Hunter of the Dead (3 page)

The sound of a horse snuffling cut through Miranda’s torso like a knife. Defying all the boogeymen in her intestines screaming at her not to look, she turned her head toward the entranceway and caught sight first of the black hooves dripping a substance so dark it must have been tar, but she feared it was not.

Over her head, in a child’s voice, Scav whispered, “
Il cacciatore del morto
.”

Miranda blinked and strained her neck to see the rest of the dark figure. The horse was black on black, with black eyes that didn’t even seem to reflect the moonlight. The man astride the charger was sealed in a wall of black plate armor, festooned with spikes and barbs. No mortal could have carried such armor; it must have weighed two tons. Like the horse’s hair, the man’s armor dripped with the dark, syrupy substance.

The high helmet he wore had two long, curved horns, but otherwise it was nearly impossible to pick out any part of him. He had all the appearance of a blob of fresh black ink that had somehow been smeared on the landscape. He held a bastard sword in one hand, and in the other, seemingly defying the laws of physics; he held a long, pointed lance weighed down with what had to be a dozen corpses. From the hilt to the tip, stacked one on top of each other, each of Cashley’s remaining wives and concubines, at least fifteen of them or so, had been pierced directly through the heart. Blood soaked their grey jumpsuits.

Their feud forgotten, Miranda and Scav rose to their feet. The horse slowly cantered into the temple. As it did, the knight merely shifted his lance, lifting it up into the air at a downward sloping angle. Alice’s body toppled from the lance first. Peggy’s followed.

And with barely a shake, the bodies of a dozen or more of Cashley’s followers fell from the mounted figure’s lance and formed a trail behind him, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

Cashley was the first to regain his senses. He cowered, pushing his brides into a semi-circular shield wall in front of him.

“I warned you. I warned you, MacVicar. Everyone’s scared of a serial killer but now you see what’s really happening.”

The knight raised his lance in MacVicar’s direction, as though lining up a gigantic pool cue for a difficult shot. Scav seemed to realize what was about to happen.

“No!”

“Scav, don’t!”

Scav flew through the air like a bird of prey dropping onto an unsuspecting rodent, but his trajectory was immediately arrested. Without looking in his direction, the knight lashed out with his blade, and sliced cleanly through Scav’s neck with a single stroke. His head came to a rest, balanced on the outstretched blade, while his torso crumpled to the floor.

“You motherfucker!” MacVicar roared, dropping to his knees. “You cocksucking bastard!”

His face remained dry, but Miranda could have sworn he was weeping. He was unable to produce tears. One of the many, dark in-betweens of being a vampire.

The horse reared back on its hind legs. Like a wave, the great darkling mass poured down the aisle. Even with the preternatural speed of his kind, MacVicar couldn’t get out of the way before the figure was upon him.

The black knight’s lance struck true, and the force of the blow impaled MacVicar practically up to the hilt. Miranda had never seen a vampire actually killed with a stake to the heart. It was nearly impossible – a joke. Practically every vampire wore a piece of armor across their chest, and judging by the glint of metal around the hole in MacVicar’s body, the Signari fixer had been no exception. Miranda’s mouth hung open as it occurred to her that the mysterious knight had pierced through an inch of plate metal and Kevlar, not to mention a man’s ribcage, with a single stroke.

There was no way. Was it possible? Was this really the semi-mythic Hunter of the Dead?

The knight sat there astride his horse, holding up Scav’s sire bodily, not half a meter from his featureless mask. He seemed to be examining MacVicar like a diner looking at a hair in his soup. Then he lifted his lance over his head and snapped it forward like a bullwhip. The crumpled mass that had been MacVicar flew off and smashed into the rear wall of the chapel, a few feet above Cashley’s head.

“Protect me!” Cashley shrieked, ducking down so that his brides formed a barrier in front of him, and stumbling off toward the hole they had punched through the back wall.

The bastard sword cut an arc through the air and bifurcated one of the brides through her waist, sending her torso toppling forward before the blade passed through the back of the crouching Cashley’s head. Cashley’s corpse crumpled into a heap, his hasty retreat ended before it had even begun.

The five brides whose legs remained attached to their bodies tripped over one another trying to flee through the hole in the back wall. But that, too, was no avail. The knight was upon them in an instant, skewering hearts and ripping heads from their bodies with only his gauntleted hands. When those five were dealt with, he turned to look for the top half of the bride who had been split in two.

She was scrabbling away on her palms. The knight raised his lance.

“No, no, no, no!” the bride began muttering.

With a furious slam he brought the lance down through the middle of her chest, snapping the tip of the weapon with the force of the blow and sending it hurtling away to embed itself in one of the walls. The lance was so heavy that when he let it go it toppled to the ground and raised the halved vampire off the floor. She strained and struggled to pull herself free of the impaling lance, but her efforts were either in vain or too slow. The knight dismounted, retrieved his bastard sword from Cashley’s severed head, and lopped through her brainpan at nose level.

Then, as if some eldritch and terrible god had cast its eye upon her, Miranda saw the horns of the knight’s helmet turning in her direction. In that instant, she became certain that this was the legendary Hunter of the Dead.

Even weighed down with so much armor, The Hunter was upon her in a split second, and pressed his dripping sword to Miranda’s breast.

“I…I’m on your side,” she said, holding up her wrist to display her tattoo, “I’m an Inquisitor. We hunt…”

The blade drove into Miranda’s sternum and exited just as quickly, drawing a trail of crimson through the air like an exploding firework.

Night One

One

A few days before…

The young girl sat on the roof watching the sun set. Autumnal violets and crimsons devoured the fields and paddies of her homestead, and receded into the night.

She felt him before she saw him, like an arctic breeze raising goosepimples on her neck.

“I didn’t think to wait for you so long,” she whispered.

“My dear, I am but an ignoble caliban for making you wait,” Topan replied. His Cantonese was flawless, as always. “I had to deal with your parents.”

Her eyes opened wide and she turned to look at him. He was smiling; that flawless, charming smile that set everyone at ease, even her father who mistrusted everyone and everything. There was no guile in Topan’s eyes, just delight.

She ran her hands through her hair, which was still messy from the day’s work, and felt embarrassed suddenly. She was no one, a no-account night soil farmer from a no-account village in an underdeveloped section of Guangdong province. What would they say about her clothes and her hair and her fingernails in Beijing? Or, for that matter, in Guangzhou?

A hick, a rube, a nobody. They’d laugh at her. And yet…

And yet here was Topan, a wealthy foreigner, and he had eyes seemingly only for her. She couldn’t believe it was her appearance. There were prettier girls in the village. It certainly wasn’t her family’s relative wealth. Though he had never explicitly said so, she believed he could buy their entire village many times over.

So why her? She shook her head, letting her messy brown hair fall over her face. Best not to question such fortune.

“And they’re all right? I mean, they’ll let me go away with you?”

He took her hand and kissed it.

“They won’t be a problem anymore. I promise you.”

“And we can leave? Go to Beijing or Hong Kong?”

He laughed.

“If you like. We can go anywhere you desire. First, though, I need to take you to meet my father.”

“In Malaysia?”

“No. I didn’t mean my biological father. He’s long dead. I meant…well, you’ll find out. My real father. In America.”

“America?”

He nodded.

“How’s your English?”

She paused before answering in that language, “Quite fine, thank you very much.”

“Oh, you’ll do magnificently in America.”

She laughed and pressed her free hand over her face to hide the tears. He shook his head and parted her hair carefully before smoothing it over her ears and then gently forcing her hand away from her face.

“You shouldn’t cover up so much. You’re beautiful.”

“I’m not, though. Not really.”

“I told my father about you. I told him you were Iði’s shining talk.”

She stared at him and shook her head slowly.

“I don’t understand.”

He pursed his lips.

“In Norse myth Iði was a giant, one of three brothers. Their father was immensely wealthy and when he died the brothers, being giants and thus not famous for their accounting skills, had to invent a method for dividing the inheritance. So, each one took a mouthful of treasure at a time until they had three equal piles. And so today we have the saying for a treasure beyond reckoning, ‘Iði’s mouthful’ or ‘Iði’s shining words.’”

The cicadas were roaring and she felt her heart pounding in her chest. She feared her face was as red as a cherry.

“I can’t really be so precious to you.”

“You have no idea of your own worth. I’ve searched for you all my life.”

He wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck and placed his thumb on her cheek, stroking it.

“Topan…”

“Let me take you.”

She froze, as if suddenly aware for the first time of the strange man’s immense physical power. She felt certain if he squeezed, her neck would shatter, and if she tried to run, he could snatch her before she made it two steps.

“Topan, I don’t know if…”

“My dear, all the preparations have been seen to. Now is the time. I’m afraid this is going to hurt. Quite a bit.”

She tried to wriggle out of his grasp, but as she had suspected, his muscles were like iron. She slapped, punched, kicked, even delivered a devastating blow to his groin but he seemed to pay her no more heed than a mayfly buzzing about his ear.

“Topan!” she cried out, “Let go! You’re hurting me!”

“Oh, I wish I could spare you this, my love. I remember the pain well. But you’ll thank me for the Long Gift. In time.”

With a single motion he ripped away nearly a quarter of her cheongsam, exposing her right breast fully. She struggled to keep herself covered, but he paid her little mind.

“I’m sorry about this, my dear, but it must be done and it must be done beforehand.”

He sliced through the bare flesh of her bosom with the fingernail of his pinky as easily as if it had been a razor. She shrieked, partially at the pain, but more at the violation, and with the hand he still kept on her throat, he throttled her until she quieted, and tears flowed from her eyes.

When he was done carving her skin she looked down to see an oval – an eye, perhaps – split in two by a straight line with hatchmarks like a scar. He had marked her. Like a cow.

“Why?” she tried to whisper, but instantly she felt something cold driving deep into her neck, as though she were being stabbed with an icicle. It was not the usual chill of his icy grip. It was as though he were pouring coldness into her.

She gasped. No, it wasn’t cold. It was blankness. An inky white touch. Death. She tried one last time to yank herself free of his grasp, but Topan was as impassive as stone.

The young girl coughed. She gasped when she saw the spatter of blood she had hacked up on Topan’s face and shirt, like a tuberculosis patient. He made no move to wipe the splatter away.

Her limbs turned to ice. She nearly crumpled, but he held her aloft with his single arm alone. He wouldn’t let her fall, wouldn’t let her tumble. He pulled her close to himself, wrapped her in a cold but loving embrace.

“Please stop,” she whispered, “Please let me go. I don’t want this.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want.”

She opened her mouth to speak again and realized she couldn’t. Her mouth was full of blood. The blood was funneling up and out of her. Alarmed, she tried to pull away again, but he held her close, stronger than a team of oxen.

She felt her vagina open up, gushing with blood. Not like her menses. The warm red liquid poured out of her, hemorrhaging from her every orifice. She felt it fill her nose, trickle out both of her ears, even explode out her rectum like painful diarrhea.

She tried to speak, to scream, to make her wishes known, but everywhere was choked with redness. At last her eyes seemed to burst, and she felt the blood begin to trickle out of the corners of her eyelids.

That, it seemed, was the last of it. Her limbs and torso were emptied. What little blood remained in her brain was leaking out of her eyes now. The flow began to ebb, and she almost felt like she could move her tongue again without it being pushed to the floor of her mouth by an unholy stream of effluvia.