Demon Deathchase (3 page)

Due to the fact that none of the other Hunters’ corpses had ever been recovered, there
was no choice but to believe the Marcuses’ claims that the Hunters were slain by the
Nobility, but rumors spread like wildfire, and now an ominous storm of suspicion swirled
over the clan members’ heads.

Be that as it may, no one doubted their abilities as Hunters. After all, the number
of Nobility their group had single-handedly destroyed was staggering.

Still, when other Hunters heard the Marcuses’ name, the abhorrence felt was always
coupled with a sense of aweover the threat the other killers felt from the clan’s
clearly demonstrated ability, and their willingness to use their skills for harm.

In all likelihood, this was probably the first time the clan had ever heard a man
say their name so calmly.

“Look, jerk—” Unexpectedly, the giant—Borgoff—made a strange face. “—er, pal . . .
I’ve heard about someone with your looks and a blue pendant. Ten years back, this
one village elder told us there was only one Hunter in all the Frontier that was a
match for us. That alone he was probably tougher than all of us put together or some
such thing . . . But you couldn’t be . . . ”

Giving no answer, the young man turned away, as if completely unconcerned by the bunch
of fearsome villains in front of him.

“Uh, hey, wait up,” the man with the hexagonal staff called out. “We’re going after
the Noble that grabbed the geezer’s daughter. If you’re not with us, that makes you
an enemy, too. Is that the way you want it?”

There was no response, and the horse and rider’s silhouette was swallowed by the darkness.

“We’re not gonna let him go, are we?” Leila asked indignantly, but Borgoff didn’t
seem to be listening,

“A dhampir . . . is that what he is then . . . ?” he muttered with an imbecilic look
on his face. This was the first time the younger siblings had heard the man speak
in such a tone.

Or say a certain, mysterious name.

“I’ve finally met a man I actually fear . . . D.”

—

The spot was thirty miles north of the village of Vishnu, where wholesale slaughter
followed tragedy in just two short days.

A lone black carriage rushed along the narrow road through the forest. The six horses
that pulled it were ebon, too, and the driver in the coachman’s perch was garbed in
black. The whole vehicle seemed born of the darkness.

Showering the horses with merciless lashes, the driver occasionally looked to the
heavens.

The sky was so full of stars it seemed to be falling. Their light seemed to flicker
on the face gazing up at them. The graceful visage of the driver clouded suddenly.

“The stars moved. Those giving chase . . . to me . . . Six of them.” There in the
darkness, his eyes began to give off a blazing light. “And no mere pursuers at that
. . . Each possessed of extraordinary skill . . . One of them in particular . . .
”

As if unable to contain his agitation, he stood upright in the coachman’s perch, shaking
the jet-black vehicle beneath his feet.

“I won’t let them have her. I won’t let anyone take her away.” Light coursed from
the eyes he opened wide. Blood light.

There was a sudden discordance in the monotonous drone of the carriage wheels.

When turbulence had raced into that graceful face, one of the right wheels slipped
off the axle with a crash. The wind groaned and the carriage lurched wildly to the
right, kicking up a thick cloud of dust as the carriage rolled over.

What was truly unbelievable was the acrobatics of the driver. Releasing the reins
of his own accord, sailing through the air, and skillfully twisting his body, he regained
his balance, landing like a length of black cloth a few yards from the carriage.

Anxiety and despair filled his face as he dashed to the vehicle.

Throwing the door open like a man possessed, he peered inside. His anxiety was replaced
by relief.

Letting out a deep sigh, he approached the special metal-alloy wagon-wheel that lay
some thirty feet away.

“So, misfortune has decided to put in an unfashionably early appearance,” he muttered
glumly, lifting the wheel and walking back to the carriage. He looked to the sky once
again. In a low voice, he said, “Soon the day will be breaking. Seems I shall be walking
to the Shelter, and repairing this when it’s night again. That’s more than enough
time for those dogs to catch up to us.”

—

Around the time the mountain ridges were rising faintly from the darkness like the
edges of so many jigsaw pieces, the pair halted their horses. They were atop a fair-sized
hill.

“Ol’ Borgoff’s got us doing some crazy shit—riding hard in the middle of the night
like this. I tell you, he’s all worked up over nothing,” the man in black said, giving
a light wave of his right hand. The green grass below him was shaken by a dye deeper
than the darkness.

In the pale, panting darkness of daybreak, this man alone seemed blackly clad in the
remnants of night. In a black shirt and pants, it was Kyle—the youngest of the Marcus
boys. The ebon flecks that remained like stains not just on his right hand but on
his chest and shoulder as well were splashes of blood from all the nocturnal beasts
they’d cut down during their ride.

“I thought he told you to stow that talk. That punk—he’s no garden-variety Hunter.
You must’ve heard about him, too,” the man said in an attempt to settle his wild younger
brother, a black staff looming on his back. The man speaking was Nolt, the second
oldest.

“Ha! You mean how he’s a dhampir?” Kyle spat the words. “A lousy
half-breed
, part Nobility and part human. Oh, sure, everyone says they make the best Vampire
Hunters, don’t they? But let’s not forget something. We slaughter real, full-blooded
Nobles!”

“Hey, you’ve got a point there.”

“If he’s a half-breed, he’s more like us than the Nobility. Nothing to be afraid of.
Not to mention, we even rode all night just so he wouldn’t lose us, but if you ask
me our big brother’s lost his nerve. Who besides us would race through a Frontier
forest in the middle of the night on horseback?”

Out on the Frontier, the forests were thick with monsters by night.

Though it was true the beasts’ numbers had decreased with the decline of the Nobility,
to move through the woods before dawn you still either had to be a complete idiot,
or someone endowed with nerves of steel and considerable skill. As the brothers were.

It was for this reason Kyle was repulsed by the oldest of the boys, who’d ordered
their charge by night so that the youth they’d met earlier wouldn’t get a lead on
them. Even he would be set upon by numerous creatures before he made it to this hill.
The only reason they’d somehow managed to get there before daybreak was because they’d
passed through the area before and knew a shortcut through the woods.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Nolt said wryly, being more philosophical than the
youngest boy. “We’re talking about a guy that fended off your crescent blade, after
all.”

While Kyle glared at the second oldest, Nolt’s eyes glimmered. “A horse—I wouldn’t
have thought it possible.”

Kyle was at a loss for words. Sure enough, the sound of iron-shod hoofs came from
the depths of the same forest from which the two brothers had just emerged. “It was
no problem for us because we knew a shortcut. But that son of a bitch . . . ”

Just as the two were exchanging glances, a horse and rider appeared from part of the
forest below them, knifing through the darkness. Making a smooth break for the road,
the figure struck them as being darker than the blackness.

“It’s him all right,” said Nolt.

“He ain’t getting away,” Kyle shot back.

There was a loud smack at the flanks of the pair’s mounts, and hoofs were soon kicking
up the sod.

With intense energy, they pursued the black-clad silhouette. The way he raced, he
seemed a demon of the night, almost impossible to catch.

“We got orders from Borgoff. Don’t try nothing funny.” Nolt’s voice flew at Kyle’s
back, about a horse-length ahead

of him.

They couldn’t have D getting ahead of them, but, even if it looked like that might
happen, they weren’t to do anything rash. Borgoff had ordered them not to attack in
the sternest tone they’d ever heard from him.

But for all that, the flames of malice burned out of control in Kyle’s breast. It
wasn’t simply that he had the wildest and most atrocious nature of all his siblings.
His lethal crescent blade attack had been warded off by D. For a young man with faith
in strength alone, that humiliation was intolerable. What he felt toward D surpassed
hatred, becoming nothing less than pure, murderous intent.

Kyle’s right hand went for the crescent blade at his waist.

However . . . the two of them couldn’t believe their eyes. They just couldn’t catch
up.

They should have been closing the gap on the horse and rider who didn’t seem to be
going any faster than they were, but weren’t they in fact rapidly falling farther
and farther behind?

“Sonuvabitch!” Kyle screamed. Even as he put more power behind the kicks to his horse,
his foe still dashed away, the tail of his black coat fluttering in the breeze he
left. In no time at all, he shrunk to the size of a pea and vanished from their field
of view. “Dammit. Goddamn freak!”

Giving up and bringing his horse to a halt, Kyle trained his flaming pupils on the
point in the road that had swallowed the shadowy figure.

“We ride all night, only to have this happen in the end . . . ” Nolt said bitterly.
“From the looks of it, we’re never gonna catch up to him by normal means. Let’s wait
here for Borgoff to show up.”

—

III

—

Around him, the wind swirled.

His hair streamed out, and the wide brim of the traveler’s hat seemed to flow like
ink. The silver flecks crumbling dreamlike against his refined brow and graceful nose
were moonlight. Though the air already wore a tinge of blue, the moonlight reflected
in his gaze shone as brightly as in the blackest of nights. While it was possible
for a specially modified cyborg horse to gallop at an average speed of about sixty
miles per hour, the speed of this horse put that to shame.

What could you say about a rider who could work such magic on the kind of standard
steed you might find anywhere?

The road dwindled into the distant flatness of the plain.

Without warning, the rider pulled back on the reins. The horse’s forequarters twisted
hard to the right, while the sudden stop by the forelegs kicked up gravel and dirt.
This rather intense method of braking was not so much mesmerizing as it was mildly
unsettling. Once again, the moonlight fell desolately on the rider’s shoulders and
back.

Without a sound, the black-clad figure dismounted. Bending down, he patiently scrutinized
lines in the dirt and gravel, but he soon stood upright and turned his face toward
the nearby stand of trees.

This person, possessed of such intense beauty as to make the moonlight bashful to
be around him, was none other than D.

“So, this is where they left the usual route then. What’s he up to?” Muttering this
in a way that didn’t seem a question at all, he mounted his horse again and galloped
toward the tree line.

All that remained after he vanished through the trees was the moonlight starkly illuminating
the narrow road, and the distant echo of fading hoofbeats.

The moon alone knew that some six hours earlier a driver in black coming down the
road had changed the direction of his carriage in that very spot. Had D discerned
the tracks of the carriage he sought, picking them out from all the ruts left by the
number of electric buses and other vehicles that passed this way by day?

Shortly thereafter, the moon fused with the pale sky, and, in its place, the sun rose.

Before the sun got to the middle of the sky, D and his steed, who’d been galloping
all the while, broke out of another in an endless progression of forests and halted
once again.

The ground before him had been wildly disturbed. This was the spot where the carriage
had lost a wheel and rolled.

Starting out a full twenty-four hours late, D had caught up in half a day. Of course,
it was the fate of the Nobility to sleep while the sun was high, and the Marcus clan
was still far behind. The speed and precision of the pursuit by the team of mount
and rider was frightening.

But where had the carriage gone?

Without getting off his horse, D glanced at the overturned soil, then gave a light
kick to his mount’s flanks.

They headed for the hill before them at a gradual pace, quite a change from the way
they’d been galloping up to this point.

It was a mound of dirt that really couldn’t be called a hill, but, standing atop it
looking down, D’s eyes were greeted by the sudden appearance of a structure that seemed
quite out of place.

It looked like a huge steel box. With a width of more than ten feet and a length of
easily thirty, its height was also in excess of ten feet. In the brilliant sunlight
that poured down, the black surface threw off blinding flames.

This was the Shelter the Noble in black had mentioned.

Immortal though the vampires might be, they still had to sleep by day. While their
scientific prowess had spawned various antidotes for sunlight, they never succeeded
in conquering the hellish pain that came when their bodies were exposed to it. The
agony of cells blazing one by one, flesh and blood putrefying, every bodily system
dissolving—even the masters of the earth were still forced to submit to the legends
of antiquity.

Though the vampires had reached the point where their bodies wouldn’t be destroyed,
many of the test subjects exposed to more than ten minutes of direct sunlight were
driven insane by the pain; those exposed for even five minutes were left crippled,
their regenerative abilities destroyed. And, no matter what treatment they later received,
they never recovered.