Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) Read Free

their impending demise.
    A dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm and rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar drawn by a headless horse. If anyone at the home of the soon to be dead was foolish enough to open their door to the dullahan, they would receive a basin full of blood splashed over them. Thus, the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.
    One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing if this was true.
    It wasn’t that she
didn’t
know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.
    When someone back in her homeland stole her head, she lost her memories of what she was. It was the search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.
    Now, with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.
    But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and now she had partially given up and accepted her new life here.
    Celty understood that society would never accept her for what she was, and in her heart, she yelled back,
So what?
    Society might not be able to accept her, but there were some people who did—and that was the lonely, lively life of the headless woman, Celty Sturluson, in a nutshell.
    The man’s scream brought her back to her senses, reminding Celty that she was just as odd a being as the slasher—if not more so—but she didn’t have time to calm the man down now. Not to mention that there was no
need
for her to calm him down.
    In less than a second, she was back to her normal wits, and she turned to the shadowy figure.
    Suddenly, the fluorescent light illuminating the underside of the girder bridge popped and went out.
    ?!
    For an instant, Celty was disoriented, until she decided that the figure must have thrown something at the light to break it. Her sense of vision went black, but that vision wasn’t passing through eyeballs. Celty “saw” the world through a different means than human beings did, and her night vision was much better as a result.
    But by the time she had adjusted to the darkness, the figure was already out of sight. It must have escaped while she was distracted by the light. Even with the distraction, it was clear that the figure had moved with abnormal speed.
    Damn. Disadvantaged by my own toughness.
    If Celty were a normal human, then even before the blow to her head, she’d have spun around instantly to keep an eye on the “enemy” or source of “fear” that was trying to take her life—and never taken her gaze off of it. But because Celty knew she was very unlikely to die here, she allowed her attention to be distracted by other things, and now the attacker had gotten away.
    All that was left under the darkened bridge was an unconscious thug and a headless motorcycle rider.
    Celty felt a strong
alien
sensation about her abrupt attacker. Not fear—something alien.
    The instant the blade pierced her, it felt like some eerie presence was trying to get inside of Celty.
    If the attacker wasn’t human but another kind of fairy or monster,she would have sensed it before being stabbed. Possibly it
was
such a creature, just one that had learned to extinguish its presence, but Celty dismissed that as unlikely.
    So what
was
that shadow, then?
    The fight was so brief that she wasn’t able to identify the attacker’s features or even height, but there was one thing, one powerful memory that stuck out in her mind.
    Just before the fluorescent light shattered, she saw the attacker’s eyes.
    Unnaturally large, bloodred, distorting the light they reflected.
    Remembering the inhumanly large, glowing red circles, the dullahan couldn’t contain a little shiver.
    She remembered the eerie images of the little gray aliens she’d seen on the TV.
    What if it was an actual alien?
    The headless knight, a symbol of