“Really? Then they gotta be like the hands and feet of whoever controls them,” Clay said, licking his chops.

Seeming to sense something in the warrior’s tone, Tae clung tightly to the Hunter’s black coat.

“This’ll be fun. I’m gonna give this thing a good long lesson in what you get for trying to use good ol’ humans as guinea pigs. Have some of this!”

A note of unearthly beauty shot off, with death as its passenger. The globes of light directly in front of Clay shattered without a sound.

“Serves you right,” the warrior sneered when he sensed obvious pain from nowhere in particular.

“Get ’im!” Granny shouted encouragingly.

“You got it!” Clay replied, spinning around. But a scream from Tae froze him solid.

“Why, what is it?” Granny asked, seeming terribly upset as she turned around. A second later, the old woman’s eyes opened wide.

The same cry of “Monster!” flew from both Granny and Lance’s mouths.

Still clinging to D, Tae screamed again when she looked up at him.

“Close your eyes!” said a steely voice that knifed through the maddening darkness. Low though it was, it had the power to make all of them comply. “It’s just a psi attack that makes each of us look like a monster to the others. Don’t open your eyes again until I tell you to.”

Eyes shut tight, Clay turned in D’s direction. A shout split his lips, a battle cry of “Goddamn freak!” In unison with his cry his right hand danced, wringing the sweet sounds of death from the instrument at his waist.

Zipping over Tae’s head after D shoved her out of the way, the ultrasonic waves disappeared into the darkness. Somewhere out there, something collapsed.

“D, I still see it, even with my eyes shut!” Granny Viper shouted, her face pale.

“Look down,” D told them, and then he leapt.

Darkness melted into darkness. Only D’s perfect pale coun-tenance revealed his location. Sailing over Clay’s head as he made ready to recklessly launch another note from his harp, the Hunter landed right behind the warrior. Screaming, Clay spun around. He wore a crazed look. D’s sword limned an arc as it came off his back.

In both narrowly evading the blade and leaping a good distance away, the younger Bullow truly deserved to be counted among the most renowned warriors of the Frontier. However, just as Clay came back to earth, a dull thud echoed from the back of his head. Before the warrior could launch any more ultrasonic waves at whatever he thought his pitch-black retinas reflected, he un-ceremoniously collapsed to the floor.

“Got ’im!” Granny was heard to exclaim.

D’s eyes discerned the old woman standing there, still facing down but with an old-fashioned firearm in one hand. Tae and Lance were lying on the ground—that was the best possible solution.

“Is this a psi attack?” Granny asked.

“That’s right.”

“What should we do?”

“Stop it,” D replied tersely.

“Good,” Granny replied, sounding like she must’ve had the biggest grin imaginable plastered on her face. She was eager to counter-attack. “What do you suppose it’ll throw at us next?” As she spoke, she unconsciously looked around her. “Hey, everything seems normal now . . . which basically means I can’t see anything at all again,” she said.

In response, D told her, “Here comes the next one.”

“What?!” As Granny frantically spun around again, two figures emerging from the depths of the darkness entered her field of view. Dimmer than the very blackness, one was faintly recognizable even in this murk. The one on the right wore a wide-brimmed hat, and the hem of his coat fluttered in a dark breeze. Spying the much smaller figure with wild, disheveled hair, Granny muttered, “It’s me—and D.”

Perhaps D had already realized the truth. He took the sword he had in hand and put it back in its sheath. It clinked home with a beautiful sound.

“Are they illusions?” Granny asked, poised for battle.

That’s very perceptive of you, the voice said. But they are no mere phantasms. As you shall see.

Was the purr of a blade through the air faster? Or was Granny swifter as she leapt out of the way? Still poised for action as if nothing had happened, the old woman now had two blackish streaks dripping down her deeply wrinkled face. Real blood.

That blood should be flowing through your veins. Even in a world of dreams, death may come. Here, reality itself is little more than a dream. If you believe you’ve been cut and think you’ll bleed, then bleed you truly shall, just as you see. The two of them were created using all the data I currently have on you, but I believe you’ll find their strength and constitution are perfectly matched against your own in virtually every regard. Meaning neither you nor they could ever win or lose to the other in all eternity. I look forward to seeing what sort of fight it will be.

The false D leapt. Coming from above with his full body weight and all his speed added to that of his blade, he brought a blow down at the top of D’s head. The painful sound of metal-on-metal gave way to blue sparks that shot through the air.

Keeping his freshly drawn blade at the same height as when it’d parried his foe’s deadly attack, D made a horizontal slash with the longsword. It met with nothing. His foe was D, too.

The two figures glared at each other across a gap of less than ten feet. Who would make the next move?

Knowing all the tricks his foe possessed, the false D readied his sword nonetheless. Seeing that a prolonged battle would be to his disadvantage, he intended to gamble everything on one lethal blow. The air whistled with a slash from above one shoulder to just below the other. He was close enough for that attack to actually work.

D took a step forward. As he did so, he simultaneously brought out his sword. The instant the false D’s blow had bitten into his shoulder, the tip of D’s blade could be seen slipping into his opponent’s chest.

“Not bad,” D said. Just as he’d taken a step forward to throw off the balance of the false D’s attack, so his foe had managed to avoid a thrust through the heart by the merest fraction of an inch—an exquisite move executed in a hundredth of a second. Apparently, what the voice had told him was no lie. The two of them were deadlocked. Whoever made the next move would die.

They leapt in unison. Streaks of light crossed in midair. The sound of blades knifing through the wind only followed later.

As D landed, a black line split his forehead—the work of a blow from his foe’s blade as they flew past each other. His foe smirked at him. No one save D could see the torrent of fresh blood spilling down his opponent’s clothes from the horizontal slash across the false D’s chest. Such was the difference between fighting with a shoulder wound versus a hole in the chest.

His opponent dashed into action.

D’s field of view wavered—one of the streams of blood running from his forehead had changed direction and run into his right eye. The blade meant to meet his foe was off ever so slightly, shaving the flesh from his opponent’s cheek while the flashing steel of the false D pierced the real D’s heart. As D dropped to his knees without uttering a word, the callous blade was driven in much, much deeper from above.

That finishes him, then, the voice said wearily.

But who would’ve thought the voice would gasp just then, or that the false D’s eyes would go wide with astonishment? His foe watched as a hand gloved in black grabbed his blade from below.

D raised his face. His eyes gave off a reddish light.

You couldn’t be . . .

Strength surged into D’s lower body. Perhaps the Noble blood that coursed through the young man’s veins gave him unnatural power, for even after being pierced through the heart, he was very slowly rising to his feet.

His opponent struggled to pull the blade free or force it in deeper. It didn’t move an inch. The balance of power had been broken.

A low moan spilled from D’s lips. Something else accompanied it—a pair of fangs. Did his foe see how the tracks of the rolling drops of blood from his forehead vanished at his lips?

When his opponent tried to leap away, it was a second too late, and D’s blade came straight down to split the other man’s head. Whipping around in a flash, the same sword then pierced his opponent’s heart. His foe crumbled to the ground.

Expressionless though he was, D somehow seemed satisfied with the way the false D’s countenance had never betrayed any terror even at the bitter end, when his head turned to dust.

The pressure of the darkness was suddenly gone. D was gazing down at his feet and the shadow he cast there. It fell across silver sand.

Having slain the phantasm his foe had conjured, he’d thwarted the psychological attack. There was no sword through his chest, no blood coursing from his brow, but he was still holding his longsword. The psi attack had been ingenious; it had managed to rouse D’s demonic nature. But had even that part been real?

“That was a hell of a scary character to deal with. I mean, whoever made him, of course,” a low, decrepit voice commented from somewhere around D. “With all the power it invested in that, I’d wager it took a terrible hit just now. If you plan on getting out of here, now would be the perfect time for it.”

Not replying, D looked around at their surroundings. Three figures were stretched out on the sand. A diminutive fourth stood ready for battle: Granny Viper. She was probably still squaring off against an opponent. Apparently, the psychological assault had affected her much more than it had D.

D returned his longsword to the sheath on his back. At the pleasant metallic song of it sliding into its sheath, Granny shuddered a bit. Dazedly, she surveyed her surroundings. Noticing D first, she blinked her eyes. “What on earth did you—? Why, I was fighting right here and . . . Oh, I get it—you broke the psi attack, didn’t you?”

She quickly turned and looked for Tae, a show of her sincere devotion to the job. Racing over to the girl with a cry that bordered on a scream, the very first thing she did was check for a pulse. Having enough foresight to take the possibility of internal injuries into consideration, she was careful not to move the girl too much.

Seeing the crone’s shoulders come down in manifest relief, D then turned his eyes to the heavens. The moon was visible in the clear sky. D began walking back toward the rocky mound. “You can handle the rest,” he told Granny. “We leave in twenty minutes.”

.

III

.

Three hours later, the horizon donned a tinge of blue. In lieu of a rising sun, the air filled with rising winds. The hard-flung grains of sand beat against the wagon’s canopy mercilessly, making a sound like the peal of a bell. Granny spat a grit-laden wad of saliva from the driver’s seat. Both D and Clay had scarves to shield their nose and mouth, and they rode on either side of the wagon. The vehicle was renowned for its ability to reach speeds of seventy-five miles per hour on level ground, but now it barely managed a tenth of that.

Granny was anxious—the damage D had dealt their enemy wouldn’t be enough to destroy it. Once its wounds had healed, it was sure to make its next move against them. If it threw out another tornado, they’d be right back where they started from; in fact, some result even more miserable definitely lay ahead for them. You could say the first order of business was to get as far away as they could before their foe had a chance to recover. In her heart of hearts, the crone prayed the enemy’s power didn’t extend across the entire desert.

But the real question was, just where were they racing now? Though they knew the direction they were headed, their present location was a mystery.

D was riding ahead of the wagon and off to the right, and as Granny gazed at his back, she had a strange look in her eye. According to the Vampire Hunter, the town they were bound for lay more than a hundred miles south by southwest of there. She’d asked him just how he knew for sure, but he hadn’t answered her. Ordinarily, she’d have accused him of pulling her leg and raised a big stink. Even Granny herself wasn’t sure yet why she’d let the matter rest so easily. She knew he was a dhampir. There was no need to be surprised when a man with the blood of the Nobility in his veins displayed such an incredible ability. However, she got the impression there was more to this young man than this fact alone.

Granny was quite familiar with ordinary dhampirs. While it was true that they were several ranks above humans, they still had their limits. If you tried hard enough and were willing to die in the process, you could even kill one. But that reasoning didn’t seem to apply in the least to the gorgeous young man before her. Could he be killed? The very thought of it had never occurred to her. Like darkness given form, the young man could send any opponent at all into the depths of the abyss, if he so wished. From her own intuition, Granny realized the Hunter’s knowledge was surely instinctive as well.

Finding something disturbing about the black back of the man they were supposed to be relying on, Granny finally decided to speak to him. “Tell me something, D. Just what do we have to do to stop this desert once and for all?”

As she expected, she got no reply. But she did hear another voice from off to her left.

“Sheesh, how the hell would he know? How could anybody possibly know anything that crazy?” Perhaps feeling somewhat humiliated after learning from the old woman that he’d been used like a puppet on a string, Clay sounded more vindictive than ever.

Granny just smiled sweetly at him and cooed, “Now, don’t go saying that. After all, he had a little part in saving you, you know.”

“Hmph. I’ll square things up with him sooner or later.” Clay then turned and looked at the wagon. “All that aside, you sure it’s a good idea having them two riding in there together? That sodbuster might look all well-behaved, but down deep he could just be some hot-handed operator for all we know.”

“We don’t really have a choice. Unlike you, the two of them are ordinary folks. See, they still haven’t shaken off all the aftereffects of the psi attack. But just let me warn you—”

“I know already! If I go touching your precious goods, you ain’t responsible for what happens next, right? Shit, if you’re that worried about it, why don’t you put a chain around her neck and keep a hold on one end of it? I ain’t promising you a damn thing. To tell the truth, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to put it to one of the hidden. Oops…” Clay said, smirking as he pulled away. No doubt he’d felt the urge to kill radiating from every inch of the old woman.

Turning forward again with a disapproving cluck of her tongue, Granny then stiffened with tension. D had come to a halt. “What’s wrong?” the old woman asked with fear in her voice, though that was just a part of a plot she’d set in motion to get his pity.

“It’s a sandstorm. A little more than a mile ahead of us.”

“Not a twister?”

“No, a sandstorm.”

The old woman squinted her eyes. “Well, I can’t see anything.”

“If we keep going straight, we’ll run right into it,” said D. “This calls for a detour.”

“But, wouldn’t that put us behind schedule? I mean, that’d be a problem for you too, right?”

“If we’re lucky, it’s just a normal sandstorm.”

“Stop feeding us this load of crap,” Clay snapped. “I don’t see a damn thing either.”

“I can see it.”

That one softly spoken phrase was enough to silence even the irrepressible Clay.

“Or would you rather try and risk it?” the Hunter ventured.

“Great idea!” the old woman exclaimed, slapping her knee noisily. “That’s just what we’ll have to do. I mean, what’s a sandstorm or two? Let a little thing like that stop you, and you could hardly call yourself a man the rest of your days.”

“You gotta be shitting me. I’m completely against this,” Clay groused.

“Oh my! I thought you were one of the greatest warriors on the Frontier, but I guess you ain’t all you’re cracked up to be.”

Granny’s retort brought immediate results. Blood rushed into Clay’s face. “Don’t make me laugh,” he snarled. “I ain’t saying I’m afraid. I just gotta find my brother, is all.”

“Oh, you poor thing, you. Say, D—how far is it from here to the place we got scooped up?”

“About seventy miles, I’d say.”

“Now, I don’t care how chock full of fraternal love you are when you gallop off, you won’t be able to cover that kind of distance. You’ll just have to leave your brother’s fate to the heavens. If luck is on your side, who knows—you could run into him again some-where outside the desert in two or three years. And if it’s against you, he’ll bake in the sun and die like a dog.”

At that point, a bizarre reaction came over Clay. A smile that really had no business on a wild beast of a man like him—a smile some might even call spooky—spread across his whole face. “My brother Bingo baking in the sun? Did you say something about dying? That’s just too funny. I’d sure as hell like to see that with my own two eyes,” he spoke in a voice like a corpse, with a grin that was almost unimaginable from someone with such a ruthless, fearless image. Even Granny’s expression grew stiff.

Just then, the back door of the wagon suddenly started to open, leaving the crone at a loss for words.

Scrambling down the built-in set of steps, the pale figure kicked up the sand as she ran down the right side of the wagon.

“Tae!” Granny shouted, standing like a vengeful demon. “Get her for me, D!”

In response to her cry, the Hunter wheeled his cyborg horse around. It was a heartbeat later that the horse tumbled forward, just as he was about to gallop off. From its back a figure in black flew like a mystic bird. Landing in a spot some fifteen feet away, D plunged the sword he’d already drawn deep into sand at his feet.

“What’s going on?” Clay asked as he looked all around.

“It looks like it’s come back around,” D told the younger Bullow. While he was speaking, the figure of Tae dwindled between the dunes with a speed never anticipated from such dainty little legs.

“Wait up, Miss Tae!” Lance cried, clutching his head as he tumbled from the back of the wagon.

“What on earth happened?”

Stopped short by the question Granny had barked, he replied in an almost tearful tone, “I don’t know. We were talking, and then all of a sudden she whacked me over the head with a wrench.”

“You stay right there. I’ll do something about this,” the old woman said. Still standing in the same spot, she reached for her jar with her right hand. D, however, didn’t move, and Tae just kept getting farther away—she was already more than a hundred yards from the wagon.

Granny’s hand came out of the jar balled in a fist. From behind her, Clay saw that countless multicolored particles had begun to trickle smoothly from between her clenched fingers, but the flow quickly ended. And just what had become of those particles that fell on the floor of the front seat by Granny’s feet and down onto the desert sands? Driven by what might be called a warrior’s instinctive curiosity, the younger Bullow was just about to spur his mount forward when Granny bent low. For a split second, it seemed like a flash of blue light shot by her feet.

Tae was just about to disappear behind a dune. Seeing the way the girl collapsed completely made Lance’s eyes bulge out of their sockets.

“D—how’re things over there?” Granny cried out.

“Better for the moment.”

Apparently it was no exaggeration, as the Hunter’s cyborg horse had gotten back up and was shaking off the grains of sand.

“In that case, go! The girl’s out cold.”

The figure in black dashed off, coat fanning around him.

“What did you do, old lady? What the hell is that sand, anyway?”

Granny turned and smiled at Clay’s query. “That’s a trade secret,” she replied.

“Don’t give me any of that crap!”

“It is, just as sure as your little tricks are.”

By that, she clearly meant the way he did battle. The gazes of the two—ferocious and cruel—collided in midair in a shower of unseen sparks.

D scooped up Tae. The reason she’d collapsed so suddenly surely had something to do with the crone’s mysterious skill, although D didn’t know exactly what that was. Judging from the way Tae’s hair stood on end, she must’ve been hit with some sort of electric shock. However, D had seen with his own eyes that nothing had passed between the old woman and the girl. How, then, had it happened?

A light tap on her cheek, and Tae quickly opened her eyes. “D?” she said.

“Don’t move. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Tae replied, her eyes tinged with terror. “I was talking with Mr. Lance, when I just got this feeling that I had to get out of there. This voice was telling me to go outside—”

It was clear then that the desert had indeed returned to the way it had been.

D reached out with one hand to pull the girl up, and behind him a flume of sand shot up unexpectedly. Not simply sand, this had a humanoid shape. Tae’s eyes were wide open now, and they caught the silvery flash of light that shot through the air. The outline of the figure that’d pushed just its upper body from the ground suddenly crumbled, and a heartbeat later it was again a golden pile of sand melting back into the desert. Tae gave a scream.

To either side of them the sand rose in one place after another, taking human form everywhere it did. The forms almost looked like the miasma rising from a solidified swamp. Pole-thin arms reached for D’s neck.

The silver flash that shot up diagonally took the limbs off at the elbow. When all of their arms had fallen to ground, the shapes flopped backward in what seemed like pain and slowly sank back into the earth.

“There’re still more of them,” Tae said, her eyes reflecting the countless round heads springing from the sea of sand around them. Would they be able to get back to the wagon? A hundred yards seemed completely hopeless.

A powerful arm wrapped around the girl’s waist. As Tae gazed at the gorgeous visage of her sturdy guardian, his name came to her lips. Her anxiety burned away like a fog.

“Here we go,” said the Vampire Hunter.

“Okay,” Tae replied. She was no longer afraid.

A cloud of dusty creatures was closing in on them. Their heads lacked eyes or noses or mouths. Their bodies were like short, fat rocks with a couple of logs stuck in them, but completely smooth. These unsettling interpretations of the human form were more than six feet tall and born of the sand.

A black figure raced like the wind between those sandy shapes. Any hand or body that threatened to block his path was promptly severed, with some of the would-be assailants turning to dust on the ground and others doing so in midair.

Having already covered more than twenty yards at full speed, D artlessly slammed his blade into the right shoulder of yet another foe that stood in his way. True to the strange feel of what it was cutting, the blade hacked halfway through the creature’s chest before stopping. As the Hunter pulled his blade free, his foe pounced, turning back into sand over D’s head.

Ignoring the sand men that were springing up all around them, D quietly inspected his longsword. Black grains clung to the blade—iron dust—causing his weapon to lose its edge. If it stuck to steel it had a powerful magnetic charge, and that had to be what helped the sand men keep their humanoid shape. But understanding the reason did nothing to help the irrefutable fact that D’s offensive might had dropped considerably.

Sand creatures were packed all around them. Tae clung to D’s waist while D gazed at his blade without saying a word. It was a cold, clear gaze that seemed to suggest that this young man would greet life and death, joy and sorrow, all with the very same look.

The wind snarled loudly.

As an eerie shudder climbed her spine, Tae saw the sand men stop . . . and then back away immediately. When the girl looked up at D again, she learned the reason: his eyes were giving off a red glow.

D dashed forward, carried by the wind. He landed right into the heart of the sand men. With the coolness of an artist raining destruction on a group of standing sculptures, the Hunter swung his longsword in wide arcs. His blade was already thick and black with the iron particles that clung to it. As if to demonstrate the power of his Noble blood, he left a few of the sandy monstrosities split from head to crotch, while others were sliced clean through the torso. Without exception, they all returned to their original material. As the wind blew the dust from the crumbling bodies into D’s face, his crimson eyes gleamed beautifully and with ineffable mystery.

Someone was shouting in the distance. D leapt into the air and over the edge of a nearby sand dune. Off to his left, the upper body of another sand man stretched from the ground.

Tae was about to scream when right before her very eyes D’s left hand snapped closed on the featureless face of a sand man. Dust spilled from between the Hunter’s fingers, and the creature’s head broke apart like a clod of dirt.

But the sight that greeted them next was like some sort of miracle. The countless sand men crumbled to pieces in a matter of seconds and mixed with the dusty clouds, as if some titanic hand had wiped them all out of existence.