—
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.
As Caroline’s eyes went from a look of agony and disbelief to a haze of death, Leila stared into them and smirked. “Too bad. You know, I noticed something while you were ordering me around. Seems there’s at least one woman you bit who didn’t wind up your own personal marionette.” Leila, it seemed, possessed an unusual resistance to the demon’s call, though she had not known it until now.
When Leila turned her eyes from the falling body of the beautiful woman, the death match seemed about to be decided.
As soon as he’d batted down all of the rough wooden needles D hurled at him during a leap back, Mayerling felt composure coming over his mind. It was the next instant that he saw a thick flash of silvery light. His injured arms hadn’t recovered their previous speed yet. D’s longsword, thrust with calculated precision at this hole in Mayerling’s defenses, slid neatly into the Noble’s stomach.
As the Noble thudded to the ground in a bloody mist, the girl ran like the wind to his side. “Please, try not to shake me so much,” Mayerling told her. He smiled wryly under his pained breathing.
D came over. Two pairs of eyes met, the huntsman and the prey. Both men’s eyes had a mysterious hue of emotion to them.
“You did well to dodge that strike,” D said softly. No matter how deep the wound to Mayerling’s stomach, it wouldn’t be the end of a Noble. Once the sword was pulled out, even a wound from D would eventually heal.
“Why did you miss?” asked Mayerling.
The girl and Leila—who’d also come over once her own deadly little battle was done—looked at D in surprise.
Giving no answer, D bent over and took several strands of the girl’s lengthy hair in hand. Pulling out a dagger, he cut off a lock about eight inches long and put it in one of his coat pockets. “So long as I have some of her hair, the sheriff’s office will be able to confirm her identity,” he said. “Baron Mayerling and his human love are dead. Never show yourselves before mankind again.”
An indescribable light welled up in the girl’s eyes.
D took hold of the hilt of his longsword and pulled the metal out of Mayerling’s body. His blade rasped back into its sheath. “There’s the ten million right there. Easy money.” Without another word, D walked toward the exit.
“D!” Leila shouted. She was about to go after him, but at that moment a roaring wind caught her ear.
When D whipped around at the sound of flesh being penetrated, he saw the steel arrow th
at pierced Mayerling’s chest. From the angle of it, he gleaned where it’d been fired from, and a flash of silvery white flew from D’s right hand. It rebounded off the high ceiling and was barely blocked by a figure who made an easy, spider-like dash sideward.
“Borgoff!” Leila cried out.
D saw her brother, too. But was it really Borgoff? There was a huge, gaping hole in his stomach that did nothing to conceal the deep red scraps of entrails, sinew, and bone within. Half of either thigh was exposed bone, and the right side of his face was just a skull. Such was the fate one met when attacked by flesh-eating mint ants.
Laughing maniacally, he shouted, “You’re next, jerk!”
Black bits of lightning streaked at D, but each and every one was struck down. The corpse didn’t have quite the same skill it’d possessed in life. Hoping to attack from a different angle, Borgoff ran across the ceiling to the wall. He was confident of his speed. Of the speed he’d had in life.
A second later, his shoulder and the top of his head were pierced by flashes of white that shot vertically from below, where by all rights no one should’ve been able to get him. If that’d been the extent of the damage, the already dead Borgoff wouldn’t have had any problems. Due to D’s ungodly skill, however, one of the wooden needles rebounded and shattered his right ankle, which was just denuded bone. His remaining leg couldn’t continue to support his weight of nearly two hundred and twenty-five pounds, and Borgoff’s massive frame fell head over heels from a height of some thirty feet before smashing against the lobby floor.
“Damn it all!” He spat the words down at his own barely fleshed chest. “But if his memory serves me, there’s still something I can do.” Borgoff’s grotesque right hand—bones with chunks of flesh still clinging to it—went into his pants pocket.
At that moment, the drifter who was searching for food in the bus parked right in front of the spaceport jumped as he heard a tiny explosion from one of the beds lined up in the back.
D was cloaked in a ghastly aura as he walked toward Borgoff, but, suddenly, a young man stood between them.
“There you are, Grove,” Borgoff’s corpse said in Borgoff’s voice. “Do your thing! Kill all of these fuckers.”
Before he’d finished speaking, D leapt. His longsword sank into the youth’s shoulder and went through it like water.
The youth wasn’t looking at D. He was gazing at the long-haired girl in a corner of the lobby as she cradled a figure in black and sobbed. A hue of sadness suddenly invaded his flushed face. He shook his head ever so slightly from side to side.
“Gro . . . Grove?!” Borgoff stammered in disbelief.
Before his brother had finished saying his name, the young man became transparent, then quickly faded away.
When agony seemed to force Grove’s desiccated form to sit up in bed, the horrified drifter inched ever closer to him, but, the instant the youth appeared before him, the intruder was scared out of his mind. The youth’s sad gaze was trained on the convulsing body, and then he put himself against it. The second he did, he started to melt into the feeble form, and a shudder ran through the still upright body. Then it moved no more.
Walking to Borgoff’s body, D quickly pressed the palm of his left hand to its chest. There was an anguished cry. From Borgoff’s feet.
Something squirming around inside Borgoff’s thigh seemed to be gradually rising toward his chest, inch by inch, as if it was being pulled up on a string. Past the stomach it went, slipping through organs left exposed by the gaping wound, and when it reached the spot directly under the palm of D’s hand, the crunch of meat and bone reverberated. It gave a scream in its death throes, but that ended soon enough.
D pulled his left hand away. The tiny mouth in the middle of his palm opened. From it, something like a catfish tail wriggled out, but it was soon sucked back in. Once again, there was the crunching sounds of mastication, and then its tongue lolled out to lick its lips before disappearing, lips and all.
Without even a glance at Borgoff, who was now a true corpse, D turned in the girl’s direction. She’d fallen by Mayerling’s side. Checking her pulse, Leila looked at D and shook her tear-streaked face from side to side.
One of Mayerling’s claws was jabbing into the girl’s chest. The girl had taken hold of it and thrust it into her own bosom.
D’s gaze was somewhat weary as he looked down at the amazingly serene countenance she wore in death. He heard Leila’s voice from somewhere. Love’s so great . . . So why does it have to go so wrong?
The human and the Noble—each died as they’d lived. The human as a human, the Noble as a Noble . . .
“She said thank you,” Leila said absentmindedly.
D took the lock of hair out of his coat pocket. That was all that remained of the girl now.
Some time later, the drifter—who’d received a large sum in gold from the gorgeous young man in black to bury the pair—stepped into the lobby. The wind that slipped in with him blew the strands of hair from where they’d been placed on the girl’s shoulder, scattering them randomly across the empty hall.
—
At the entrance to the spaceport, Leila got down off D’s horse. “I’m going to this town up north,” she said to the gorgeous countenance trained on her. “It’s a little place, and it’s always covered with snow, but this young guy who runs the butcher shop there asked me to marry him once. He’s the only guy who ever knew my last name and said it didn’t matter. By now, he’s probably got a wife and kids already, but then he said he’d wait as long as he had to. I’m sorta counting on that.”
D nodded. “Godspeed,” he said.
“Right back at you.”
D urged his horse forward. Leila remained stock still behind him, and about the time the blue darkness was starting to hide her, a faint smile slipped to D’s lips. If Leila had caught sight of it, she probably would’ve reflected with pride on how her parting words had inspired it until the end of her days.
It was just such a smile.
JOURNEY BY NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
—
I
—
On the Frontier, nothing was considered more dangerous than a journey by night.
Claiming the night was their world, the Nobility had once littered the globe with monsters and creatures of legend, as if to adorn the pitch black with a touch of deadly beauty. Those same repugnant creatures ran rampant in the land of darkness even after the dominance of the Nobility had faded. That was how the vampires bared their fangs at the way of the world, a human idea that ordained the light of day as the time for action and the dark of night for restfulness. The darkness of night was the greatest of truths, the vampires claimed, and the ruler of the world. Farewell, white light of summer.
That was why the night was filled with menace. The moans of dream demons lingered in the wind, and the darkness whispered the threats of dimension-ripping beasts. Just beyond the edge of the woods glowed eyes the color of jasper. So many eyes. Even well-armed troops sent into devastated sections of the Capital felt so much relief after they’d slipped through the blocks of dilapidated apartment complexes they’d flop down right there on the road.
Out on the Frontier it was even worse. On the main roads, crude way-stations had been built at intervals between one lodging place and the next. But, when the sun went down on one of the support roads linking the godforsaken villages, travelers were forced to defend themselves with nothing more than their own two hands and whatever weapons they could carry. That was why there were only two kinds who would actually choose to travel by night. The Nobility. And dhampirs. Particularly if the dhampir was a Vampire Hunter.
Scattering the shower of moonlight far and wide, the shadowy form of a horse and rider climbed a desolate hill. The mount was just an average cyborg horse, but the features of the rider were as clean and clear as a jewel, like the strange beauty of the darkness and the moon crystallized. Every time the all-too-insistent wind touched him, it trembled with uncerta
inty, whirled, and headed off bearing a whole new air. Carrying a disquieting aura. His wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, the ink black cape and scarf darker than darkness, and the scabbard of the elegant longsword that adorned his back were all faded and worn enough to stir imaginings of the arduous times this traveler had seen.
The young traveler had his eyes closed, perhaps to avoid the wind-borne dust. His profile was so graceful it seemed the Master Craftsman in heaven above had made it His most exquisite work. The rider appeared to be thoroughly exhausted and immersed in a lonely sleep. Sleep—for him it was a mere break in the battle, but a far cry from peace of mind.
Something else mixed with the groaning of the wind. The traveler’s eyes opened. A lurid light coursed into them, then quickly faded. His horse never broke its pace. A little over ten seconds was all they needed to reach the summit of the hill. Now the other sounds were clear. The crack of a gun and howls of wild beasts.
The traveler looked down at the plain below, spying a mid-sized motor home that was under attack. Several lesser dragons were prowling around it—more “children of the night” sown by the Nobility. Ordinarily, their kind dwelt in swamplands farther to the south, but occasionally problems with the weather controllers would send packs of dragons north. The migration of dangerous species was a serious problem on the Frontier.
The motor home was already half-wrecked. Holes had been ripped in the roofs of both the cab and the living quarters, and the lesser dragons kept sticking their heads in. The situation was clear just from the smoking scraps of wood, the sleeping bags, and a pair of—partially eaten and barely recognizable human bodies lying in front of the motor home. Due to circumstances beyond their control—most likely something to do with their propulsion system—the family had been forced to camp out instead of sleeping in their vehicle like they should. But words couldn’t begin to describe how foolhardy they’d been to expect one little campfire to keep the creatures that prowled the night at bay. There were three sleeping bags. But there weren’t three corpses.
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