Vampire Hunter D: Dark Road Part Three Read Online Free Page B

words.
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?” Roland, the Duke of Xenon, inquired softly.
    â€œWhat I mean is that I’ve already taken measures. Measures only I might take.”
    The men exchanged glances. Though each was an incomparable warrior, they needed no demonstration of this murderess’s skill with poisons. The clouds of discomfort that welled up in their hearts began to take shape, telling them that this woman, of all people, might be able to do it alone.
    â€œWhat kind of measures?” the duke was prompted to ask, which in itself revealed his state of mind.
    â€œIt’s a secret,” Dr. Gretchen replied, true to form, and then she looked up at the rolling blue sky and stretched. “If D should fail to return, then there is someone already under my spell—and that spell is eating its way into them. Ah, the sunlight we cursed for so long feels so good today! There’s something to be said for the daytime, isn’t there?”
    One might even say there was an innocent joy in her eyes, but then those same eyes abruptly narrowed as she said, “Oh, there goes a flock of birds. Winged psychopomps, I believe. They’re flying twice as high as the ones the grand duke struck down with his glance just now. Can you do the same to them , Grand Duke Mehmet?”
    The man with the look that killed turned away in a snit. Not surprisingly, it was beyond his ability.
    â€œAnd you, Duke of Xenon?”
    As she asked him this, the traveler in red hauled back with his right arm as if to hurl a javelin. At some point, grotesque armor had come to sheathe him from the elbow down to the tips of his fingers. He swung his empty right hand. But the sound that ripped through the air wasn’t that of a hand.
    It rose higher. And higher. And higher still.
    â€œYou scored a hit,” Dr. Gretchen said with squinted eyes.
    About twenty seconds later, it became abundantly clear that a number of the avian shapes were falling. They dropped. Ignoring the rotation of the earth, they landed right in the center of a circle formed by the trio. Roughly a dozen winged psychopomps had been pierced through the breast and out the back by an unseen spear high above the earth.
    â€œRemarkable,” Dr. Gretchen said with a smile. And remaining in Mayor Camus’s form, she said, “But that was only fifteen of them. From six miles away, the Duke of Xenon’s spear could do no better than fifteen birds out of a hundred.”
    She punctuated this with a haughty laugh.
    â€œYou seriously intend to say you could do better, Dr. Gretchen?” the Duke of Xenon asked, flames of outrage covering him from head to foot like a suit.
    â€œBut of course, my good duke—allow me to demonstrate.”
    The old woman raised her left hand. A golden ring set with a purple stone glittered on her ring finger. When she flicked the stone up, a mistlike strand rose from the setting and climbed into the air.
    Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
    Grand Duke Mehmet and Roland, the Duke of Xenon, exchanged despicable grins that hardly suited the vaunted Nobility. They knew what Dr. Gretchen was trying to do. However, there was no way any poison on earth could reach thirty thousand feet into the atmosphere without dispersing. Especially not when what had risen from her ring had been a gas.
    The smiles of the pair vanished. For Dr. Gretchen had looked up at the heavens. And laughed.
    As she laughed, she made an easy leap, and then a second—and had bounded thirty feet away.
    â€œStand back!” she told them.
    Grand Duke Mehmet made a leap that carried him thirty feet as well.
    And a second later, all over and around the Duke of Xenon—who’d been left behind—there was the successive thudding of impacts like the crashing of angry waves, and the Nobleman was shrouded in a crimson fog. The Duke of Xenon had been enveloped by his exoskeleton, but suddenly his shoulders and head were struck and countless chunks