The Triumph of Death (16 page)

Without a Polibow he couldn’t shoot. He had a long, dagger-like stake, but he wanted something to throw. He seized a glass ball and threw it at the back of Elle’s head.
The jolting carriage killed his shot, the ball slamming into the dashboard of the carriage. Holy water splashed up and hissed against Elle’s face and she looked back at him through gritted fangs.

Now the great enclosure of night seemed to stretch out, and Alex saw their path—there was an intersection up ahead, which was in darkness as well, cars suddenly coming into it without lights and swerving. But where were they going?

Alex grabbed the back of the carriage seat, next to Elle, who looked at him and laughed, snapping the reins as they crushed a bicycle, its rider abandoning it as they came near. The skeletal horse clopped over the rear bumper of a small French car and the car swerved off the road, colliding with a mailbox.

“Where are you going?” Alex demanded, holding his stake to the point on Elle’s neck just below her ear. She deftly grabbed his wrist and yanked him halfway over the seat.

“What do you care?” He was reading her lips more than hearing her over the cacophony. “You have two days, Alex, before this is what the world looks like.”

Beyond the intersection, Alex saw the running water of the Thames, about a hundred yards of it within the dark bubble.

“You can’t go to the river,” Alex said. “You can’t cross running water.”

“Why don’t you leave the logistics to the professionals?” Elle grabbed his ear and tried to smash Alex against the seat. He struggled to twist free.

Something flashed on the dashboard, and Alex saw what looked like a radar screen, where a large red dot was coming in fast from the right up ahead. Alex heard a long, bellowing horn.

Elle picked up speed, within an eighth of a mile from the intersection. Alex grabbed Elle by the shoulders, reaching his arm around her body, bringing the stake to her neck. “If you’re this afraid that we’re going to get Allegra’s DNA then you must really be worried about us,” he said.

“We’re taking what’s ours.”

Right then, Alex made a decision. The red dot on the screen and the sounding horn were probably someone Elle was planning to meet. He could keep trading blows with her until they reached whatever reinforcements were flying down the road up ahead, or he could change the game.

“No, you’re not.” Alex dropped back and looked at the coffin. Screw it. They could grab what they needed after.

The horn sounded again, and Alex looked over his
shoulder to see an enormous red vehicle like an armored personnel carrier plunge into the intersection, bashing cars out of the way as it slowed.

He looked back at the tiny coffin, all four feet of it, plain and wooden and ancient. “Bye, Elle,” he said, and put his fingers under the box’s end. With one solid heave, he lifted it and kicked.

The coffin of Allegra Byron tumbled like a bowling pin off the end of the trailer.

Alex felt something heavy collide with his shoulders, Elle’s claws grabbing him as she tossed him aside. She was screaming in rage.

The carriage was still moving, out of control and heading into the intersection, as Elle left her seat and pushed past him, reaching out to the wooden casket.

The casket hit the ground and began to roll and shatter, wood splintering. There was no time now. He had to get off and gather it. He looked for a soft landing, found a pickup truck traveling next to them, the driver staring in wonder, and leapt.

Alex hit the metal bed of the pickup truck and felt the driver brake instantly. Alex quickly tucked his shoulders and rolled into the front of the pickup bed. He got to his feet, looking out onto the road and wincing as the coffin continued to pinwheel, its top flying off and its sides exploding. Pieces of it smashed into an oncoming car.

Alex dropped out of the truck to the side of the road, wincing in guilt as he prepared for the grand finale of a tiny mummified body flying through someone’s windshield.

But that didn’t happen at all. The coffin of Lord Byron’s daughter burst open like an old tomato and spat out a flurry of paper, straw, fluttering yellow ribbons, and cobblestones.

Alex got out of the way of another vehicle and stood on the curb in shock, looking back to see Elle, who dropped to her knees in her wild carriage, arms outstretched toward the coffin, her black-painted eyes wide with rage.

The carriage swept into the intersection and smashed into the enormous red vehicle, and the last Alex saw of Elle, her body was catapulted through the air into the open side of the personnel carrier as it zoomed past. She disappeared into it completely, leaving the bones of her horse.

The carrier sped away, and Alex could still hear her screaming as he brought his eyes back to the obliterated, empty coffin.

The coffin is empty.
Alex ran into the street, daylight already streaming back in, the nightmare of darkness lifted. He held out his hands toward traffic in vain hope that this would somehow keep cars from running over him. “Astrid, help me get the pieces!” he called into his wireless.

Get the pieces.
He wouldn’t think about it until he recovered the pieces. Alex ran around, grabbing wood and tossing it to the side of the road. He ran after bits of straw and shredded paper that turned to dust in the damp air. Amazingly, at least one motorist hopped out of his car and helped him, and then Astrid was there, running, too.

At the side of the road Alex had a stack of ruined casket—lid and bottom, pieces of all six sides, and the stuffing, a few bits of which he shoved into his pack.

Something caught his eye, and Alex squinted, feeling his contacts swim as his eyelids squeezed his eyeballs, trying to drag a few extra feet of vision out of them. What looked to him like a paper flag was stuck in a corner of the casket, flitting in the wind against the opposite curb. Alex ran, dodging cars and delivery trucks, and when he reached the chunk of wood he saw that the paper was an envelope. There was a plug of wax on the back with a stamped indicia that looked to Alex like an early version of the one he saw every day:
P
, and below it:
Talia sunt
.

In the coffin of Allegra Byron, he had found a letter from Dr. John Polidori himself.

Alex picked it up and looked back across the street at Astrid, who stood with the other chunks of wood. He waved it.

“What’s that?” he heard her say.

“I think it’s a letter.” That was all there was. He turned it over in his hand—very thin and delicate, with a wax stamp on the back and a pressed, ornate letter
P
. He tapped his Bluetooth. “Sangster, we found—”

Alex suddenly heard sirens ringing out. “Sangster, where are you?”

A click finally responded in his ear. “Alex, are you hurt?” Sangster said with urgency.

Alex was running back to the churchyard, waving at Astrid to follow. He ran back around the street, huffing as he made his way down the sidewalk. An ambulance was pulling to the curb next to the Polidorium van.

Sangster was walking next to the gurney that two English paramedics were putting Armstrong on. Alex and Astrid met them as they were moving across the lawn.

“What is it? Is she—?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Armstrong screamed. She was lying on the gurney as the paramedics moved her quickly, trying to put an oxygen mask on her face. She tried to grab at her knee, which was bleeding profusely, and the paramedics were fighting with her. “This is not necessary; I have a van,” he heard her say.

Sangster was bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, and he spoke rapidly to Alex in short spurts. “I’m fine, leave it,” he said as he waved off a medic. “There were reinforcements among the skulls; they wanted to keep us away from the grave. One of them caught Anne’s leg as she kicked him and bit into her knee. Did they get the body?”

“What about Armstrong?” Alex asked as she was whisked into the ambulance. She was shouting muffled
profanities at them as the ambulance doors closed.

“Just a cluster—it happens all the time. Someone must have called the EMS, and they’re not gonna take no for an answer. It’s fine; they’ll get her checked in, and we’ll have someone kidnap her tonight and bring her back to the farmhouse.” Again he said: “Alex, did they get the body?”

Alex made an open, helpless gesture with his hands. “There was no body. It was empty.”

“What?!” Sangster’s question sounded as angry as it did shocked.

“The Scholomance looked as surprised as we were. Elle screamed bloody murder. But I did get something…I don’t know; it’s a letter.”

Sangster shook his head and doubled over for a second, breathing as he put his hands on his knees. Sangster stood up, as if beating back his stress with a poker. He turned and started to jog toward the Polidorium van. “We gotta go.”

Alex and Astrid looked at each other and followed when Alex repeated, “I got a letter here!” The ambulance was pulling away, its siren wailing.

Sangster stopped at the door to the van and turned back. “What?”

“Well, like I said, the coffin was empty. But I got a letter here that fell out of it. No DNA, but we got the
ribbons and stones that weighed it all down, and we got a letter.” He waved it idiotically, standing next to the open van door as the engine idled. “It’s from Polidori.”

“So open it,” Astrid said.

Alex looked at Sangster. “Maybe we should take it to the lab first.”

Sangster shook his head. “What does it say?”

Alex tore into the old paper, feeling it splinter in his hands.

There was a battered and stained sheet of paper within. He sighed at the few words written there. “The coarsest sensations of men.” Alex paused, then shook his head. “Everybody get that? No body, but we got ‘the coarsest sensations of men.’ Why? Because nothing can ever be easy.”

Sangster turned around and ran his hands along the roof of the van, as if answers would be found in the steel. “The coarsest sensations…?”

“The coarsest sensations of men.”

“Right,” Sangster said, pressing his forehead against the van.

“It sounds like a pirate thing.”

Sangster swore and smacked the van with his fist.

“What?” Alex said.

“It’s a line from
Frankenstein.
”

“Alex, we’re out of time.” Director Carreras, a paunchy, middle-aged man with a Spanish name and a British accent, spoke the words flatly, as if to end an argument they had barely begun.

Alex realized the moment he, Sangster, and Astrid slunk into the Polidorium headquarters below the woods surrounding Lake Geneva that the game was considered over. There were twice as many agents as usual in the halls, and when Sangster had driven their van in from the airstrip, they had been slowed by heavy traffic moving down through the tunnels. There were rocket launchers being prepared. He saw agents practicing formations and assaults in fake urban landscapes in
the far corners of the cavern.

And then Sangster had been texted and ordered immediately to a briefing room, and Alex and Astrid were sent to see the principal. Or in this case, the director. Armstrong was with him, a pair of crutches leaning against the wall behind her. She looked sour.

“What do you mean, ‘out of time’?” Alex said. “We have two more days. Two days to make a weapon that can stop the Queen.”

“With what? The DNA is gone,” Carreras said. “The one shot was to find DNA from Claire and Byron’s daughter, and we’ve missed it.”

“Well, don’t you think that’s a little strange?” Alex said. He waved the envelope. “This is a letter. From Polidori, from
your founder.
It’s a clue. Sangster said it has something to do with
Frankenstein
.”

Carreras sighed. He had been the one to give Sangster permission to bring Alex into the Polidorium in the first place. He even seemed to know Alex’s dad, and Alex was aware that he truly owed every part of his adventures with the group to him. But the director had run out of patience. “A clue, if it’s real, left nearly two hundred years ago. Agent Van Helsing, we have preparations to make. We’ve run out of time to chase a cure. I’ve already assigned Agent Sangster to more pressing
matters. This mission is done.”

“Sir, Astrid and I are still on the search.”

“That is not the plan.”

“So what—” He looked around the boardroom at Armstrong, then at Astrid, who sat silently. “What is your plan?”

Carreras tapped a keyboard and brought up a map onscreen—Europe, then it toggled and unfolded to show the western hemisphere. Little gray lights blinked all across the map. “We have to prepare for the next phase.”

“Next phase?” That didn’t sound good.

“Everyone has a job, Alex,” Carreras said. “Agent Sangster is assigned to France, where the Polidorium will rally with the French secret police. All of the high-ranking agents are being field-promoted to Special Agents in Charge and are now receiving their orders. Transports are leaving on the hour. These gray lights you see? Those are Polidorium stations. In ten minutes I have a conference call with the defense authorities of every nation. U.N. peacekeeping forces are being shifted and reassigned.”

Alex looked at the map. Switzerland. France. Germany. The U.K. The U.S. Russia. He shook his head. “This is giving up.”

Carreras looked at Alex. “No. This is defense. The
Scholomance is not negotiating, Alex. They’re not asking for a ransom. They’re going to plunge the world into darkness, and we have to be ready for a new…normal.”

“And what is the new normal?”

“There will be armies of vampires in the streets,” Armstrong said. “Chatter among the clans is off the charts. They’re preparing to occupy every major city when there’s no more daylight. We’ll need armed forces on every street corner. We’ll need to close schools for a time until we can figure out how to get them open—if we can. Hospitals, don’t even get me started. Forget shopping malls. Forget grocery stores. We’ll have to have armed forces delivering food to protected drop zones, and escort civilians in groups from their neighborhoods to the storehouses.”

“Something like this,” Carreras cut in, “was bound to happen. We always knew it and we have the plans in place.”

Alex pushed back his hair, friendly faces the world over zipping through his brain. “I haven’t seen anything about this…on the news.” Even though he hadn’t actually been watching the news, he knew what he was saying was stupid. If people knew this was coming they’d have taken to the streets already. “Are you going to tell everyone…to prepare them?”

“We’re not announcing it until the night before, until late Sunday night. There wouldn’t be any point. By the time we make the announcement, roadblocks will be in place.”

Alex understood what Carreras was saying. Give the people of the world a few more days of thinking everything was going to keep on the way it had kept on their whole lives. Monday would bring a new order, when every family would be prisoners in their own home.

“And not just vampires,” Carreras continued. “Every kind of vampire the Scholomance wants to roll out. According to Sangster, they had a Nuckelavee digging up the grave in London.”

“A what?” Alex asked. Then he remembered. The thing with the roving legs was a Nuckelavee. He had seen one of them at Creature School, in fact. He waved this away, trying again. “Look, I can find the DNA. I have the instructions for the vial gun. I just need the DNA. We don’t have to assume that the apocalypse is coming.”

“And again I ask you,” Carreras repeated, “find it with what? Find it where?”

Alex sat back, drummed his fingers on the table. He pointed at Astrid. “What about Hexen?”

“I checked in,” Astrid said. “We are prepared to
cooperate. We feel a certain responsibility for Queen Claire.”

Alex shook his head. “So I guess you’re going back to…”

“The Orchard?” Astrid asked. “I could, but I have an assignment I’m still on, so those are not my orders.”

“Oh, right.” Alex turned to the rest of them. “Did I mention this? She’s a spy here to watch
me
.”

Carreras blinked. “I think under the circumstances you can use the help.”

“Oh? Where am
I
supposed to go?”

“We’ve left this up to you, Alex. You were Sangster’s protégé, so if you choose to stay on at this time, we can use you with him in France, or you can choose your current station, Geneva. You’d be reporting to an agent named Hall. Or you can go back to school, since you have that right. Or we’re prepared to send you home. You can leave within the hour. Wyoming might need you. Personally I think with the population involved, we could use you here more, but again, it’s up to you.”

For a moment Alex pictured it, his parents’ house in Wyoming. They would have Dad, who had all his skills, and Mom, who had all of Astrid’s and more. And they would have two teenage girls and two smaller girls. And
it would be dark outside, with roving bands of vampires led by whoever ruled that part of North America.

“No, no, this is crazy,” Alex said, shaking his head. “I don’t accept this.”

“We are
out
,” Carreras repeated slowly, “of time.”

Alex scanned all the faces. He was done arguing. New plan. “How long do I have to decide?”

“Twenty minutes.” Carreras stood. He seemed to slump for a moment, then stood straighter, smoothing his suit coat over his paunch. “After this meeting, I’m afraid things will be such that you won’t see me like this anymore. Agent Van Helsing, it has been good working with you.” He extended a hand.

Alex shook it. “I’ll be in the library.”

As Alex walked out he looked at Astrid. “You gonna follow at a distance or just come on?”

In the Polidorium library, an enormous room of plain-gray metal shelves and high white ceilings, the first thing Alex grabbed was a Polidorium tablet with an internet connection.

“What are you doing?” Astrid asked as they took a table in the back.

“Get me a copy of
Frankenstein
.” Alex booted up the tablet as his mind raced through what he had learned
about the book just a month or so before. “Both editions, 1818 and 1831.”

“What are you looking for?”

Alex removed his wireless and clicked it off, and gestured for Astrid to do the same. “John Polidori had Mary Shelley put clues about Claire and Byron in
Frankenstein
. I’m hoping there’s more.”

“What are you doing, Alex?” Astrid shook her head. “They said you can go home. They’ve given up on this. In fact, I think you said you were out, that you didn’t want to do this anymore.”

“Go home to what? Everlasting night because they don’t want to
read
? No, no. Just…get the books; we quit later.”

She shrugged. “
I
never wanted to quit anything.”

Alex pointed, not looking up as he scribbled notes. “Books.”

By the time she returned with the books, Alex had opened an internet chat and in a separate window entered the phrase
the coarsest sensations of men
into Google. The search brought up the notation instantly. “Sangster was right: It
is
a phrase from
Frankenstein
.” For a moment Alex wondered at someone’s ability to hear a few words and place the book from which they came. He had internet tools to do this, but only careful
reading over time could allow you to do it by memory. He had the suspicion that he could pick any five words out of any book Sangster had read and the teacher would be able to nail it. He could use him now.

A voice spoke from the tablet, young and female. “Are you sure you need this?”

Alex whispered near a microphone grating at the corner of the tablet. “Yes. Do you still have access to the forms?”

There was the sound of typing. The voice on the other end was looking something up. “Yes.”

Astrid looked at the chat window and read the name of Alex’s chat partner. “Who are you talking to? Who is ‘RVH’?”

“That would be Ronnie Van Helsing,” Alex said. “Short for Veronica. My little sister.”

“Where is she?”

“In the States, but she’s the only one who can do what I need her to do in the time we have.” Alex scribbled some notes on a sheet of paper.

“New girlfriend, Al?” the voice taunted.

“Not the time, Ron,” Alex answered. “Just set me up and come back when you do.” He took the book Astrid handed him and flipped through the 1818 edition of
Frankenstein
, to the place where his Google search
had led him, chapter 11. He looked at Astrid. “Polidori had Shelley put her hints in the 1831 edition, but here this phrase is in the 1818 version. That means it
wasn’t
a plant by Polidori; it was just a reference. Still, see if there’s a difference in the 1831 book.”

Astrid flipped to chapter 11 and frowned. “It’s not here.”

“The chapters are different.” Alex glanced back at the internet version. “Try chapter…nineteen in yours.”

“Okay.” Astrid searched the pages. “Paragraph?”

“A few pages in, starts ‘On the whole island, there were but three miserable huts.’”

Astrid found it and they pushed the books together and confirmed that the paragraphs were the same in both, just in different chapters. Alex made a decision that the difference meant nothing. He had to move quickly and rely on snap decisions.

“What’s going on in this section?” Astrid asked.

Alex scanned, relying as much on having read the book recently as on what he was seeing. “Uh, Dr. Frankenstein has been threatened, and he has to build a bride for the monster. He has to go off by himself to do it. And he chooses an island.” He paused and looked up. “Is it possible that Polidori hid Allegra’s body away on this island, wherever it is—this is somewhere in Scotland, by
the way—and used a reference to
Frankenstein
to lead us there?”

“Why would Polidori do that?”

“I guess to keep the body safe.”

“But why not just leave instructions?”

“If I had to guess? Because he didn’t want random grave robbers to know, and because from my limited experience, that’s kind of the way he worked.”

“It’s a lot of assumptions, Alex.”

“Yes,” Alex hissed, “but look: Every clue we’ve followed so far has been
right.
The vampires caught up to us at Harrow. We were right. So this has a good shot at being right, too.”

Astrid sighed and looked at the paragraph. “This island is in Scotland?”

Alex read some. “They don’t name it. Ugh. So it’s just ‘an island.’ In the Orkneys,” he read, jumping around paragraphs. He went back to the computer and brought up the Orkneys on the internet, finding a map of tiny islands scattered around the north of Scotland. “The Orkneys is an archipelago, a system of islands. We can’t search a system of islands for a two-hundred-year-old body. Not in the time we have.”
Need a new plan.

“How would you search?”

“Hang on, hang on; don’t get ahead of me. I know
you’re good at that, but don’t do that right now.” He gave her a half-smile and turned back to reading. “Orkneys. What does Mary Shelley say in the book? Frankenstein gets food from the mainland, which is five miles distant.” Then he looked at his watch. “Okay. ‘Five miles from the mainland.’ That could be any of
these
, along the south of the archipelago. And it doesn’t make sense that Polidori would leave a clue that could point to
anything
. By the way, I think we’ve got ten minutes and then our friends come looking for us.”

Next he brought up a list of the individual Orkney Islands. “Oh,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s not ‘an island five miles off the mainland of Scotland.’ It’s ‘five miles off Mainland,’ which is the name of another island. I hope, I mean. There is one called Mainland.”

“Go with your gut, Alex,” Astrid said.

“If this”—and now he pointed at the largest island in the group—“is Mainland, then there’s only one island on this map that’s within five miles.” He spun the tablet around to show it to her.

Astrid read the name. “Brough of Birsay?”

“Brough of Birsay. An isolated, desolate island of old ruins.
That’s
where Mary Shelley picked to be the lab for
Frankenstein building the bride. And it’s where Polidori picked to hide the body of Allegra Byron when he stole it, or most likely bribed it, off the gravediggers in England.” There was something else, though. Something Armstrong had said.