Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) Read Free Page B

officers had been following commonsense procedures according to what they knew was normal. But now they recognized an abnormality.
    There was no head where there should have been beneath the helmet. From the cross section of her neck, black smoke spilled like some kind of out-of-control humidifier.
    That in this world, there are monsters that surpass all human understanding.
    To impress her nature upon them, the being atop the black motorcycle reached out—and controlled the night lights with her own shadow.
    The seeping shadow instantly spread, forming a mist that clouded the officers’ vision. This mist only existed for a span of several seconds until the particles of shadow contracted, materializing into a weapon in Celty’s hands.
    But it was far too ugly and warped to be called a weapon. It had a handle about ten feet long, twice Celty’s height, ending in a pitch-black scythe just as long. It was the kind of object found on the Death tarot card, lit by a powerful light to project a large shadow against a wall, then cut out and turned into a real object. Endless, spotless, black, black, black.
    More shadow exuded from Celty’s back, erupting upward into wings just as black as the scythe that enveloped her body.
    At the same time, the previously silent bike’s engine roared into life.
    As it brayed with the sound of a great beast’s dying roar, Celty swung her enormous scythe, completing the image of her true self—a creature not of this world. A headless dullahan.

    Celty Sturluson was not human.
    She was a type of fairy commonly known as a dullahan, found from Scotland to Ireland—a being that visits the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending mortality.
    The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basin full of blood. Thusthe 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 her memories were still lost. And she was fine with that.
    As long as she could stay with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could live the way she was now.
    She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face and held this strong, secret desire within her heart.
    That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.

    Instantly dragged against their wills into a display of the abnormal, the motorcycle cops panicked, which gave Celty an easy window of escape. Naturally, none of them would dare to follow her—or so she assumed.
    Sadly, reality was not so kind.
    Even to a monster to whom reality had only a tenuous connection, reality was cruel to all.
    “It’s always been on my mind,” muttered one of the motorcycle cops to himself, seemingly the central figure of the four men, his face shadowed by his helmet.
    —?
    This was not the reaction she expected.
    Celty concentrated on the officer’s long soliloquy, feeling that something was definitely wrong.
    “Always, always. When things like you show up in manga and movies, we’re always the
punching bags
. By the time the hero with his superpowersshows up, we’re always lying in a pool of our own blood, just to show off how tough your kind is.”
    This didn’t seem to have anything to do