“Who the hell are you?” The mayor tried his level best to sound intimidating, but there was no hiding the quiver in his voice. The youth had about him an air that churned the calm waters of the human soul.

Doris turned around and was amazed, while Dan’s face shined with delight.

Without a word, D stopped Doris from saying whatever she was about to say and stepped in front of the Langs as if to shield them. His right hand held a longsword. “I’m D. I’ve hired on with these people.”

He looked not at the mayor, but at the sheriff as he spoke.

The sheriff gave a little nod. He could tell at a glance what the youth before them really was. “I’m Sheriff Dalton. This here’s Mayor Rohman, and Dr. Ferringo. The rest back there don’t count for much.” After that reasonable introduction, he added, “You’re a Hunter, aren’t you? I see it in your eyes, the way you carry yourself. I seem to recall hearing there was a man of unbelievable skill traveling across the Frontier, and that his name was D. They say his sword is faster than a laser beam or some such thing.” Those words could be taken as fearful or praising, but D was silent.

The sheriff continued in a hard voice. “Only, they say that man’s a Hunter, and he specializes in vampires. And that he’s a dhampir himself.”

There were gasps. The village notables and hoods all froze. As did Dan.

“Oh, Doris! Then you really have been...”

Dr. Ferringo barely squeezed the hopeless words from his throat.

“Yes, the girl’s been bitten by a vampire. And I’ve been hired to destroy him.”

“At any rate, the mere fact that she’s been bitten by a vampire is reason enough not to let her remain at large. She goes to the asylum,” the mayor declared.

“Nothing doing,” Doris shot back flatly. “I’m not going anywhere and leaving Dan and the farm unattended. If you’re hellbent on doing it, you’ll have to take me away by force.”

“Okay then,” Greco groaned. The girl’s manner and speech, defiant to the bitter end, reawakened his rancor at being spurned. He gave a toss of the chin to his thugs, whose eyes burned with the same shadowy fire as a serpent’s.

The rowdies were about to dismount in unison, but at that moment their horses reared up simultaneously. There was nothing they could do. Each gave their own cry of “Oof” or “Ow,” and every last one of them was thrown to the ground. The sunny air was filled with moans of pain and the whinnying of horses.

D returned his gaze to the sheriff. Whether or not the sheriff comprehended that a single glare from the Hunter had put the horses on end was unclear.

An indescribable tension and fear flowed between the two of them.

“I have a proposal.” At D’s words, the sheriff nodded his assent like he was sleepwalking. “Hold off on doing anything about the girl until I’ve finished my work. If we come out of it okay, that’s fine. If we don’t...”

“You can rest assured I’ll take care of myself. If he’s beaten by the lord, I’ll drive a stake through my own heart.” Doris gave a satisfied nod.

“Don’t let her fool you! This jerk’s in league with the Nobility. You shouldn’t be making deals with him—he’s out to turn every last person in Ransylva into a vampire, I’m sure of it!” Having been thrown to the ground for the second time that day, Greco was still down on all fours, screaming. “Let’s do away with the bitch. No, better yet, give her to the lord. That way, he won’t go after any of the other women.”

With a pffft! a four-inch-wide pillar of flame erupted from the ground right in front of Greco’s face. The earth boiled from a blast of more than twenty thousand degrees, and the flames leapt to Greco’s greasy face, searing his upper lip. He tumbled backwards with a beastly howl of agony.

“Say anything else bad about my sister and your head’ll be next,” Dan threatened, perfectly aligning the barrel of his laser rifle with Greco’s face. Though it’s true the weapon had no kick, it was still unheard of for a child a good deal shorter than the weapon’s length to be skilled enough to hit a target dead-on.

Far from angry, the sheriff wore a grin that said, “You done good, kid.”

D addressed the sheriff softly.

“As you can see, we have a fierce bodyguard on our side. You could try and plow through us, but a lot of people will probably get hurt unnecessarily. Just wait.”

“Well, some of them could do with a little hurting if you ask me,” said the sheriff, glancing briefly at the hoodlums moaning behind him. “What do you make of this, Doc?”

“Why don’t you ask me?!” the mayor screamed, veins bulging. “You think we can trust this drifter? We should send her to the asylum, just like my boy says! Sheriff, bring her in right this moment!”

“The evaluation of vampire victims falls to me,” Dr. Ferringo said calmly, and then he produced a cigar from one of his inner pockets and put it in his mouth. It wasn’t a cheap one like the local knock-off artists hand rolled with eighty percent garbage. This was a high-class cigar in a cellophane wrapper that bore the stamp of the Capital’s Tobacco Monopoly. These were Dr. Ferringo’s treasure. He gave a little nod to Doris.

Her whip shot out with a wa-pish!

“Oof!” The mayor gave an utterly hysterical cry and grabbed his nose. With one slight twist of Doris’ wrist, her whip had taken the cigar from the doctor’s mouth and crammed it up one of the mayor’s nostrils.

Ignoring the mayor, whose entire face was flushed with rage, the doctor declared loudly, “Very well, I find Doris Lang’s infection of vampirism to be of the lowest possible degree. My orders are rest at home for her. Sheriff Dalton and Mayor Rohman, do you concur?”

“Yessir,” the sheriff replied with a nod of satisfaction, but suddenly he looked straight at D with the intimidating expression of a man sworn to uphold the law. “Under the following conditions. I’ll take the word of a damn-good Hunter and hold off on any further discussion. But let me make one thing crystal clear—I don’t want to have to stake you folks through the heart. I don’t want to, but if that time should come, I won’t give it a second thought.” And then, throwing the Lang children a look of pathos, he bid them farewell. “I’m looking forward to the day I can enjoy the juice of those Gargantua-breed grapes of yours. All right, you dirty dogs, mount up and make it snappy! And I’m warning you, any of you so much as make a peep about this back in town, I’ll throw you in the electric pokey, mark my words!”

The crowd disappeared over the hill, glancing back now and then with looks of hatred, compassion, and, from some, encouragement. D was about to go into the house when Doris asked him to wait. He turned to her coolly, and then she said, “You sure are strange for a Hunter. You might’ve taken on some work you didn’t have to, and I can’t pay you for it.”

“It’s not about work. It’s about a promise.”

“A promise? To who?”

“To your little bodyguard over there,” he said with a toss of his chin. Then, noticing Dan’s stiff expression, he asked, “What’s wrong? You hate me because I’m supposedly ‘in league with the Nobility’?”

“Nope.”

As he shook his head, the boy’s face suddenly crumpled in on itself and he started to cry.

The young hero who’d put Greco in his place minutes earlier now returned to being an eight-year-old boy. He blubbered away as he threw his arms around D’s waist. This child had rarely cried since the death of his father three years earlier. As he watched his sister struggling along as a woman on her own, the boy had secretly nurtured his own stores of pride and determination in his little heart. Naturally, life on the Frontier was hard and lonely for him too. When his youthful heart felt he might be robbed of his only blood relative, he forgot himself and latched onto not his sister, but rather to the man who’d only arrived the day before.

“Dan...”

Doris reached for her brother’s shoulder with one hand, but D gently brushed it away. Before long, the boy’s cries started to taper off, and D quietly planted one knee on the wooden floor of the front porch, looking the boy square in his tear-streaked face.

“Listen to me,” he said in a low but distinct voice. Noticing the unmistakable ring of encouragement in his voice, Doris opened her eyes in astonishment.

“I promise you and your sister I’ll kill the Noble. I always keep my word. Now you have to promise me something.”

“Sure.” Dan nodded repeatedly.

“From here on out, if you want to scream and cry, that’s your prerogative. Do whatever you like. But whatever you do, don’t make your sister cry. If you think your crying will set her off too, then hold it in. If you’re being selfish and your sister starts to cry, make her smile again. You’re a man, after all. Okay?”

“Sure!” The boy’s face was radiant. It glowed with an aura of pride.

“Okay, then do your big brother a favor and feed his horse. I’ll be heading out on business soon.”

The boy raced off, and D went into the house without another word.

“D, I...” Doris sounded like something was weighing greatly on her.

The Vampire Hunter ignored her words, and said simply, “Come inside. Before I head out, I want to put a little protective charm on you.” And then he vanished down the dark and desolate hall.