Alex Van Helsing (6 page)

“Pierce was a werewolf, Alex,” Sangster said. He tapped some keys on the keyboard in the table and there Alex’s face was on the screen, next to the Frayling expulsion report. And more: a picture of Pierce. No, two pictures. One was Pierce’s student ID photo and the other was a photo of a wolflike head with eyes that looked familiar. Pierce’s.

“Why do you have this?”

“This entry in the database is on our American servers; it was triggered by an anonymous tip. We can keep an eye on him now. Your fight was in the middle of the lunar cycle—Pierce was itching for a change but wouldn’t have undergone a full transformation for another week. During the day he was normal, so
no one but you ever noticed.”

“The school called my father,” Alex said, almost to himself. “He came right away. He was furious. He talked to the counselors and police and got me out with only an expulsion and no jail time, no newspaper stories. I gotta say that I got off easy. But when we were finally alone and I told him what I—what I
felt
, the way Pierce acted, he made me promise not to mention it ever again. He said people would think I was crazy. It even sounded like he thought I
was
crazy. But if what you’re saying is true, he probably knew all about it. That Pierce was a werewolf.”

Alex couldn’t help feeling betrayed by this realization. His father had lied to him, and worse, made him question his own sanity.
How could he—what would be worth that?
“So…why didn’t he tell me?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know why he didn’t tell you,” said Sangster. “But he’s been preparing you. All your life. Self-defense. Mountain rescue. Whether he likes it or not, he knows what you’re going to be.”

Alex wondered if Dad knew he had spent a considerable part of the past week running for his life. “Who was that on the road tonight?”

“Icemaker,” Sangster replied. He tapped at the keys again, and now a new sketch appeared—a cruel-eyed
man with swept-back hair. “That was the arriving caravan of a clan lord, a big boss, that we call Icemaker.”

“You call him that because of the cold?” Alex asked.

“That’s right.”

“You give all the vampires cool superhero names?”

Sangster smiled.

Alex went on. “So who is this Icemaker?”

“Polidori knew him as, believe it or not, Lord Byron,” Sangster said. The sketch morphed into an older image: The eyes and face remained, but now the hair was longer and the man’s clothes were in the ruffled, nineteenth-century style. “The poet…and the first vampire Polidori ever faced. That last summer when the whole group of friends was together, the Haunted Summer, is the summer that Byron began to consort with vampires. Byron was an arrogant man, attractive to every woman he met and able to best any man in any contest, but he was plagued by self-consciousness, about his club foot, his height, his reputation as a writer. Vampirism attracts people who want to become something greater than themselves. It took years before Byron became a full vampire, but Polidori saw it coming. Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing I would ever teach in class.”

Too bad for Sid,
Alex thought. Sangster went on.

“Today Icemaker controls thousands of vampire sol
diers. He’s very secretive, even for a clan lord. But know this: He is extraordinarily dangerous. When he needs blood, he doesn’t just come in and kill a few, he kills hundreds. He’ll attack, freeze the town, then reduce it to shards.”

“Do you know why he’s here?” Alex asked.

“Nope. We got word that he destroyed one of our ships, the
Wayfarer
, which had a cargo of relics and other holdings on its way to a warehouse in the States. Then suddenly we started tracking him here. Something got his attention and drove him back to Lake Geneva.”

“Where would they be going? Where would they put all of those vehicles?”

“In a place we can’t find,” Sangster said. “A place even better hidden than this: a place called the Scholomance.”

Alex nodded. He had heard that word. “That’s a hideout?”

“It’s a school, more a university, like an MIT for vampires.”

“And it’s around here?”

“We think so,” Sangster said. He tapped another key and Alex nearly choked on his drink.

There, in a blurry photograph, was a shot of his own father, that skinny, seldom-exercised man, here twenty
years younger, fitter, and hunkered down behind a crumbled wall as he talked on a radio. “Where was this taken?”

Sangster looked up. “Hmmm…I’d say Prague.”

“
When
was this taken?”

“I would figure not long before you were born.” Sangster looked at Alex searchingly. He smiled and then said, “Come
on
, Alex.”

“What?”

“One more time: It’s
really
your position that you have never heard of the Polidorium or the work it does? And that your knowledge of the Van Helsing Foundation is restricted to its charitable activities?”

“Yes! Everything you said.” Alex couldn’t take his eyes off the picture.
Incredible. Dad was an honest-to-God, hunkering-down-behind-crumbling-buildings-and-shooting-things spy.
“Doesn’t happen,” Alex muttered.

“What?”

“All my life my dad brushes off anything that he thinks sounds like nonsense with ‘that doesn’t happen.’ But it turns out that everything that doesn’t happen actually does.”

“Probably not everything,” Sangster said. “Anyway, we can’t keep you from talking. Even if we tried, drugs wear off. I have no idea what we’re going to do with you.”

“Can
I
learn this stuff?” Alex said, stepping closer to the screen.

“Maybe you should ask your dad that,” Sangster said, studying Alex.

“I don’t get it. Why would he send me here? If he didn’t want me involved with this.”

“He didn’t send you
here
,” Sangster responded, “he sent you to one of the most prestigious private schools in the world.” The teacher/agent bit his lip. “I don’t think he knows the Polidorium has a location at Lake Geneva. It’s top secret, and it’s only been here since we started focusing our search for the Scholomance. We don’t share that kind of information with former agents.”

“If you tell him, he’ll drag me out of here,” Alex said seriously. “That’ll be it for me. I don’t want that. This is too much to turn my back on.”

Sangster rose, tapped a key, and the screen went dark. Then he turned back to Alex with a serious look. “Alex, can you sense them?”

Alex sat silently for a moment. “I think so. When they’re close. I felt it the other night in my room.”

“At school?”

“Yes, and then it—she—was there, outside my window. And…I felt it at Frayling, too.”

Sangster was weighing something in his head.

“You tired?”

Alex had to admit he was.

“Let’s go back to school. It’s going to be morning in a few hours.”

They exited the boardroom and Armstrong and Carerras were down by the foyer in conversation.

Sangster went to find a jacket and helmet for Alex. As Alex waited, he watched the other commandos going about their business, putting back their weapons, fooling around.

Armstrong was talking to Carerras, who was puffing away at his pipe. “Still have no idea where they are,” Carerras was saying.

“We might have found out tonight.”

“Never can tell.”

Sangster returned and handed Alex the helmet. “If you felt it the other night before it chased you at the school, then it’s worse than I thought,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“They know you’re here.”

“Up and at ’em, hero,” Paul was saying. Alex lay in his makeshift bed, wincing against the light, as Paul and Sid moved about the room, the morning sun streaming in. He blinked awake.

“What?”

Paul was looking in the mirror at the bruise that shone bright blue on the side of his head. “You don’t want to miss breakfast this morning,” he said. “Everyone is going to be cheering after yesterday.”

Alex was confused for a moment and then it all came flooding back. After the woods and the motorcycles and the vampires and the cave, he had completely forgotten that the evening had begun with the Secheron fight. In
fact, he had almost gone back to the Merrills’ room after Sangster had dropped him off, wordlessly, at the gate.

Alex moved like a zombie through washing up and putting in his contacts as Paul and Sid lingered near the door, ready to go down to the refectory.

Sid was watching him. “You look terrible,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the sleeping on the floor,” Paul said. “I can see if we can add more blankets.”

“No, no.” Alex waved a hand, his mind still racing through everything he had seen. “No, it’s fine.” He splashed his face again. His eyes were a little sore, but he was getting better at putting his contacts in. He was thinking of the moment when the creatures had spotted him, as he crouched next to…next to Sid’s bike.

He slapped his forehead in disgust. “The…” He turned around, reaching for his sneakers and jamming his feet into them. “You guys go on.”

“What are you doing?” Paul stared.

“I forgot—I wanted to go for a walk. You know…think,” he said awkwardly.

“You wanted to…
think
?” Paul repeated the words as though he had never heard them before. He pointed to the scratches on his face and neck. “People will be cheering. Look at my face! This is like a medal.”

Alex smacked Paul on the shoulder as he ran out the
door. “Enjoy it.”

He raced down the stairs, past bleary-eyed students on their way to breakfast. Headmaster Otranto was coming in from outside and Alex nearly bumped into him, eliciting a short, disapproving look.

Out the door, onto the path, through the gate, a steady pace to the road. He had forgotten Sid’s bike, left it in the woods halfway to Secheron. He was glad for the mistake—he wanted to go back into the woods. Unlike school, the woods were a clearer world, of hooded monsters and agents on motorcycles. Every inch of the area crawled with the kind of energy that he barely felt in his everyday school life. Out here there was energy with purpose. Heroes on a mission. Alex found himself thinking hard as he ran.

The trees looked unfamiliar in the daylight, but after a while he felt he was reaching the bend where he had left the road, where the caravan had started to pass. Finally he saw the glint of the reflector on Sid’s bike as it lay in the leaves.

Alex froze. There, leaning against a tree, arms folded, was Sangster, wearing a navy blue jogging suit. “We need to talk,” he said.

Alex went to the bike and lifted it. “I want in,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘in’?” Sangster asked.

“You showed me pictures of my father. I can do it. I want in.”

“Are you sure that’s what you need to be doing right now?” Sangster asked. “You’re skilled and you’re lucky, but I gotta admit, I’m worried that you shouldn’t even stay in the area.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” Alex asked, and he meant the question sincerely. “Even if I wanted to be normal, to lead a normal life—I’ve got these vibrations in my head when I see these—oh, wait, right—
monsters.
”

“And they know you have that,” Sangster said. “I’m willing to bet that the Scholomance got wind that a Van Helsing was in Geneva.”

“Last night when you guys were checking out my glasses, you were acting like you thought maybe I was spying on you,” said Alex. “Spying for my dad, I guess.”

“Right.”

“Why would he want me to do that?”

“The relationship is complicated,” Sangster said.

“You gotta understand that’s just not part of what I know of my father. I want to learn about that. I want to learn to do what he did.”

“Alex,” Sangster said soothingly, “this stuff takes years to learn. And you
have
years.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Alex said. Sangster was calling him a kid basically. That was what this was about. Alex was furious. Last night Sangster had sounded ready to hand him a machine gun. “First, I’ve already killed one of those things without any of your training. And second, I can learn to do what you do. You think I can’t ride through
trees
?”

Sangster tilted his head. “I didn’t say I don’t think it will happen. I already told you that.
Some
day.”

Alex started rolling the bike. “I have to go. Paul and Sid are waiting.”

“Be careful on these roads,” Sangster called, adding to Alex’s irritation.

Alex returned the bike and made it to the refectory just as Paul and Sid were getting up from breakfast. Sure enough, there was a crowd of admirers gathered around, who indeed regarded Paul’s scratches and wounds as badges of honor. Alex’s bruises ran up and down his body but were generally invisible, and he felt a twinge of jealousy.

“How was your walk?” Sid asked. Alex shrugged.

A hand clapped down on his shoulder from behind. Alex spun, anticipating a fanged demon that would bite his head in half. Close enough. It was Bill Merrill.

“You didn’t come in last night,” Bill said.

Behind Alex, Paul and Sid grew serious. Steven Merrill, nursing his own wounds, lingered nearby.

“I was there,” Alex said evenly. “Don’t you remember?”

This answer caught Bill by surprise—he was about to respond, then stopped and seemed to chew on it.
Get there faster, Bill,
thought Alex. Bill looked back at Steven, who pursed his lips.

“Yeah,” Bill said finally. “Maybe so. But don’t think for a minute we’re done.”

“Okay,” Alex said.

Paul made a time-out gesture with his hands. “It’s Saturday, mates. Saturday. For the love of God. Let’s all do something else.”

Bill and Steven consulted each other and reached an agreement. “See you tonight,
roomie
,” said Bill.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Alex said, knowing they were glad to be rid of him. He hoped that would be the end of it.

Alex, Paul, and Sid spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about the grounds. After lunch they spent some time on the battlements, sprawled out and reading stacks of Sid’s comics and magazines.

Alex was reading a vampire comic called
Tomb of Dracula
and despite the events of the past week his first feeling was guilty thrill. His father had always forbidden books on the supernatural—for the first time, Alex thought, he had a clue as to why. But still he couldn’t help trying to compare the pale figures of the comic with those he had seen, even if he could not discuss them aloud.

“What was the first vampire book?” Alex asked.

Sid leaned back against the wall. “Modern vampire?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean there were always stories about family ghosts that came back to haunt sons who’d embarrassed them,” Sid said. “A modern vampire, that’s the Dracula kind, a revived human who, you know, sucks blood and chases women.”

“Okay.”

“You have two important works in 1816—
Christabel
by Coleridge, but that’s a poem and you want books,” Sid went on, “so that brings us back to
The Vampyre
by John Polidori. Of course that one was really about Lord Byron.”

“Lord Byron, the poet?” Paul asked. Alex remained quiet.

Sid nodded. “He was called Ruthven in the book,
but it’s about how he would seduce and destroy everyone he met. It was clear to everyone that Polidori was writing about Byron. Byron was cruel, man. That girl Claire, Mary Shelley’s half sister? She was obsessed with Byron and followed him everywhere, but when they had a child, Byron insisted on taking it and not letting Claire anywhere near it. Then he got tired of raising the baby and stuck her in a convent, where she died before she was six. He was a narcissist and a sadist. This guy was so bad, some people believe Polidori’s vampire metaphor wasn’t a metaphor at all.”

Alex shook his head, impressed. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Sid stood up and looked over the battlements at the woods and the lake. “We have vampires
here
.”

“Come
on
,” Paul said, snorting. “There are no such things. Not in real life.”

“What do you think happened to that woman in the square?” asked Sid insistently. “Just don’t go in those woods at night, is all I’m saying.”

Paul started snickering and Alex tried to join him. After a moment Paul said, “Do you ever look anything but sad?”

Alex smiled awkwardly. “Is that how I look?”

Paul rested his great forearms on his knees and said,
“When I got here—this is three years ago—I spent all my time thinking about Ealing. That was my neighborhood. I thought about it all the time. The parks where I rode my bike, my friends. It got where if I
wasn’t
thinking about it I felt guilty for
not
thinking about it.”

Sid nodded to Alex, indicating this was true.

Paul said, “So Count Dracula here started bugging me about London. Had I been to where they filmed those Hummer movies.”

“Hammer,” said Sid. “That’s a vampire series.”

“Hammer movies. Whatever. And there’s classes, and there’s answering all these bloody questions. And sooner or later, I realized that my life was here, at least for now.”

“Your life was talking about your home instead of thinking about it?”

“My life was whatever was going on,” Paul said. “What do you miss?”

“I don’t know,” said Alex, trying to think. “We watch a lot of old movies, that’s my mom’s thing. And I miss skiing with my sister.” That wasn’t quite accurate, unless one understood skiing to mean
rescue
skiing. His little sister Ronnie, although twelve, was already an enthusiastic search-and-rescue aficionado, and when they had lived in Wyoming she and Alex had both thrown themselves
into the training they were lucky enough to receive. Ronnie was the most daring of his four siblings.

“So I have news for you, mate,” Paul said. “You can keep that. But everybody back home would probably want you to make the best of your life here.”

They cracked into the shojo that Sid had borrowed from Minhi.

When Alex looked at the first shojo, emblazoned with a great, black-winged angel holding a guitar, he saw her name scrawled on the back cover. “Minhi with an h,” he said. He opened up the book and a slip of paper fell out, jagged and torn from Minhi’s pink notebook. He picked it up. After reading it for a second, Alex asked, “Did you guys see this?”

Paul and Sid shook their heads. “What?” Paul asked.

Below the phone number and email address, the note said: FALL RECITAL AND MIXER. SATURDAY AT 8. LALAURIE SCHOOL.

“It’s an invitation,” Alex said, as he stood up. For a moment he leaned on the battlements, watching the lake, feeling a bit like a knight.