, despite this admirable display of what some would call sorcery, Borgoff glared mercilessly at the moon in the sky with bloodshot eyes. No, not at the moon, but at a big mass of clouds under it. The moonlight shining on the clouds edged them in blue.

There was no change in either the moon or the cloud mass, or so it appeared for an instant. Then, even though the moon remained unchanged, the heart of the cloud mass seemed to begin to glow ever so faintly. In the space of a breath, a figure shaped like a man started wriggling there, and, with a second breath, it became a clear picture. Someone was riding a horse down a pitch-black road.

Based on his past memory of D, Borgoff was using the silver platter and moon as projectors to make the present D appear in the cloud mass.

The receding figure that seemed to be looking down on them from the distant heavens was a remarkable likeness of D as he raced down the road a few score miles ahead.

—

II

—

They’d run full tilt for a good two hours after leaving D in their dust, and, when Mayerling saw that the road continued on in a straight line for the next dozen or so miles, he left the coachman’s perch of the racing carriage and skillfully slipped inside.

When he’d closed the door, not a hint of sound from the outside world intruded into the carriage. The girl sat there in a leather-bound chair like a night-blossoming moonbeam flower.

Carpet spread across the floor, and an exceedingly fine silk padding covered the walls and ceiling. In days of old, bottles of the best and rarest potables had sat on the collapsible golden table that seemed to grow from the wall, and this dozen miles of starlit road had run to great masquerades by the Nobility. However, the carpet was now somewhat dingy, there were tears in the silk, and there wasn’t a single silver glass on the table. Even the table drooped for lack of a screw.

This model of carriage was said to be the last equipped with magnetic stabilizing circuits, which would hold the passengers safely in position even if the vehicle were to flip over.

Mayerling’s right hand moved, and the interior was filled with light. “Why don’t you turn on the lights?” he asked. “By rights this dilapidated old buggy should have been scrapped long ago, but that much at least is still operational.”

Encouraged by a smile that bared teeth of limitless white, the girl showed Mayerling a smile in return. Yet her smile was thin, like a mirage.

He tried to recall the last time he’d seen this girl’s brightly smiling face, but had little luck. Perhaps he’d only dreamt it, and was dreaming this as well.

“I don’t mind,” she replied. “If you live in the darkness, then I want to, too.”

“I’m sure the sunlight suits you wonderfully. Though I have yet to see you in it,” he added, heading over to the chair across from her to sit down.

“Do you think we’ll make it all the way?” the girl asked hesitantly.

“You think we won’t?”

“No.” The girl shook her head. It was the first vehement action he’d seen from her since he’d taken her out of the village. “I’ll be fine anywhere. So long as I’m with you, I could make my home in a cave in the craggy mountains or in some subterranean world where I’d never see the light of day again.”

“No matter where we might be, the Hunters would come,” he said, allowing resignation to drift into his jewel-like beauty. “Your fellow humans won’t be happy until they’ve destroyed everything. You’re nothing like them, of course.”

She said nothing.

“There’s nowhere on earth we can relax now. A long trip out into the depths of space . . . ” He caught himself. “Perhaps it has become too much for you?”

“No.”

“It’s all right. Perhaps you weren’t cut out for this from the very beginning. A graceful hothouse flower can’t endure the ravages of the wild. You were kind enough to indulge my willfulness. We shall take a different course if you so desire.”

The girl’s white hand pressed down on his pale hand, and her slender face shook gently from left to right. “I want to try and see if we make it. To go to the stars.”

Oh, who could have known the journey these two had undertaken was not a fiendish abduction, but rather a flight by a couple madly in love? A young vampire Nobleman and a human lass—linked not by fear and contempt, but by a bond of mutual love all the stronger for its hopelessness. Were that not the case, there was no chance this girl taken from a village where everyone had been turned into vampires would still be untainted, her skin still unbroken.

For the Nobility, drawing a human into their company was part of how they fed, colored as it was by their aesthetic appreciation of sucking the life from someone beautiful. But at the same time, the act was also filled with the pleasure of violating the unwilling, as well as the twisted sense of superiority that came from raising one of the lowly commoners to their own level.

Mayerling had done nothing of the sort. He did no more than lead the girl from her home, taking her by the hand as he let her into his carriage and nothing more. He had not used freedom-stealing sorceries, nor veiled threats of violence against her family to force her compliance. The girl had quietly slipped out of the house of her own accord.

From time to time, such things did happen. Bonds formed between the worlds of the humans and of the supernatural. However, they didn’t necessarily become a lasting bridge between the two worlds, and typically the couple concerned would be chased by a stone-wielding mob. As was the case with these two.

The Nobility flickered in the light of extinction, and the girl had lost any world she might return to, so where could the two of them go? Out among the stars.

Mayerling raised his face.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “It seems the dawn will be early today. If we’re to gain a little more ground, I shall have to see to the horses.” Kissing the girl on the cheek, he returned to the coachman’s perch like a shadow.

Whip in hand, it was not to the fore that he first turned his gaze, but rather to the darkness behind them. In a place cut off from all the rest of the outside world, he heard the clomp of iron-shod hoofs approaching from far off. “So soon,” he muttered to himself. “That would be D, wouldn’t it?”

A crack sounded at the horses’ hind as his whip fell. The scenery on either side flew by as bits and pieces. However, the ear of the Noble caught the certain fact that the hoofbeats were gradually growing closer.

“Just a little further to the river,” Mayerling muttered. “Hear me, O road that lies between him and me. Just give me another ten minutes, I beseech thee.”

—

Oh. He’s finally catching up,” Nolt said. In the cloud that held his gaze, a small luminous point began winking ahead of D. Light spilling from the windows of the carriage, no doubt. “Give him another five minutes. No matter which one buys it, it’s all sweet for us. So, what kind of vision you gonna show us next, bro?”

He didn’t get to ask Borgoff anything, as his words died down to muttering when he saw how the oldest of the clan was completely focused on the mirror, to the exclusion of all else.

Perhaps it was due to this unprecedented sorcery, a magic that could choose one scene at will from the moon’s gaze—which was privy to all things on earth—and then use cloudbanks as a screen for projecting that scene, but, for whatever reason, every scrap of flesh on Borgoff’s colossal frame seemed to have been chiseled off. He looked half-shriveled, almost like a mummy.

When Nolt turned his eyes once again to the screen in the mass of clouds, he muttered a cry of surprise. At some point, the scenery rushing by D on either side had become desolate rocky peaks. “Well then, big bro, you thinking of maybe starting a landslide or something to bury the bastards?”

—

At last, Mayerling’s darkness-piercing vision caught the black rider. The tail of his coat sliced through the wind, billowing out like ominous wings.

Could he face and beat this foe on equal terms? While he was fairly self-confident, anxiety was beginning to rear its ugly, black head in Mayerling’s bosom. Though they’d only met for a split second, the force and keenness of the blade that’d assailed him from overhead lingered all too vividly in his left hand even now. The numbness was finally beginning to fade. But more than that, the distinct horror of learning the steely hand-armor that could repel laser beams had been cut halfway through rankled him, and caused him concern.

Vampire Hunter D could not be underestimated.

Mayerling’s eyes glowed a brilliant crimson, and the curving black claws creaked as they grew from his right hand, which still clenched the whip.

Perhaps anticipating the new death match about to be joined, even the wind snarled. Up ahead, a wooden bridge was visible. The sound of running water could be heard. The current sounded rather strong.

Mayerling’s gaze was drawn up. Quickly bending over, he pulled a pair of black cylinders from a box beside the driver’s seat. They were molecular vibro-bombs, complete with timers. The molecular particles within them were subjected to powerful ultra-high speed vibrations, and they could destroy cohesive energy to reduce any substance to a fine dust.

Raising a tremendous racket, the carriage started across the bridge. The span was about sixty feet in length. Some thirty feet below, a white sash raced by. Rapids.

He halted the carriage as soon as it was across, then turned. Grabbing the molecular vibro-bomb’s switch with his teeth, he gave it a twist. They weren’t exactly a weapon befitting the Nobility.

D was on the bridge roughly five seconds later. He rushed ahead without a moment’s hesitation.

He didn’t think he was being foolish. This Hunter must’ve had the self-confidence and skill to deal with any situation. There was no choice, then, but for Mayerling to exert every lethal effort in return. “I had hoped to settle this like men, one on one,” he muttered as he listened to the thunder of the iron-shod hoofs. “See how you like this, D—”

But the instant he jerked his arm back to prepare for the throw, lightning flashed before his eyes. It’d flashed down without warning from a black mass of clouds clogging the sky, aiming to strike the top of the bridge—and the road right in front of D.

Sparks flying without a sound dead ahead, how could the Hunter avoid the gaping ten-foot-wide hole that suddenly yawned before him? The legs of his horse clawed vainly at air, and D, keeping his graceful equestrian pose, plummeted headfirst toward the fierce, earth-shaking rapids below.

—

III

—

Just as Nolt shouted, “You did it!” Borgoff’s greatly withered frame suddenly slumped forward.

On hearing the commotion, Kyle sluggishly stuck his head out, too. “What happened?” He looked out the window and up at the sky, but the screen-like properties of the clouds had been lost along with Borgoff’s consciousness. “Oh, man, bro—you went and used it again, didn’t you? And you’re the one who’s always going on about how it takes three years off your life every time you do.”

Feeling the derisive jibe, the oldest brother said in a halting voice like that of the dead, “He fell into the river. Dhampirs ain’t swimmers . . . Nolt, find him and finish him off.”

A few minutes later, after he’d watched the second oldest depart in a cloud of dust, Borgoff gave Kyle the order to drive. He headed for the bedroom in the rear to rest his weary bones. There was one set of bunk beds on either side for his siblings. His alone was especially large, and located the furthest in the back.

As he was making his way down the aisle, trying to keep his footsteps as quiet as possible, his meatless but still sizable arm was grasped by something eerily cold. Borgoff turned around.

A white hand that could easily be mistaken for that of a genuine mummy stuck out from the bottom right bunk.

“Hey, I didn’t know you were up. I’m sorry if that idiot Nolt disturbed you with all his hollering.” Where the eldest Marcus normally kept this gentle tone of voice was a complete mystery.

The person in the bunk turned over, though it was clearly painful to do so. He was a pitifully small lump beneath the blankets. “I’m sorry, bro . . .about not carrying my own weight . . . ”

In response to the frail voice, Borgoff shook his head without a word. His bull neck creaked and looked like it might pop. “Don’t talk nonsense. The four of us are more than enough to take anyone on. You ought to keep quiet and get your rest.” After he stroked it lightly, the slender hand finally pulled back into the blankets. “So,” Borgoff added, “it doesn’t look like you’ll be having any seizures for a while then, eh?”

At this entirely sympathetic question, the other man let the covers he’d pulled up over his head slip back down smoothly. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I think I’ll be able to keep it under control on my own.” His face was smiling as he answered feebly. His brother knew he had to be smiling, but the expression turned out to resemble nothing so much as a rictus. His cheeks were hollowed, his terribly cloudy eyes were sunken in cavernous sockets, and the breath that leaked out with his voice from lips the color of earth was as thin as that of a patient at death’s door. The feeble body belonged to Grove, the infirm younger brother Nolt mentioned when the clan first met D.

However, if he were to catch a glimpse of these corpse-like features, even D himself would have been surprised. Grove’s face, which held a childlike innocence, was etched with exactly the same features as the vital young man who’d slaughtered the army of attacking vampires that day in one blow, and then left.

—

Mayerling watched almost absentmindedly as his fearsome pursuer was sucked into the dirty torrent below the bridge and was lost from view in a matter of seconds. Mayerling didn’t notice that the girl had opened the light-impermeable curtains and poked her head out the window.

“What happened?”

Turning around at the sound of her anxious voice, he replied, “It’s nothing. Just one less thing to bother us.”

Seeing the bridge behind the carriage, where flames and black smoke were still rising, the girl’s face clouded quickly. “What on earth—” she gasped. “Did you make that hole?”

Mayerling wouldn’t answer. He could feel in his bones that this was the work of another foe.

It wasn’t lightning that’d bored a hole through the bridge, but a destructive energy-beam of another sort. Even now, a swarm of over two thousand satellites loaded with beam weaponry continued their long slumber in geostationary orbit some 22,500 miles above the Earth. Many of them had been launched by the government to help keep the human rebellion down, but there were also numerous privately owned satellites. Each of them was equipped with a means of generating beams that were decidedly man-made. What they fired was quite unlike the natural energy generated by storms. Judging from the beam’s accuracy, and how it seemed to be only aiming at D, it’d been fired by a human, and one who undoubtedly felt some animosity toward D. That much was evident; any who would’ve wished to help Mayerling had long since perished.

It was probably another Hunter. A foe who should be feared for different reasons than D. But was it just one?

Training his boundlessly cold and dark pupils on the silver serpent of current, Mayerling presently turned to face the girl again. “Be assured . . . with the passing of but two more nights, we shall be at the gateway to the stars. Sleep well. Relax, and trust everything to me.”

When the girl nodded and pulled back inside, Mayerling looked up at the moon hanging in the heavens and muttered, “Two more days . . . but daylight will come shortly. I wonder if I’ll encounter this new foe before those days have passed?”

—

Even a torrent that flowed with enough force to split rocks lost its ferocity when it had come so far, and when it hit the shore here it no longer bared its fangs. The river widened, and here and there the glimmer of silvery scales from fish leaping out to seek the light of the moon rippled along the surface of the water. Occasionally, the water ran translucent all the way down to the riverbed, and the way colossal snakelike shapes swam upstream on a zigzagging path was rather unsettling.

On the trail that ran just a little way above the riverbank, a rider muttered, “Well, this should put me right in the neighborhood now.” The rider, Nolt Marcus, the oldest of the clan, halted his mount. In accordance with Borgoff’s orders, Nolt had set off to find and destroy D after D had been swallowed by the muddied current. This is how far Nolt had gone.

The spot was about two miles downstream of the bridge. Along the spine of the eastern mountains, a foreshadowing of the thin blue light of dawn had come calling, but the darkness swathing the world was still thick and black.

Scanning his surroundings, Nolt reached for his hexagonal staff with his right hand. “I don’t think I’ll find him any farther downstream. So, did the bastard make it out without drowning then?” the Marcus brother wondered aloud. “Then again, I don’t see how a dhampir could manage a stunt like that . . . ”

The tinge of displeasure in Nolt’s voice was due to the fact the species known as dhampir had many of the characteristics of supernatural creatures. As a blood mix between the Nobility—the vampires—and humans, dhampirs inherited some of the physical strengths and weaknesses of both. From the Nobility, dhampirs inherited the ability to recover from injuries that would be considered lethal to a human being. On the other hand, dhampirs lost up to seventy percent of their strength in daylight, they felt an unbridled lust for the blood of the living when they were hungry, and, perhaps strangest of all, not one of them could stay afloat in water.

At the beginning of the era of mankind’s Great Rebellion, the vampires’ utter lack of buoyancy was prized as one of the few possible ways to dispose of them. However, when it became clear that drowning itself had markedly milder results when compared to stakes or sunlight, a much dimmer view of immersion’s value as a countermeasure was adopted. Drowning caused the heart to stop functioning and the body to cease all regeneration, but these effects were easily undone with the coming of night and an infusion of fresh blood.

But so long as a vampire was denied either blood or the onset of night, it would be impossible for him to recover from drowning. In other words, after an immersion, it was possible to put the comatose Nobility to the torch or to seal him away in the earth forever. Because vampires were so vulnerable after drowning, running water still served mankind in reasonably good stead.

That’s what Borgoff was talking about when he told Nolt to “Finish him off.”

“I’m glad you could make it.”

The low voice made Nolt’s whole body stiffen. Just for an instant, though. His hexagonal staff ripped through the air behind him—in the direction of the voice. It was as if his right hand had become a flash of brown. The strange thing was, the arc his weapon painted with the speed of light was a full circle. Surely enough, the hexagonal staff had grown to nearly twice its former length, stretching toward the spot from which the voice had issued.

However, when Nolt spun around dumbstruck by the lack of contact, the pole in his hands was no longer than normal.

“That’s quite an unusual skill you have, sir,” the youth of hair-raising beauty said in a voice of steel from atop a cyclopean block of stone that loomed by the side of the road.

No reply was given, but a flash of brown shot out. The spot it touched blasted apart, and in the midst of the scattered chips of stone D flew through the air like a mystic bird. Had his gelid gaze caught the mark the pole left on the rocky surface?

In Nolt’s hands, the staff that plowed through almost diamond-hard stone like it was clay changed direction easily and raced for the airborne D.

There was a glimmer in D’s right hand. The arc of brown was countered by a flash of silver, and there was a dull thud. Not giving Nolt time for a second attack, as soon as he landed right in front of the Marcus brother, D swung his blade down.

Tasting the blood-freezing fear of that blade all the while, Nolt leapt backward. The attack he unleashed as he leapt was not a swing but rather a jab, and his staff seemed to grow without end as it struck for D’s face. Though he didn’t seem to move a muscle, the pole missed D by a fraction of an inch as he launched himself into the air.

A flashing sideways slash. The blade that would’ve put a diagonal split down the middle of Nolt’s face bit instead into the pole that shot up, and the two figures broke to opposite sides.

The end of his staff still aimed at D’s chest, Nolt was breathing hard. Tidings of his fear. A thread-thin line of vermilion ran down the middle of his face from his forehead, and it widened at his jaw. That was the work of the blade D brought down as soon as he’d landed.

However, the blood trickling down his face wasn’t Nolt’s only concern. His hexagonal staff wasn’t a mere piece of wood, but rather its center was packed with a steel core that, despite its thinness, could still deflect a high-intensity laser beam. Yet the pole was missing about a foot off one end. Realizing that it’d been chopped off while he was in midair, Nolt lost much of the fever in his blood.

“You son of a bitch,” he growled, finally managing to say something. “So I guess you ain’t no plain old dhampir, are you?”

“I’m a dhampir,” D answered, still holding the same pose in his opponent’s blue eyes.

Nolt’s mouth twisted up in a smile. “Is that a fact? Then how do you like these apples?” With these words, his staff spun in a circle and struck the ground next to him.

With a gut-wrenching rumble, a chunk of ground a yard in diameter collapsed in on itself. This was no ordinary hollow. Maintaining a depth of about a foot, it became a ditch running all the way to the river.

About to pounce once again, D turned his eyes to this subsidence. Madness gripped the once calmly flowing water. As it coursed down the ditch from the shore, the water gathered intense speed, and, slapping up against the banks, it rose like a living creature. In great rolls, the water gushed into the space between the two of them. First the ankles and then the boots of both D and Nolt sank below the surface.

“How about it, dhampir? Can you move?” Nolt asked with a smile. It was the smirk of a victor. “You know, I’ve thrown down with your kind before. And this is what I did then. When a part of a dhampir gets wet, it kinda gets all stiff, don’t it?”

D didn’t move. Perhaps he couldn’t move?

“Die, you bastard!” Nolt screamed as he charged forward. Getting a solid grip on the bottom part of the staff, he brandished it like he was going to bring it straight down and smash D’s head open. The water splashed from his feet, and he kicked off the ground.

Black lightning raced up from below. Higher and faster than the staff, it danced up over his head. The last thing Nolt saw was the thick water stretching up from the ground like a tenacious predator clinging to D’s black boots.

Split by D’s blade from forehead to chin, by the time Nolt had fallen back to earth he wasn’t breathing anymore. A bloody mist reeled out from his remains.

Without so much as a glance at Nolt as he collapsed in a heap, D walked back behind the rocks where he’d first appeared. His horse was waiting there. Coat billowing as he straddled his mount, the Hunter’s eyes were eternally cold as he set them upstream, but they held a hint of sadness as well.

“Run if you like,” D murmured. “But I’ll still catch you.”

While his words hung in the air, his horse clambered down to the shore. Without pausing, it stepped into the water. It wasn’t shallow. The river would be about waist-deep on D while mounted.

If anyone was watching, they would’ve thought the horse was leaping across the surface of the water. Making a massive bound, the horse sank only hoof-deep before continuing to take one effortless leap after another, kicking up a little white spray as it carried D across the wide river.

There couldn’t be all that many stones submerged just an inch or so below the water’s surface. But clearly it was within D’s power to find them in a split second and maneuver his horse onto them.