INTO THE FOREST OF DEATH

CHAPTER 4

—

I

—

The warriors stood facing each other in the darkness for a few seconds—the rasping of Slayer in its sheath the only sound to be heard—while a murderous intent no one save these two could sense continued to build. When they crossed naked steel, who would prove the better man? D’s coat had been cut by the attacks of the vicious, nimble little homunculi, while the White Knight’s cape had remained unscathed. What’s more, it seemed Slayer itself was imbued with some sort of magic.

The silence was broken by the White Knight as he said, “Time to draw you, Slayer.”

The blade danced out. The motion was so smooth, it looked as if the sword had leapt into the knight’s hand rather than waiting to be drawn.

D, on the other hand, wasn’t poised for action—he had neither relaxed nor tensed his body, and his arms hung by his sides.

“You’re good . . . ,” said the White Knight. “Simply by standing there, you’re nearly enough to make my blood freeze. I doubt I shall ever again face such an opponent in a battle of life or death.”

The knight suddenly wheeled his horse around. Without a backward glance he rode on, the hoofbeats growing fainter and fainter.

Though his foe’s actions were perplexing, D didn’t move from where he stood.

What was he waiting for?

The dwindling hoofbeats began to ring louder and stronger. The rider was coming back. And as the strides of the approaching mount resounded, they echoed a faint yet unshakable determination to kill.

He kept coming. One hundred fifty feet . . . One twenty-five . . . One hundred . . .

D was motionless.

The rider’s blade would come crashing down like a tidal wave. But what would happen when it was met by another sword whipping up from the ground like a gust of snow and ice?

Thirty feet . . . Fifteen . . . Ten . . .

The gorgeous form was eclipsed by a massive figure and the wild pounding of hooves. And then—there was the most gorgeous chime in the world, and a flash of white flew off like a shooting star.

Who would’ve thought that D’s blade would snap off at the hilt?

Sparks shooting from his horse’s hooves as it came to a sudden stop, the White Knight turned and laughed.

“No blade can stand up to Slayer,” he said. “Now you’re finished.”

And what did D do? He remained in the same spot while the enchanted blade once again groaned through the air, this time aimed at the Hunter’s skull.

A bloody spray shot out.

“Oh!” the knight cried in surprise when he felt his sword do something other than sink into flesh.

Slayer’s blade was pinned between the palms of the hands D had clapped together over his head. However, a dark liquid was also gushing from those same hands. The Hunter’s own fresh blood rained down on his forehead, streaming down the side of his nose.

Slayer sank a bit deeper.

“Die, damn you! Die! All who do battle with the Slayer die,” the White Knight bellowed, his eyes tinged red with insanity.

Was this knight’s strength actually a match for D’s? Or was it his sword’s enchantment that gave him the edge? The blade was slowly sliding down between the palms of D’s hands, releasing a shower of blood on the Hunter in the process.

Screeching like a crazed raptor, the White Knight let his cry become the force behind his blade as he brought it down. His bloodshot eyes reflected a hue that was far deeper. Yes, D’s eyes. The blood that’d coursed down off the Hunter’s forehead ran in a crimson line to his lips.

D pivoted.

“Oof!” the knight exclaimed, the cry stretching from the back of the mount he’d been sitting on to the spot fifteen feet away where he thudded to earth again.

As D prepared to stalk over to the fallen knight, a gigantic white form leapt in front of him—the White Knight’s steed. It stood stock still, blocking the way.

“Outstanding!” the knight exclaimed with apparent pleasure from where he lay, and his horse dashed over to him at full speed. Gory blade dangling limply from one hand, the White Knight grabbed the reins that hung by him and finally managed to pull himself up. Giving a rough shake to his head, he said, “You’re a powerful brute. I believe I may have broken some bones . . . It can’t be . . . that you descend from the same sort of blood as our princess . . . You’re the Vampire Hunter I heard about . . . aren’t you?”

“How right you are!” a voice cried from the darkness. Needless to say, it was that of the princess. She sounded like a little flirt, but her presence had gone undetected by the White Knight, and even D himself hadn’t noticed her.

“Oh, my . . . Princess . . . ,” the knight stammered. As demented as he seemed to be, his mistress apparently merited special treatment. Putting Slayer back on his hip, he went down on one knee, his head already bowed. Evincing not a trace of madness or mockery, the act was one of pure loyalty.

With a dance-like movement the pale and lovely princess appeared from a spot about fifteen feet to the left of the Hunter.

“Well, I trust you had an interesting experience, did you not, my White Knight?” said the princess. If ever a face glowed, hers did now.

“Yes, milady,” the knight replied succinctly, sounding like a completely new man.

“There are men of such power out in the world. I wonder if even your Slayer could best him.”

The white helm rose.

“Begging your pardon, but I believe you’ll find—”

The princess hastily waved her hands, saying, “You needn’t say a thing. I was mistaken, and please forget I mentioned it. This will be decided at some other time. D, that goes for you, too. Now that you’ve lost your sword, you couldn’t possibly go on,” she said, but as her eyes studied D’s profile, the fear in them was evident.

D’s eyes were ablaze with blood. Still empty-handed, he advanced.

“Don’t stalk over to me with that frightful expression. Off with you!” the princess said as she backed away. “Why don’t you go back to the village instead? The flowers I scattered there should be causing quite a furor.”

A whistle pierced the air.

“Princess!” the White Knight exclaimed, deftly drawing his blade and cutting down the rough wooden needle.

However, the reason the princess moaned as she pressed down on the left side of her chest was because another needle had eluded her knight and penetrated not her breast, but the back of her hand.

“Isn’t that something,” she said with a grin, no doubt highly appreciative of the way the Hunter had managed to get one of his missiles past Slayer, although the lovely princess’s skill in narrowly stopping the needle he’d just thrown with her bare hands had probably impressed D in return.

Still, a second later the hem of the gorgeous Hunter’s coat billowed out as he dashed at the lovely vampire princess.

The White Knight was ready to meet him.

It was just then that the earth rumbled. Six hundred feet underground, the floor of this subterranean chamber was braced by an unspeakable mass of earth, yet it thrashed like a giant serpent.

D’s body flew into the air and was swallowed by the darkness before it ever touched the floor.

—

Light had returned. D was surrounded by a sea of stars.

“Looks like we’re okay,” said the Hunter’s left hand. It didn’t sound at all apprehensive. If anything, its tone could’ve been described as matter-of-fact.

Giving no reply, D surveyed his surroundings. The darkness was almost kin to the young man.

He was on top of a huge rounded stone. A long line of similar stones continued downward, their faces glimmering in a manner reminiscent of the crescent moon. The lights that flickered far off in the distance must’ve been those of some community.

“We’re on top of a mountain,” his left hand said incredulously. “Judging by the strength of the winds and the direction they’re blowing, we’ve gotta be a good two miles up. Looks like our little friend can teleport stuff. Well, she sure caught us napping!”

D was looking up at the stars, but he quickly lowered his eyes again and began making his way down the rocks without a sound. The way he leapt from one rock to the next, he seemed like a master of dance.

Based on the positions of the stars, he must’ve been at the northern extreme of the princess’s domain. It would probably take a whole day and night of hard riding to get back to Sacri.

—

“That’s an interesting tidbit,” the old woman said as she tossed a whole bundle of herbs into the dirty brown liquid boiling in her cauldron.

They were in the dispensary she ran out of a back room in her house. Not one of the village mayors had ever seen the inside of it, and as Elena stood there by the crone’s side telling her all about what had transpired at the castle, she was actually the first visitor the room had seen in fifty years. The noon daylight speared the sooty lace curtains.

“To think that the princess would ask the Hunter to get rid of her four knights. Well, anyone as handsome as him could probably do it, too.”

As the conversation seemed like it was about to take a strange turn, Elena tried to get it back on track, saying, “I thought you’d be more surprised, Mama Kipsch. I mean, the princess asked him to kill her knights, of all things! What the hell could she be plotting?”

“She’s not plotting anything,” the aged witch doctor said purposefully as she took three tablespoons of red powder from a glass jar and added them to her pot. “She’s probably telling the truth.”

“You mean she seriously wants them dead? Why?!”

“For the very reason you said. I suppose she wants to be free now.”

“The Nobility abandoning one of their castles?” Elena said. Shrugging her shoulders, she continued, “I’ve never heard of such a thing. They’re connected to their fortresses, like light to shadow. One can’t exist without the other. Isn’t that why we’ve been put through hell?”

“There is no hell,” Mama Kipsch muttered, her tone once again heavy with meaning. “We humans grow some odd ducks. Like you, or my grandson. It’s not so strange to suppose it’s the same for the Nobility. After all, they look pretty much the same as we do.”

“Then that bitch might really mean it . . . ,” Elena muttered. Mama Kipsch was the village’s great repository of wisdom, and her words made the girl finally appreciate the grave import of what the princess had said.

“But listen—you’re not to mention that to anyone else,” the witch doctor said, her forcefulness bringing Elena back to her senses.

“Why’s that?”

“Because in this village, there are those who wouldn’t be too happy with the news.”

A horrible expression briefly passed across Elena’s face.

“I suppose you’ve got a point there.”

“But enough about that. Help me think of some way to deal with the crisis at hand. I simply don’t have enough blue yaki moss to finish making this medicine,” Mama Kipsch said as she folded her arms.

“Blue moss . . . Do you mean the stuff I think you do? From the Shamballa Forest?”

“Oh, forget I mentioned it,” the old woman told her. “I’m sure I’ll find something else I can use instead.”

A thought seemed to occur to Elena, and she said, “There’s nothing else to use and you know it. You’ve always been a lousy liar, you know. Okay, I’ll go get it.”

“Don’t. It’s high noon already. Even on your bike it’d be two hours to the forest and another hour to find the moss—You’d be lucky to make it back by five o’clock Night. And the forest is far too dangerous.”

“Hell, I’m not going alone. That’d be nuts. I’ll bring my boyfriends with me. Luckily, they were off drinking at a warehouse on the edge of town, so some of them didn’t get the vampire rose baptism.”

“You’ll be throwing your lives away,” Mama Kipsch told the girl.

“We’ll never know if we don’t try. Your own grandson lost his life doing what he believed in. And not even for his girlfriend, but for an unrequited love. We all respect the hell out of that.”

Turning her eyes to the floor, the old woman then placed a hand on Elena’s shoulder and thanked her. “Okay, you’ll get some for me then?” she asked.

“Of course. I wanna do whatever I can to make things miserable for those bastards.” And with those words, Elena ground her back teeth together as if testing the firmness of her own resolve.

—

II

—

Going outside, Elena headed toward the square—it was less than a three-minute walk from Mama Kipsch’s house. A hastily improvised tent had been stretched over the spot where so many of the village’s inhabitants had buried themselves. Needless to say, it was there to ward off the rays of the sun. Though there was a facility for people who’d been turned into Nobility situated on the southern edge of the village, it couldn’t begin to accommodate them all. The tent had taken the villagers who remained unaffected a good five hours to put up after sunrise, and it still hadn’t been large enough—a third of the covering had been improvised from blankets and fabric.

As she got closer to the tent, odd cries began to beat against her eardrums. Scowling alone wasn’t going to accomplish anything, and she didn’t want to plug her ears. She had to listen to keep feeding the rage she felt toward the bastards responsible for all those moans.

As one of the villagers standing at the entrance to the tent noticed Elena, his expression grew stern. He adjusted his grip on the spear in his right hand. It was a farmer by the name of Gary.

“I’m not a Noble, you know,” Elena said, showing him a smile anyway.

“Why is this happening to us?” Gary asked, his expression unchanged.

“I don’t know.”

“That young feller comes along and all this shit happens on the same day. Someone saw the two of you taking the road up toward the castle.”

“Well, we turned around before we got there,” the girl replied. “Since we don’t get many lookers like him in town, I thought I’d take him on a little date.”

“Bah, you lousy whore,” the man spat as he turned away in disgust. No one in the community really appreciated the wild behavior of Elena’s group.

“Pardon me,” Elena said without letting the expression change on her face, but once she’d slipped in through the flap, she unleashed a vicious kick with her right foot.

As always, her instincts were spot-on. Most likely, not even the rough-and-tumble farmer had ever taken a kick to the genitals through a layer of canvas before. Groans of pain could be heard coming from the ground outside.

“Learn how to talk to a lady, you damn limp dick,” said Elena. And though that kick should’ve lifted her spirits, her voice was heavy.

The moaning in the tent had grown deafening. It took quite an effort on Elena’s part just to keep from shutting her eyes.

Half-buried in the earth or caked with dirt, the villagers were writhing on the ground. On their backs, necks, and foreheads, roses of four different colors opened unexpectedly. Even if the villagers who hadn’t been afflicted pulled them out, more roses would rise from the sundered flesh to flower in beautiful displays of red, blue, black, and white. Apparently, this abnormal method of infection hadn’t made them true servants of the Nobility, as they didn’t sleep through the day but rather writhed in agony when the rays of the sun penetrated the thick canvas tarp sheltering them. That was why they were being protected instead of having stakes driven through their hearts, Elena told herself. If these people had received the kiss of the Nobility, they’d have long since been dispatched. It was the law of the Frontier.

“E . . . le . . . na . . . ,” a voice sobbed down by her feet.

Saying nothing, Elena just kept looking straight ahead.

“Help . . . It’s me . . . Decoy . . .”

“And me . . . Seren . . .”

“It’s so hot . . . The pain . . . My body . . . is . . . burning . . .”

Something caught hold of her ankle. A cold hand. Elena didn’t move.

“Just wait a little longer. I’m sure we’ll get you back to normal.” But as the girl spoke, her body trembled. From the ankle in her friend’s grip, an evil chill that beggared description was needling into her. Her flesh was starting to crawl. And that voice—

“E . . . le . . . na . . .”

“You damn freak!” she snarled, the words coming out in a tone even she couldn’t have imagined. Her right hand slid down to her hip and took a length of weighted chain. She hauled back with it, and then whipped it down hard, all intentionally. A sickening sound was heard, and unpleasantly warm spray flew in her face. But she just kept bringing the weighted end down. Time and again she swung it. And between the blows, the voice continued to call her name faintly, almost as if intoning a curse.

Perhaps that was what the weight on the end of the chain was meant to bring to an end.

Behind her, a different voice cried out, “Elena—What are you doing?!”

A thick arm roughly encircled her torso, dragging her backward.

“Let go of me, you freak! I’ll kill you!” she shouted, the last expression echoing out in the sunlight.

“Simmer down, you idiot.”

A slap resounded against her cheek.

Now free of whatever had possessed her, Elena stood to one side of the square. Out in front of the tent, Gary was still curled up on the ground, and it was one of the bikers that came out from behind the girl to face her. A single strip of hair that resembled an eclair stretched down the center of his otherwise bald head. It was Stahl, the gang’s second-in-command.

Rubbing her cheek, Elena said softly, “That hurt, you know. Care to be a little gentler next time?”

“Sorry about that,” Stahl replied, baring his pearly teeth in a smile. His eyes told her, That’s more like it.

“How many of us are left?” Elena asked him.

“Seven came down with this thing. All that leaves is me, Tan, and Nichou.”

“Counting me, that makes four. That’ll be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To go into the Shamballa Forest and find some blue moss,” Elena said as she stared off in the exact opposite direction from the Noble’s manor.

Her words made Stahl’s eyes bulge.

“You mean now? It’ll be night by the time we finish!”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Going out there near dark is just plain suicide,” said Stahl. “We’d be throwing our lives away.”

“I wish to hell I knew why that’s all anyone ever has to say. If your life’s that dear to you when push comes to shove, maybe you’re not cut out for playing the tough guy even in a little hick village like this. Run on home and hide under your blankets.”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“My ears are gonna bleed if I hear any more excuses,” the girl told him. “Fine. I’ll go by myself.”

“And if you get the moss, what happens then?”

“Then everyone goes back to normal—probably. That all depends on Mama Kipsch.”

Stahl was at a loss for words.

Turning her back on her still silent compatriot, Elena walked off toward the houses. The only thing on her mind was where she’d be able to find the weapons she’d need. That, and one thing more—the figure of a young man in black whose garments whirled out in the moonlight danced across Elena’s eyelids, but she pushed the image to the back of her brain with willpower . . . and perhaps a little sadness.

—

Racing along at just under a hundred miles per hour for exactly two hours, she could finally see a fog-like blob of black beyond the red clay plains. Just as she was going for the accelerator to increase her speed, she heard the tinny whine of an engine coming up behind her. She rode on regardless, but a few seconds later three more bikes pulled up alongside her so their vehicles advanced in a perfect line.

“Welcome back, wimp,” she said, still facing forward.

To her right, Stahl rubbed his own head and said, “Aw, don’t say that. I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Maybe I should give you a medal or something.”

“Cut ’im some slack already, Elena,” moon-faced Nichou said from the bike to her left, giving her a wink. Like his face, the man’s body was plump and round. “Why didn’t you come get us sooner? Me and Tan chewed his ass pretty good, you know.”

“Stahl was just worried about all of us,” said Tan from the other side of Nichou as a smile rose to his lips. He and Nichou were thick as thieves, but physically they were complete opposites—he was a mass of lean muscle.

“Well, I suppose you didn’t want or need me worrying about any of you. Anyway, I don’t think even we’re low enough that we’d let our leader go off all alone to fetch that stuff,” Stahl said, bashfully pawing at his one remaining strip of hair.

Without so much as cracking a grin, Elena said to him, “Just as long as we’re clear on that. This might be the only chance we ever get to do something for somebody else. Your lives are in my keeping now.”

The only reply she got from her compatriots was the roar of their bikes.

Ten minutes later, the four of them reached the entrance to a forest where massive black boles reached out with branches and leaves the hue of darkness. Finding the thin thread of a footpath that led into the thickly packed forest was simple enough.

“We’ve got no choice but to leave the bikes here,” Elena said as she got out of the saddle.

“Do you even know where this blue moss stuff grows?” Stahl asked as he put a gun that looked more like a cannon and an ammo belt across his back.

Tan unloaded a thick, three-foot-high cylinder with a nozzle from his vehicle, and Nichou walked along lightly while busily rotating both wrists. Around them spun long, thin gleams of light.

“Let’s roll!”

At Elena’s command, the gleams resolved into three throwing knives in each of Nichou’s hands.

There were cracks in the forest canopy that hung over the group like a black cloud, and through them trickled long, thin shafts of light. Although the patterns of sunlight were the product of nature, they possessed such a strangely geometrical order that it was said many traveling artists came to admire them.

As Elena recalled, the blue moss grew on a rock pile in the western part of the forest. Cautiously venturing in further, the group found their entire field of view filled by the great variety of plants that called the forest home.

“Hot damn! Would you look at all that yogari weed, slim green, and stretching bamboo! If we could pick that alone and sell it in the Capital, we’d be living high on the hog for a good six months. A goddamn shame is what it is. You sure we can’t stop and pick some?” Tan muttered.

“Every second counts,” Elena told him. “Pretty soon, this well-behaved forest is gonna show its ugly side.”

But even as she reprimanded her compatriot, Elena couldn’t help but share his feelings of what a waste it was to leave such treasures behind.

The vibrantly colored plants Tan had named—and many more—grew in profusion between the trees or among their roots, and all of them were eagerly sought by merchants from the Capital for their medical applications. Even though the nearby village didn’t have an appreciable amount of land under cultivation, it was quite wealthy thanks to the bounty of the forest. What’s more, due to the special properties of the ozone given off by the trees in the forest and the unique composition of its soil, there were always enough plants regardless of how many were harvested. The path the group was following had actually been worn by people out collecting the various specimens.

“Notice anything, Stahl?” Elena asked nonchalantly after they’d been walking for about three minutes.

“Yep,” he replied without as much as a nod of his nearly bald head. “We’ve had a tail on us for a while. My gut’s telling me it could be real trouble.”

“No argument there. You suppose it’s ‘the forest dweller?’”

“Damned if I know. But it’s not closing or losing any ground—gotta be pretty smart by the look of things.”

Although Tan and Nichou must’ve been able to hear every word the other two said, they didn’t seem at all concerned. After all, these young men had not only grown up on the Frontier, but they’d led a rough-and-tumble life in their gang. It took a lot to unnerve them.

“Should we say hello?”

“Sure,” Elena replied, and as she spoke, she snapped her fingers twice. There was no reaction.

The path twisted up ahead and disappeared into the trees. As they took their first step around the curve, Elena and her gang demonstrated their teamwork.

Turning his torso just a bit to the right, Nichou let a streak of black fly from his right hand. The throwing knife he’d hurled with a speed that could only be termed ungodly was swallowed by the trees. It was only seconds later that the barrel of Stahl’s gun and the end of Tan’s nozzle were brought to bear on the same spot.

And after a few seconds more, Stahl muttered, “It’s stopped.”

He wasn’t talking about the throwing knife. Rather, he meant whatever they could sense following them.

Eyes glittering, Elena said, “Your knife disappeared. Was this a bust?”

“No, we would’ve heard it if it’d been blocked. And there would’ve been the sound of it sticking into a tree if it was dodged. But I don’t think anything could’ve caught my blade.”

“Then what happened?” Elena asked, not doubting her friend’s ability in the least.

“Well, it was probably—,” Nichou was saying when a black figure dropped from the sky without a sound. “Head-taker!” he shouted as a hirsute arm wrapped around his neck and he was lifted high into the air.

Before flame could spit from Stahl’s firearm, Elena had sent the weighted end of her chain whirring after the creature. There was the crack of bone and an almost beastly howl of pain, and with that Nichou crashed back to earth. The snap of branches continued and something rained down on the group like a mist, then stillness returned.

The sun still hung in the sky. Yet there wasn’t the chirping of a single insect or the song a single bird to be heard in the forest.

“Shit! This is freaking blood!” Stahl cursed as his fingers revealed the liquid that’d fallen on his bald pate. “At two hundred, that damn head-taker must’ve finally gone senile if Elena was able to catch a piece of him with her chain,” he chided.

“Hey! Just what’s that supposed to mean?!” Elena said, glaring firmly at Stahl. She then continued, “Well, since I didn’t kill it, it’ll probably be back. There’s no sign of whatever was following us anymore, either. So let’s pull ourselves together already and get going.”

Their leader brimmed with determination as she started onward, and the three men couldn’t help but grin.

No sooner had they started walking than Nichou said to Tan, “Notice anything about that head-taker just now? About the funny way it was dressed?”

“Nah, I was right underneath you, so I didn’t get a good look at it. You mean to tell me it was wearing something?”

“Well, I saw it,” Nichou replied. “It had on a green shirt and striped pants. That was always old man Geppe’s favorite outfit.”

Tan fell silent.

A year earlier, ninety-year-old Geppe had ventured into the forest to find a plant called “regression grass” that was said to bring back lost youth. But he was never heard from again. Nichou had lived near the old man’s house.

“Then it looks like the head-taker really did get old man Geppe after all,” Tan finally said.

Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou replied, “I saw something else, too. On the arm it had around my throat. The whole thing was pretty hairy, but it had a scar by the fold of its elbow. It was exactly like the one Geppe got splitting wood back when I was maybe four or five years old.”

“You mean to tell me that thing . . . that was old man Geppe?!” Tan said, his voice thin as a thread.

Nichou shook his head, saying, “It couldn’t be. It had a face just like a monkey. There’s no way it was Geppe.”

“That’s enough creepy talk out of the two of you,” Stahl suddenly interjected.

But the two bikers didn’t look startled by his remark. Rather, their expressions suggested he’d saved them from something, as they said no more.

—

III

—

The wall of trees ended as abruptly as the stroke of a knife, and their field of view was suddenly dominated by a bizarrely shaped mountain of rocks. But more than the mound of smooth cube-like rocks that literally looked to have been polished with mechanical precision, it was the area around it that drew the eyes of the group. This was their destination.

“Hey, it ain’t here!” Stahl called from the lead.

Everyone quickly gazed in the same direction, finding neither blue moss around the rocks nor anything else but black earth.

“How do you like that! It must’ve died off,” Tan clucked.

Throwing her gaze on the mountain of rocks, Elena said, “That can’t be. I saw some just last year—up there!”

Her finger pointed to the summit of the rock pile some sixty feet high, where a patch of blue that could’ve easily been missed clung to the surface.

Turning around, Stahl asked, “Who’s going up after it?”

“Me,” Elena replied.

“It’s gonna be crazy-dangerous,” said Nichou.

“And it’d be any safer for the rest of you?”

Still massaging his neck, Nichou shrugged his shoulders.

“The head-taker might come back. Keep your eyes open.”

And leaving them with that, Elena grabbed hold of a nearby outcropping of rock. As she nimbly climbed, a dark gauze seemed to cling to her body. The dusky eve was drawing closer.

Holding his firearm at the ready, Stahl anxiously scanned his surroundings. “The wind’s picking up,” he said.

“Hell, the wind’s gonna be the least of our worries,” Tan replied. Looking over at Nichou, he said, “You don’t look so hot. You okay?”

Rubbing his neck all the while, Nichou wiped the sweat from his brow with his other hand.

“You know, I heard this story from Mama Kipsch once,” Tan said as he adjusted his grip on the metal nozzle of his weapon. “Ages and ages ago, it seems the Nobility used this pile of rocks for certain experiments. That’s why it looks all neat and artificial.”

“What kind of experiments?” asked Nichou.

“Well, in order to make the monsters they spread all over the Frontier, they needed to collect normal animals first. Breeding stock, I guess you could say. This rock thingy was supposedly a conning tower for that. They say that’s how new species like head-takers, toothless suckermouths, and whatnot got made.”

“They sure did screw things up for us.”

“Hey, you’re sounding a little better now, Nichou.”

“Yeah, finally,” he said, grinning at his friend but never taking his hand away from his neck.

Cupping one hand by the side of his mouth, Stahl shouted toward the sky, “How’s it going, Elena?” Of course, he’d watched to make sure Elena had sure footing before he said anything.

“I’m okay. Just a little further to go.”

Relieved at her reply, the second-in-command had just turned back toward the woods when a shriek drifted down to him.

Stahl grunted in alarm as he whipped around, and his eyes were met by the sight of Elena with a number of tendrils that could’ve been vines or ropes wrapped around her body. Spilling down from the very top of the mountain, they clearly showed signs of moving of their own volition.

But it was Elena who’d been really surprised. Just as she was reaching for the moss that clung to the underside of a rock, the things had reached down from above and snared her. Naturally she’d been unnerved and had nearly fallen. But irony still abounded in the world, and it was these very same strange tendrils that’d saved her from that fall. And the second they’d twined around her, Elena had noticed the most surprising thing. They were cold and hard to the touch—metal. This was no living creature.

“Don’t shoot, guys!” she shouted down to her gang as she pried off the wriggling tentacles, while her right hand slid down to the cylinder that hung on her belt. It was an incendiary grenade her late father had purchased in the utmost secrecy from a merchant out of the Capital. Once she pulled the pin and threw it, it would char everything within a hundred-fifty-foot radius with ten thousand degrees of heat five seconds later. Or melt it, it this case. Although it was probably crazy of her to use it in this situation, she had no alternative.

Elena grabbed the pin with her teeth. Suddenly, the rest of the grenade was pulled away from her. Clutching the silvery cylinder, a tentacle of the same color was thrashing around just above the girl’s head. The sound of the burning fuse was painfully audible.

Four seconds to go.

“Hurry up and take the damn thing already!” the girl shouted.

Cold as the situation made her blood run, it was astonishing she could speak at all. More surprising yet was the fact that she didn’t ask her friends below for help.

Of course, even if she had called out to them, there was some question as to whether the three men would’ve been able to aid her. For just then, the trio had grown tense at the sight of a bizarre figure coming out of the forest.

Its torso was that of a human male, bare-naked and well-muscled—but below that was a long tail that twisted along behind him. Even with him fifteen feet out of the woods, the end was still hidden among the trees, like a snake. The blue-green scales that reflected the evening afterglow covered a lower half writhing as sinuously as a serpent. It actually was a snake.

Though the creature had a vacant gaze until it reached the trio, when it halted and slowly appraised the men, its eyes began to blaze with a phosphorescent green.

“You have the ssstink of head-taker blood about you. But you’ll be my meal, not hisss!” it declared, its sibilant tone like the air rasping from a punctured tire.

And with that cry, the serpent man suddenly tried to grab Stahl.

A huge black hole opened in its face—right in the middle of its forehead.

Failing to expend all its energy inside the creature’s brain, the three-quarter-inch ball of lead Stahl’s firearm had sent through the serpent man’s brow had burst from the back of the thing’s head along with a vast quantity of gray matter. But in less than a second the entrance and exit wounds both closed and the serpent man smirked at the burly biker.

This was the descendant of creatures the Nobility had created, and its ability to regenerate damage was staggering. The expression it wore was no longer that of a human, but rather was the face of a fiend. As its mouth snapped open, a thin ribbon of tongue slid out, the end of which was forked.

A gout of orange blew into the creature’s face. Flames. They billowed from the nozzle Tan held. The tank strapped to his back was filled with an oily substance that burned at high temperatures, and when it was discharged by compressed air, the liquid ignited from friction with the atmosphere. In other words, it was a flamethrower.

Apparently this supernatural creature that seemed so inured to being hit or stabbed or even shot couldn’t regenerate the damage from burns, for as the flames enveloped it and its skin quickly baked and peeled, its ophidian form began a wild dance in the throes of death.

“I got it!” Elena shouted, but Stahl was the only one who could spare a look up at her.

Elena was coming back down, and the item tucked under her arm was definitely a big chunk of blue moss. Her eyes declared her delight at this accomplishment while flames flickered in their depths.

Just as the girl groaned with the effort of her descent, flames whooshed madly from the rocky summit and the whole mound rattled.

“Hurry up! That thing’s ready to collapse!” Stahl shouted to her.

“I know, so get ready to make a catch!”

And once she’d said that, Elena didn’t toss down the moss as expected, but rather threw herself into the air.

Not completely prepared, Stahl managed to catch her shapely form but wound up flat on his ass.

“Damn, that hurt,” he groaned while Elena promptly got to her feet.

The girl’s eyes went wide at the sight of the weird serpent creature writhing before her. Its tail looked to be a good thirty feet long, and in its wild thrashing it struck the ground repeatedly. Every time it did so, the rumble seemed to reach the very heavens.

Suddenly, a mass of rock landed on the creature’s tail. Smashing it flat, the boulder went on to bounce once or twice more on the ground.

Fighting desperately to maintain her balance all the while, Elena raced for the woods. Behind her, the mountain—or rather, the rock pyramid—had come tumbling down like a pile of dominos.

“What the hell’s going on?” Stahl asked as they made a mad dash for the path that’d brought them there.

“That stupid tentacle grabbed the incendiary grenade from me—with the fuse going—and pulled it back into the rocks. It must be some kind of animal catcher or something. I wonder what it looks like under all those rocks . . .”

“Oh, so you wanna see the Nobles’ machines up close, do you?”

“Are you kidding me?!” Elena shot back, and then she heard the undeniable sound of hoofbeats behind them. But why was it the Frontier woman pictured not the Nobility, but rather the Hunter in black?

Turning to look, Elena froze.

The horse seemed to be running in slow motion just to keep pace with her friends as they fled, and on it sat the Black Knight. She’d seen him many times before. And although she found the might of the leader of the four knights as intimidating as always, she had no time for such emotions with him on their tail. He was a veritable grim reaper. But, what would he be doing out here?

“Shit!” cried Tan. He, too, had frozen in his tracks, but he pointed the nozzle of his weapon at the Black Knight. It spat a ball of fire.

Not even trying to avoid it, the Black Knight rode straight into the blast, then through it. The flames slid right across his armor and cape, and then vanished.

A streak of light zipped up from the ground toward the sky. Without so much as a cry of pain, Tan was sliced right down the middle. The iron-shod hooves trampled his body, splitting the brave man into two separate pieces before he fell in the brush.

Elena halted. Turning, she glared at the knight following her. Stahl and Nichou both followed her lead, and the Black Knight stopped at the same time.

“So it’s you after all. You’ve been on our tail ever since we first set foot in the forest, haven’t you?” Elena asked in a demanding tone after the flutter in her chest had subsided.

“Indeed I have,” he replied, his voice like a rumbling from deep in the earth.

“Why the hell were you following us?”

“The answer should be obvious. I can’t have you bringing that moss back to the village. Because then I wouldn’t be able to dispose of all those abominations.”

“But this will put them right!” Elena cried. “They won’t be your kind any more.”

“They are filth!”

A beam of light shot out, shattering the ground right in front of Elena. But even as the soil showered her, Elena didn’t recoil.

“Hold on just a minute!” the girl shouted, her mouth open as wide as it would go.

Perhaps her bluster actually worked, for the Black Knight stopped moving.

This was a do-or-die situation. With new determination, Elena said, “I’ll let you in on a little secret. Something concerning the wonderful princess you’ve sworn allegiance to.”

“Something about the princess?” the Black Knight muttered dubiously, though there was laughter in his voice. Undoubtedly he was convinced this was some fabrication on her part to stall for time.

“That’s right, I’m talking about that bitch. Does your precious princess approve of what you’re doing?”

The Black Knight said nothing.

“That’s what I thought. Honesty is a virtue, you know. But the way you pretend to be all loyal and stuff yet run around disobeying orders behind her back is why she’s gonna put you out like so much trash.”

“Like trash? Me?” the Black Knight asked, his tone naturally sounding suspicious. These were remarks no one could’ve imagined coming from this man.

“No, not just you—all of you!” Realizing the upper hand was now hers, Elena let her strength flow into her voice as she said, “I’m telling you this as a special favor. Your precious princess actually asked me and D to get rid of the lot of you.”

After blurting out the words, Elena was frightened by the response they might bring.

Silence descended, and the beating of the girl’s heart rang through her head like a gong.

The shoulders of the Black Knight trembled. A low voice spilled from somewhere in his armor.

She wondered if he was crying. Even Stahl and Nichou looked at each other. But suddenly Elena realized she was mistaken.

The twilight was beaten back by a great booming laugh.

“I never would’ve thought you’d say such a thing. In all my days, I’ve never heard anything half so entertaining! So, the princess appointed the two of you to dispose of us, did she?”

“It’s true!” Elena snapped back even as realized it was pointless to debate him. The black harbinger of death would surely spread its lethal wings over her head.

Sure enough, the Black Knight began to advance. Not rushing, but slowly. Like a massive mountain.

“From the fight you gave me last night, I felt you had promise despite being human. But when you resort to such tricks, I’m sorely disappointed. What’s more, your little ploy couldn’t possibly have been more impertinent. It’s unforgivable.”

“Who are you to talk?! You came sneaking along after us! Why didn’t you just show yourself from the very beginning, eh?”

“I wanted to see what you’d do first,” the Black Knight replied. “To come out to this forest knowing what time it would be takes a formidable store of determination and strength. And I thought it would be nice to see those traits for myself. I was also curious as to what you’d be searching for.”

“When did you start following us?” Elena asked, groping for a question. Now she actually was trying to buy some time. Even if it only kept her alive a few minutes longer, she couldn’t miss any chance to improve her odds of delivering the blue moss.

“When you and the others left the village.”

“You’re a creep. You’ve been spying on us all along, haven’t you?”

“All for the good of the princess,” the Black Knight said, his form growing larger by the second.

Elena finally noticed that he was steadily approaching her.

“Run for it, Elena!” Stahl shouted as he suddenly jumped between the two of them. Thunder and flames flew from his gun. A hard thud resounded far off, and the Black Knight’s upper body swayed every so slightly. A shallow indentation had been left in the brow of his helm. Around it, other dents formed in rapid succession as bullets and sparks bounced off of him.

“Sorry,” Elena said, kicking off the ground with the second shot. The report from Stahl’s weapon was like a knife in her heart.

Although she thought about diving between the trees to take the Black Knight’s horse out of play, Elena knew that if he reached the bikes before she did, she’d be finished anyway. She ran as fast as her legs would carry her. Then she heard hoofbeats. It felt as if all the blood had drained from her body.

“Stahl,” she said, the name coming to her lips naturally.

The beating of the iron-shod hooves had come to within three feet of her, and the hot breath of a horse brushed the nape of her neck.

So, this is the end? she thought for a second, and then a roar to shake the very heavens came from off to the right.