Vampire Hunter D (23 page)
Doris ground her teeth. Rei-Ginsei definitely had her at a disadvantage where the FDF case was concerned. Without victims, he couldn’t be charged with a crime. Though if the sheriff was there, there’s little doubt he’d have promptly taken Rei-Ginsei into custody as a material witness.
“Mister Mayor, may I be so bold as to make a suggestion?”
Greeted by a flash of pearly teeth, the mayor smiled back nervously. Like all who’d been enslaved by Rei-Ginsei’s grin, he did not notice the devil that hid behind it. “And what would that be?” the mayor asked.
“Please allow me to do battle with our friend, here and now. Should he win, you will leave this family alone, and should I win, the girl shall go to the asylum. How does that suit you?”
“Well, I don’t know ...” The mayor vacillated. His position really wouldn’t allow him to entrust a matter of this magnitude to a man he didn’t know in the least—particularly someone as shrouded in suspicion as Rei-Ginsei was.
“Can the lot of you do something then? Come tomorrow evening, there shall be more victims.”
The mayor made up his mind. All the villagers were held at bay by D’s energy. He had to see what the man could do. “Very well.”
“One more thing,” Rei-Ginsei said, extending a single finger of the combat suit. Of course it was Greco’s. To keep Doris from realizing as much, he’d only donned the one sleeve. If his connection to Greco came to light, they would realize where the Time-Bewitching Incense was now. “Dispatch someone to the neighboring villages and have the warrants out on me withdrawn.”
“Okay—understood,” the mayor said, the words coming out like a moan. With no one but this dashing young man to rely on, he had no resort but to concede to his every demand.
Rei-Ginsei turned to Doris and asked, “And is that fine with you, too?”
“Sure. You’ll just wind up getting your other hand lopped off,” Doris replied.
D asked, “Where do you want to do this?” He made no mention of the fact that his opponent was trying to curry favor with the Nobility, or that he’d attempted to strangle a helpless young boy.
“Right here. Our duel will soon be over.”
Only the moon watched the moving people.
In front of the porch the two of them squared off, ten feet apart.
The villagers filling the front yard, and Doris and Dan up on the porch, were on pins and needles. When they all let out a deep breath seemingly on cue, three shrike-blades flew from Rei-Ginsei’s right hip. The combat suit’s muscular enhancement system made them all faster than ever, faster than the human eye could follow, and yet all of them were knocked from the sky just in front of D by a silvery flash.
In the blink of an eye, D was in the air over Rei-Ginsei’s head. Sword raised for the kill, the moment the crowd gasped at their premonition of the blade cleaving Rei-Ginsei’s head, the victorious Hunter wobbled in midair.
Who could miss that chance? Once again Rei-Ginsei’s right hand went into action, sending out a stream of white light. That was Greco’s wooden stake, which he’d kept tucked through the back of his belt. With Rei-Ginsei’s normal skill, D most likely would have dodged it despite his throes of agony, but now it had the added speed of the combat suit. Longsword still raised above his head, with the stake stuck through his heart and sticking out his back, D sent out a faint mist of blood as he thudded to the ground.
“Nailed him!”
The jubilant cry came from neither Rei-Ginsei nor the villagers. The crowd was more confused by the strange feeling that night had become day than they were by the duel’s gruesome finale.
“Greco! Oh, so you were in cahoots with this jerk!”
With that shout, Doris took aim with her rifle at the figure who’d popped up in front of the fence holding a candle in one hand, but a sudden massive blow to the barrel of the weapon knocked it back, striking its owner in the forehead.
“Now’s our chance! Grab her!”
Giving a faint smile to the villagers as they charged Dan and the unconscious sister Dan clung to, Rei-Ginsei fastened the last returning shrike-blade to his belt and stripped off the combat suit sleeve.
The limp Doris was thrown on a horse, as was her bellowing and far-from-cooperative brother, and the villagers went back out through the gate.
“What are you up to?” Greco grimaced, about to go get the horse he’d hidden at the rear of the farm.
Rei-Ginsei was stooping down over the body of the already deceased D. Raising the left hand, he eyed the palm and back of it suspiciously. “I simply don’t understand,” he groaned. “This is the same hand that swallowed Chullah’s spiders and made the mayor spill his secrets ...There must be some secret to it.” As he said that, he took a shrike-blade from his hip and slashed the left hand off at the elbow, which made Greco’s eyes bug in his head. He then discarded the hand in the nearby bushes. “I couldn’t rest easy if I didn’t do that. Also, I believe that makes us even,” he said coolly.
Rei-Ginsei walked toward the gate without so much as a glancing back, but Greco called out in an overly familiar tone, “Hey, wait up. Why don’t we have a drink in town or something? Together, me and you could do big things.”
Stopping dead in his tracks, Rei-Ginsei turned around. The look in his eyes riveted Greco. “The next time we meet, consider your life over.”
And then he left.
“Sheesh, you’re pretty damn full of yourself,” Greco muttered with all the venom he could muster, and then he too headed for the exit. His legs froze. He turned around, looking scared out of his wits. “I must be imagining things,” he mumbled, and then he wasted little time getting back out through the gate.
He thought he’d heard what sounded like chuckling. And it hadn’t come from D’s corpse, but from the dark bushes where his severed left hand had been discarded ...
..
“Ha ha ha ... Everything has gone exactly as planned. It’s unfortunate I had to wait an additional day, but I suppose that has only increased my ardor all the more.”
Standing on the same hilltop where Greco had encountered Rei-Ginsei by day, the figure took the electronic binoculars from his eyes and laughed softly. With white fangs spilling over his red lips, it was none other than Count Magnus Lee.
A carriage was parked by a tree, and the moonlight illuminated the werewolf Garou standing beside it in his inverness. Naturally, he had his human face and form at the moment.
He asked, “So, what shall we do next?”
“That should go without saying. We force our way into that miserable little hamlet and take the girl. That damned mayor of theirs undoubtedly plans on locking her in the asylum while he negotiates with me, but I shall have none of that. For all the inconveniences they’ve caused me thus fur, I shall create more living-dead in their village tomorrow night, and still more the night after that. Their children and their children’s children shall have a tale to tell of the horror of the Nobility. Consider it a gift to commemorate my nuptials. Upon our return, order the robots to commence preparations for the ceremony immediately.”
“Yessir.”
Giving a magnanimous nod to his deeply bowing servitor, the Count was about to get into his carriage when he turned and asked, “How is Larmica?”
“As you instructed, sire, she was punished with Time-Bewitching Incense, and she appeared to be in severe pain as she was still lying on the floor of her room when I took my leave.”
“Is that so? Very well then. If this serves to keep her from harboring any further thoughts of disobeying her father then everything will once again be as it should. I merely wanted to take the human girl as my wife. To live forever, sucking the blood as it gushes from her pale-as-wax throat night after night. Transient guest? The words of our Sacred Ancestor do not apply to me, I dare say. The rest of my kind may face extinction, but the girl and I shall stay here forever and hold the humans down with power and fear. Just you watch!”
Once again Garou gave a deep nod.
The Count shut the carriage door firmly from the inside.
“Go! The dawn is nigh. Of course, I don’t believe there shall be any need to burn it, but I have Time-Bewitching Incense ready just in case.”
Neither the Count nor Garou had noticed that, soon after D had been felled by Rei-Ginsei’s stake, a carriage had come from the woods on the opposite side of the farm and headed toward town.
..
For some time after Greco left, only a refreshing breeze and the light of the moon held sway at the farm. The cattle were sleeping peacefully, but an unsettling chuckle suddenly arose in the otherwise silent, solemn darkness.
“Heh heh heh ... It’s been a while since I got to take center stage. Eating spiders and making baldy spill his guts is all well and good, but I want a little more time in the limelight—of course, he and I might both be happier if I left things the way they stand now, but there’s still things that need doing in this life. And I kinda like that firecracker and her squirt of a brother. I’m loathe to do this, but I guess I can bail him out once again.”
By “him” it meant D.
The voice came from within the bushes. At the same time, something seemed to be moving around in there. Oh, it was the hand. The fingers. As if it possessed a mind of its own, the left hand Rei-Ginsei had hacked from D and thrown away was now moving all five of its fingers.
The hand had its back to the ground and its palm pointed to the sky. The surface of the palm rippled, like a lump of muscle was being pushed to the surface from the inside. But the truly startling part was still to come. A few creases shot across the surface of the lump, depressions formed in the flesh in some places while other parts swelled up—forming at last a human face!
Two tiny nostrils opened on the slightly crooked, aquiline nose, and when the lips twisted in a sarcastic smile they exposed teeth like tiny grains of rice. The disturbing tumor with a face took a breath, and then its hitherto closed eyelids snapped open.
“Well, time to get started I suppose.”
With those words as a cue, the arm started to move. Though the nerves and tendons had been severed, the weird countenanced carbuncle had the ability to reanimate the arm portion and make it do its bidding. The fingers of the prone hand swam in the air and grabbed hold of a branch of the shrubbery directly overhead. Clinging to the branch and pulling itself up, the hand flopped back to the ground palm down. “Okay, time to take a little trip.” The five fingers curled like spider legs and the wrist arched into the air. Dragging the heavy forearm behind it, it cleverly wound its way through the bushes and inched toward D. When it came to the stump of his left arm, the fingers once again scurried around busily, turning to the right and matching both sides of the cut together perfectly.
D had fallen on his back, so the palm of his hand naturally faced the sky. The countenanced carbuncle’s bizarre visage was left naked in the moonlight. And this is when it—the hand—began to act truly strange. It inhaled for a long time, like it was taking a deep breath. Given the relatively small size of D’s palm, it seemed to have an incredible lung capacity. The wind whistled and howled as it coursed into the tiny mouth. After this amazing display of suctioning skill had gone on for a good ten seconds, it paused for a breath and repeated the same behavior three more times. And then the countenanced carbuncle did something even more wondrous.
Cleverly flipping over from the elbow so that the palm faced down, the fingers sank into the ground and began tearing up the soil.
Thanks most likely to D’s steely fingertips, they scooped up the hard ground like it was mud, and before long there was a sizable mound of dirt into which the palm proceeded to shove its own face. In the hush, an eerie munching sound could be heard. The tumor was eating the dirt! By the light of the moon this unearthly repast continued, and several minutes later the mound of dirt had vanished completely. Where had it gone? Right into the countenanced carbuncle’s maw. But where in the world could it put all that dirt? The shape of the arm hadn’t changed in the least. And yet, the severed hand had consumed both the air and the earth. But toward what end?
The down-turned palm let out a small burp.
“Without water and fire this may take a while, but there’s not much we can do about that,” it said to itself, and then the whole arm abruptly reached for D’s chest.
It couldn’t be! The two sides of the slice along D’s arm were together again, even though reattaching the arm after both sides had bled dry should’ve been impossible. But the arm rose nonetheless.
Then the countenanced carbuncle said simply, “This should be a lot faster than using my fingers.”
With that it opened its mouth wide and bit down on the end of the stake jutting from D’s chest.
“Oof!”
With a weird grunt it pulled the stake right out.
Disposing of the wooden implement with a flick of the wrist, the palm once again turned to the sky.
The air howled. Once more it was being savagely sucked in, though it was now clear it was being consumed just as the earth had been. Pale blue flames could be seen flickering deep in the cheeks of the countenanced carbuncle every time it inhaled. With its third such breath, flames spouted from its mouth and nose. Earth, wind, fire, and water were commonly known as the four elements. Having consumed only two of them—earth and wind—the countenanced carbuncle had turned them into heat within itself, and then into life force, and now it was pumping life itself back into D’s body.