Her left hand flipped the revolver, thumb pushing the cylinder release; the cylinder swung out to the side.
At the same time her right hand drew a speedloader from inside her trench coat, six silver-white bullets lined up neatly on the metal clip, reflecting a piercing cold light under the moon.
The speedloader aligned with the cylinder; a single push of her fingers sent all six rounds into the chambers with a crisp metallic click.
A flick of her left wrist, and the cylinder snapped home.
The entire sequence flowed like clouds and water, from start to finish—
John could not believe his eyes.
It was impossible for anyone to complete a reload in two seconds.
His mind frantically searched for a reasonable explanation.
She had blocked his attack with the short blade, driven her knee into him and sent him flying, let the blade drop, drawn the speedloader, opened the cylinder, loaded the rounds, and closed it again.
That chain of actions should have taken at least ten seconds, yet from the moment he struck the wall to the moment he stood up, no more than three seconds had passed.
The timing did not add up at all.
A sense of wrongness and panic flooded John’s chest like seawater, dousing the confidence and thirst for revenge that had just ignited in his heart.
This dislocation of time ran through the entire fight; he felt like a gear with a broken tooth, forever catching on the back half of the girl’s rhythm.
Claire’s figure vanished once more.
This time John did not even see the process of her disappearance.
One second she was still standing three rows of seats away, pistol raised, moonlight flowing through her hair; the next second that spot was empty, as if someone had simply erased a stroke from a canvas.
John looked around wildly, pupils dilated to their limit, trying to catch even the slightest clue at the boundary between moonlight and shadow.
The carriage was filled with debris and corpses; every shadow seemed to conceal killing intent.
His ears raced at high speed, filtering out the sound of the wheels, the wind, the fall of metal fragments—
Then he heard it.
Directly behind him.
The soft sound of the hammer being cocked before the trigger was pulled.
John slowly turned his head.
Claire stood less than two feet behind him, the muzzle of the revolver pointed at the back of his skull.
The black barrel gleamed with cold metallic luster under the moonlight; inside the muzzle was a circle of bottomless darkness.
The girl’s face still held no expression.
Her eyes under the moonlight showed a color like amber, clear and cold, like two mirrors reflecting an eternal winter.
“Farewell, John.”
Her voice was very soft, as light as a snowflake landing on ice.
“May you find redemption in hell.”
The gunshot exploded inside the carriage.
The silver bullet pierced John’s skull at twice the speed of sound and burst into dozens of scorching fragments inside the cranial cavity.
Every fragment was like a small ball of burning white phosphorus, spreading wantonly through his neural tissue and incinerating one by one the synapses that had once belonged to human memory.
John’s body froze in place, holding a standing posture for roughly two seconds.
In those two seconds his regenerative ability made one final, futile struggle.
Damaged tissue tried to heal; newborn cells had barely emerged before they were burned to ash by the silver fragments, like attempting to build a castle on magma.
Then his body slowly toppled forward.
In the final few seconds of life, John’s consciousness was collapsing at an astonishing speed.
He saw the courtroom.
The gallery of the Yorkshire County Court was packed with people; the sound of the judge’s gavel echoed beneath the dome.
He stood at the defense table, thick case files in hand, a confident smile unique to the young on his lips.
The opposing counsel was a balding middle-aged man, reduced to speechlessness by his arguments; suppressed laughter rose from the gallery.
He saw the library.
The library of Humber University School of Law had towering oak bookshelves and desk lamps that were never quite bright enough.
He sat by the window, three casebooks thick enough to serve as murder weapons open before him, the pencil in his mouth chewed to ruin.
Outside, the plane tree leaves were turning yellow; a few had fallen onto the open pages.
He saw his father.
His father stood at the front door waiting for him to come home, an unlit pipe in his hand, his smile plated with warm gold by the setting sun.
His mother leaned out from the kitchen, flour on her apron, calling something—probably telling him to wipe his shoes before coming in.
These scenes flashed through his collapsing consciousness like a revolving lantern, every frame as clear as yesterday.
Then they darkened one by one.
At the very end, John Cornwall lowered his head.
He saw what lay at his feet.
Not memory, but reality.
On the carriage floor the passengers he had slaughtered lay scattered in all directions—a mother clutching a child, a merchant with a pocket watch, a worker with half a curse still in his mouth.
Their faces were pale and quiet under the moonlight, like some silent accusation.
John suddenly realized that it had been a very long time since he last stood at a defense table.
He was no longer the lawyer who fought for the rights of the weak.
He was a vampire.
A murdering monster.
And the girl had been right: the moment he bit through the throat of the first innocent person, he had already abandoned the rights of a human being.
Thirty-one years of imprisonment had indeed been unjust, but injustice could not become a reason to slaughter the innocent.
He really was a terrible lawyer.
His consciousness completely dissipated on that thought, like a wisp of light smoke melting into the boundless dark.
Moonlight seeping through the breach in the carriage fell across John’s corpse, draping him in a thin silver coat.
Wind passed through the valley and stirred the hand that had already returned to human form; the claws and black fur had faded at the moment of death, revealing a slender hand with clear joints.
It was a hand that had once turned the pages of countless law books.
Before dawn at Kent Harbor, the sky was still blanketed by heavy night.
The air carried the damp chill unique to early morning, mixed with the salt of the sea and the scorched scent of kerosene lamps on distant fishing boats.
Occasionally a few seabird cries drifted from the direction of the port, like the lazy, intermittent changing of the guard between night and day.
The train slowly entered the platform; the friction of wheels against rails dragged out a long trailing note through the empty station.
Steam billowed from both sides of the locomotive and condensed into white mist in the biting air, enveloping the entire platform in a haze.
Most of the carriages looked ordinary, except for one that drew the eye—its right wall had been torn open by a huge gash.
Almost no one stood on the platform.
Only a tall woman stood quietly at the edge of the platform, as if she had already been waiting a long time.
She wore a long black coat, the collar embroidered with an exquisite three-headed dog crest; her chestnut curls drifted lightly in the sea breeze.
Dim yellow streetlamps shone from behind her, casting a long slender shadow at her feet.
The train came to a stop.
Steam released from the valves gave a long sigh; after a brief hesitation the carriage door slowly opened.
A cold wind laced with the smell of blood surged out from within and brushed across the face of the woman on the platform; she did not even frown.
Claire stepped out of the carriage.
Wood chips and fine metal fragments clung to her black trench coat; there was a less obvious tear at the cuff of her left sleeve.
The short blade had been returned to the sheath at her lower back; the revolver was holstered at her waist, the barrel still carrying residual heat.
Her face was pale—paler even than a vampire’s usual pallor—clearly the fight had cost her considerable strength.
“Are you all right, Cheshire Cat?” the waiting woman asked.
Claire shook her head.
Cheshire Cat was her codename in the Fourth Agency.
The vampires of the Fourth Agency were responsible for hunting frenzied kin and demonkin criminals on the run; it was a job that naturally made enemies.
The target you hunted today might have shared the same blood ration with you yesterday; the one you personally sent to the execution ground tomorrow might be a distant relative of some family.
In this post, a true name was more precious than life itself, so the operatives of the Fourth Agency addressed one another only by codename.
The Cheshire Cat was the cat from Alice in Wonderland that could vanish at will; Claire had chosen the name herself, and it had to be said that the choice was perfectly fitting.
“This guy used Demon Spinal Fluid,” Claire yawned, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, her voice muffled. “Definitely the Mutual Aid Society’s handiwork. Sorry to trouble you again, Dorothy—you’ll have to handle the aftermath.”
Having said that, she lifted her head and stared at the eastern horizon that was about to turn pale, her gaze somewhat vacant, as if thinking of something, or as if thinking of nothing at all.
Mutual Aid Society.
Those three words were a top-level red-flagged entry in the intelligence system of the Northern Continent United Kingdom.
Seventy years ago the last human-demon war had ended in a pyrrhic victory for the United Kingdom.
The first Supreme King had made a decision after the war that was highly controversial at the time and is still repeatedly debated today: she had not slaughtered the demon prisoners of war who had laid down their arms, but had granted them the right of residence.
She had designated dozens of containment zones within the United Kingdom’s territory, allowing these alien races from the demon realm to live freely among human society, on the condition that they obey the laws of the United Kingdom and accept supervision by the Cerberus Bureau.
In that era of reconstruction from ruins, the decision was called “the King’s Mercy.”
Seventy years later, mercy had borne bitter fruit.
The demon descendants who had grown up in the containment zones were not as grateful as their parents’ generation.
They had grown up on the edges of human cities, knowing from childhood that they were different from the human children across the street.
They had curfews, travel restrictions, employment discrimination, and the Cerberus Bureau’s mandatory registration inspections once a month.
Their parents might still remember the cruelty of war and be willing to endure humiliation for the sake of peace; but they did not remember.
They only remembered that they had been born as second-class citizens.
The Mutual Aid Society had been born in that soil.
In a short span of twenty years this demon terrorist organization had attacked the containment zones of several duchies, recruiting large numbers of discontented demon citizens under the banner of “liberating our kin.”
They supplied prohibited drugs to their imprisoned kin, helped them break through their restraints and cast off their chains, then incorporated these “liberated warriors” into their underground networks.
John Cornwall had probably been selected in exactly this way.
A lesser vampire imprisoned for thirty-one years and full of resentment, plus one dose of Demon Spinal Fluid, equaled a bomb with its fuse already lit.
The Mutual Aid Society did not care who that bomb ultimately killed—innocent train passengers, a Cerberus enforcer come to carry out the sentence, or John himself.
They only cared about the explosion itself.
Every explosion was a declaration: the order of the United Kingdom is hypocritical, the Supreme King’s mercy is a lie, and only resistance is the way out.
And tracking down and eliminating those who lit fires in the dark was the daily work of the Fourth Agency operatives who addressed one another only by codename.
The woman called Dorothy took the short blade Claire unfastened from her waist.
The blood staining the blade had already congealed into a dark brown that was no longer glaring under the dim yellow station lamps, but the faint sweet metallic scent still lingered.
Dorothy wiped the blade carefully with a black handkerchief, her movements skilled and natural, as if she had done this ten thousand times.
“You always push yourself so hard.” She slipped the short blade into an inner pocket of her coat; there was a trace of reproach in her tone, but more of the unspoken concern that only old partners shared. “Go back to the safe house and rest for a few days. Leave the rest to me.”
She gently patted Claire’s shoulder.
Claire smiled faintly.
That smile lingered on her pale face for only a very short time before vanishing, as brief as a meteor streaking across a winter night sky.
But in that instant she truly looked like an ordinary young girl who would smile because of a companion’s concern, rather than an enforcer who had just executed a rampaging vampire fifteen minutes earlier.
The two of them walked side by side toward a black carriage parked at the edge of the station.
The carriage bore no markings; its lacquer reflected a dull sheen under the lamps, looking ordinary to the point of suspicion.
Dorothy opened the door and stepped aside to let Claire board first.
A faint scent of iris perfume filled the interior, forming a sharp contrast with the blood reek of the train moments before.
The leather seats were soft and warm; the instant Claire sat down, exhaustion surged over her like a tide.
She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes.
The carriage started; the wheels rolled over the stone pavement with an even rumble.
Behind them the sky over Kent Harbor gradually took on a fish-belly white.
On the eastern horizon the first ray of morning light was like a golden blade, slowly cutting open the heavy curtain of night.
Mist over the sea began to dissolve in the sunlight, revealing the blurred outline of a distant lighthouse.
Seabird calls gradually increased; the earliest fishermen on the docks had already begun carrying nets and wooden barrels onto their boats, their figures hazy in the morning fog.
In a corner of the station the damaged carriage still sat quietly on the tracks.
Its torn gash faced east; morning light shone through the broken iron into the interior, illuminating shattered seats, sprawled corpses, and the figure lying face-down on the floor.
No one looked at it again.