Demon Deathchase (6 page)

From the roof of the carriage down to D, the miasma flowed. And from D back up to
the roof. At this intense exchange of unearthly auras, the horses whinnied, and the
carriage rocked wildly.

Long claws grew from the fingers of the Noble’s right hand. But no, they were not
simply nails—glittering blackly, they clearly had the lustrous sheen of steel. When
danger was near, the vampire’s normal fingernails became murderous steel implements.

“Such a refined face, and such skill—I’ve heard your name before. The name that can
make any Noble grow pale. So, you’re D—” Mayerling said, his voice a blend of admiration
and fear.

“I’ve heard of you, too,” D responded softly. “I’ve heard there was a young lord praised
for his virtue by his subjects, perhaps the only one among all the Nobility. His name
was Mayerling, I’m quite certain.”

“I always wanted to meet you. One way or another.”

“Well, now you have,” the Hunter replied. “I’m right here.”

“Will you not let us go? I’ve done nothing to the humans.”

“Tell that to the father you made like yourself before you carried off his daughter.”

Distress filled Mayerling’s countenance.

The tension abruptly drained from D’s body.

With a shout of “Hyah!” from Mayerling, the horses pummeled the earth. Speeding by
D’s side, they started to gallop up the earthen slope.

D raced like the wind.

The carriage was every bit a match for D’s speed.

At the summit of the hill, D came alongside the carriage. His right hand reached for
the door handle. And then the golden handle just started pulling away. As he watched,
the carriage dwindled in size, and D turned himself around and headed over to a stand
of trees. That was where Leila lay.

“Heard a strange voice, didn’t you?” the usual strange voice said. “Kinda makes you
think being hard of hearing might not be so bad. We might be wrapping up this job
right about now otherwise.”

D squatted down and put a hand to Leila’s brow. She was as hot as fire. Her sweat-drenched
face was twisted with pain. Both fever and pain were due to her infection. Relentless
chills would soon follow.

Without a moment’s hesitation, D stripped off Leila’s clothes. When her beautiful
naked body was stretched out on the green grass, a surprised “Wow!” came from his
left hand. “By the looks of it, I’d say this little girl’s had a pretty hard life.”

From her round, firm breasts down to her thighs, and across her whole back, Leila’s
skin was covered with the scars of numerous gashes and the stitches that had closed
them. This was a girl who lived in the carnage that was the Frontier.

Without seeming to be harboring any strong emotion, D covered Leila with himself.

Crying out a little, Leila clung to his powerful chest. Her fever-swollen lips trembled,
letting a mumbled word escape over and over again. A single word, but it was what
had stayed D’s hand at the carriage door.

—

When Kyle Marcus’s mount crested the hill an hour later, there was no sign of anyone
or anything in the vicinity, aside from his sister, who was wrapped in a blanket and
resting peacefully in her seat in the battle car.

Another thirty minutes after that, the bus driven by Borgoff appeared, along with
Nolt, who was riding point.

Kyle carried Leila into the vehicle in a great hurry. They must’ve been very close,
because his expression had changed markedly. “She—she’s gonna be okay, won’t she,
bro?” he stammered. “Give her something, I don’t care what.”

As Borgoff watched him struggle on the brink of tears, he wore a rancorous expression,
but he took Leila’s pulse nonetheless, checked her fever, and before long gave a satisfied
nod. “She’s all right. I’ll check out her internal organs and circulation with a CAT
scan anyway, but there’s no need to worry.” Staring down at Kyle where he’d slumped
to the floor in apparent relief, he added, “This kinda shit is what happens when you
go behind my back and send Leila out alone.”

“I know. You can take the strap to me later for all I care. But which one of them
you figure roughed Leila up so bad?”

Kyle’s face had reclaimed its original viciousness. Eyes staring firmly into space,
he was so angry he didn’t notice the froth running from the corners of his mouth.
His body shook.

“Well, probably not the one who treated her. Which means maybe it was neither of them.
You wouldn’t think anyone as soft as all that could survive this long out here on
the Frontier.”

“It don’t matter,” Kyle said, almost ranting deliriously. “It don’t matter which of
’em did it. I’ll find ’em both and cut ’em to pieces. Take their arms and legs off
and put ’em back on where they don’t belong. Stuff their mouths with their own steaming
guts.”

“Knock yourself out,” his older brother said. “Anyway, you’re sure there wasn’t anyone
around Leila? From the look of her wounds, she got them three, maybe four hours ago.”

The door opened and Nolt stuck his head in. “We’ve got some tracks from a carriage
passing this way. Still fresh. Maybe from an hour before we got here, tops. There’s
something else, too—some prints from horseshoes.”

“If that’s the case, then the two of them must’ve gone at it here, too. And it looks
like it didn’t get settled yet . . . ”

Nodding gravely at his own words, Borgoff ordered Nolt to take care of Leila and Groveck.
He went to his room in the back, returning to the driver’s seat clutching a cloth-wrapped
package of apparent significance.

“If I’ve seen D’s face, I can spot him,” he muttered, pulling from the cloth a silver
disk about a foot and a half in diameter. Setting it up on a little stand almost in
the center of the dashboard, Borgoff turned his heavily whiskered face to gaze out
the window and up at the moon rising in the heavens. The moon was round and nearly
full, but, thanks to the clouds obscuring part of it, it looked like it’d been nibbled
here and there by bugs.

When he set his huge form down, the driver’s seat creaked and groaned. Then Borgoff
crossed his hands in front of his chest, and began to stare fixedly at the propped-up
silver platter with eyes that looked like they could bore right through it. A minute
passed, then two.

Kyle wouldn’t leave Leila’s side as she lay in bed. As Nolt peered in through the
door next to the driver’s seat sweat beaded his face just as profusely as Borgoff’s.

And then, as the silvery surface of the platter grew smoky, almost like clouds covered
it, the figure of a young man in black astride a horse suddenly formed on its surface.

It was D. Turning their way and saying something, he pulled on the reins in his hands
and disappeared into a thicket.

It was a replay of D from the previous night, talking with them after the battle with
the vampiric villagers. If people or things looked a little different, it was probably
because these images were taken from Borgoff’s memories. Here was a man who could
project his own memories onto a silver platter. Yet, despite this admirable display
of what some would call sorcery, Borgoff glared mercilessly at the moon in the sky
with bloodshot eyes. No, not at the moon, but at a big mass of clouds under it. The
moonlight shining on the clouds edged them in blue.

There was no change in either the moon or the cloud mass, or so it appeared for an
instant. Then, even though the moon remained unchanged, the heart of the cloud mass
seemed to begin to glow ever so faintly. In the space of a breath, a figure shaped
like a man started wriggling there, and, with a second breath, it became a clear picture.
Someone was riding a horse down a pitch-black road.

Based on his past memory of D, Borgoff was using the silver platter and moon as projectors
to make the
present
D appear in the cloud mass.

The receding figure that seemed to be looking down on them from the distant heavens
was a remarkable likeness of D as he raced down the road a few score miles ahead.

—

II

—

They’d run full tilt for a good two hours after leaving D in their dust, and, when
Mayerling saw that the road continued on in a straight line for the next dozen or
so miles, he left the coachman’s perch of the racing carriage and skillfully slipped
inside.

When he’d closed the door, not a hint of sound from the outside world intruded into
the carriage. The girl sat there in a leather-bound chair like a night-blossoming
moonbeam flower.

Carpet spread across the floor, and an exceedingly fine silk padding covered the walls
and ceiling. In days of old, bottles of the best and rarest potables had sat on the
collapsible golden table that seemed to grow from the wall, and this dozen miles of
starlit road had run to great masquerades by the Nobility. However, the carpet was
now somewhat dingy, there were tears in the silk, and there wasn’t a single silver
glass on the table. Even the table drooped for lack of a screw.

This model of carriage was said to be the last equipped with magnetic stabilizing
circuits, which would hold the passengers safely in position even if the vehicle were
to flip over.

Mayerling’s right hand moved, and the interior was filled with light. “Why don’t you
turn on the lights?” he asked. “By rights this dilapidated old buggy should have been
scrapped long ago, but that much at least is still operational.”

Encouraged by a smile that bared teeth of limitless white, the girl showed Mayerling
a smile in return. Yet her smile was thin, like a mirage.

He tried to recall the last time he’d seen this girl’s brightly smiling face, but
had little luck. Perhaps he’d only dreamt it, and was dreaming this as well.

“I don’t mind,” she replied. “If you live in the darkness, then I want to, too.”

“I’m sure the sunlight suits you wonderfully. Though I have yet to see you in it,”
he added, heading over to the chair across from her to sit down.

“Do you think we’ll make it all the way?” the girl asked hesitantly.

“You think we won’t?”

“No.” The girl shook her head. It was the first vehement action he’d seen from her
since he’d taken her out of the village. “I’ll be fine anywhere. So long as I’m with
you, I could make my home in a cave in the craggy mountains or in some subterranean
world where I’d never see the light of day again.”

“No matter where we might be, the Hunters would come,” he said, allowing resignation
to drift into his jewel-like beauty. “Your fellow humans won’t be happy until they’ve
destroyed everything. You’re nothing like them, of course.”

She said nothing.

“There’s nowhere on earth we can relax now. A long trip out into the depths of space
. . . ” He caught himself. “Perhaps it has become too much for you?”

“No.”

“It’s all right. Perhaps you weren’t cut out for this from the very beginning. A graceful
hothouse flower can’t endure the ravages of the wild. You were kind enough to indulge
my willfulness. We shall take a different course if you so desire.”

The girl’s white hand pressed down on his pale hand, and her slender face shook gently
from left to right. “I want to try and see if we make it. To go to the stars.”

Oh, who could have known the journey these two had undertaken was not a fiendish abduction,
but rather a flight by a couple madly in love? A young vampire Nobleman and a human
lass—linked not by fear and contempt, but by a bond of mutual love all the stronger
for its hopelessness. Were that not the case, there was no chance this girl taken
from a village where everyone had been turned into vampires would still be untainted,
her skin still unbroken.

For the Nobility, drawing a human into their company was part of how they fed, colored
as it was by their aesthetic appreciation of sucking the life from someone beautiful.
But at the same time, the act was also filled with the pleasure of violating the unwilling,
as well as the twisted sense of superiority that came from raising one of the lowly
commoners to their own level.

Mayerling had done nothing of the sort. He did no more than lead the girl from her
home, taking her by the hand as he let her into his carriage and nothing more. He
had not used freedom-stealing sorceries, nor veiled threats of violence against her
family to force her compliance. The girl had quietly slipped out of the house of her
own accord.

From time to time, such things did happen. Bonds formed between the worlds of the
humans and of the supernatural. However, they didn’t necessarily become a lasting
bridge between the two worlds, and typically the couple concerned would be chased
by a stone-wielding mob. As was the case with these two.

The Nobility flickered in the light of extinction, and the girl had lost any world
she might return to, so where could the two of them go? Out among the stars.

Mayerling raised his face.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “It seems the dawn will be early today. If we’re to gain a
little more ground, I shall have to see to the horses.” Kissing the girl on the cheek,
he returned to the coachman’s perch like a shadow.

Whip in hand, it was not to the fore that he first turned his gaze, but rather to
the darkness behind them. In a place cut off from all the rest of the outside world,
he heard the clomp of iron-shod hoofs approaching from far off. “So soon,” he muttered
to himself. “That would be D, wouldn’t it?”

A crack sounded at the horses’ hind as his whip fell. The scenery on either side flew
by as bits and pieces. However, the ear of the Noble caught the certain fact that
the hoofbeats were gradually growing closer.

“Just a little further to the river,” Mayerling muttered. “Hear me, O road that lies
between him and me. Just give me another ten minutes, I beseech thee.”

—

Oh. He’s finally catching up,” Nolt said. In the cloud that held his gaze, a small
luminous point began winking ahead of D. Light spilling from the windows of the carriage,
no doubt. “Give him another five minutes. No matter which one buys it, it’s all sweet
for us. So, what kind of vision you gonna show us next, bro?”