I don’t own Vampire Hunter D, except for the Bloodlust DVD and the novels 1-11. If I actually did have D, he would be doing my chores and looking awesome while he did them.

Title: Following His Footsteps

Rating: T, for teen.

Summary: Traveling with the dhampir who may (or may not) be his brother, Dualarc learns that with D actions are louder than words.

“No.”

With that one word, we were back to square one. D the untouchable Hunter was back in full force. Something about my request had pissed him off, because the look he was giving me was just short of a glare. My skin wanted to crawl right off my body from that look. I was suddenly very aware of the fact that I was sitting down in front of a trained killer who had his extremely sharp sword within easy grabbing distance.

I froze.

D moved.

His sword was out of the sheathe and moving a simple arc to come right against my neck and –

Nothing. It wasn’t real.

D was simply standing up, his undrawn blade in his hand. My mind had given me a false image, so great was my fear.

He took the now empty kettle from the fire, kicked the dying ashes apart with his boot to scatter them and then left for his waiting horse. I stayed where I was, sitting stock still with the metal cup in my trembling hands.

“You are a child.”

I breathed out, the insult somehow taking away the paralyzing fear that had taken over my body.

“Go home.”

Leather creaking.

Metal clinking.

Hoof beats.

They faded away.

I stayed there, sitting in the rising sunlight. The cup in my hand grew cool.

And then I could hear the thin metal between my fingers creaking, but that might have been my teeth crushing together in a snarl.

Fuck that!

I tossed the cup to the ground, grabbed my bag and my sunglasses from where they had fallen the night before, and ran after him.

I’d said I was going to follow him no matter what and I’d meant it.

Fuck you, D. You think you’re gonna get rid of me that easy?

On some level I knew he had been going easy on me. It was still really annoying to find that I now had to constantly run to keep up with him. Damn him and his horse.

I’d thought it was bad before? What the hell did I know? Bad was slowly starving to death because you were down to two plasma capsules. Bad was getting, on average, four hours of sleep at night. Bad was having the prick you were following choose – deliberately choose, because he had to have been doing it on purpose – to travel through the swampiest bogs, ford over the wildest rivers and scale the highest cliffs when there were perfectly serviceable roads and bridges he could have taken instead!

D, I fuckin’ hate your guts.

But I’m not stopping.

No no no. I am not giving up. I will be your little shadow for as long as it takes.

Just watch me, you jerk.

Despite my bravado, there were (naturally) moments when I just wanted to throw my hands up to the clouds and scream loudly for a thunderbolt to end my miserable existence. Or D’s. I wouldn’t have minded seeing him get crispified.

It was day thirteen and I was still in hell. I was down to one plasma capsule, which would give me a week before I had to do something drastic. I had enough money to buy a few, but there weren’t any shops around to do so. I could have strayed away from D and gone to find a town, but I had the feeling he’d make sure I never caught up with him.

There was, granted, option number two – go hunting. I’d done it often enough to put meat on our table back at home, but lately the thought of it was bothering me. The serum had repressed my vampire blood (and I mean really repressed it) to the point where I had been able to consume human food without any trouble. Now that I was off of it, I was craving… well, something else. I could still eat normal food. I’d done it. But, the thing is, it just didn’t feel right anymore. It filled me up, but my body didn’t get gratified.

If I ran out of plasma capsules, the only thing that would give me satisfaction was the real deal.

And I didn’t think I could do it.

Hell, I didn’t want to do it.

We live in a world where vampires are reviled monsters. They enslaved humans for over five thousand years, and spent the next five thousand years doing their damndest to fight back against their own extinction and against the aforementioned humans who were doing their damndest to hasten it along.

They’re the oldest monsters in history. All the beasts, all the monsters that plague this world were created by or served the vampires. Many of those same creatures were bred simply to kill humans for the enjoyment of the Nobility. They got a kick out of watching humans bleed.

Why shouldn’t they have? Dinner and a show, two packages in one.

Children were taken from their families and experimented on. Sometimes they came back, sometimes they didn’t. If they did, sometimes they’d change. A mailman would go up to a house, find two weeks worth of post stuffed into the mailbox, and get concerned. He calls the sheriff. The sheriff goes into the house and finds the family spread all over the living room floor. And the walls. And the ceiling. And then he gets the joyous task of finding and staking the seven-year-old child that is not.

There were some that built careers out it. Noble scientists who were applauded, awarded, admired for building the most exquisite form of torture for humans. They liked to take us apart, see what made us tick.

…Us?

Heh, I’m doing it again.

You’re not human anymore, Dualarc.

You never were.

Problem was, I couldn’t believe it.

Fucking hunger.

I needed plasma capsules or things were going to get nasty.

Two days after that, the universe finally cut me a break.

Good timing, too. The ground moles I had seen poking their heads out of the ground by the road were starting to look pretty damn tasty. Ick.

D led me (okay, not really) to a tiny little town that couldn’t have been more than three hundred people strong. It was small, even by Frontier standards. That, boys and girls, is not a good thing. Less people means less defense and less defense means more paranoia towards strangers. The fact that D and I were dhampirs was not going to lend help to our standing, either.

Still, most of the people I’d met before catching up to D hadn’t seemed to notice what I was. If I was careful, maybe these ones wouldn’t either. If D stopped here for the night, I could get some shopping done quickly before he left.

D….

I didn’t really get why he never tried to draw less attention to himself. I mean, even if they didn’t know he was half-vampire, he was still a silent, creepy, stunningly good-looking guy and that is not something you ignore. It worked in my favor when I was tracking him down because everyone remembered when he passed through, but now that I was in danger of being affected by it I was having second thoughts about its usefulness.

He rode up to the town’s gates and I limped along behind him. As we approached, they creaked open and a man who could only have been the town sheriff stepped out.

When I was eight years old, a circus came to Birch. Mom took me to see them for a treat. I really liked the acrobats, but I also remembered the dancing bear the animal trainer had brought out. It was eight feet tall, extremely shaggy and looked like it wanted nothing better than to rip someone’s head off. The fact that it was wearing a jingly bell cap did not detract from this image. Standing in front of me now was that same bear, only it had no jingly bell cap and it was wearing a miniature rocket launcher at its hip.

“State your names and business,” the sheriff ordered.

He growled like a bear, too.

“D. I’m just passing through.”

“Dualarc, and I’m with him,” I said, jerking a very weary thumb in the asshole’s general direction. My eyesight and motor skills were not in top condition at that point, so I may have been pointing more at D’s horse. That would have explained the look the sheriff gave me.

Or it could have been the fact that I looked like an absolute wreck. I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. I felt like an absolute wreck.

Oh god, I needed sleep.

“You okay, kid?” The sheriff asked.

The wreck theory bore fruit.

“Peachy,” I growled.

Apparently he didn’t buy it because he stared at me for a while longer before turning back to D.

“You wouldn’t happen to be the Vampire Hunter D, would you?”

Oh god, say no. That’s what I was thinking. Everyone knew about the Vampire Hunter D, even if they didn’t know him. Everyone also knew he was a dhampir and nobody willingly let a dhampir into town unless they had to. This town was fenced one, no outlying farms or ranches. If they refused entry, I was screwed. I would be drinking mole blood before the night was out.

I was musing on this (and possible ways to erase the memory of it afterward) when D answered, “Yes.”

Crash, go my hopes.

But like I said, the universe was finally cutting me a break.

The sheriff looked like he’d swallowed a wriggling lemon.

“Then I need you to come with me,” he said.

Contrary to my first conclusion at the sheriff’s statement, we were not tossed into a jail cell. Instead, he and five of his deputies escorted us to the sheriff’s office. Well, D was escorted. I just followed. The deputies were giving me sidelong looks like they couldn’t figure out what to do with me. I was expecting one them to tell me to wait outside when we reached the office, but no one did. I guess my ‘I’m with him’ statement was actually believed, although D never affirmed it. Then again, he never disaffirmed it either. I was back to being a fly on the wall to him.

Whatever. It worked for me at the moment.

The town itself was pretty tired looking. Then again, with so few people to work with, it was no wonder. Most of the buildings looked like a stiff breeze could knock them over. I know the people in the Capitol like to romanticize about the ‘rugged frontier of the world’ (which is pretty much everyplace, but the Capitol), but the reality ain’t so great. Only a few places are well off enough to fulfill the magazine picture image of bountiful orchards and verdant hills. Birch, the place I grew up, was normal for a Frontier village and we had enough trouble just keeping ourselves fed.

And speaking of food….

“Hey, sheriff?” I called as we climbed the steps leading to his office.

“Yeah, kid?”

Oh, so I’m still ‘kid’.

“Where’s the store around here?” I asked.

Plasma capsules. Need. I mentioned that, right?

“Main street’s just down that way,” the sheriff said, pointing to the right. “Boiz, you go with him.”

What, he thought I was going to do something? Couldn’t blame him, but still.

“S’okay. I’m not going just yet,” I said.

Not while there was a chance D would slip away while I was off. No way.

The interior of the sheriff’s office was nice and cool. It felt great getting out of the sunlight. I don’t have it so bad. There are some dhampirs who can’t go outside without getting third-degree level burns. Still, it really stung.

The deputies stayed outside the door while the sheriff (who still hadn’t given us his name) led D around to his desk. It was stacked high with important looking papers, though that was just my thought. Maybe he just really liked origami?

“Nineteen years ago,” The-Sheriff-Who-Remained-Nameless said, “we had a horse come into sight of the gates half-dead from exhaustion, and its rider missing his right arm at the shoulder. He lived to give us his message before dying.”

What, no preamble? No offer of tea and cake?

Don't look so surprised. Hunters aren't sentimental people. Everything's business to them and D was no exception. The sheriff was smart enough to know that.

He looked at D, who was leaning against the wall, and gave the Hunter a stony gaze.

I was ignored. Big shock there.

“’Vampires have taken over Skethagen',” the sheriff repeated the dead man’s message. “Now, Skethagen’s the next town over. I don’t need to tell you that we weren’t real thrilled to get that message.”

Putting it lightly.

“I was just a deputy back then, and the sheriff sent me and some of the other boys to check it out. There were eight of us and we were the best in this whole damn town. Two days later, I was crawling back through the gates with no ammo left and half my guts hanging out. When he said that they’d taken over, he hadn’t been kidding.

“We’re poor, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We couldn’t afford to hire a team of vampire Hunters, or even one. Instead, we got a set of dimensional displacement units and set them up around the Skethagen county limits. By then, the vampires had started to spread out from Skethagen, but thank god, we sealed the town away before too many of them did. We dealt with the ones we could and let it rest.”

It wasn’t a terrible idea. A dimensional displacement unit can take something and send it to an entirely different reality. Something’s only dangerous if it can reach you. A whole village full of vampires is something you really don’t want reaching you.

“Like I said, that was nineteen years ago. Until about four weeks ago, we’d all but forgotten about it. Then Zario’s son went missing and turned up the next day in the forest with a bite mark on his neck.

“It was a nightmare. Suddenly, everybody remembered the seven hundred and something bloodsuckers that were seventeen miles away. I rode out myself to check on the displacement units and almost all of them had been destroyed, sure enough. I had to hide the few that were left, but even so, they ain’t gonna last much longer on their own. I give it three days before the displacement field collapses and Skethagen comes back.”

“Why hire me?” D spoke for the first time. “Why not simply repeat the displacement?”

Scared the hell outta me. He’s so quiet, you forget he’s there.

Then something new flickered over the sheriff’s face and I saw it as an even mix of rage, embarrassment and desperation.

“We tried. The second I got back, we put in an order for a new set. But when they arrived they were sabotaged before we could put them in place. We’ve put in another order, but they won’t be here for another two days and we can’t wait that long. Hell, I can’t wait that long.”

Now his shaggy, bearded face was giving off a new emotion: grief.

“The person who sabotaged the dimensional displacers turned out to be my daughter, Ari. I found out after she tried to kill me in my sleep four nights ago. She was bitten by a vampire. That’s why she did it. It made her. And she ain’t the only one. We’ve got five other people locked up in the isolation ward of the hospital, all of them with bite marks on their necks. None of them have turned yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

“We’re poor, but whatever we have is yours if you sign on for us. The way I figure, we must have missed one of the vampires that escaped the displacement nineteen years ago and it’s finally come back to free the others. It ain’t stupid, either. It’s been keeping out of sight. No one’s seen anything. I don’t have any clue where to start looking and I can’t start a search on the whole town with only six people, myself included. It’ll be even less after today, because I’m sending half my deputies to meet up with the caravan holding the displacers. With any luck, they’ll get them here faster than the merchants.

“I want to hire you, D, to kill the vampire that’s been sleazing around my town before it gets anyone else to do its dirty work. People have been going missing. The six in the isolation ward are just the ones we’ve managed to account for. One vampire’s bad. We might have a dozen by now.”

I was feeling kind of sick when he gave the last bit of his speech.

“But I really, really don’t want to think about how bad it would be if we don’t get the displacement units set up three days from now.”

Neither did I.

I’d been following D to learn the trade of a vampire Hunter. I had said that I would do whatever it took to do so. I had followed D into what should have been a golden opportunity for me to do just that. If he succeeded, I’d see him kill a vampire. If he failed, I’d still get a chance to see him kill a vampire (probably a few hundred. You know, before they ate him) and I’d more than likely have a few to fight myself (you know, before they ate me).

Well, I’d gotten my wish.

And what.

The fuck.

Had I.

Been.

THINKING?!

Those people who say ‘be careful what you wish for’?

Yeah, you should REALLY listen to that advice.

Dualarc’s a pretty tough brat, though. He should be okay.

…Should be….