“What do you mean by calling me an old pervert? Why, you … you little bastard! To say something like that about the mayor even in jest ... A pervert of all things! I’ll have you know ... ”
The old man had lost all control. He might hold all the real power in town, but he was still just the mayor of one tiny village. Simply touch on one of his sore spots, and his emotional restraints would burst. In that, he wasn’t so different from the thugs behind him.
From the back, Greco bellowed, “They’re making fools of us! C’mon boys, don’t pay them no nevermind. Let’s grab them and burn the damn house down!”
Cries of “Hell yeah!” and “Damn straight!” resounded from the rowdies.
“Hold everything! You pull any of that crap and you’ll answer to me!”
The rebukes flew from Sheriff Dalton. For a moment, Doris’ expression was placid. Though still under thirty, the sincere and capable sheriff was someone she was willing to trust. The hoodlums stopped moving, too.
“Are you with them, Sheriff?” Doris asked in a low voice.
“I need you to understand something, Doris. I’ve got a job to uphold as sheriff in this here village. And checking out your neck is part of it. I don’t want things getting out of hand. If it’s nothing, then one peek will do. Take your scarf off and let Doc have a look.”
“He’s right,” Dr. Ferringo said, rising in his saddle. He was about the same age as the mayor, but thanks to his studies of medicine in the Capital, he had the intelligent look of a distinguished old gentleman. Because Doris and Dan’s father had been a student of his at the education center, this good-natured man worried about their welfare on a daily basis. Before him alone, Doris couldn’t hold her head up. “No matter what the result may be, we won’t do wrong by you. You leave it to me and the sheriff.”
“No way, she goes to the asylum!” Greco’s spiteful words came from the back. “In this village, we got a rule that anyone that gets bit by a Noble goes to the asylum, no matter who they are. And when we can’t get rid of the Noble … heh heh … then we chuck them out as monster bait!”
The sheriff whipped around and roared, “Shut up, you damn fool!”
Greco was shocked into an embarrassed silence, but he drew power from the fact that he was surrounded by his hired hands. “Well, put a badge on you and you get pretty damn tough. Before you give me any more back talk, check out the bitch’s neck. After all, that’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?”
“What’d you say, boy?” The sheriff’s eyes had a look that could kill. At that same moment, the hoods were going for their backs and waists with their gunhands. An ugly situation was developing.
“Stop it,” the mayor barked bitterly at the entire company. “What’ll we prove by fighting among ourselves? All we have to do is take a look at the girl’s neck and we’ll be done here.”
The sheriff and the hoods had no choice but to begrudgingly go along with that. “Doris,” the sheriff called out to her in a gruffer tone than before, “you’d best take that scarf off.”
Doris tightened her grip on the whip.
“And if I say I don’t wanna?”
The sheriff fell silent.
“Get her!”
With Greco’s cry, the mounted thugs raced right and left. Doris’ whip uncoiled for action.
“Stop!” the sheriff shouted, but it looked like his commands would no longer do the trick, and just when the battle was about to be joined—
The toughs all stopped moving at once. Or to be more accurate, their mounts had jerked to a halt.
“What’s gotten into you? Move it!”
Even a kick from spurred heels couldn’t make the horses budge. If the men could’ve looked into their horses’ eyes, they might have glimpsed a trace of ineffable horror. A trace of overwhelming terror that wouldn’t permit the horses to be coerced any further, or even to flee. And then the eyes of every man focused on the gorgeous youth in black who stood blocking the front door, though no one had any idea when he’d appeared. Even the sunlight seemed to grow sluggish. Suddenly, a gust of wind brushed across the fields and the men turned away, exchanging uneasy looks.
“Who the hell are you?” The mayor tried his level best to sound intimidating, but there was no hiding the quiver in his voice. The youth had about him an air that churned the calm waters of the human soul.
Doris turned around and was amazed, while Dan’s face shined with delight.
Without a word, D stopped Doris from saying whatever she was about to say and stepped in front of the Langs as if to shield them. His right hand held a longsword. “I’m D. I’ve hired on with these people.”
He looked not at the mayor, but at the sheriff as he spoke.
The sheriff gave a little nod. He could tell at a glance what the youth before them really was. “I’m Sheriff Dalton. This here’s Mayor Rohman, and Dr. Ferringo. The rest back there don’t count for much.” After that reasonable introduction, he added, “You’re a Hunter, aren’t you? I see it in your eyes, the way you carry yourself. I seem to recall hearing there was a man of unbelievable skill traveling across the Frontier, and that his name was D. They say his sword is faster than a laser beam or some such thing.” Those words could be taken as fearful or praising, but D was silent.
The sheriff continued in a hard voice. “Only, they say that man’s a Hunter, and he specializes in vampires. And that he’s a dhampir himself.”
There were gasps. The village notables and hoods all froze. As did Dan.
“Oh, Doris! Then you really have been ...”
Dr. Ferringo barely squeezed the hopeless words from his throat.
“Yes, the girl’s been bitten by a vampire. And I’ve been hired to destroy him.”
“At any rate, the mere fact that she’s been bitten by a vampire is reason enough not to let her remain at large. She goes to the asylum,” the mayor declared.
“Nothing doing,” Doris shot back flatly. “I’m not going anywhere and leaving Dan and the farm unattended. If you’re hellbent on doing it, you’ll have to take me away by force.”
“Okay then,” Greco groaned. The girl’s manner and speech, defiant to the bitter end, reawakened his rancor at being spurned. He gave a toss of the chin to his thugs, whose eyes burned with the same shadowy fire as a serpent’s.
The rowdies were about to dismount in unison, but at that moment their horses reared up simultaneously. There was nothing they could do. Each gave their own cry of “Oof” or “Ow,” and every last one of them was thrown to the ground. The sunny air was filled with moans of pain and the whinnying of horses.
D returned his gaze to the sheriff. Whether or not the sheriff comprehended that a single glare from the Hunter had put the horses on end was unclear.
An indescribable tension and fear flowed between the two of them.
“I have a proposal.” At D’s words, the sheriff nodded his assent like he was sleepwalking. “Hold off on doing anything about the girl until I’ve finished my work. If we come out of it okay, that’s fine. If we don’t ...”
“You can rest assured I’ll take care of myself. If he’s beaten by the lord, I’ll drive a stake through my own heart.” Doris gave a satisfied nod.
“Don’t let her fool you! This jerk’s in league with the Nobility. You shouldn’t be making deals with him—he’s out to turn every last person in Ransylva into a vampire, I’m sure of it!” Having been thrown to the ground for the second time that day, Greco was still down on all fours, screaming. “Let’s do away with the bitch. No, better yet, give her to the lord. That way, he won’t go after any of the other women.”
With a pffft! a four-inch-wide pillar of flame erupted from the ground right in front of Greco’s face. The earth boiled from a blast of more than twenty thousand degrees, and the flames leapt to Greco’s greasy face, searing his upper lip. He tumbled backwards with a beastly howl of agony.
“Say anything else bad about my sister and your head’ll be next,” Dan threatened, perfec
tly aligning the barrel of his laser rifle with Greco’s face. Though it’s true the weapon had no kick, it was still unheard of for a child a good deal shorter than the weapon’s length to be skilled enough to hit a target dead-on.
Far from angry, the sheriff wore a grin that said, “You done good, kid.”
D addressed the sheriff softly.
“As you can see, we have a fierce bodyguard on our side. You could try and plow through us, but a lot of people will probably get hurt unnecessarily. Just wait.”
“Well, some of them could do with a little hurting if you ask me,” said the sheriff, glancing briefly at the hoodlums moaning behind him. “What do you make of this, Doc?”
“Why don’t you ask me?!” the mayor screamed, veins bulging. “You think we can trust this drifter? We should send her to the asylum, just like my boy says! Sheriff, bring her in right this moment!”
“The evaluation of vampire victims falls to me,” Dr. Ferringo said calmly, and then he produced a cigar from one of his inner pockets and put it in his mouth. It wasn’t a cheap one like the local knock-off artists hand rolled with eighty percent garbage. This was a high-class cigar in a cellophane wrapper that bore the stamp of the Capital’s Tobacco Monopoly. These were Dr. Ferringo’s treasure. He gave a little nod to Doris.
Her whip shot out with a wa-pish!
“Oof!” The mayor gave an utterly hysterical cry and grabbed his nose. With one slight twist of Doris’ wrist, her whip had taken the cigar from the doctor’s mouth and crammed it up one of the mayor’s nostrils.
Ignoring the mayor, whose entire face was flushed with rage, the doctor declared loudly, “Very well, I find Doris Lang’s infection of vampirism to be of the lowest possible degree. My orders are rest at home for her. Sheriff Dalton and Mayor Rohman, do you concur?”
“Yessir,” the sheriff replied with a nod of satisfaction, but suddenly he looked straight at D with the intimidating expression of a man sworn to uphold the law. “Under the following conditions. I’ll take the word of a damn-good Hunter and hold off on any further discussion. But let me make one thing crystal clear—I don’t want to have to stake you folks through the heart. I don’t want to, but if that time should come, I won’t give it a second thought.” And then, throwing the Lang children a look of pathos, he bid them farewell. “I’m looking forward to the day I can enjoy the juice of those Gargantua-breed grapes of yours. All right, you dirty dogs, mount up and make it snappy! And I’m warning you, any of you so much as make a peep about this back in town, I’ll throw you in the electric pokey, mark my words!”
.
The crowd disappeared over the hill, glancing back now and then with looks of hatred, compassion, and, from some, encouragement. D was about to go into the house when Doris asked him to wait. He turned to her coolly, and then she said, “You sure are strange for a Hunter. You might’ve taken on some work you didn’t have to, and I can’t pay you for it.”
“It’s not about work. It’s about a promise.”
“A promise? To who?”
“To your little bodyguard over there,” he said with a toss of his chin. Then, noticing Dan’s stiff expression, he asked, “What’s wrong? You hate me because I’m supposedly ‘in league with the Nobility’?”
“Nope.”
As he shook his head, the boy’s face suddenly crumpled in on itself and he started to cry.
The young hero who’d put Greco in his place minutes earlier now returned to being an eight-year-old boy. He blubbered away as he threw his arms around D’s waist. This child had rarely cried since the death of his father three years earlier. As he watched his sister struggling along as a woman on her own, the boy had secretly nurtured his own stores of pride and determination in his little heart. Naturally, life on the Frontier was hard and lonely for him too. When his youthful heart felt he might be robbed of his only blood relative, he forgot himself and latched onto not his sister, but rather to the man who’d only arrived the day before.
“Dan ...”
Doris reached for her brother’s shoulder with one hand, but D gently brushed it away. Before long, the boy’s cries started to taper off, and D quietly planted one knee on the wooden floor of the front porch, looking the boy square in his tear-streaked face.
“Listen to me,” he said in a low but distinct voice. Noticing the unmistakable ring of encouragement in his voice, Doris opened her eyes in astonishment.
“I promise you and your sister I’ll kill the Noble. I always keep my word. Now you have to promise me something.”
“Sure.” Dan nodded repeatedly.
“From here on out, if you want to scream and cry, that’s your prerogative. Do whatever you like. But whatever you do, don’t make your sister cry. If you think your crying will set her off too, then hold it in. If you’re being selfish and your sister starts to cry, make her smile again. You’re a man, after all. Okay?”
“Sure!” The boy’s face was radiant. It glowed with an aura of pride.
“Okay, then do your big brother a favor and feed his horse. I’ll be heading out on business soon.”
The boy raced off, and D went into the house without another word.
“D, I ...” Doris sounded like something was weighing greatly on her.
The Vampire Hunter ignored her words, and said simply, “Come inside. Before I head out, I want to put a little protective charm on you.” And then he vanished down the dark and desolate hall.
THE VAMPIRE COUNT LEE
CHAPTER 3
.
From the farm he rode hard north by northwest for two hours, until he came to a spot where a massive ashen citadel towering quietly atop a hillock loomed menacingly overhead. This was the castle of the local lord—the home of Count Magnus Lee.
Even the shower of midday sunlight changed color here, and a nauseating miasma seemed to come from the morbid expanse of land surrounding the castle. The grass was green as far as the eye could see, and the trees were laden with succulent fruit, but not a single bird could be heard. Still, as one would expect around noon on a sunny day, there were no signs of life in the vampire’s castle. Constructed to mimic the castles of the distant middle ages, the walls were dotted with countless loopholes. The dungeon and courtyards were surrounded by broad, stone stairways that linked them together, but there was no sign of android sentries on any of them. The castle was, to all appearances, deserted.
But D had already sensed the castle’s bloodied nocturnal form, and the hundreds of electronic eyes and vicious weapons that lay in wait for their next victim.
The surveillance satellite in geo-stationary orbit 22,240 miles above the castle—as well as the uncounted security cameras disguised as fruit or spiders—sent the castle’s mother-computer images so detailed that an observer could count the pores of the intruder’s skin. The photon cannons secreted in the loopholes had their safety locks switched off, and they were drawing a bead on several hundred points all over the intruder’s body.
As the Nobility was fated to live by night alone, electronic protection during the day was an absolute necessity. No matter how much mystic-might the vampires might wield by night, in the light of day they were feeble creatures, easily destroyed by a single thrust of a stake. It was for precisely this reason that the vampires had used all their knowledge of psychology and cerebral biology in their attempts to plant fear in the human mind throughout the six or seven millennia of their reign. The results of this tactic were clear: even after the vampire civilization had long since crumbled—it was rare to catch even a glimpse of one about—they could take residence in the midst of their human “foes” and, like a feudal lord, hold complete mastery over the region.
According to what Doris told D before he set out, the villagers in Ransylva had taken up sword and spear a number of times in the past, endeavoring to drive their lord off their lands. However, as soon as they set foot within the castle grounds, black clouds began swirling in the sky above, the earth was rent wide, lightning raged, and not sur
prisingly, they were ultimately routed before they even reached the moat.
Not giving in so easily, a group of villagers made a direct appeal to the Capital and succeeded in getting the government’s precious Anti-Gravity Air Corps to execute a bombing mission. Because the government was afraid of depleting its stores of energy or explosives, however, it wouldn’t authorize more than a single bombing run. The defense shields around the castle prevented that single attack from accomplishing much before it was forced to return home. The following day, villagers were found butchered with positively unearthly brutality, and, by the time the villagers had seen the vampires’ vengeance play out, the flames of resistance were utterly snuffed.
Home to the feudal lord who would taste D’s blade, the castle the Hunter approached was the sort of demonic citadel that kept the world in fear of the now largely legendary vampires.
Perhaps that was what brought a haggard touch to D’s visage. No, as a Vampire Hunter he should’ve been quite familiar with the fortifications of the vampires’ castle. As proof, he rode his horse without the slightest trace of trepidation to where the drawbridge was raised. But against the lord and his iron-walled castle, crammed with most advanced electronics, what chance of victory did a lone youth with a sword have?
Blazing-white light could have burnt through his chest at any moment, but a tepid breeze merely stroked his ample black hair, and soon he arrived at the edge of a moat brimming with dark blue water. The moat must have been nearly twenty feet wide. His eyes raced across the walls as he pondered his next move, but when he put his hand to his pendant the drawbridge barring the castle gate amazingly began to descend with a heavy, grating noise. With earth-shaking force, the bridge was laid.
“It is a great pleasure to receive you,” a metallic voice called out from nowhere in particular. It was computer-synthesized speech—the ultimate in personality simulation. “Please proceed into the castle proper. Directions shall be transmitted to the brain of milord’s mount. Please pardon the fact no one was here to greet you.”
Vampire Hunter D Page 5
