Before the men had even fallen, the fight was over. However, three thuds echoed from the ground. For the battle had proven so ghastly that, watching the situation from behind D's back, Rosaria had fainted dead away.
-
III
-
The darkness that night was different from usualâit was filled with the glow of flames and the stink of blood. But only one person stood there in beautiful brilliance, the same one who'd put the scent of blood into the air.
Not even looking at the deadly scene he'd created, D walked over toward where his horse was tethered in front of the general store. Even Rosaria was left behind. He hadn't fought for her sake. The instant the man who'd been after her laid a hand on D's shoulder, death had spread its black wings over the men's heads.
After he'd gone two or three paces, a voice that sounded like someone dead and buried echoed up from the ground behind him, saying, “She called you D, right?”
It was the man with the two broken arms. Although he'd been the catalyst for this bloodbath, he was the only one of them who'd survived it.
“Always thought . . . I'd like to meet you someday . . . But this is what I get . . . eh? My name is Quinn. I work for Grays.”
D put the saddle resting near the horse on his mount's back. He never even halted.
“Wait . . . please. This area's got a lot of dangerous creatures. Take me with you . . . please.”
The Hunter and his horse began to walk away.
Somehow, the manâQuinnâmanaged to get back up again using only his legs.
“It's true . . . These last six months . . . the number of monsters has increased like mad . . . This used to be a safe zone . . . but now . . .”
While the man was telling him this, the rider in black and his white steed had gone to within a few yards of the gate.
The man's shoulders fell despondently.
The clomping of hooves stopped. Halting, D soon turned back toward the village. His horse began to walk again.
Above them, a black shape bounded.
Fwiiish! the wind snarled.
The shadowy form was split lengthwise. A black liquid that wasn't the form itself spread in the air like ink. And the halves of the form that lay on the ground were covered with black bristles and had trenchant claws exposed.
Quinn hadn't been lying.
From D's back there was the slight click of sword hilt against scabbard.
Advancing on his horse as if nothing had happened, the Hunter dismounted by Rosaria. With her unconscious form over one shoulder, he easily got back on his mount, this time heading straight for the gate.
“I'm begging you . . . It's about my future . . . Please, just wait,” Quinn said, his voice seeming to creep across the ground. “I was always prepared . . . to die anywhere . . . but now I've got a reason not to die . . . In the village of Valhalla . . . I've got a girl. It's been five years since I left . . . and I was on my way back there.”
How did it sound to D, hearing the name of a village he'd already heard once repeated now?
Halting his horse, he turned to the leftâin the direction of the steam-powered vehicle.
At that point, what could only be described as a hoarse voice clearly rang out in the darkness from the hand that gripped the reins. “As always, you're such a softy!”
The mocking voice left Quinn down on the ground feeling terribly relieved.
-
The car's interior was both strangely cramped and strangely hot. There wasn't room for more than two people to ride in it to begin with, and heat from the steam boiler intruded mercilessly. When over capacity, it must've been more comfortable for those who had to ride on the outside.
From the way D looked at the cockpit, Quinn had guessed that it was his first time driving, but on seeing how easily the Hunter mastered the controls after making only one or two mistakes, the man was quite naturally left dumbfounded.
The cyborg horse followed along meekly. It wasn't tethered to the vehicle.
The common school of thought was that you didn't travel by night. The darkness impenetrable to human eyes held numerous supernatural beasts and monsters filled solely with boundless hunger and murderous intent. However, no earthly school of thought applied to the handsome young man behind the wheel.
Rosaria soon regained consciousness. On seeing Quinn the eyes nearly popped out of her head, but Quinn himself explained his situation to her. Only he left out the part about him having a woman in Valhalla.
Sure enough, Rosaria tore into him.
“Why should we help a murderer like you? You deserve to get a taste of your own medicine and feel the same terror that everyone you killed felt. You'd know what that was like if we left you behind in the dark forest for about five minutes!”
“Shut your hole, little girl!” Quinn bellowed back, his own mouth open about as wide as it would go. “I make my living as a Vampire Hunter. Taking care of the half-dead who've been drained by the Nobility is my job. I'm warning you, you'd better not set foot outta this car so long as you're traveling with me!”
“No, you shut up! What's a no-talent bum like you supposed to do when you can't even move your arms?”
Rosaria's right hand raced toward his bearded faceâand met with empty air.
“Take that! You . . . you . . . you . . .”
The slap didn't ring out until her sixth swing.
Quinn staggered. Rosaria was a lot stronger than he'd expected.
“I knew it! You're a monster bitch!” he howled with loathing.
Since he called himself a Hunter, his reflexes should've been keen enough to keep a woman or child from striking him. There could be only one reason why she'd landed a hit on him. Rosaria's speed was that of neither a woman nor a child.
“I knew you were part of the Nobility after all! Just try walking down a normal street with those marks on your neck. You wouldn't last a minute. You'd be better off letting me kill you now.”
“The hell I would! Why don't you try killing D, then? Think you could? After all, he's a dhampir, you know!”
A second later, Rosaria turned in D's direction and said, “Oh, no! I went and told him!”
His beautiful back to her, the Hunter didn't move a muscle as he said in a low voice, “He must have known anyway.”
“Dear me!”
“Ha! This is one messed-up group. Two Vampire Hunters and a victim. And two out of the three have the blood of Nobility in 'em,” Quinn sneered. “That being the case, traveling by night should be safe enough. It's when the two of you do your thing, after all. Hey, don't let me get in the way. Why don't you find a little farmhouse hereabouts and go drink their blood?”
Rosaria was so incensed her whole body shook.
“You dirty bastard! D, say something!”
There was no reply.
“See? What did I tell you? I'm not surprised he knows his place. Now, you've also gottaâ”
The voice of the night flashed out like a blade.
“Be quiet.”
That was enough to leave both of them with expressions like those of the dead.
“Have you ever walked the road at night until dawn? If not, you'd better settle down.”
His meaning dawned on them both instantaneously because the man and woman were, indeed, residents of the Frontier. The two of them squeezed themselves into the narrow space between the seat cushion and the dashboard.
“What is it?” Quinn asked.
Rising to his feet unconsciously, he peered out ahead of them through the windshield. His goggles still worked. But right away, he groaned.
From the left-hand side, a pale little figure had just stepped right out into the middle of the road.
“We've got trouble here!” Quinn shouted, his whole body tensing.
“Help . . . me!” cried a tiny voice that echoed in the depths of their ears.
“She's just an ordinary girl!” Rosaria called over to D in the driver's seat.
They were less than thirty feet from her.
“Stop the car!”
The girl turned in their direction. With smooth, rosy cheeks, wavy black tresses, a dress torn in a number of places, and an absolutely terrified expression on her face as she sought succorâshe was so cute, it wouldn't have been strange for even the most cold-hearted deity to make an exception in the case of this girl.
The vehicle kept heading right for her. It hadn't slowed down yet, and showed no sign of ever doing so.
“Don't!” Rosaria cried, picturing the girl being crushed horribly beneath the black wheels of the vehicle.
But a second later, the girl was flying through the air. The instant she'd risen as high as D's forehead, her right hand flashed into action even as the Hunter's sword raced out of its scabbardâand without a word from the girl, her body split down the center and something like white petals rained onto the black ground.
“What was that?” Rosaria shouted from the back. “When she flew up, she had the scariest look on her face. She was a monster, wasn't she?”
“You just figured that out, you dolt?” Quinn sneered. “What are the chances of a girl just happening to be out in the road at this hour waiting for someone to drive along? Of course it's a monster! It was just waiting for some kind heart like you to get all sentimental and stop their car. It'd tear us to shreds with its fangs and claws. What theâ”
Suddenly they picked up speed, and Rosaria grabbed onto the leather strap beside her. Quinn narrowly managed to maintain his balance.
“What's going on?” Quinn asked as he leaned over the driver's seat.
“We're being followed.”
D's quiet reply only served to instill all the more fear in him.
Quinn and Rosaria both looked out the back window.
“What?”
“No way!”
Something pale in the air was chasing after them. Despite the darkness, they could see everything with perfect clarity, just as they had before. The black hair, the pink skin, the cute faceâit was the same girl.
However, needle-like teeth jutted from the mouth that now rent her face from ear to ear, and the claws that stretched from her fingertips looked to be about as long as her arms. More than anything, what dug talons into the hearts of both were the green flames that burned in her eyes. Her hatred made fire shoot from them. While the way she reached out with one hand and wriggled her body as if swimming through the air looked rather cute, she was also ten times more horrifying than any ordinary monster.
“She's gonna catch us!” Quinn shouted.
The distance between the vehicle and the girl was most definitely shrinking. A supernatural creature versus a product of civilizationâin this world, the former always won.
Quinn reached for the broadsword on his right hipâand groaned. His arms were still broken, after all.
And that was when Rosaria gasped, her eyes bugging out.
The girl's body began to slip apart right down the middleâthat was the only way to describe what was happening. Rosaria saw that her left half had fallen about a hand's width behind her right.
“She was cut by D!” she exclaimed.
Precisely. The body of the flying girl had tasted D's blade, and now, perhaps having lost its ability to rejoin, it split in two.
The girl wrapped her arms around herself. On her face as plain as day were bottomless malice and loathingâand a hint of pain.
“Hurry!”
Rosaria's cry almost seemed to reinvigorate the flying girl. The distance between them and her decreased even further, until the girl was just outside the windowâthey could've reached out and touched her. Blazing eyes were trained on the two of them. Her left hand reached out with its claws.
There was a hard clack against the glass. The tips of her claws had struck it.
Rosaria curled up in a ball.
However, a second later, the flying girl suddenly pulled away. Perhaps her power was spent, because the last thing the two of them saw was the two halves of her charming form flying apart in midair.
Â
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
Hideyuki
Kikuchi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1949. He attended the prestigious Aoyama University and wrote his first novel,
Demon City Shinjuku
, in 1982. Over the past two decades, Kikuchi has written numerous horror novels, and is one of Japan's leading horror masters, working in the tradition of occidental horror writers like Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. As of 2004, there are seventeen novels in his hugely popular ongoing Vampire Hunter D series. Many live-action and anime movies of the 1980s and 1990s have been based on Kikuchi's novels.
-
A
BOUT THE
I
LLUSTRATOR
Yoshitaka
Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. He is well
known as a manga and anime artist, and is the famed designer for the Final Fantasy game series. Amano took part in designing characters for many of Tatsunoko Productions' greatest cartoons, including
Gatchaman
(released in the U.S. as
G-Force
and
Battle of the Planets
). Amano became a freelancer at the age of thirty and has collaborated with numerous writers, creating nearly twenty illustrated books that have sold millions of copies. Since the late 1990s, Amano has worked with several American comics publishers, including DC Comics on the illustrated Sandman novel
Sandman: The Dream Hunters
with Neil Gaiman, and Marvel Comics on
Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer
with best-selling author Greg Rucka.