His footsteps were like riding wind and thunder.
The wilderness of the Northern Continent unrolled beneath the moonlight.
He ran for an entire night, crossing the borders of three counties, and only stopped when the first pale fish-belly white appeared on the horizon.
He stood at the top of a nameless hill and looked back the way he had come, feeling as if everything had been a dream.
Unfortunately, it was not.
John began his escape.
At first he still tried to preserve some kind of bottom line.
He only moved through the wilderness, only hunted solitary travelers, and only took enough blood to sustain himself.
He told himself this was a last resort, told himself that once he reached a safe place he would stop, told himself that he was different from those monsters who had lost all reason.
But hunger was a terrible negotiating partner.
The first time he killed someone he vomited for a full hour.
The third time he merely fell silent.
By the seventh time he began to feel that the taste of fresh blood was not as hard to accept as he had imagined.
By the fifteenth day he was already able to feed while calmly considering the next stage of his escape route.
Every act of sucking granted him a satisfaction that rose from within, tens of thousands of times more delicious than the dead blood stored in the bags.
This pleasure was toxic, and he knew it, but he could no longer quit.
Yet even at the peak of that pleasure, John could not completely drive away the shadow that hung over his heart.
The Cerberus Bureau would not let him go.
Rumors about the “Black Crows” circulated by word of mouth through the dark side of the Northern Continent, differing in version but identical in core: they could make stone statues speak, make streams flow backward, and hunt along the moonlight to the ends of the earth.
John knew nothing of their exact numbers or combat strength, but thirty-one years of imprisonment had given him a profound understanding of the organization’s style.
They were never in a hurry.
They never rushed.
They would track their prey like hunters of infinite patience, waiting until the prey had run into the perfect place for a shot, and then kill with a single blow.
In this seemingly endless flight, John did not know where the end lay.
Perhaps there was no end at all.
The train was still threading through the valley in the night, the sound of wheels rolling over the rails echoing between the canyon walls.
John crouched among the corpses, the bloodstains at the corners of his mouth not yet dry, when he suddenly jerked his head up.
His hearing was a hundred times more acute than a human’s.
In the gaps between the noise of the wheels and the howling of the mountain wind, he caught a sound that should not have existed—
Someone was walking on the roof of the train.
A calm, unhurried, even elegant pace.
What kind of person could walk with the rhythm of a stroll on the roof of a train racing at sixty miles an hour?
John’s pupils contracted sharply.
There was only one answer.
The Crows had arrived.
They had tracked his scent here, and choosing this moment to strike was no accident.
The train was currently traveling through a narrow valley, with nearly vertical rock walls on both sides, the railway corridor an uninhabited zone, with no witnesses, no escape routes, and nothing to restrain them.
This carriage was the execution ground the Black Crows had selected.
“Come out, Crow!” John stood up and looked around, his voice echoing through the deathly silent carriage.
Anger and fear twisted together in his chest into a scorching storm.
Deep down he was still afraid of them.
No matter how loudly the slogans of revenge were shouted, no matter how much strength the potion in his veins had given him beyond imagination, he could not forget the words spoken casually years ago by a black-clad man during a birthday visit, when they had caught a former colleague who had defected to the Empire.
They had cut off the traitor’s limbs one by one.
They had stuffed his mouth full of salt bags.
They had hung several stones around his neck.
Then they had sunk him alive into the bay of Storm Gorge.
That black-clad man had spoken of these things in a flat tone, as if describing the weather of the day.
John raised the misshapen claw covered in black fur and began to smash everything inside the carriage with wild abandon.
Wooden seats shattered into flying fragments under his strength, mixing with the bones of the passengers and tumbling through the air, forming a bizarre blizzard.
The footsteps on the roof of the carriage stopped.
That figure shifted silently to a position above and to his right; John keenly caught the change.
He swung the entire row of seats he had wrenched free as if wielding a heavy war hammer, smashing them furiously against the right-hand carriage wall.
A dull boom.
The seats disintegrated into scattering wood chips, and a huge gash was blasted open in the wall of the carriage.
Twisted metal peeled outward, revealing the night of the valley beyond.
A full moon hung exactly in the center of the breach.
Silvery-white light poured in, illuminating every corner of the carriage with crystal clarity—shattered seats, sprawled corpses, mottled bloodstains, and John’s pair of scarlet eyes glowing under the moonlight.
A figure leaped in through the breach.
She wore a long black trench coat, the hem rising and falling in the airflow of her landing; her crow-feather-black short hair took on an almost blue sheen in the moonlight.
She looked very young.
Young enough that she did not seem like someone who should appear in a place like this.
If she had been placed on the campus of Humber University, no one would have found anything out of place—a young and pretty female student, perhaps hurrying to an early class.
Of course, John knew that a vampire’s age could not be inferred from appearance.
The face he saw in the mirror was still that of a twenty-three-year-old.
But to have been transformed into a creature of the night at such a tender stage must mean she too had a past she would not speak of.
“Tell me who you are.” John’s voice was forced out from the depths of his throat, hoarse and distorted, no longer capable of producing a normal human tone.
The girl raised her head, and the moonlight illuminated her face.
There was no expression on that face.
It was not a deliberately suppressed coldness, but a deeper blankness, as if every superfluous emotion had already been stripped clean.
“Cerberus Bureau, Fourth Agency, Enforcer Claire,” she said lightly. “I hereby announce the verdict of the Court of Alien Affairs—you are to be executed.”
“More of that damned law!” John almost roared. “When you locked me up back then there was no trial at all! Did you ever give me a chance to defend myself?”
Thirty-one years.
For thirty-one years he had waited in that white room for a trial that never came.
No lawyer, no jury, no judge.
He had been stripped of the most basic faith of a man of the law.
The girl’s fingertips slowly brushed across the engraved grip of the revolver at her waist.
“The moment you bit through the throat of a citizen of the United Kingdom,” she said, “you had already abandoned the rights of a human being.”
Then she said nothing more.
Moonlight fell on her face, and those eyes were as cold as the ice layers in the depths of the North Sea.
Not hatred, not anger, not even contempt—only a pure, temperature-less scrutiny, as if looking at a specimen already sentenced to death, with only the final procedural step remaining.
That was all that needed to be said.
John’s misshapen giant claw tore through the air, carrying force enough to shred steel plate into fragments, and chopped down toward the girl’s head.
The wind pressure blasted the surrounding debris in all directions; several corpses were flung about like rag dolls by the shockwave.
Yet his claw only pierced the iron skin of the carriage.
Five black nails sank deep into the metal plate, while the girl before his eyes had vanished.
It was not a dodge, not a retreat, but like a drop of ink dissolving into the darkness—completely, without any warning, evaporated from his field of vision.
Gunshots rang out from behind him.
The first bullet struck his left shoulder; the second punched through his right ribs.
The third, the fourth, the fifth—
Bullets streaked through the carriage, emitting sharp whistles, every one striking a vital point.
Yet John only staggered slightly; dark red light flickered at the wounds as muscle tissue writhed, contracted, and rewove itself at a speed visible to the naked eye.
A few seconds later, several deformed lead bullets slid gently from beneath the healed skin and clink-clanked onto the carriage floor.
Ordinary bullets were already meaningless against him.
The potion in the test tube had reshaped every one of his cells, granting him regenerative ability far beyond that of inferior vampires.
John turned around and saw Claire standing at the other end of the carriage.
The girl held her gun in both hands, the muzzle still trailing pale blue gunsmoke.
He recognized the model of gun in her hands.
The Schofield Model Two revolver, the standard-issue weapon of the Cerberus Bureau.
For thirty-one years he had watched the Black Crows arrive with this exact pistol at their waists, thirty-one times.
He even remembered every one of its parameters: caliber .45, barrel length six inches, cylinder capacity—
Eight rounds.
John calculated at lightning speed.
He had heard at least six shots just now, plus two that might have been masked by the wind and echoes; the cylinder should already be empty.
As long as he hit her once before she reloaded—just once—he had absolute confidence that he could tear her to pieces with his claws.
Without thinking, John exploded into motion, his entire body transforming into a black afterimage as he lunged forward.
His speed was so great that the air itself had no time to part; the remaining debris inside the carriage was whipped into a vortex along his path.
Closer.
Three meters, two meters, one meter—
He could already see the curve of the girl’s eyelashes, could smell the residual gunpowder on her coat and a very faint scent of soap that did not belong to this bloody scene.
His black-furred claw was less than half an arm’s length from her face.
Then he heard the girl’s voice.
Very soft, as if speaking to herself, or as if speaking to him—
“I should have used silver bullets from the start.”
In that instant John’s pupils contracted sharply.
The girl’s trench coat exploded outward at close range, like a black flower blooming in a storm.
Her body spun at an angle that violated human biomechanics; in the gap of that spin, John saw a flash of silver at her lower back.
A short blade.
The blade was not long, about a foot, but it gleamed with an eerie cyan light under the moonlight.
The motion of it sliding from its sheath made almost no sound—only a faint sigh as the air was parted by the extremely thin edge.
The giant claw and the short blade met in midair.
There was no dull impact of the kind John had expected; instead there came a sharp metallic ring that nearly pierced the eardrums.
Sparks sprayed in every direction from the point of contact, drawing dozens of fleeting meteor trails through the dim carriage.
John’s heart jolted violently.
That short blade had not only blocked his all-out strike, it had done so without the slightest effort; the rebound force transmitted through the blade left his entire arm numb.
This was impossible.
Under the effect of the potion his strength had increased at least fivefold; a single claw should have been enough to split a carriage and its horses in half.
Yet this girl who looked to weigh less than a hundred pounds had caught the blow one-handed with a short blade?
He had no time to think further.
Claire’s figure blurred again the moment the blades met; using the reactive force of the parry she leaned sharply backward, then snapped upward like a bent spring, her knee driving like a heavy hammer fired from a cannon, striking John’s chest with perfect precision.
The force of that knee far exceeded anything her frame should have been capable of.
John felt his sternum emit a piercing crack at the point of contact, and then his entire body flew backward as if struck head-on by a runaway steam locomotive.
His body skimmed over the wreckage of three rows of seats, each one sending up a cloud of splinters and dust, until he slammed heavily into the bulkhead at the rear of the carriage.
The entire carriage shuddered; the kerosene lamps overhead swayed and spilled a rain of light and shadow.
John struggled to his feet from the dented bulkhead; the fractured sternum had already healed within seconds.
Black blood threads hung at the corners of his mouth, and a mad light flickered in his eyes.
The power of the potion was still boiling in his veins; his strength, speed, and regenerative ability all far surpassed those of ordinary vampires.
He had not lost yet.
He only needed to find a gap in the girl’s defense and tear open her throat with one claw—
Then he saw that thing, and the faint spark of hope was doused by a basin of ice water.
The short blade in the girl’s hand had somehow already fallen to the floor; the black blood staining its surface had gathered into a small pool on the broken floorboards.
And Claire’s hands were busy with something else.