Demon Deathchase by Hideyuki Kikuchi

something, I don’t care what.”
    As Borgoff watched him struggle on the brink of tears, he wore a rancorous expression,
     but he took Leila’s pulse nonetheless, checked her fever, and before long gave a satisfied
     nod. “She’s all right. I’ll check out her internal organs and circulation with a CAT
     scan anyway, but there’s no need to worry.” Staring down at Kyle where he’d slumped
     to the floor in apparent relief, he added, “This kinda shit is what happens when you
     go behind my back and send Leila out alone.”
    “I know. You can take the strap to me later for all I care. But which one of them
     you figure roughed Leila up so bad?”
    Kyle’s face had reclaimed its original viciousness. Eyes staring firmly into space,
     he was so angry he didn’t notice the froth running from the corners of his mouth.
     His body shook.
    “Well, probably not the one who treated her. Which means maybe it was neither of them.
     You wouldn’t think anyone as soft as all that could survive this long out here on
     the Frontier.”
    “It don’t matter,” Kyle said, almost ranting deliriously. “It don’t matter which of
     ’em did it. I’ll find ’em both and cut ’em to pieces. Take their arms and legs off
     and put ’em back on where they don’t belong. Stuff their mouths with their own steaming
     guts.”
    “Knock yourself out,” his older brother said. “Anyway, you’re sure there wasn’t anyone
     around Leila? From the look of her wounds, she got them three, maybe four hours ago.”
    The door opened and Nolt stuck his head in. “We’ve got some tracks from a carriage
     passing this way. Still fresh. Maybe from an hour before we got here, tops. There’s
     something else, too—some prints from horseshoes.”
    “If that’s the case, then the two of them must’ve gone at it here, too. And it looks
     like it didn’t get settled yet . . . ”
    Nodding gravely at his own words, Borgoff ordered Nolt to take care of Leila and Groveck.
     He went to his room in the back, returning to the driver’s seat clutching a cloth-wrapped
     package of apparent significance.
    “If I’ve seen D’s face, I can spot him,” he muttered, pulling from the cloth a silver
     disk about a foot and a half in diameter. Setting it up on a little stand almost in
     the center of the dashboard, Borgoff turned his heavily whiskered face to gaze out
     the window and up at the moon rising in the heavens. The moon was round and nearly
     full, but, thanks to the clouds obscuring part of it, it looked like it’d been nibbled
     here and there by bugs.
    When he set his huge form down, the driver’s seat creaked and groaned. Then Borgoff
     crossed his hands in front of his chest, and began to stare fixedly at the propped-up
     silver platter with eyes that looked like they could bore right through it. A minute
     passed, then two.
    Kyle wouldn’t leave Leila’s side as she lay in bed. As Nolt peered in through the
     door next to the driver’s seat sweat beaded his face just as profusely as Borgoff’s.
    And then, as the silvery surface of the platter grew smoky, almost like clouds covered
     it, the figure of a young man in black astride a horse suddenly formed on its surface.
    It was D. Turning their way and saying something, he pulled on the reins in his hands
     and disappeared into a thicket.
    It was a replay of D from the previous night, talking with them after the battle with
     the vampiric villagers. If people or things looked a little different, it was probably
     because these images were taken from Borgoff’s memories. Here was a man who could
     project his own memories onto a silver platter. Yet, despite this admirable display
     of what some would call sorcery, Borgoff glared mercilessly at the moon in the sky
     with bloodshot eyes. No, not at the moon, but at a big mass of clouds under it. The
     moonlight shining on the clouds edged them in blue.
    There was no change in either the moon or the cloud mass, or so it appeared