Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane (18 page)

This is your answer, then? Very well. That is what makes you my only success. But
so long as you embrace that fate, death will ever cast its shadow over you.

Once again, D’s blade shot up from below, slicing the steel banister in two.

“It’s no use,” the voice in his left hand said. “This is just some residual image
from the past. Quit it already.”

The shadowy figure leisurely receded up the staircase.

About to follow him, D was suddenly struck by a strange sensation—like he had just
awoken from a dream. A single bound took him down the staircase, and the world grew
hazy. Now D was in a dream. If the dreamer awoke, it would all disappear. The power
to manipulate dreams was truly incredible.

D’s left hand stretched out before him. A black line shot out toward the door. Even
that rectangular region was distorted, but the instant it burst open to reveal blue
sky, the door returned to reality.

Leaping out into the overgrown garden, D looked over his shoulder. The house behind
him suddenly vanished, and a few prismatic orbs of light drifted toward him. Dreams.
The orbs themselves were purely dreams. Anything they touched turned to dreams and
faded away.

The black thread snagged a globe of light in midair. A second later, D drove his blade
into the stain spreading across the surface of the globe, and the substance of the
dream shattered to pieces.

“Outstanding!” a sleepy voice could be heard to say from the overgrown grass. As the
swaying figure got to his feet, his legs wobbled unsteadily.

“Where’s your brother?” asked D.

“In a saloon.”

“Who put you up to this?”

“Didn’t you know already?” Bingo said drowsily.

His body was pierced by a needle that scorched through the air, and then vanished
as it still jutted from his flesh.

“When I dream, I am a dream,” Bingo told the Hunter, laughing in his sleep.

Being real, D couldn’t carve up a dream; at that moment Bingo was essentially immortal.

“I put a hole in your dream,” D said softly.

Thin flakes of dark red fell like dust from his opponent’s chest. The black lines
that had flown from the Hunter’s left hand were thin trails of blood.

“Shall we do this another day?” Bingo said calmly. As he slept, his serenity only
seemed natural. “You can name the time.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” D replied.

“Okay. Early tomorrow morning, then. Dawn is at four o’clock. So, right here at three-thirty.”

“Why don’t you make it during the day?” the Hunter inquired.

“Why don’t you cut me down right here and now?”

The guard on D’s longsword clicked home as the Hunter sheathed his weapon.

Pointing a slowly swaying hand in the direction of town, Bingo said, “I’ll be in a
bar called El Capitan all day long. Stop by if you like.”

.

Night came. The wind that had been blowing out into the desert changed directions,
carrying the grains of sand back to town. As they struck the windows and wooden fences,
they made a lonesome hum. It was a melancholy sound both for those it saw off on departure
and those it welcomed back on arrival.

It was late that night that Granny Viper called on D as he slept in the overgrown
garden of a mansion. He ended up there after the hotel had refused to give him a room.

“Tae didn’t come by, did she?”

Those were the very first words out of the old woman’s mouth, after she’d called out
to D in a shrill voice and followed his voice back to him.

“If she didn’t come with you, then she’s not here.”

Granny sighed dejectedly. “A fine mess this is. Running off the very same day she
gets here, the little fool.” The old woman took a seat on the ground. Her shoes were
white with dust. There was no light save that of the moon.

“What happened?”

According to what Granny told D in answer to his question, when the girl called on
her brother and his wife, things didn’t go so well. Her sister-in-law heaped abuse
on her, determined from the very start to drive her away.
You’re the Nobility’s plaything,
she’d sneered.
Why couldn’t you have just died somewhere along the way? It was my mother-in-law and
father-in-law that asked them to look for you, not me. If you hang around, they’ll
burn our house down.
Tae’s older brother said nothing as he simply watched his sister walk away.

“There’s no reason to be so upset,” D told the crone. “You must’ve imagined this would
happen. Besides, your job is done when you deliver someone.”

“That’s true,” Granny said, shrugging her shoulders. “But, you see, even
I
worry about what becomes of my merchandise from time to time. Why, I even swung by
the saloon and asked those boys if they’d seen her. Well, I don’t know about the older
one, but the younger one ran out like I’d lit a fire under him. He’s probably still
looking for her now.”

“If she comes by, I’ll contact you. You’re at the hotel?”

Granny mumbled something once again about the girl’s stupidity, how she couldn’t restrain
herself for even a single day. Compared to how tough she’d have it trying to make
it on her own with a dhampir baby to look after, a little verbal abuse should be music
to her ears. Saying she was heading out to look for the girl again, Granny took off.

“A dhampir baby? Yeah, a dhampir . . .” she muttered, the words growing fainter and
fainter until they were like a whisper through the trees.

A short while later, someone called out, “D!”

The pale figure appeared between the trees in the distance. By the time the figure
reached the Hunter, he could see that it was Tae.

“Granny told me what happened.”

“I . . . I really was going to put up with them,” the girl stammered. “No matter what
they said about me. But . . . when they called the baby inside me a vampire . . .”

“It’s a dhampir.”

“It’s the same thing to everyone else!” The tracks of tears remained on Tae’s cheeks,
but no sparkling beads could be seen. She’d run dry. Held captive by the Nobility
for eight long years, when she finally returned home she couldn’t stay even one day
. . .

“What will you do?”

“Let me rest here just for tonight,” Tae said, her tone firm for the first time. Her
single-minded gaze met D’s eyes. “Come tomorrow, I’ll manage something on my own.
Just until then. Please, just let me stay with you.”

“Do as you like.”

Tae seated herself by D’s side. He dropped a blanket in her lap.

“But this is yours . . .” said the girl.

“It’s not for you.”

Tae gazed at the blanket and then back up at D. A tear fell from her cheek, splattering
against the back of the hand that held the edge of the blanket. Her supply of mournful
tears had nearly been exhausted.

“Okay,” Tae said as she pulled up the blanket.

“You said you’d manage something on your own, didn’t you?” D asked as he gazed straight
ahead.

“Yes.”

“Well, there’ll be two of you soon.”

Tae didn’t know what to say.

“It seems dhampir children are quite considerate, although there are exceptions.”

While the young man seemed as cold as ice, a faint hint of a smile skimmed across
his lips. Tae watched with utter disbelief and then sheepishly touched D’s chest with
her pale hand. D didn’t move.

“I . . . I’ll try to be brave,” Tae mumbled, bringing her cheek to rest next to her
hand. “Good,” she said after a little while. “I can hear the sound of your heart.
When I was a little girl, Papa told me something. He said dhampirs didn’t breathe.
And so their hearts didn’t beat. I honestly believed him. That the Nobility had hearts
of gold and veins of crystal, and that dhampirs did, too. Now I know that’s not true,
though after seeing you, I sort of thought it still might be.”

D said nothing.

“But I’m glad it’s not. A dhampir’s heart beats just like ours. Your blood is warm,
too. I’m glad. My baby will be just like you, won’t it?” Tae said. She was crying.
And she went on crying. Her voice was full of joy. Without knowing why, Tae thought
that somehow she’d get by now.

At some point the girl lapsed into the quiet breath of sleep, and D had a puzzling
look in his eye as he gazed down at her. A lock of hair had fallen across her forehead.
His left hand reached out and stroked it back into place. Then he raised his face
and stared off into the darkness before him.

A trio of silhouettes suddenly appeared. It was Granny and the Bullow Brothers.

“I’ll look after her tonight,” D said.

Granny twisted her lips at that, and Clay snapped in a deep voice, “You’ve gotta be
shitting me! Would anybody leave a girl alone with a sex fiend like you in the dead
of night? Behind that iron mask of yours, you’re just looking for some fast action,
you bastard!”

Her eyes shifting from the girl to D, Granny said, “It just occurred to me—isn’t this
going to wake her up?”

D’s left hand came to rest of the back of Tae’s head, and then came away again quickly.

“That won’t be a problem now,” the Hunter told her.

“I see,” Granny said with a nod. But it was unlike the nod she always gave. “I think
that rather than having the two of them live in misery, it’d be better for one of
them to lead a regular life. You know what the best thing to do would be,” Granny
said, her right hand going for the jar on her hip. “You know, my sand paintings can
even picture the insides of a person. I’m going to do this,” the crone said, her voice
trembling. But the quavering only served to make the strength of her resolve all the
more apparent.

Gently setting Tae down on the ground, the Hunter in black slowly straightened up
again. “Leave her alone,” he said. Though his tone didn’t hold so much as a hint of
a threat, it froze not only Granny, but the Frontier’s greatest warriors as well.
D’s eyes were glowing deep red—the color of blood.

“See . . . You see that?” Granny said, the words spilling from her trembling lips.
“Would you look at your face now? That’s what Tae’s kid will be like, too. No matter
how handsome he might be born, or how much stronger than a human being, in the end
he’ll always show that face. And every time he does—mark my words—every time it happens,
everything he’s managed to build up ’til then is finished. Not just once or twice.
Every time.
How many times have you worn that face so far? How often have you had the face of
a Noble?”

“Leave her alone,” D repeated.

“No, I won’t stop. You may be a dhampir, but you’re a man. How could you know the
least bit about how a woman feels?”

The bloody hue rapidly left D’s eyes. Staring at Granny, his expression was calm as
he said, “You’re a dhampir, aren’t you?”

Time seemed to stop.

Granny was mired in a perplexity she couldn’t begin to conceal. “What?” she exclaimed.
“What do you mean?”

“Back in the desert, Clay came to lead you and me away. But Lance and Tae he carried
off asleep.”

“Pure coincidence is what that is.”

“There’s more. Except for the first glance you caught of the marker I set up on the
grave, you wouldn’t look at it at all. Because it’s a shape you have trouble with.
And why is it that when you came here earlier looking for the girl, your shoes were
white with dust but you weren’t breathing hard?”

D stared at her. The silence following the question was a hundred times more fearsome
than any enraged shouting could’ve been.

Granny shook her head feebly from side to side. “Lies,” she said. “You’re making this
up . . .”

“I have one more piece of evidence I couldn’t have made up.” D dealt the coup de grace.

“What . . .”

“The hatred you have for dhampirs. Only another dhampir feels that strongly.”

“Stop it!” Granny exclaimed. As she shouted, she raised her right hand high in the
air. Sand billowed from between her fingers.

A shot rang out.

The crone’s right hand was thrust as high as it could go, and the sand in it scattered
vainly in the breeze.

As he watched D dash toward the falling crone, Bingo called out, “Clay!” His voice
may have been sleepy, but his orders were sharp.

“I’m on it!” Clay replied as his massive form vanished in the direction from which
the shot had come.

There was never a second round fired.

D inspected Granny’s wound; it went right through her heart. It must’ve been the work
of a firearm of some sort. While it wasn’t exactly a wooden stake, surely the only
reason she was still alive was because she was a dhampir.

“D—” the old woman rasped.

“Don’t speak.”

“Don’t boss me around.” Granny took a shallow breath. “Don’t know who the blazes did
this or why, but there’s no saving me now. That’s okay. Let me go. And don’t you dare
think about waking up the girl. I wanna go out smooth. Say, would you mind holding
my hand for a bit?” And as soon as Granny said that, she grabbed hold of D’s hand
herself. “Come on, it’s not like we’ve got a lot of time. Ah, just as I thought—a
cold hand. That’s okay. It’s a dhampir’s hand. There’s not much anyone can do about
it. Oh, it’s been decades.”

D looked down at her face, the paleness of which was evident even in the darkness.

“You know . . . I had a child,” Granny said with a laugh. “The mother was a dhampir,
so her son was bound to be one, too. That’s why my man ran out on me. I must’ve worked
ten times as hard as anyone else bringing up my boy. If he had to be a dhampir, I
wanted him to at least have a good dhampir life. But in the end there wasn’t anything
I could do. The night before his wedding . . . he went and sank his fangs into the
throat of the girl he loved and was set to marry. Cried tears of blood, I did.”

Granny turned her gaze toward Tae.

“Looks pretty while she sleeps, doesn’t she?” the old woman remarked. “Tonight may
be the last night for that. You know, other people always used to tell me the same
thing. They’d say they’d never seen anyone look so hurt and angry in their sleep.
It shouldn’t be that way. I never wanted her to have to go through what I did. I still
don’t think what I was about to do was wrong. There are dhampirs who live like you
do. Well, maybe I was in the wrong after all . . .”