Demon Deathchase Read Online Free PDF Page A

gravel, but he soon stood upright and turned his face toward
     the nearby stand of trees.
    This person, possessed of such intense beauty as to make the moonlight bashful to
     be around him, was none other than D.
    “So, this is where they left the usual route then. What’s he up to?” Muttering this
     in a way that didn’t seem a question at all, he mounted his horse again and galloped
     toward the tree line.
    All that remained after he vanished through the trees was the moonlight starkly illuminating
     the narrow road, and the distant echo of fading hoofbeats.
    The moon alone knew that some six hours earlier a driver in black coming down the
     road had changed the direction of his carriage in that very spot. Had D discerned
     the tracks of the carriage he sought, picking them out from all the ruts left by the
     number of electric buses and other vehicles that passed this way by day?
    Shortly thereafter, the moon fused with the pale sky, and, in its place, the sun rose.
    Before the sun got to the middle of the sky, D and his steed, who’d been galloping
     all the while, broke out of another in an endless progression of forests and halted
     once again.
    The ground before him had been wildly disturbed. This was the spot where the carriage
     had lost a wheel and rolled.
    Starting out a full twenty-four hours late, D had caught up in half a day. Of course,
     it was the fate of the Nobility to sleep while the sun was high, and the Marcus clan
     was still far behind. The speed and precision of the pursuit by the team of mount
     and rider was frightening.
    But where had the carriage gone?
    Without getting off his horse, D glanced at the overturned soil, then gave a light
     kick to his mount’s flanks.
    They headed for the hill before them at a gradual pace, quite a change from the way
     they’d been galloping up to this point.
    It was a mound of dirt that really couldn’t be called a hill, but, standing atop it
     looking down, D’s eyes were greeted by the sudden appearance of a structure that seemed
     quite out of place.
    It looked like a huge steel box. With a width of more than ten feet and a length of
     easily thirty, its height was also in excess of ten feet. In the brilliant sunlight
     that poured down, the black surface threw off blinding flames.
    This was the Shelter the Noble in black had mentioned.
    Immortal though the vampires might be, they still had to sleep by day. While their
     scientific prowess had spawned various antidotes for sunlight, they never succeeded
     in conquering the hellish pain that came when their bodies were exposed to it. The
     agony of cells blazing one by one, flesh and blood putrefying, every bodily system
     dissolving—even the masters of the earth were still forced to submit to the legends
     of antiquity.
    Though the vampires had reached the point where their bodies wouldn’t be destroyed,
     many of the test subjects exposed to more than ten minutes of direct sunlight were
     driven insane by the pain; those exposed for even five minutes were left crippled,
     their regenerative abilities destroyed. And, no matter what treatment they later received,
     they never recovered.
    But in the Nobility’s age of prosperity, that had mattered little.
    Superspeed highways wound to every distant corner of the Frontier, linear motor-cars
     and the like formed a transportation grid that boasted completely accident-free operation,
     and the massive energy-production facilities erected in and around the Capital provided
     buses and freight cars with an infinite store of energy.
    And then the decline began.
    At the hands of the surging tide of humanity, all that the Nobility had constructed
     was destroyed piece by piece, reducing their civilization to ruins hardly worthy of
     the name. Even the power plants with their perfect defense systems collapsed, a casualty
     of mankind’s tenacious, millennia-spanning assault.
    While the situation wasn’t so dire in metropolitan areas, Nobility in the