Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts One and Two

by Pale Fallen Angel (Parts 1

  “We’re dealing with a Noble here.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” he declared in a tone brimming with confidence. However, suddenly crinkling his brow, he added, “But to be honest, it was just too easy. She wasn’t surprised at all by my dolls.”

  The pair’s plan had been to throw her off guard and then release the net, and the results had been satisfactory. However, there was still something they couldn’t understand.

  “It looks like she’s Balazs’s mistress. With her as a hostage, it’ll be child’s play to lure the baron out. He’ll probably walk right into a trap for the honor of the Nobility and all that crap,” Mario said, looking down at the woman and laughing. “But from where I’m sitting, she sure is one fine-looking lady. Hey, you ever had a piece of a Noblewoman?”

  Crimson Stitchwort was stupefied, exclaiming, “Come on—you can’t be serious!”

  “She’s out cold, after all. Plus, we wouldn’t have to take the net off her. Even if we let her loose from the waist down, she still won’t be able to do anything.”

  “Count me out.”

  “Okay, have it your way. But it wouldn’t be easy for me to do my thing with you looking over my shoulder. Make yourself scarce, will you?”

  “I’m not trying to be a pain. Just don’t do this.”

  “Stay out of this, okay?!”

  For the briefest instant, the two assassins on the branch glared at each other. But Crimson Stitchwort was the first to turn his face away indignantly, saying, “Do what you like, then. I’m going on ahead. Don’t call out for me.”

  The next instant, the branch dipped straight down and he was swallowed by the darkness below.

  “Sheesh, what a pansy!” Mario remarked spitefully.

  Hauling Miska up, he reached over to paw at her body with his right hand—and had his breath taken away.

  In the moonlight, the net glowed like some weird fog, and within it, Miska’s body was bound tight by nigh-invisible threads, just as Mario had said. Her right shoulder and breast were half exposed and the left side of her dress had risen greatly, leaving her pale and alluring thigh exposed almost to the waist. But more seductive than anything was the way her face was twisted with pain. She was a veritable work of forbidden sculpture that would never be seen by human eyes except here, deep in the forest on a moonlit night.

  The second his eyes saw her damp red lips make an O and his ears heard the faintest moan that O allowed to escape, Mario lost his last fragment of rational thought. One swipe of his nails easily severed the strings, and her pale and damp thighs spilled out onto the branch.

  “I wonder what happens when Noble blood and human blood mix? Eh?”

  Holding both her slim ankles, the puppet master spread her legs far apart.

  What happened then, the moon alone knew.

  What D heard was an explosion that sounded like a great hole opening in the heavens. As the girls jumped back up, D commanded, “Get in the carriage.”

  Shutting the door, he then raced off with the wind whirling in his wake.

  When he arrived at the clearing, there was no need for him to look up above. Miska was standing in the center of the clearing. There was no sign of Mario.

  “What happened?” asked the Hunter.

  D’s senses told him there’d been no change at all in the sky or on the earth. The wind had been stirred, but that was all. After an explosion, such stillness was difficult to comprehend.

  “Nothing,” Miska mumbled, and then she collapsed on the spot.

  As D gazed down at her, his face was palely illuminated by the moon. Hard beyond words, his expression still made it clear that even he feared this kind of bizarre development.

  THE MAGICIAN’S KINGDON

  CHAPTER 1

  I

  __

  Dawn came without either the baron or Hugh returning.

  After laying the still-disoriented Miska into her carriage and leaving Taki and May in the baron’s vehicle, D announced that he was going to head back to where the aircraft had crashed.

  “I wanna go, too,” May said, clinging to the Hunter like a shadow. If Taki hadn’t stopped her, she probably would’ve gone right after him.

  “Leave this to me,” Taki said.

  With her words hovering behind him, D rode off on his horse.

  Along the way, his left hand inquired in a hoarse voice, “You think she’ll be okay?”

  “Which one?”

  “Taki. Because if she starts acting crazy, May will be in danger, too. Did you leave her behind because you think she’s still okay?”

  “No, because she’d be in the way.”

  “I suspected as much. What’s more, we’ve got that vampiress—that’s even dicier. There’s definitely something possessing her.”

  “We checked her.”

  “Then it must be something we wouldn’t find that way. What comes to mind is—”

  “We’ll find out eventually. Very soon, I’d say.”

  “Hmm, I suppose that’s true. But you know, I’ve got a really bad feeling.”

  Without replying, D rode all the way to the crash site in silence.

  A bizarre scene awaited him there in the sunlight. No matter where he looked, there was no sign of the aircraft. Of course, D hadn’t actually seen it crash in the first place. All he could do was guess at the area based on the speed of the aircraft and the angle of its descent.

  As he sat on his mount with eyes gleaming, D seemed to find something. Dismounting, he walked over to one corner of the clearing. What he picked up there was a thin shred of cloth. It wasn’t old. And it was stuck to a clump of brush.

  “Looks like this was the end of the line for the airplane,” said his left hand.

  Indeed it was.

  Putting the scrap into his pocket, D turned his gaze to the shadowy depths of a grove of trees. While Hugh might be another matter, the baron would probably be lying in there somewhere where the sunlight couldn’t penetrate the branches and leaves. This was probably the last thing in the world a Vampire Hunter should be doing, but at any rate, the person in question was his employer.

  Just as D was about to head in that direction, the wind whispered to him.

  The forest is . . . dangerous.

  The thread-thin voice was that of Baron Balazs.

  “Where are you?”

  Can’t really be sure . . . of your position . . . but there’s a large rock . . . on the south end of the clearing.

  Turning his head ever so slightly, D saw it.

  There’s a fissure under it. That’s where I am.

  “What are you doing?”

  What do you think I’m doing—listening to music? The sun came up before I could head back.

  “You were searching for Hugh all this time?”

  There was no answer. He wasn’t the sort of man that needed to reply.

  “Stay there for the time being. I’ll look for him.”

  I ran into an odd character. Vince was his name, and he didn’t die even after I put a spear through him. He can turn all the blood in his body to poison. I’m sure I separated his head from his body, but when I came back after searching another area, the corpse had vanished. Apparently, “Vince” stands for “invincible.”

  “One of the Hunters?”

  Yes.

  As if he had no further interest in the matter, D wheeled his horse around. Regardless of what he may have thought of this new foe, nothing could be gleaned from his gorgeous but expressionless visage.

  These woods are strange, the wind told D in the baron’s voice. Though there’s been no change from what I saw last night, they seem completely different.

  That being the case, he had no choice but to enter them—that’s what it meant to be the young man named D.

  “I’ll say it’s strange,” a gleeful voice remarked from the vicinity of the Hunter’s left hand the second he rode in among the trees.

  Midday darkness enveloped the rider and his mount. Shadows of the countl
ess branches interlaced on either side of him. The scant light and crushing darkness cast a hazy patchwork on D’s handsome features.

  The forest was deep, but nevertheless, a number of narrow paths ran through it. Though most were game trails, the wider ones had surely been left by humans who’d come hunting and gathering. Mixed in among the verdant grass and moss were pretty colors like something out of an artist’s sketch—probably wildflowers. Occasionally there was the beating of wings as a black silhouette flew by overhead.

  While D looked to be advancing on his steed as if there were no problem at all, every fiber of his being was focused through his five senses. Needless to say, at present he could isolate each sound and find the source of not only every cry from the birds and the beasts, but also the scratching of the bugs burrowing down into the moss and the rustle of grass and leaves swaying with the breeze.

  Off to the left-hand side of the trail towered a massive tree that was a good thirty feet in diameter. Its bark made one wonder how many millennia it’d seen, giving way to countless crevices and knots and emitting a dull glow here and there. The glow came from lumina moss, which was said to grow only on trees of considerable age. It could be boiled to make a tea that proved highly effective in treating lymphatic disorders.

  From behind the great tree came a pair of figures. Hugh—and an old man in a black tuxedo and silk hat. The pointed tails of his coat nicely complemented his flowing beard. The jewels encrusting his bow tie put a red glow in D’s eyes.

  “Nice to meet you . . . although technically that’s not correct. We met once by the side of the road. I am Lord Johann—but people call me the Trail Magician.”

  Though the old man waited a bit, D made no move, so with a shrug of his shoulders he continued, “Can’t be bothered to introduce yourself? D, isn’t it? My assistant is imposing on your hospitality.”

  D’s mouth finally opened as he said, “Release the child.”

  Perhaps sensing something in that quiet tone, the magician shrank back.

  “And if I don’t—there’ll be violent deeds in place of words? I don’t know which of us would prove the victor.”

  Twisting his lengthy beard, he smirked. The teeth exposed by his thin lips were pointed like a carnivore’s.

  “However, I shan’t let you have this boy. If you want him back—well, now, why don’t you throw down that sword for a start and show me where I might find the baron?”

  Though the magician’s face wore a smile, his eyes were cruel as could be.

  D’s right hand went for the sword on his back. He made no fuss about doing as he was told—or so Lord Johann must’ve thought as a grin split his face, but at that moment, he reeled backward wildly, his body spinning around two or three times. Something long and thin was jutting from his right eye—a needle of rough wood. The hand reaching for the sword had drawn it from a hiding place on the sheath and hurled it with lightning speed, though no one who’d witnessed it would’ve ever believed it.

  “You—you son of a bitch! You have some nerve!”

  Lord Johann’s face paled as the sound of hoofbeats rolled over him. Without giving the man time to get back on his feet, D raced toward him on his horse.

  A flash of light shot out from the man on horseback.

  With the sword that’d cleaved Lord Johann’s head still in hand, D turned his mount around. In the meantime, the magician ran unsteadily for the cover of the gigantic tree. Though D’s blade seemingly split not only the man’s silk hat but the head beneath it, it sent an odd sensation into the Hunter’s right hand.

  At the end of the blade’s graceful curve hung a hat—and not the magician’s top hat, but a bowler. Or so it appeared for a second before it melted into a black tar that then covered the entire sword.

  Not even glancing at the boy on the road—ensuring that there were no foes nearby came first—D leapt off his horse’s back at Lord Johann, who was attempting to circle around behind the massive tree. D was a beautiful black wind in flight. The horizontal swipe of his blade narrowly missed the magician’s head, biting into the tree trunk instead. But who would’ve ever thought it’d bounce off?

  Furrowing his brow only for an instant, D then chased after Lord Johann, circling around the trunk himself. But the magician was gone. Not even a trace of his presence remained. D’s ultra-keen senses confirmed that he’d neither risen up into the heavens nor burrowed into the earth.

  Giving no further chase, D looked at his blade. Apparently the melted bowler hat was meant to dull the edge it coated.

  The Hunter returned to the road.

  Hugh stood in a daze in the same spot as before. The only thing different now was the length of rope that hung down to his hands. He wasn’t holding it up. Rather, it hung down from the sky.

  D looked up.

  The sunlit gaps between the branches opened into a round canopy. The rope ran right up into the center of an opening in the trees.

  Even after Hugh took hold of the rope with one hand, D still didn’t move. Perhaps not realizing D was there, the boy began to climb the gently swaying line as if he were a monkey. After he’d climbed about fifteen feet, a needle of white wood flew from the Hunter’s right hand. Just as it was about to strike, the rope twisted as if possessing a will of its own and batted the needle back down. And the writhing didn’t stop there. As if to guard against D’s next attack, the rope swiftly began to rise along with the still frantically climbing boy, and in no time at all they had vanished into the heavens.

  D got back on his horse. He looked up high. But he didn’t find the heavens he sought.

  Something resembling a black cloud had descended from the sky, and what spattered against the ground was fresh blood. Striking with such force that it tore at the earth, it must’ve fallen from an incredible height. As he watched, a mass the same color whizzed right by his eyes. Warping the ground and bouncing back up again were the pair of arms that’d been taken off at the boy’s shoulder. A bloody spray went out. The arms were followed by a pair of legs. There was a loud thud. A torso sunk into the black earth. Taking the shock from the bottom up, the organs sprayed up through the stump where his head had once been. The last part splattered like a rotten tomato.

  From the back of his horse, D gazed at what had once been a human body. Each piece still had clothing attached—Hugh’s clothes. Even the horribly mangled head seemed to retain the features of the brave young boy.

  “What’s all this?” a voice asked from the vicinity of the Hunter’s left hand.

  “It’s a fake,” said D.

  Although it seemed the Hunter had been right out in the middle of the bloody rain, his nigh-translucent skin wasn’t marred by even a drop of vermilion.

  “Oh, I see. Not a bad job. But it’s not a synthetic form. It’s a real human body. That bastard—he grabbed another kid just to put a scare into you.”

  And the magician had apparently butchered him in cold blood as well. While the child had looked exactly like Hugh, D’s eyes had undoubtedly found discrepancies in the severed limbs.

  “What are you gonna do?” the voice asked in a leaden tone, but the Hunter’s gorgeous features remained like an icy blossom as he didn’t so much as arch an eyebrow.

  Based on that image, it would’ve been difficult to imagine him then sending his coat whirling out as he dismounted. Once he’d gotten down and taken a single step, the corpse suddenly moved. The twisted pair of arms slid over to the torso that was stuck in the earth, planting their palms against the ground to lift themselves up and press their stumps to the gaping wounds at either shoulder. The fingers moved. Almost seeming at a loss, at first the digits of one hand and then the other twitched, but finally growing more accustomed, all ten fingers worked together, curling and bending before they began to twist the opposing wrist. After this continued for about twenty seconds, the arms finally put their palms flat against the earth, and after many attempts at straightening their elbows, they lifted the torso out of the hole in the ground once more. T
he pair of legs rolled over and attached themselves to the lower body. Accustomed to standing, the legs straightened, and the figure rose.

  By anyone’s estimation, it was a perfectly good body—well, perhaps not quite. All the limbs had been left twisted by the shock of striking the ground, and bones jutted out by the right elbow and left knee. A pulpy mess from the chest up, the torso was covered with blood, and it lacked a head as well.

  “He sliced it to pieces and yet he can still push it around? Must be one hell of a magician,” the hoarse voice said in apparent amazement, but the corpse showed no sign of stopping at its words, and now misshapen hands reached for the pulverized head on the ground.

  D quickly stepped forward.

  Beneath his blade, the diminutive torso was sliced in two. The manipulated corpse collapsed without ever witnessing the final act of misery.

  “I thought your sword wouldn’t be up to doing any cutting—nicely done,” the hoarse voice cooed in admiration.

  Cutting with a blade that shouldn’t be able to cut—D had the power to surpass mere physical phenomena.

  D went back to his horse. Wheeling the animal around, he slowly headed back the way he’d come.

  “The going is easy, easy—or that’s what the song used to say,” said the voice that trailed after him. “How did the rest go? It’s the trip back that’s scary . . . We’re headed in the opposite direction.”

  As if he’d already known this, D asked, “What happens if we keep going this way?”

  “There’ll be a trap, I suppose. After all, this is the magician’s kingdom.”

  The horse’s gait didn’t change at all—D chose to ride right into the lion’s den. Perhaps he thought that if he played into the enemy’s hands, it would bring him into contact with the one responsible.

  Unexpectedly, his horse came to a dead halt. The animal then reared up on its hind legs for dear life. Though D tugged at the reins, the cyborg horse didn’t respond. Its rear quarters went back a step and, unable to bear it any longer, the front legs came down again. But there was no ground beneath them. Where the earth was supposed to be, D saw a great void. The wind swirled behind them as they fell.