Vampire Hunter D Omnibus: Book Five

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

A new omnibus collecting volumes thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen of the Vampire Hunter D horror novel series!

The hunt continues in the bizarre far future of 12,090 A.D, where the immortal vampire lords who were the only winners of mankind’s nuclear war still oppress the human survivors who have pushed the blood-drinking fiends back to the lawless Frontier. Yet humanity too remains as quick as ever to prey upon itself, and where the law can’t bring safety or justice, the crescent blade of D will—assuming you meet the half-vampire wanderer’s price!

Vampire Hunter D Omnibus Book Five collects in full two different multi-part novels!

Twin-Shadowed Knight is a story in two parts—most apt, as the D’s investigation into a vampire’s dying words leads to a sorcery that splits the Hunter himself into two beings…the second D, full of passion, hunger, and carnal desire!

Then, the three-part Dark Road brings triple the thrill, as D crosses over the southern border into the realm of General Gaskell. No ordinary vampire noble, this immortal warlord survived his supposed death under the sun to command the loyalty of a veritable army of the undead, who have been given their silent marching orders—eliminate D!  

The Vampire Hunter D Omnibus Book Five collects volumes 13, 14, and 15 in author Hideyuki Kikuchi’s adventure horror series: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts One and Two, Dark Road Parts One and Two, and Dark Road Part Three. Illustrated by Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, the legend of D endures!

Release date: April 30, 2024

Publisher: Dark Horse Books

Print pages: 736

Sample

MUMACHAPTER 1

I

__

A heavy wind raced by. It bore a weight because it carried the molecules of what was termed a killing lust.

Two shadowy figures squared off on a desolate patch of earth. Whenever the wind passed them, it grew furious.

The sky was as dark as the afterworld.

Suddenly, one of the shadowy figures pounced. As he rose ten feet straight up, he swung both arms down.

Two spiteful flames erupted from the black earth, shooting straight for the figure still on the ground. Like lines drawn by a talented artist, the fiery streaks came together on the figure.

Two silver flashes crossed.

If fire is a physical phenomenon, it has to have mass and substance. Thus, it is possible for a greater mass and harder substance to deflect it.

The light from the flames bouncing off the stark cutting edge became a sword rising into the air. A simple leap made the second figure a sparrow in flight.

Faster than the figure in midair could rise to greater heights, the sword came straight down on him, splitting him from the crown of his head to the base of his neck.

The wind was stained red. As it slapped bright blood against the black earth, the two figures landed on their feet a dozen yards apart. One of them collapsed, while the other stalked across the ground.

Not even bothering to wipe his blade off, the victor returned it to the sheath on his back. There wasn’t a speck of gore on it. There was nothing special about the blade, but its speed had prevailed over the cohesive powers of the blood.

The wind had a fawning glow, for it had blown across the shadowy figure’s face. Deep, dark eyes gleaming beneath the wide-brimmed traveler’s hat, the line of a nose that was sure to send tens of millions of artists into despair, lips that quietly brimmed with a will heavier than anyone would ever know—

The wind had a request. Tell me your name, it said.

“D . . .” a voice called out.

The figure with his head split in two had called to him. Though already a death mask, his face wore a smile.

“D . . . Listen to me,” he said, even his voice that of the departed.

The heavens and earth roared, and the hem of the black coat hid D’s face. As if to shield him from the words of the dead. As if to keep him from hearing.

There was a sharp slap. A hand in a black glove had knocked his coat out of the way.

“Oh . . . so you intend to hear me out . . . One word will say it all . . . Of course . . . for you . . . that one word . . . might send you to hell.”

The figure on the ground was an old man with white hair and a white beard. His long robe was woven from metallic threads in a wide range of hues, and its distinctive color scheme declared that even among the Nobility, he was a necromancer of some stature.

The beautiful figure stood there without saying a word, as if he’d heard these words tens of thousands of times before.

The bisected and bloodied face split apart, and the old man raised his hands to hold it together again.

“Go to . . . Muma . . .” he said, his voice sounding like it came straight up from hell.

And as he finished speaking, he took his hands away, and something that might’ve been blood or brains oozed from the reopened skull.

A life that’d lasted who knew how long had ended.

Only the wind growled across the wilderness until a new voice was heard, saying, “Did he say, ‘Muma’?”

It sounded like it came from D’s left hand, which hung at ease by his side.

“What’s that mean?” D asked.

Signs of surprise seemed to rise from his left hand for a second.

“Damned if I know,” the dried, cracked voice responded. “Just the babbling of some guy about to die. A little memento to mess with you.”

The voice then mixed with groans of pain. D had squeezed his left hand into a tight fist.

“D-don’t . . . do . . . anything . . . stupid . . .”

The fist trembled. Finger and finger pressed together, and nails broke through skin and muscle. A thin red stream had begun to drip to the ground.

“Answer me,” D said.

“About what? Ow! I don’t know . . . anything at all . . .”

“What is ‘Muma’? A person? The name of a place? Or is it—”

“I . . . don’t . . . know . . .” the hoarse voice said, its manner changed so that it now sounded like it might throw up.

He gave his fist one more squeeze. Silence resulted. After maintaining the fearsome tension for several seconds, D opened his fingers. The blood that covered the palm of his hand was scattered by the wind.

D squinted his eyes. He

had no memories of this word Muma. And yet, his body told him of subtle changes. His blood was coursing faster by a thousandth of a second. D instinctively knew when something that small had changed.

Was it in his heart or his genes? It was like he’d felt a mysterious excitement from the second he’d heard the word Muma.

D turned his gaze to the far reaches of the gloom-shrouded plain.

Something roiled like smoke all along the horizon: a mob of countless figures shaken by the wind. Their vile forms were evident to D’s eyes alone. Arms like withered branches, fingers tapering into claws, skin that seemed born of corruption, cloudy eyes reminiscent of a dead fish, bodies covered with pustules—all of these creatures had been summoned from their graves deep in the earth by the necromancer who’d just been slain. Even D didn’t know what they actually were. Nor did he know what they were supposed to accomplish. Their overlord had just been reduced to a blood-soaked cadaver.

D gave a brief whistle. The sound of iron-shod hooves approaching rang out. Before the white cyborg horse could come to a stop, D was in the saddle. As he took up the reins, the horse went right into a gallop—in the opposite direction from the mob of misbegotten dead. And most likely toward the hell the necromancer had mentioned.

It was after midnight when the white horse and black rider blew into the village of Gilhagen like a monochrome cyclone. Street lamps glowed through the weighty darkness of the wee hours.

Atop a hill that was rather high, even for a village in the rolling terrain at the foot of a mountain, a house with roof and walls painted black squatted in the darkness. It didn’t have windows, either. It was impossible to tell if it had a door or not, but D stood in front of the house and brought his fist down just once.

A thin crack of light spread through the dark. The door that’d opened in response to that single knock couldn’t even be seen.

Standing there with a soot-stained lamp in hand was a gray-haired crone. She had a face that looked like leather pasted on a skull. The black leaf that covered her left eye must’ve served as an eye patch.

Opening a crack of a mouth, she said, “To be calling on the home of Origa, the greatest sorceress in the southern Frontier, at this hour, you must be prepared to sacrifice your life . . . if not your very soul.”

Her voice was like a chill wind gusting from a dark grotto.

“I will, if that’s your wish,” D said.

The sorceress’s eyes snapped wide open.

“That voice . . .” the crone said, blinking vigorously behind the light. “Yes, and that beautiful face . . . It can’t be . . . You’re—”

“I’ve come because there’s something I’d like to ask Origa the Sorceress.”

Before D had even finished speaking, the door opened wide.

A few minutes later, D sat at a heavy table, and the sorceress brought him a hot cup of tea. As she shot a mysterious look at a countenance so gorgeous it seemed to drink up darkness and light and even sound, she asked, “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve heard Origa the Sorceress specializes in memory regression.”

“That’s right. Humans, horses, birds, flame beasts, shadow eaters—hell, I can slip into the memories of any supernatural creature and make ’em recall the past. But—”

Origa stopped there, the expression wiped right off her face, as if she’d just committed some unpardonable sin. A face of unearthly beauty was right before her. The woman’s next words would be a betrayal—a betrayal of a beauty that couldn’t possibly

be human.

“But . . .” the old woman sputtered, trying desperately to retain her pride. “But . . . I won’t for you. Be on your way. I didn’t meet anyone tonight. Didn’t see anyone, no matter how gorgeous. I’ll believe that to my dying day.”

“Why are you afraid?” D asked from the other side of the little round table.

“I’m not afraid of anything, I’ll have you know.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met before. Or have we—”

“Hell, I’ve never laid eyes on you before. At any rate, kindly be on your way now. Or if you won’t leave, I will!”

“Please, restore my memory.”

The crone quaked at D’s words as if struck with palsy.

“I already told you . . . No more of this foolishness!”

“I’ll pay you ten times your normal rate. And I’ll do you a favor as well.”

“A favor?”

“I’ll give you a look into your own past.”

“You’re talking nonsense!” the crone said with a low laugh.

The laws of nature had decreed that sorcerers who could restore the memories of others couldn’t go back through their own.

D wasn’t smiling.

The crone stopped smiling, too. Licking her puckered mouth, she said in a parched, cracked voice, “You mean to tell me . . . you could do that? No, you could . . . I believe you could at that . . . you of all people. Nearly thirty bandits were cut down before my very eyes . . . back when I was five—and that’s the only thing I remember from my past.”

“How about it?”

As the question was put to her, the crone suddenly turned her gaze to the vicinity of D’s left hip. She’d gotten the feeling the hoarse query she’d just heard had come from there.

After a bit of consideration, the crone nodded and said, “Okay, my beautiful demon. My normal fee will suffice. That . . . that and the return of my past. Not that I doubt you or anything, but would you be so kind as to show me a little proof you can really do it?”

D’s left hand rose before the crone’s eyes, which were rocked by puzzlement. There was no glove on it.

When he reached across the table and touched that hand to her right temple, the crone’s body arched in her chair. Her expression changed. The fluctuations came at intervals of a fraction of a second. Anger, hatred, fear, joy, and finally sadness skimmed ruthlessly across her deeply wrinkled face, hammering her, teasing her, and then leaving.

Somewhere, the lid of a pot rattled quietly. Apparently she was boiling medicinal herbs. Before it rattled a second time, the crone sat back in her chair normally. Her whole body was suffused by a mysterious kind of peace unconnected to the relaxation of her muscles, and tears rolled from her eyes.

What had she seen?

Blinking repeatedly to stem the flow of tears, the crone then focused her gaze on D.

“You pass muster, D,” she said in a perfectly clear tone. “I remembered all manner of things. But instead of thanking you, I’ll see to it I give you what you want for certain. Come this way.”

Rising with the lamp in one hand, the crone began to walk toward the doorway, and then stumbled. Falling to the right before she could regain her balance, she was caught by the figure in black. D.

“You’re a surprisingly good

person at heart, D. Right this way.”

After stepping through the doorway and walking down the dark corridor a bit, the crone opened the door at the end.

The room was a dreary affair, with nothing but a metal bed and a chair.

“Lie down,” the crone told D, gesturing to the bed.

She then took a bamboo flute out of a niche in the wall.

“This is called the returning flute. It has a unique construction that allows it to extract memories from the brain. To date, I’ve used it on nearly twenty thousand people and supernatural critters, and not once has it failed.”

And yet, she hadn’t wanted to use it on D. The incredible swordsman the crone had seen when she was five must’ve been him after all. But what was it she feared she might glimpse in his past?

“Lie back,” Origa said, pointing to the bed and readying the flute.

In no time at all, the thin strains of a melody echoed from the instrument, moving to the ceiling and walls as it flowed through the room.

“First layer of the subconscious—passed,” Origa muttered in a low tone, although how she managed that with the flute still to her lips was a mystery.

The melody changed.

The secrets of the famed flute that could restore lost memories were its inner workings, mechanisms that made the memories replay, and this tune, which was known only to the sorceress’s clan.

D didn’t move. Was he sleeping? Was he even breathing, for that matter? 

 

As if entranced by his handsome visage, the crone said, “Second layer—no, let’s just dive straight down to the mystic layer.”

There was a ghastly ring to the voice of Origa the Sorceress, like she was sick from the smell of blood.

The mystic layer—that was a mysterious zone of the human mind only those of her line could reach.

Adjusting her grip on the instrument, Origa began to pipe a short, strange rhythm wholly unlike what she’d played thus far. Accompanied by light, the arrows of sound slipped into the ears of the gorgeous Hunter—no, they battered his brain directly.

Origa’s features grew indistinct—blurred by the sweat that had covered every inch of her in a split second.

Look what kind of misery had to be endured to call back lost memories! The body of the sorceress contorted and grew dehydrated, and she might have shed as much as a tenth of her weight. In exchange for that fearsome price, the notes produced by the magic flute seemed enough to make even a rock shudder, echoing in an eerie melody like the marching tune of a demonic army, orderly and awe inspiring.

At that moment, the first thing that could be called emotion suddenly raced across the face of the sleeping D. His right hand reached for the sword by his side.

“Don’t!”

Whose shout was that?

The woman’s screams, exploding from the little black house, were swallowed by a far deeper darkness. The sounds dragged long, long tails after them—then vanished unexpectedly.

Aside from that, this had been a particularly quiet evening.

__

Past noon on the following day—when the Hunter in black was more than 120 miles from the village—a villager who called on the home of Origa the Sorceress was left standing frozen and speechless upon discovering the crone’s body in pieces in the blood-spattered room.

__

II

__

Surprisingly, there were many types of travelers that one could expect to see on the highway. Medicine peddlers dressed in white with drug cases of the same hue slung from their shoulders and tricolored pennants of red, white, and blue flying high off the poles on their backs. Contract fighters in old-fashioned armored cars that had heavy machine guns and the barrels of rivet guns protruding from them and the words Warriors Available written in large letters on their sides. Traveling performers who did flips on top of carriages, disgorging flowers from their mouths, then striking them down with knives or gouts of flame. And so on, and so forth. And the eyes of all of them bulged in their sockets.

What some saw from the front and others from the rear was a cyborg horse galloping at terrific speed. But even those who recognized it as a horse still didn’t believe it. Cyborg horses couldn’t keep that kind of pace, and what was more, as it was passing them, a number of people saw a figure of unearthly beauty . . . and to some it looked as if said figure was actually running right alongside the horse. Whatever the case, by the time they could focus their eyes, both the cyborg horse and the human figure were dwindling in the distance.

Not even the bands of warriors astride their vaunted steeds or the riders of the Pony Express—who were said to have the fastest horses on the road—felt like challenging that pair, who had literally galloped along as if possessed by the dark lord of the winds.

It was D. However, the gorgeous young man had never raced like this in the past. Whenever he commanded his mount to run at full speed, the cyborg horse entered a mad gallop, as if in the grip of some unearthly spell. As a result, his horse moved as swiftly as a swallow in flight. But it couldn’t continue like that forever. If he saw that his cyborg horse had grown exhausted, D dismounted and ran alongside it to lighten its load. Needless to say, those times were few. His horse slowed down a bit, but keeping pace with a wildly galloping horse was something no human—or even Noble, for that matter—could do.

Nevertheless, the horse had been ruined.

Near the towns and villages, there were rest stops along the highway where travelers might obtain cyborg horses or energy bikes. The proprietor of the shop D entered glanced at the cyborg horse that’d collapsed after it galloped in, but by the time he realized it had died of excessive exhaustion, D had already selected a new mount, left a pile of coins that would also cover the burial costs of the old horse, and then disappeared into the distance in a cloud of dust.

In the past three days, he’d ridden twelve hundred miles without a moment’s rest, and he was on his third cyborg horse. He truly was riding at an insane pace. D’s unearthly aura took hold of the steed. But what was the purpose of that aura, and at what was it directed? Where was he going? And what was waiting there?

The far end of the desolate night plains had begun to take on a watery hue.

Wherever this young man

 went, people always met their fate. But whose might it be this time? Would it be D’s?

__

In the village of Sedoc—or to be precise, on the outskirts of the village—an incredible change took place on the twenty-sixth day of the third month of season A——. A group of elderly women on a pilgrimage from the east were staying at Sedoc House, the village inn, when all twenty of them suddenly suffered heart attacks in the night and died. After the sheriff’s department wrote up a perfunctory report, they were carted off to the morgue.

In the middle of the night, the janitor from the morgue rode to the sheriff’s office with bizarre news. One after another, the corpses in the morgue had gotten up, smashed through a stone wall, and begun to march off in single file toward “the red wasteland” on the village outskirts, by his account.

The sheriff railed about how they’d been bitten by a Noble and grilled the janitor on what the hell he’d been doing, but the poor janitor insisted there was absolutely no way a Noble could’ve gotten near them.

At any rate, talk soon turned to forming a search team and rounding up the corpses, but just then, the caretaker from a cemetery near the sheriff’s office bolted in with a face as pale as a dead man’s. He told them that every corpse in the entire cemetery had risen from its grave. After clawing up through ten feet of heavy dirt, they reached the surface and started walking.

The sheriff asked him where they were headed. But he already knew the answer.

“The red wasteland,” the cemetery caretaker replied.

An urgent appeal went out, and more than thirty men responded immediately, taking up their inevitable task as residents of the Frontier. They came with sharpened stakes and spears and bows in hand, quickly proceeding toward the outskirts of the village.

They were a third of the way to their destination when the massive earthquake struck. Heaven and earth rumbled. The ground undulated like waves across fabric, rapidly pitching from side to side. You could say it was a miracle that no one in the search party was harmed. Not even the horses had been able to flee, and they’d fallen to the ground and rolled around on their sides for what’d seemed like an eternity, though it was later learned that the trembling of the earth hadn’t lasted five seconds.

Still, the sheriff and a number of other brave souls were to be lauded for the way they decided to press on less than five minutes after the great quake had passed. Driving their cyborg horses as fast as they could, they arrived at the edge of a red plain where the composition of the soil made it look like blood, and were struck by a terror that effaced all other thoughts of strangeness as they froze on their mounts—or rather, with their mounts.

The red ground was missing.

What they saw was an outer ring that seemed to go on forever, dropping at a sharp angle into a great mortar-shaped depression. From the standpoint of natural phenomena, such an occurrence wasn’t inconceivable. What terrified the group was that along that vast brink—later the hole would be found to be a mile and a quarter in diameter—there was a mob of shadowy figures. Some clad in rags, others fairly well dressed, and still others nearly completely naked, they stood peering down at the bottom of that subsidence without moving a muscle, irrespective of age or sex. There was nothing about them that had the slightest semblance of human life—they had eyes as cloudy as those of dead fish, sunken cheeks with bones laid bare, and pale shapes wriggling in holes through their chests and bellies that

could only be maggots.

All of the village’s dead.

“No,” the caretaker said in a flat tone. “That’s not right. They aren’t just from our village cemetery. There are too many of them.”

At that point the sheriff sensed the presence of countless people behind him and heard their footsteps.

“Corpses,” someone shouted. The moonlight drank up his voice.

Behind them, dead beyond numbering were coming down the highway. And although the sheriff and his men didn’t notice it, they must’ve traveled quite some distance, since each was stark white with dust from the ankles down.

“What are they up to? What the hell are these things?”

Ignoring the sheriff’s muttered remarks, the walking dead marched on, trudging right past the living. And then, as if they’d been given a push from behind, all the dead who stood at the brink of the mortarlike depression leapt in at once. The row behind them followed suit, as did the one after that, and another, and another.

Their brains assailed by rank horror and the foul stench, the entire search party passed out. They were brought back to the village by the remaining members of their group.

And for two full days after that, the sheriff watched the procession of the dead to their mass grave.

Were there really that many bodies buried around the area? How much longer would this go on?

These concerns ate at every brain, leaving the townsfolk on the edge of madness. The next thing they knew, the procession of the dead had ended, but the villagers were left in a state of shock, roaming the streets like the newly dead.

A young man in black with heavenly beauty and an exhausted horse came into town with the wind whirling in his wake. Halting his horse in front of Sedoc House, the rider grabbed one of the unsteady villagers and asked, “What happened?”

The young man’s tone and his handsome features returned the stupefied villager to his senses. He told the young man everything he knew, from start to finish.

“Am I too late?” D muttered in a tone devoid of emotion—a voice of iron—and he prepared to get back on his horse.

“Wait!” someone called out to him. Though it was low, the voice had a faint tinge of something to it.

Not even looking, D put his heels to his horse’s flanks.

As the gorgeous rider and his mount tore up the ground, the voice called out once more.

“Wait, D!”

__

The girl introduced herself as Mia. She said she was the daughter of a fortuneteller who lived about sixty miles to the north. Her smock and the skirt she wore below it were both embroidered with a mysterious crest representing where she came from, and her numerous necklaces and bracelets were set with stones with a deep luster that seemed to hold a dark history. She knew D’s name because when her mother predicted a strange occurrence in this region, she’d told the girl that would be the name of the man who’d

race there from afar.

“From what Mother says, the key to solving this mystery is held by a man who comes from far away,” Mia said in a hard tone. “This case is something no one can handle. No one except the man named D. D—if that’s the name that you go by—what in the world are you?”

“Can you see the future?” D asked.

“A little,” Mia replied, her voice betraying restrained pride and self-confidence.

“In that case, do you know how this all ends?”

“No, not even Mother knows that. But it’s not because she’s not powerful enough to see it. Something interfered.” After a short pause, the girl continued. “As far as what happened, I asked the villagers before you got here. Mother had pointed to a spot on the map and said that an incredibly evil power was at work. It was the same area where there was that massive subsidence. That’s probably the center of it.”

“What kind of power?”

“An evil one is all she said.”

“It probably would’ve been better if your mother came.”

“I think so too,” Mia conceded, not seeming the least bit angry. “But unfortunately, she can’t do that. Right after predicting this incident, Mother coughed up blood and collapsed. She’s probably passed away by now.”

“And you came here instead of tending to her?”

“Mother’s orders were explicit,” Mia replied, with her eyes focused straight ahead.

Her age had to be sixteen or seventeen. Some childlike innocence still remained on her face, but a strength of will that hardly suited her had also spread across it.

“She doesn’t view this incident as merely another catastrophe. Mother said it’s a major event that could have repercussions on a global scale. Ordinarily, she’d have gone herself. Even though going might not accomplish anything, as someone with the power to catch a glimpse of people’s future—society’s future—she has to try and do whatever she can. But since she couldn’t possibly move, she told me to go.”

A mother who sent her own daughter into an incident that might shake the very world.

A girl who’d raced here even though she knew her mother was fated to die.

D tugged back on the reins.

A split second before her face hit his back, Mia swiftly turned it away, so that only her right cheek took the impact. She could feel the swell of his muscles through the fabric. For just a second, she grew dizzy.

“We’re there,” D said.

“Okay.”

Taking away the hands she’d wrapped around his waist, Mia put them on the saddle’s cantle and braced her body. Before D could dismount, she flew into action.

Not bothering to call out to the girl who’d hit the ground before him, D began to walk.

Their entire conversation up to this point had taken place on the back of his horse.

His left arm rose naturally, and from the vicinity of his wrist a hoarse voice most humans couldn’t hear squeaked, “She’s a hell of a girl. For one thing, you’ve got a little slip of a lass like her racing into a place like this. For another, she didn’t even bother to wait for you to offer her a hand getting down from the horse. She’s been schooled in how to live on her own. If you ever take a

wife, one like that’ll—”

The voice broke off there. D had made his hand into a tight fist.

As he walked quietly but gravely, ahead of him yawned the great subsidence that’d swallowed so many dead.

“This place is incredible, isn’t it?” Mia remarked pensively as she peered down from D’s right side.

Compared to the diameter of the depression, its depth wasn’t great at all—only about a thousand feet. Blending with the sloping sides, the bottom was a chaotic mix of boulders and sand, with the red soil filling in the spaces between them.

“It’s like a sea of blood,” Mia remarked as she rubbed her cheek with her right hand.

“You saying the dead can bleed, too?”

Mia looked at D’s hip out of the corner of her eye, and then stared at his face. Perhaps aware of the rosy glow suffusing her cheeks, she swiftly averted her gaze, saying, “You do a weird little voice, don’t you? Are you teasing me?”

Making no reply, D planted one foot at the edge of the incline.

“No, I’m serious,” Mia continued. “And I’ll thank you to answer me.”

Saying nothing, D stared downward.

Piqued at being ignored, Mia undertook a reckless course of action. With unexpected speed she came up behind D and told him, “You’re rude!”

She’d just aimed a kick at his ass. But it met with nothing but the empty space over the pit.

“Wha—”

As she reflexively put her strength into the leg that still supported her, the supposedly firm ground gave way.

The second she heard her own cry above her and felt the sensation of falling, her body suddenly stopped dead. Realizing that D’s left hand had caught her by the collar, she madly reached around with her hands to latch on to him. Just as it dawned on her that she was floating through the air, her feet came down on solid ground. And no sooner had a feeling of relief flooded through her than the hand came away from her collar and Mia staggered.

As her eyes stared fixedly at D, they began to hold hints of a bottomless terror and rage—and a gleam of admiration.

“What do you think this depression’s for?”

The voice that posed that question was tinged with trust—and even a bit of affection.

Once again there was no reply. But even though he didn’t answer, no anger bubbled up in the girl.

“You said you were the daughter of a fortuneteller, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling silly for getting so excited because he’d turned the conversation to her.

“The dead left every graveyard in the region to throw themselves from here. There would’ve been thousands of them. Why do you think that was?”

There was a short pause.

The next thing Mia knew, she had one hand to her chest. Her heart was racing. She had to do something to slow it down.

Pressing a finger gently to one part of the heart—the left ventricle—she made her breathing as shallow as possible. Her heartbeat returned to normal immediately. But then, she was a strong-willed and courageous individual to begin with.

“Is it okay if it’s pure conjecture?”

D nodded.

“I think they were a sacrifice.”

“That’s it, all right.”

The hoarse response definitely sounded like it’d come from the vicinity of D’s left hand.

Though she looked, naturally she didn’t see anything.

“That’s right.”

This time the reply came in a rusty, masculine tone—D’s voice. So, was that other one just her ears playing tricks on her?

“Last time, corpses sufficed, but next time it’ll probably be living people jumping in.”

“Thousands of them . . .” Mia muttered, her remark a question at the same time.

There was no reply, of course. You could say that was his answer.

“But . . . why in the world?”

“It’s the will of the one down below this.”

“Down below?”

Mia couldn’t help forgetting her present terror and peering down past the brink of the hole. But as she quickly recalled it again, she backed away, and then stared at D.

“You know what it is?” she asked.

Not answering her, D stood there like an exquisite statue, but then he told her, “Go home.”

And then, without further ado, he dove head first from the rim of the hole into its interior.

“D!” Mia called out in spite of herself, and she was paused at the very brink of the hole, ready to go after him, when something white got in her eyes.

Gas.

Covering her mouth, the fortuneteller’s daughter made a great leap back.

It looked like the white pillars of smoke rising from the brink of the depression numbered in the hundreds. All those geysers of gas couldn’t have suddenly erupted from the ground in unison. They’d been triggered mechanically. And the one who’d set them off was—

“D . . .”

Still unsure just what was in the gas, Mia took a deep breath and raced back to the rim of the hole. She turned her gaze downward.

He’d probably been crushed. Why was she so determined to find this young man? Because his actions were so extreme. Like what he’d done just now. She couldn’t help thinking that whatever he really was, it was tremendously unsettling and of great importance—just as he’d appeared in the fortunetelling. And the last thing that occurred to Mia was something the girl tried vehemently to ignore so it wouldn’t rise to the fore of her consciousness. Because he’s gorgeous. More than anyone has a right to be.

Mia couldn’t see D anywhere, and she had to back away again. The gas had grown thicker and jetted out even harder. Luckily for her, it was only intended as a smoke screen.

She couldn’t go after him. Should she wait, or should she go back to the village?

That decision wasn’t Mia’s to make. From behind her came the thunder of approaching hooves. There were also the echoes of what sounded like a motor.

Mia turned around.

The figures she could see down at the far end of the highway halted before her less than ten seconds later. It was the same group of village peacekeepers who’d discovered the depression. And they’d brought a rare item with them.

The source of the motor sounds was an armored car. With iron plates riveted to a car chassis, the

strangely rough-looking vehicle was apparently an antiquated model, with the edges of some plates starting to pull free, and both the sturdy turret and the forty-millimeter cannon that jutted a foot and a half from it were flecked with rust. The scorches and countless bullet marks that covered its armor plates were undoubtedly shining proof it had been fighting off aggressors, in the form of bandits and supernatural creatures, for decades. And it looked as if it was still more than capable of serving as the little village’s guardian angel.

Mia’s eyes were drawn to the wagon that rode alongside it. She could read the words High Explosives branded onto the sides of the wooden boxes piled high on it. Some kinds of munitions were often obtained from military installations and battlefields where the Nobility had fought their own kind, and it wasn’t particularly unusual for towns and villages to have them on hand. Weapons that were especially easy to use, such as rifles and various kinds of grenades, could make an impressive show of force when the situation called for it. To the north of the village were wild plains and the ruins of what had once apparently been a testing ground for the Nobility, and no one normally dared set foot there.

The sheriff got down off his horse. As he moved toward Mia, he called over to the group forming around the wagon, “Get yourselves some explosives and line up along the drop-off. We’ll be pitching them in soon.”

“Wait just a minute,” Mia called out as she dashed over to the sheriff instead of waiting for him to come to her. “What do you think you’re doing? If you throw a bunch of bombs into this weird hole, there’s no way of knowing what kind of reaction you’ll get. Plus, someone just fell in there.”

“Someone? And just who might that be?”

“A man named D. He’s a Hunter.”

Actually, Mia didn’t know for a fact that D was a Vampire Hunter. But his good looks, the way he carried himself, and the way he called to mind ice and steel made her say it on impulse.

“Why’d he fall in the hole? No, before we get to that—who are you, anyway?” the sheriff asked, knitting his thick eyebrows suspiciously.

“Mia, isn’t it? You’re the daughter of a fortuneteller who lives up north. I had her tell my fortune before,” called out a young man who’d been staring at the girl all along from the driver’s seat of the wagon. He wore a heavy wool shirt and had a red scarf wound about his neck. And as befitted someone so dapper, he was a good deal more attractive than the rest of the men.

“This fortuneteller up north—would that be Noa Simon? I’ve heard the name before. Seems quite a few people are in her debt,” the sheriff remarked, and, seeing a smile break on the lawman’s face, Mia was somewhat relieved. “This Hunter you mentioned, is he some friend of yours? What in the blazes brings him here?”

Suddenly, the sheriff held his tongue.

In fact, everyone froze right where they were. Though white smoke poured over the brink of the great subsidence, covering everything up to three feet from the ground, they could make out a human shape emerging from the pit. The hem of a coat swayed around the knees of the powerfully built form. Mia alone could tell whose silhouette it was by the longsword on its back.

“D?”

How many of them heard her say that?

As Mia reflexively started to step forward, someone behind her grabbed her right arm.

“Don’t go,” said the young man who’d been in the driver’s seat.

“But—”

“When did he fall?”

“Not five minutes ago.”

“You think after falling

 in there it’d be that easy to get back up again?”

“Maybe if he got hung up on something halfway down.”

“Think that’s what happened?”

“No.”

“Stand back.”

Pushing Mia out of the way, the young man put his hand to his waist. He had a gunpowder pistol in a special holster. After drawing it, he called out to the shadowy figure in the fog, “Hey, I’m from the village!”

At the same time, the color of the silhouette darkened—and a heartbeat later, it slipped out of the fog to stand face to face with the young man.

A rumble went through the crowd—murmured exclamations of rapture. The villagers had seen the face of the shadowy figure.

“D . . .”

Mia alone knew that name.

 

A TWIN-SHADOWED FIGURECHAPTER 2

I

__

Those clothes, and, more than anything, that inimitable beauty—it was D beyond a doubt. Mia felt relieved. The fortuneteller’s daughter didn’t notice that her joy over the safety of a young man she didn’t even know had given way to feverish excitement.

“Hey, you . . .” one of the young men called out to him, taking a step closer.

The scene that unfolded a second later was an enormous and terrifying betrayal of everyone’s expectations. A streak of light flowed out. Where it started and where it ended, none could say. It simply flowed.

“What the—” the young man cried, and judging by the way he jumped back, he alone must’ve discerned the path of that light. Or perhaps he merely acted on reflex.

A mellifluous, soothing sound came from D’s back.

Jogging back, the young man halted in front of Mia. When Mia saw that his eyes were filled with tears, she was a bit surprised.

“I . . . I’m Zoah,” he said somewhat uncomfortably. “Remember that . . . Zoah. Okay?”

Feeling something she couldn’t fight, Mia nodded. “And I’m—” she was saying when the young man put both hands on top of his head as if to hold it down. A thin red line zipped across the base of his neck.

Without even knowing why, Mia cried out, “Mia! I—I’m Mia!”

A single tear fell from the young man’s eye. A smile formed on his lips, and then he reeled backward.

Once his head had fallen behind him, bright blood shot into the air from the stark stump of his neck, and the occasional gusts of wind carried it toward D as if at his bidding, covering every inch of him. Soaked in blood—an exquisite figure in vermilion.

But even that sight held Mia spellbound and drew sounds of admiration from the men—in truth, groans of pleasure. However, that only lasted a few heartbeats before the men returned to their senses and the sheriff rapped on the turret of the armored car, shouting, “Prepare to fire! Draw a bead on that bastard!”

Wait, Mia thought, but she couldn’t move. The ghastly demise of the young man who’d introduced himself as Zoah had had an explosive impact on her brain, crushing all other thoughts.

That streak of light had undoubtedly cut through Zoah’s neck. However, instead of being slain on the spot, he’d lived long enough to give Mia his name, knowing all the while he would die. Were there even words to describe such a bizarre and superhuman feat? But all that aside, why would D do such a horrible thing? The question numbed Mia’s mind. The handsome features now being dyed crimson by the vivid rain of blood had a cold beauty that dulled the very sunlight. He could murder his own parents—she just knew it. Knew it all too well. But even knowing that, in her heart Mia had still held a fiery little ember of conviction that he would never slaughter an innocent person so horribly.

Mia’s mind was pulled back to reality by the harsh music of a motor and gears. The armored car’s turret was turning toward D. The barrel of its cannon took unerring aim right at his face—dead center on his handsome visage. The marksman inside the turret was coolly taking aim through a little glass sighting window set in the armor plate. Crosshairs had been etched on the glass—and they came to a halt right between the eyes of their target.

Now! The index and middle fingers of his right hand pulled hard on the trigger. The rusty trigger was just about to pass the point of no return.

The gunner’s field of view stained crimson. Or, to be more precise, the glass window did.

He’d seen D’s upper body lean far back, and then snap forward again. But there was no way he could’ve imagined the blood that soaked every inch of D flying back at the armored car. It came with such speed, such force. The iron-plated vehicle shook when it struck.

However, its cannon belched fire. The forty-millimeter shell was true to its aim—then it flew wildly off course and made impact. Not with D’s face, but with the ground at his feet. Sparks and black smoke mixed with a roar.

Mia stood entranced by the crimson D until the impact bowled her and the men over.

D was in the air. The bloody torrent had rocked the cannon just before it fired, and at the same time he had sailed into the sky. He drifted down and landed on the front of the armored vehicle, as if thirty-odd feet hadn’t separated them in the first place. Without a second wasted, a silvery flash whisked through the turret. The armor plating could easily withstand forty-millimeter shells, but D’s blade stabbed through it like it was paper, piercing the throat of the gunner within.

Pulling his blade back out, D looked down at Mia on the ground and grinned. Ah! He was like youth incarnate, gleaming with his own beauty and cruelty.

Mia was practically ready to faint.

Leaping easily through the air, D landed about fifteen feet from the group. Not a single drop of blood clung to his sword.

“Come,” he said, speaking at last.

On confirming that it was D’s voice, Mia could taste only despair.

“Come,” he invited them once more.

The figures around Mia stalked forward. They were villagers. Each gripped a stake or spear in his hands. Full of fighting spirit—or so they looked, their expressions vacant as if some other force had possessed them.

“Don’t go near him!” Mia cried, but that only served as a kind of cue to them.

Advancing a few steps, the villagers let out a cry that wasn’t quite a word and charged at D en masse. Light streaked between them, becoming vermilion spray a second later. The lifeblood that then shot up from the decapitated men looked like the kind of entertainment one might find at a banquet in hell. There was a succession of dull thuds all around D—the sound of the severed heads landing. Stabbing one of them with his sword, D flung it toward Mia.

It fell about three feet shy of her. Mia looked down and gasped when it rolled to her feet. It was Zoah’s head.

“That’s the head of the man who loved you,” D said softly.

Unable to look at it, Mia raised her face frantically. D was right in front of her. She couldn’t say a word.

Between the speechless Mia and the Vampire Hunter, Zoah’s head rose. D had skewered it with his sword.

“From the look on his face, I doubt you could say he’s resting in peace. Why don’t you give him a kiss?”

How cruel! But as he thrust the horrible head in the girl’s pale face, a hint of surprise crept into D’s expression.

He’d intended to make Mia kiss the severed head. Mia recoiled, yet she was unafraid as the severed head seemed to sink into her face. The second the man’s and the woman’s faces seemed to overlap, Mia’s body had passed through D’s and come to stand behind him.

Looking over his shoulder in astonishment, D swung his sword down behind him. Mia was well within reach of his blade. And the instant the sword became a streak of light that split her body like a piece of firewood, she gave off an iridescent gleam and vanished.

“Ah!” a voice gasped from the vicinity of the armored car.

Wasn’t that also Mia by the back of the vehicle, steadying herself with one hand on its body while she pressed the other to her chest?

“A diversion, eh? Not bad for a punk kid,” D remarked, coolly stepping forward. Astonishingly enough, the sword in his right hand still had Zoah’s head on it.

With this beautiful fiend closing on her, Mia couldn’t move. She couldn’t recall ever having a decoy spell she’d put her heart and soul into broken that way. She’d learned from her mother that a spell could be broken only by another spell—and she had absolute confidence that things always followed that natural law. And yet, here it’d been broken by an ordinary swordsman and his blade. More than the physical trauma of having her illusion destroyed, it was despair that caused Mia to freeze up.

Once more the dead man’s mouth was thrust toward her bloodless lips.

“Here, send him off to eternal peace,” said D. His lips held a smile.

As Mia turned her face away, cold lips struck her cheek.

“Now, why are you trying to fight it?” D asked, his query every bit as still and cold as a winter night.

The lips slid right after Mia’s.

Mia’s back struck the car, informing her that escape was now impossible.

Just then, the heavens and earth rumbled. Caught off guard, D staggered, while Mia was thrown more than six feet to one side. As the ground suddenly quaked like it’d been transformed into muddy slop, the iron vehicle and the corpses danced a crazed jig across it.

Trying desperately to maintain his balance all the while, D prepared to dash toward the brink of the subsidence.

“Looks like I might’ve underestimated him,” he muttered, although whom that comment was intended for was anybody’s guess.

Suddenly, his shoulder split as if it’d met with some unseen blade. A bloody mist shot out.

Standing on the quaking earth, D twisted around and looked behind him.

Thirty feet away there stood a black horse.

“Aha,” he exclaimed, forgetting to staunch the flow of blood.

It was a cyborg horse. However, even cyborg horses came in varying qualities. The one that now stood perfectly poised in the distance, ignoring the noisy quaking of the earth, had a magnificent frame, lustrous coat, and fine musculature—everything about it attested to its being a model of the very highest quality and ability. Such a mount wasn’t easy to obtain out on the Frontier.

And D’s eyes were riveted to the blue figure astride that steed. He wore an indigo robe, and his lengthy hair, which hung like threads from the top of his head down to his waist in such a way that even his face was obscured, also had a somewhat chilling and mysterious indigo hue.

“Who are you?” D asked as he continued to defy the motion of the restless earth.

“I disposed of Origa,” the figure in blue told D, remaining completely motionless as he addressed the jostled swordsman. “Next, I’ll take care of you.”

__

II

__

Origa was the sorceress D had called on to solve the riddle of Muma. She’d been hacked to pieces the night D met with her, and it seemed that it’d been the work of this rider in blue.

“Who are you?” D asked once again.

Though he was confronted by an opponent skilled enough to remain utterly motionless through this savage quaking, and despite the fact that the flow of bright blood from his right shoulder was unabated, he didn’t seem at all surprised.

“Why are you after me?”

A sudden gust of wind stirred the hem of his coat.

The hair of the figure in blue streamed off to one side like a swarm of countless insects. And yet, his face wasn’t visible.

“You found out. That alone is the reason.”

His words seemed to creep across the ground.

What had D learned, and how did the man in blue know about it? And why had he slain Origa?

“I suppose there’s no point asking you anything else.”

D swung the sword in his right hand and sent Zoah’s head flying.

The black horse and blue rider approached. Although the animal was most definitely treading across the ground, its gait didn’t seem the least bit affected by the quaking that

 continued even now.

The instant the horse and rider sauntered within reach of his sword, D made a horizontal swipe with his blade without saying a word. He intended to sever the horse’s front legs, and as his foe was thrown from the tumbling animal, a second stroke would catch him without a moment’s delay.

The blade sliced. The black horse tumbled forward. Just as expected. And the rider in blue went flying. Just as expected. Reversing direction, D’s blade handily bisected his opponent’s torso.

At that instant the whole world was sealed away in blue. Out of the carved body of the man, a bluish hue sailed into the air. No, not merely a hue, but hair. Just how much hair did that rider in blue have inside his body? Ten thousand, a hundred thousand, no, easily a million strands flew everywhere, and every last one of them stabbed into the ground or the rocks or even the armored car.

D managed to deflect each and every one in the first wave. However, the blue needles assailed him without end. One pierced his left shoulder. He deflected dozens more without pausing to extract that one, then another slipped through and stabbed into his solar plexus, and when he not surprisingly reeled from that for a second, another needle got him through the right eye, coming all the way out through the back of his head.

Another storm of blue was about to assail his reeling, staggering form, but then white smoke surged over him from one side like a wave. Smoke—smoke roiling up from the bottom of the subsidence. While the wind had indeed shifted in that direction, the way it moved to obscure him like a bodyguard made it seem as if it were imbued with a desire to protect him.

And within that cloud, what kind of explosion of thought and deed took place? The roiling of the white smoke grew ever more turbulent, swirling, painting everything with a solid and disturbing hue of white as it began to roll thickly over the road.

The rumbling of the earth continued.

__

Late that night . . .

Mia was in the village hospital. Though she was weary to the marrow of her bones, the events of midday were branded into her brain, refusing to leave her or even wane, so while she wanted to sleep, a sort of insomnia now troubled her. All she could remember was that D had been forcing her to kiss a severed head when the earth had quaked—and that was it. Her body was thrown against the ground once or twice, and the next thing she knew, she was receiving treatment from a new scouting party that’d come from the village. Based on what one member had told her, all that’d been left at the scene was the tipped-over armored car and the sheriff—who’d lost both legs when they were pinned under the vehicle. The remains of Zoah and all the other villagers had vanished completely.

Though the villagers wanted to get the story from Mia, she kept silent. She’d decided that the best thing to do would be to leave the entire matter to the sheriff’s department. Simply keeping a dazed look on her face was sufficient to fool the villagers. As Mia kept up the act, countless questions sprang into her head and then faded again, and try as she might, she couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer to a single one of them before she sank wearily into a despairing conclusion.

Getting out of bed, Mia went over to the window. She could see the courtyard. White blossoms swayed in the flower beds. These were plants that bloomed by the light of the moon.

The moon hung in the middle of the sky. Its surface was like a silver platter, and onto it a gorgeous visage burned itself, sharper than the rest of its glow.

“D . . .” she murmured sadly, although Mia herself wasn’t aware of the sadness. She’d witnessed his

cruelty with her own two eyes. It’d been directed at her. She’d tasted terror and anger and hate. And yet his strikingly handsome face continued to hold the nubile fortuneteller captive.

“Damn, this is no good,” Mia told herself sternly. “What did I come here to do, anyway? After leaving my mother for dead . . .”

The intense battle between will and emotion lasted only a second. Her chest, well developed for her age, rose and fell heavily as she let out a morose sigh.

“Come tomorrow, I’ll be back to normal,” Mia told herself. “Tomorrow.”

But there was no evidence to support that claim, and she had no confidence in it.

Mia focused her gaze intently on the crystal-clear night as if seeking salvation. The darkness grew thicker. A cloud had hidden the moon, and there was no other light. The moon quickly reclaimed its starring role. But that wasn’t what made the girl feel that the stillness had grown ever deeper.

A figure astride a white horse was in one corner of the garden. The moonlight cast sinful shadows on a face so handsome she had to wonder if the moon existed solely to praise him. D.

Fear bubbled up within her. Doubts eddied. Anger rose. Forgetting all that, Mia opened the windowpane.

The white horse and rider approached. There wasn’t a sound. Although the path through the courtyard was paved with bricks, the hooves of the horse D controlled remained silent.

“You’re okay . . .” Mia muttered to the handsome face that stopped not three feet from her.

Though she had intended to ask D what had happened after he’d flown down into the subsidence, she remained oblivious to the fact she hadn’t finished her question.

Still on horseback, D leaned toward her. No sooner had she noticed him placing one hand on the sill than a wind gusted in so quickly Mia didn’t have time to get out of the way, and then the Vampire Hunter stood in her room.

“D . . .”

“I’d like to ask you something,” D said in the voice of the night.

Before she even responded, D extended his right hand. Mia felt her back grow warm.

“What . . . what is it?” Embarrassment flooded through her. As if to push it away, she asked once more, “What is it?” She realized she’d forgotten to close the window.

“What happened up top?”

It took her a while to understand the question. “Up top? Don’t joke around about that. That was you, wasn’t it?”

As the girl barely managed to choke back a hail of invective, D quietly gazed at her face, finally asking, “What did I do?”

“What did you—are you out of your mind?”

“Unfortunately, it would seem not.”

Mia’s eyes were drawn to the vicinity of D’s left hip, and the girl showed some bewilderment before she looked at the Hunter’s face again.

“I only came back up just now. Up top, there was the smell of blood. Was that my doing?”

After a short time, Mia nodded. “You mean, that wasn’t you?”

Nothing from the Hunter.

“Or is it that you don’t remember?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you

don’t know . . .”

“As soon as I reached the bottom, I lost consciousness. I don’t know what happened after that.”

Mia found it incredibly difficult to believe that this gorgeous Hunter could lose consciousness even for the briefest of times. Managing to fight through her surprise, she said, “Okay, I’ll tell you all about it, then. In return, you have to tell me what happened underground.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?” she asked, her tone reproachful in spite of herself.

“You’re better off not knowing.”

In keeping with the darkness, his words were low and grave, but even as she felt their inescapable pressure, Mia shot back, “That’s not fair. While you were gone, I went through hell. I’ll have you know, you—”

Mia broke off as it dawned on her that the person who’d put her through hell was the same person who stood before her, and she was left speechless. Judging from that, it would seem that up until now, she hadn’t considered that D to be the same as this one.

“I did what to you?”

“Y-you . . . That is . . .”

“Just as I suspected,” a hoarse voice remarked.

Her nerves already stretched to the breaking point, Mia didn’t even seem to notice it.

“What happened?” D asked again.

It’s not fair, Mia thought to herself, but she couldn’t fight him any longer.

There was nothing coercive about him. Well, actually there was, but in his soft query there was just the faintest bit of something terribly urgent—it had a ring of sadness to it wholly unsuited to a young man who seemed to be made of ice and steel.

“Fine,” Mia sighed, dropping her shoulders. She gestured to the chair next to her. “Have a seat. I’ll tell you everything.”

Then she seated herself on the edge of the bed.

Time flowed like a river under the wintry moonlight.

“I see,” D told her, rising unaffectedly and heading for the window.

“Wait!”

Her faint cry made him turn and look.

Mia’s face was turned down, and she stared at her knees. “Is that all?” she said.

A puzzled silence from the Hunter.

He had been less than amiable, if not downright blunt.

“You heard my tale, and now you’re just going to go? Without thanking me in any way?”

“She’s got a point,” the hoarse voice said. It seemed somewhat intrigued.

Squeezing his left hand into a tight fist, D said, “You have my thanks.” Then he prepared to turn away again.

“That won’t do.”

When she spoke, it made him look at her again.

“I’d like to have it done properly.”

“Oh la la,” said the hoarse voice. This time it sounded rather surprised.

However, the most astonished of all was Mia herself. Even she didn’t know why she’d said such a thing. Something warm had stirred in her chest and, unable to stand

it, she expelled it from her mouth, where it became those preposterous words. What’s more, it was the middle of the night, and she was alone in a hospital room with a young man of unearthly beauty. Conveniently enough, there was a bed right there, too. Mia didn’t know what a proper expression of gratitude would be. But her heart was on fire.

D’s hand reached for her knee. Feeling like her heart might stop, she closed her eyes. The hand quickly came away.

When her eyes opened, they found a few gold coins sitting in her lap.

“That’s the only kind of gratitude I know how to show,” said D.

“I meant—” the girl sputtered, beginning to rise in spite of herself. The gold coins tinkled merrily against the floor.

A black-gloved hand came to rest on her shoulder. Although that should’ve been what she wanted, Mia froze in place, and she couldn’t even speak. There was a chance this young man was a cold and merciless murderer. What was she doing with him?

His hand came away again quickly. Thick, heavy, and cold it was—and yet, a quiet warmth unlike anything before seeped into Mia’s heart. A chill struck her face.

The shape of the horse and rider dwindled in the moonlight without a sound.

For a long time, the young fortuneteller didn’t move from the edge of the bed. Then, finally, she stood up and quietly shut the window. ...