“Our duel is over, stray mongrel. It shall be
you
that the mints feast on.”
Borgoff opened his eyes wide. “I’m afraid not. This fight is just getting started.”
Saying that, the Hunter ran. Right to the mint nest. The nest of the flesh-eating
ants was little more than a fragile metropolis of soil hardened by an adhesive the
ants themselves secreted. A large bird landing on it would be more than enough to
crush it—to say nothing of what the weight of a grown man would do to it.
But Borgoff stood on the ant nest. Or rather, he stuck to it. Both his legs were at
a right angle to the wall. What’s more, he must’ve been using some sort of trick,
because the fragile tower didn’t show a single crack.
In that outré pose—which, not surprisingly, drew a cry of astonishment from Mayerling—Borgoff
let his arrows fly. They no longer had the same power they’d had a few moments earlier.
Mayerling’s right hand went into action, and the murderous steel implements were struck
down one after another.
Confusing his foe by moving over to one of the passageways and hanging upside down
from it like a monkey, the Hunter dipped once more into his quiver. Suddenly, a strange
sensation came from his legs. His profuse bleeding had robbed his legs of the ability
to render him weightless, and he fell with the crumbling dirt into the very heart
of the flesh-eating ants’ nest.
His next sensation was that of countless insects swarming all over his body.
Borgoff screamed. Squeezing every last bit of power from his body, he got up and ran.
Each footfall crushed towers, destroyed passageways—he didn’t even feel the pain in
his belly now. The fear of being eaten alive had his heart in its talons.
Deep into the woods he ran, his screams resounding through the trees.
—
III
—
The moonlight limned three faint shadows on the ground. D, Leila, and the girl.
Leila let out a deep sigh. The girl had just finished telling them the circumstances
that’d brought her there. Only the wind moved near the trio, and darkness had fallen
around them.
“There’s just one thing I want to ask you,” D said. He was still admiring the moonlight.
“Are you aware that the Claybourne States are now . . . ”
The girl nodded.
“I see,” said D. “Then I guess you may as well go. But what’ll you do then?”
“I don’t know,” the girl replied. “Once we get there, our journey will be over. One
way or another.”
D fell silent. The wind was singing a sad tune in the treetops.
“But it’s something good,” Leila muttered. “Love’s so great . . . So why does it have
to go so wrong?”
For a long time, none of the trio moved.
D made the moonlight sway. “It seems he’s come for you,” he said. His eyes indicated
the depths of the forest.
Tears glistened in the girl’s eyes. “Don’t do this, I beg of you. Please, just let
me go to him. If we keep going at this rate, we’ll reach the Claybourne States by
tomorrow night. Everything will end there. After that . . . ”
D faced the forest.
“Don’t move,” Leila said. D turned to face her. She had the barrel of the sliver gun
aimed at his chest. “Let her go. We can settle things once they reach the Claybourne
States.”
D didn’t move.
“Thank you,” said the girl. “Thank you—thank you both.”
In the depths of the woods, a tall silhouette hove into view. The girl ran to it.
Pausing for an instant, the two silhouettes vanished among the trees as if embraced
by the forest. Once they were gone, Leila lowered the sliver gun. “Sorry, D,” she
said.
“Why the apology? I should thank you again.”
Leila said with surprise, “You don’t mean you would’ve—”
“Go to sleep already. Tomorrow morning I’ll take you to where to left your car. There
we part company. After that, you can tail me, go back to your brothers, or whatever
you like. You can count on me to take care of the female dhampir.”
“I . . . ” Leila swallowed the rest of the words. She was going to say she wanted
to go with him. But how would she go about traveling with a shadow?
A blanket was tossed at her feet. D took another one in hand and walked over to the
trunk of a nearby tree. Spreading the blanket on the ground, he sat back against the
tree trunk and crossed his arms. The sword off his back had been placed by his left
side.
After a moment’s consideration, Leila sat down next to D. D gazed at her steadily.
His pupils seemed deep enough to swallow her. Suppressing a wave of rapture, she asked,
“Does this bother you? You know, where I’m a vampire victim and all?”
“Nope.”
“Thanks,” she said. Pulling the blanket up to her chest, Leila lay down on the ground,
using her arm for a pillow.
There was a fragrance to the wind. Night-blooming jasmine, moonlit grass, nocturnal
peonies, moonshine . . . Sweet and heart-rending . . . There was life by night. The
croaking of frogs, music from the jaws of longhorns, the whispering of great silkworms
. . . All small and tough and full of life . . .
For a moment, Leila forgot she was the prey of a female dhampir. It’d never been like
this for her. “Funny, isn’t it,” she said as she scratched the tip of her nose.
D didn’t move, but he seemed to be listening.
“The night doesn’t frighten me a bit. None of my brothers has ever done this . . .
Every single night, we had the feeling there were beasts and evil spirits out to get
us . . . Even inside the bus, we were still on edge.” And yet, now she seemed perfectly
fine. “I wonder why I don’t mind the night now?”
After she’d said it, Leila was surprised. Had she actually thought that stern young
man would give her an answer? She said it herself, quietly, in her heart.
Because I’m with you . . .
Even after Leila fell asleep listening to the song of the wind, the young Vampire
Hunter still trained his gaze patiently on the darkness of the night, anger and grief
far from the void that was his eyes.
—
At about the same time, in a part of the forest not very far away, a strange and truly
disturbing event was unfolding.
Borgoff could feel his internal organs being bored through and devoured. There was
no longer any pain. Ants were swarming all over his body. They were inside his face,
too. He saw his right eye fall out. The sensation of ants crawling around in his eye
socket was strangely tickling. Tens of thousands of them were dining on his flesh.
Each and every trifling bite splashed a chill over him. It was cold. So very cold.
A strange thing clawed its way out of the grass and came into view of the corner of
his remaining left eye. It was a gooey gray lump. Oddly enough, though it lacked arms
and legs, it clearly had eyes and a nose.
“Oh, this is a nice little find I’ve made,” said the lump. “It’s a little beat up,
but if I knock all the freaking ants off it I should be able to get some use out of
it. Yessir, when it comes to traveling, you can’t beat a human body.” Moving over
to Borgoff’s mouth, it said to him, “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m kind of in a hurry,
too.”
The gooey limbless lump pried open lips that the man himself lacked the strength to
open, and Borgoff felt the thing sliding down his esophagus and into his stomach.
—
IV
—
There wasn’t really any place called the Claybourne States any longer. Neighboring
sectors had only heard about the Ninety-Eighth Frontier Sector’s capital region because
the spaceport was there, and the Claybourne States had come to be known by the spaceport’s
name as well. But that name, too, had long since been forgotten, and people hadn’t
mentioned either in ages.
With its automated housekeeping-systems destroyed, the interior of the terminal building
was left to the rampant dust, and the winds that blew in through shattered panes of
reinforced glass traced thin, swirling patterns in the accumulated grit.
A drifter who was calling one of the spaceport rooms his home that particular evening
found his meager dinner interrupted by the untimely arrival of guests. A black carriage
drawn by a half-dozen horses came in through the central gate. Once it halted at the
entrance to the terminal building, two passengers got out. There was a man and a woman.
What astonished the drifter was the fact that the couple consisted of a Noble and
a human. Both of them went into the building, but the way they held each other’s hands
only added to his consternation.
A human and a Noble?
he thought to himself.
It couldn’t be!
He slipped quietly out of his room and headed out of the spaceport as if he’d just
had a nightmare.
—
The pair stood dazed in the blue dusk of the lobby. Or, to be more precise, only Mayerling
was dazed. The pity in the girl’s expression was directed at her love.
“No . . . This can’t be . . . ” Mayerling mumbled. His words echoed through the emptiness.
The only ships for sailing to the stars visible in the vast complex were horrible
derelicts. A photon-powered spaceship with melted engines, a galaxy ship crushed in
the middle, a dimension-warping schooner wrecked beyond repair . . . It was a quiet
and cruel death that covered the apron. There was no road out there that might carry
them together on a voyage among the stars.
“It can’t be . . . ” Mayerling stammered. “The rumors said . . . ” In his mind, rumors
that the spaceport still operated on a small scale must’ve seemed more and more real
with each passing day, taking shape and becoming the absolute truth to him. Knowing
his kind was doomed, even declaring as much himself, he remained a Noble after all.
As he stood paralyzed, a hand gently pressed upon his shoulder. He saw the girl’s
face. Her perfectly placid expression.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll go somewhere else now. So long as I’m with you,
I’ll go anywhere. Together forever . . . until death do us part . . . ”
“But—I can’t die,” Mayerling replied.
Tears welling in her eyes as they clung to him, the girl said in a determined tone,
“In that case, make me just like you . . . ”
“I can’t do that.”
“I don’t mind.” The girl shook her head. “I don’t mind at all. I was prepared for
that from the very start . . . ”
Blue light tinged the faces of the young couple. Mayerling’s face slowly approached
the nape of the girl’s neck. The girl had her eyes shut. Her long, lovely eyelashes
trembled. When she felt the lips of her beloved on the base on her neck, her eyes
snapped open.
A scream echoed through the lobby.
Mayerling stared in amazement at his love, who’d pulled free of him with that scream.
The girl’s violent emotions quickly passed. A tremendous feeling of remorse showed
on her face. Her lips quivered. “I . . . I . . . That was a horrible thing for me
to do . . . ” she stammered.
Mayerling smiled. It was the smile of a man who’d just lost something. “It’s okay,”
he said gently. “We’re fine the way we are. If you should wither and die first, I
shall follow after you.”
The girl crushed herself against him and hung on for dear life. She said not a word,
but he softly stroked her quivering shoulders.
“Shall we go then?” he suggested. “Though the pathway to the stars is barred to us,
we may yet journey across the earth.”
The girl looked up at him and nodded. Stroking her waist-long hair in sympathy, he
let his eyes wander to the lobby’s exit. A figure in a black coat suddenly stood there.
The blue pendant at his breast and his unsettling beauty burned into the Noble’s retinas.
Holding his tongue, Mayerling pushed the girl aside.
“Your trip’s over,” D said. “Give me the girl.”
“Take her then. That is, if you survive,” Mayerling said gruffly. He made no effort
to keep his ladylove by his side and avoid the fight.
“This way, if you don’t mind,” Leila said to the girl as she came over from one of
the other walls, took the girl by the hand, and brought her to the corner of the room.
D walked toward Mayerling. He stopped with ten feet still between them.
“You know, D,” Mayerling said, discharging the words like a sigh, “there’s no road
to the stars after all. But then you knew that all along, didn’t you?”
D didn’t answer.
Vampire and Vampire Hunter discarded hatred and anger and grief, and readied for battle.
Trenchant claws grew from the fingertips of Mayerling’s right hand. Neither of the
men seemed to move, but the distance between them shrank nonetheless.
A horizontal flash of black shot out, and D took to the air without a sound. The eldritch
blade that howled with the Hunter’s downward swipe hit Mayerling’s left arm with a
shower of sparks. Again the black claws swiped out in an attack, and again they met
only air as D leapt back six feet.
This lobby, where nothing save ages of decay sat in stagnation, was playing host for
this one night alone to a condensed conflict between life and death.
—
While her eyes were riveted to the pair’s deadly battle, Leila felt warm breath brushing
the nape of her neck. “Come this way,” someone said to her. The voice was seductive
and female. Oddly enough, the girl didn’t seem to notice it at all. “Come this way,”
it said again.
Even when Leila quietly slipped to the rear, the girl and her soul remained prisoners
of the deadly duel before them.
A knife of some sort was placed in Leila’s right hand. “Take this and stab the girl,”
the voice told her. “Kill her!” The speaker must’ve still believed Mayerling would
be hers if only she disposed of the girl.
Leila nodded. Her grip tightened on the handle of the knife. Circling around behind
the girl, she stealthily raised the blade.
“Now!” the voice commanded.
Leila did a flip. Caroline’s rapture-twisted face was right in front of her own now.
Before the Barbarois woman’s expression could register her shock, the silver knife
was gouging deep into the female dhampir’s heart. What’s more, out of apparent concern
about distracting the pair of combatants from their battle, Leila took the added measure
of clamping her left hand down like a lid over Caroline’s lips. Blood gushed out between
Leila’s fingertips.