Alex Van Helsing (13 page)

There was a crashing sound as the glass doors of the cafeteria burst open again. A tall, bald vampire in red burst out, followed by three security guards. The bald vampire was pointing at Alex and the captives.

“That’s the human, he’s taking the sacrifices!”

Alex, Minhi, and Paul ran faster, Alex pulling in front. “Follow me,” he shouted. As he ran, he extracted the Polibow.

They made a beeline for the vehicles near the wall, but just as they were nearing them, two red-clad vampires came bounding fast toward the trio.

Alex waited until the first one was practically at his throat before firing, shooting a bolt into its chest and sending it
fwooshing
off. The other went straight for Minhi, but Alex saw her meet it, prepared. As the creature went for her throat, she feinted to the side, striking
it in the shoulder and sending it flying past her. Paul and Minhi kept moving, but Alex stopped and aimed, catching the vampire in the back—not deep enough. The creature turned and kept pursuing them.

“There, there, that vehicle,” Alex said, whipping his arm around as he, Minhi, and Paul ran toward an armored personnel carrier about the size of a school bus.

There was a driver in the front who looked at them and hissed. Alex brought up his weapon and pumped a silver bolt into the creature’s chest. Dust and flame erupted and evaporated.

Alex climbed in, dropping his backpack into the passenger seat. Looking out the windshield, he saw it was heavy and threaded with a grid of shining metal. As Minhi and Paul piled in, Alex turned the key and the truck rumbled to life. Minhi came forward, leaning on the driver’s seat. “Do you drive?”

Alex put the APC in reverse and started backing up. The pursuing vampires were up on them and Alex grabbed a large, bulbous handle, slamming the side doors closed. “We had a farm in Oklahoma for a while; I’ve done a little driving there.”

“Driving what?”

“Hay, bales of hay,” Alex said, and now he put the
vehicle in drive and hit the gas, lurching forward.

They pulled out and Alex aimed right for the vampires, led by the tall bald one. One went under the wheels, the vehicle lurching and shaking as it went over the creature.

“Paul! Minhi!” Alex shouted as he got a handle on the enormous steering wheel. His legs were just long enough to allow him to work the pedals.

“What?” Paul called.

“Look around for what we have in this thing, weapons, rope, anything.”

“Alex,” Minhi said.

“Yep.”

“Why are we driving toward the castle?”

“We’re not driving toward the castle,” Alex corrected. They rounded the corner of the castle and now were hurtling along the wall. “We’re driving toward the cafeteria.”

“What?” Paul cried. “Are you bloody insane? We just got out of there.”

Alex took a second to check himself. Nope, not insane. “I’m not leaving those people.”

There were vampires running alongside the APC, jumping up on the side of the vehicle, but it was designed not to let anyone, human or demon, simply burst in.
The APC hit the front steps of the cafeteria and plowed through glass doors and metal frame as well as a handful of vampires in self-consciously ironic
MEAT IS MURDER
T-shirts as it ripped into the building.

Inside the cafeteria, Alex jerked the steering wheel hard to the right, spinning the vehicle on linoleum tiles and sending cafeteria tables flying. He threw the vehicle in reverse and backed it up.

“What did you find back there, Paul?” Alex shouted.

Paul came forward. “Lead batons and an ax.” He held up a couple of police-style batons, red in color, and a fire ax.

“No guns?”

“I’m thinking these guys prefer to fight up close and personal.”

Alex hit the brakes as the vehicle came near the cages that hung in the back of the cafeteria.

“Okay, opening the back,” he said, flipping a switch on the dashboard. There was a metallic groan as the rear of the vehicle began to roll up like a garage door.

Alex took the ax, handing Minhi his Polibow. “You have about six shots left.”

There was a loud growl and Alex looked forward. In front of the vehicle, vampires were climbing up on the hood, heading for the glass.

“How do I keep them from coming through the windshield?” Alex asked aloud, scanning the dashboard.
Think.

They were vampires. If they traveled in these vans, they couldn’t have big glass windshields; the sun might burn them alive. Unless they kept these vehicles inside all day. He was betting vampires planned better than that.

Alex looked around at his controls and found a switch that said
SUN SHIELD
. He hit it, and suddenly thin, metallic sheets slammed into place across the windshield, severing two of the bald vampire’s fingers at the knuckles. The vampire howled in pain.

An image flickered on, projected against the windshield—a video feed of the outside. Of course there were no vampires on it because vampires were invisible to cameras. But at least Alex could see the room.

“Let’s get those other captives,” he said, running through to the back of the APC.

Alex jumped out the back door, swinging at a vampire that rose up in front of him, bringing the ax against its head. The creature fell back, stunned. Alex hit the first cage and broke the lock.

Some of the captives were struggling to their feet, agitated, grasping. As he got the first cage open, Alex
looked at Minhi and Paul. “Look alive, help them in.”

The first captive, the woman, was barely strong enough to move, but Paul and Minhi put their arms under her shoulders and dragged her into the vehicle.

There were seven cages in all, and Alex moved fast. Even with Minhi and Paul’s help he had to alternate between hacking at the locks and turning to slash at the vampires as they crowded around.

Paul punched one of the vampires in the head with a baton, and it went down but quickly rose again. Alex hit the last lock and began to drag out the final captive, a man in his thirties. Shoving the man into the rear of the APC, Alex saw Minhi strike one vampire across the face with her foot, then raise the Polibow and punch a hole in its chest with a silver bolt. It went up in a flash.

Alex realized they were surrounded—growls coming fast.

A bony white hand caught him by the shoulder. He heard a laugh and turned as a vampire bared her fangs. Alex’s heart sank. It was the yellow-haired vampire again. Her shoulder was already healed and she was back for more.

“We’re not done,” she said. Alex swept at her with the ax but she dodged him—and started to leap for his throat.

An explosion ripped through the air, and suddenly her neck and the side of her face were on fire. The female snarled in pain and fell back as other vampires shrank from the vehicle, their skin burnt.

“What the heck was that?” Alex said.

Paul held up a glass ball of holy water. He must have found it in the backpack. “These things are like antivampire hand grenades.”

“Let’s go,” Alex shouted, climbing up into the APC; he had lost track of the yellow hair. He flipped the door switch and they were already moving as the rear door descended. Minhi brought the ax down on the head of another vampire who was trying to get through the closing door. The creature fell away.

The APC lurched and jumped as Alex steered it through the same hole he had created, and they churned out onto the white grass.

“Is everyone all right?” Alex asked, glancing back. Minhi and Paul were still okay, but the other captives—he had no idea what it would take to help them. Their help would have to come later, from more able hands.

He gritted his teeth as the APC rumbled over a couple of vampires who were trying to jump up on the hood.

Suddenly the APC slid hard to the left. Alex cursed, turning the wheel. There was a powerful sound of
something striking the outside and he looked around. They were still barely halfway across the courtyard. “What was that?”

Paul tapped the screen on the windshield. “He’s icing the road.”

Ice.
“This is one of his vans, Paul. They gotta have chains.”

“What?”

“Chains, automatic tire chains—if these guys travel with Icemaker, they’ll have to have a way to drive these vehicles when he ices the place up.”

Alex scanned the dashboard and spotted a switch that said
ICE CHAINS
, and hit it. Up ahead, toward the iron gate, he could see white layers of ice and snow building up on the ground. Suddenly the APC jumped a bit as the wheels gained traction again.

Heavy staccato sounds came pounding against the hull as Alex aimed for the closed gate. “They’re surrounding us,” he said flatly. He looked back, scanning the ceiling of the van. “Paul—reach into the pack where you found the glass balls.”

“Okay?” Paul was listening.

“Grab a cartridge for my bow and reload it.”

Paul was rummaging through the pack and found the cartridges, and took a moment to eject the Polibow’s
cartridge and pop in a new one. He looked back in the bag and held up a small device the size of a pager. A red light was blinking and making a barely audible beeping sound. “Hey, this thing is beeping, Alex, is this a bomb?”

Alex glanced at it and shook his head. “I have no idea, leave it,” Alex said. “Look for the escape hatch in the roof.”

Paul looked up and saw the fire-escape-like ladder in the roof. “Okay.”

“Bring it down, open the hatch, stick out your head, and shoot some vampires. Be careful; you only have twelve shots.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Paul!”

“Got it.” Paul leapt over the seat and grabbed the ladder that was attached by a hinge to the ceiling, yanking it down.

In the back, the other captives stared in disbelief as Paul climbed the ladder. He turned a handle at the roof of the vehicle and flipped open a huge, metal cover, sticking out his head, his arm, and the Polibow.

Paul pumped bolts as the Scholomance gate with its iron
S
came up fast. They hit the gate hard, sending the iron bars crashing back, and they were finally on the
long road up to the top.

Paul was cursing and shooting as Alex steered, flooring it up the grade. Suddenly there was a
slam
and the image on the windshield went dark. Something must have hit the video camera.

Alex flipped the sun shield off and the metal shields fell back.

There were vampires all over the hood.

They were tearing at the windshield, baring their fangs as their fingers managed to punch out chunks of Plexiglas. They were yanking at the metal grid even as their fingers sizzled against it. The metal must be silver, Alex realized. To stop rival vampires. Alex couldn’t see the road at all; he scraped against the wall as he drove blind, and he heard Paul shout, “DO NOT CRASH!”

“Can you get these guys off the hood?”

Paul started firing away at the vampires up front, and at least two of them burst into ash and flame, but there were more.

Suddenly, a terrible thought occurred to Alex. They had no way out of the tunnel, or at least he didn’t know one. They could hit the edge and crash into the wall, surrounded by vampires. They would be torn apart while they tried to open the magic door. How would they get
through the exit? When he had struck it with his fist it had felt like concrete.

Now they hit the last grade, vampires leaping around them, coming up fast on all sides. Alex tried to ignore the vampires on the hood, looking past their shoulders. He could see the end of the tunnel.

“Paul, come inside!” He had no choice. “Brace yourselves!”

Alex floored the accelerator and pounded the APC toward the end of the tunnel and the shimmer of moonlight that he could see showing through the invisible wall.

He looked up ahead as the end of the tunnel came fast. Out there beyond the shimmering wall, Alex saw great arcs of water flying.

Someone was spraying gallons of holy water.

All at once the entrance was sparking and opening up.

Beyond that, Alex saw what appeared to be a thick iron lattice, snapping out across the surface of the lake from the shore, glimmering brightly in the night.

The vehicle slammed through the wall of water with vampires still attached to the hood. Alex closed his eyes, waiting for the impact of the APC falling into the lake. He forced his eyes open in shock as the wheels came
down on solid ground—or something solid, anyway.

“What is that?” Paul shouted.

They were driving toward the shore on a
road
that someone had laid from the lip of the tunnel to the land.

“It’s a bridge,” Alex shouted. He couldn’t believe it. But he was
driving
on it! Alex looked out at the iron road that had been rolled out across the water; it was actually floating on hundreds of glistening aluminum pontoons. And then he had another shock: the sight of a Black Hawk helicopter hanging over the shore, waiting to protect their exit.

Alex drove right under the Black Hawk, so close that the APC nearly struck the belly of the chopper as it passed.

Looking up, Alex saw none other than Sangster grin briefly from his place inside the door of the Black Hawk, next to a mounted, Gatling-style, six-barreled M134 Minigun.

Alex heard Sangster’s voice booming across the intercom.

“I got this, kid. Proceed out to the road.”

As they passed underneath, Sangster spun the Minigun around and tore the heads off the vampires crawling on the vehicle. Alex kept driving, up onto the shore and past the vineyards. In the rearview mirror he
saw the helicopter hanging there as Sangster shot hundreds of rounds of wood-and-silver bullets, until the entrance to the Scholomance closed up and disappeared once more.

“How did you know I was driving out?” Alex asked as Sangster ushered him into the bowels of the farmhouse.

The events of the dawn had been a splendid blur. Sangster’s colleagues in the Polidorium, though grim faced that Alex had gone in alone on a mission they had never fully supported, took charge of the captives, whom they treated gently. The Polidorium would help with their physical and mental recovery before handing them over to the Swiss police for reunions with their families.

Paul and Minhi had been told,
You don’t know who rescued you. Nobody here was anyone you recognize. You never saw the terrorists’ faces.
They were now back at
their schools—there were headmistresses to be assuaged and parents to be called. Alex himself should have been exhausted, but he was still running on adrenaline. He would have to crash soon, he knew.

“We had a tracker in the go package. By the time you hit the tunnel we knew you were on the way out and moving fast, too fast to be on foot,” Sangster said.

Sangster was still limping—but not much, and he had left his cane behind. “You’re nearly healed,” Alex said, incredulous, as they went through the door and into the carpeted corridors of the Polidorium HQ.

“It was a sprain.”

Alex snorted. “Hairline fracture—so how does that work?”

Sangster stopped and Alex did, too. “A long time ago I was offered a choice by the Polidorium. It’s a choice you may make one day. But not anytime soon.”

“Holy—are you a vampire?”

Sangster rolled his eyes. “The one good vampire in a world of evil?”

“That seems plausible enough.”

“Let me tell you something.” Sangster stopped, turning to look Alex in the eye. “There are no good vampires, at least none I’ve ever encountered. Icemaker may have an obsession but he was never all that sympathetic
in the first place. It just doesn’t work that way. Whatever that person was is perverted by the curse, and no empathy, no feeling, no love in the way
we
know it can remain. Don’t ever forget that.”

“So you’re saying you’re not a vampire.”

“Surely we have work to do…”

“What about a
dhampyr
, like in
Vampire Hunter D
?” Alex asked, remembering Sid’s comics.

“
Vampire Hunter…
A
half
vampire?” Sangster raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know where to start. But I’ll say this; the dead don’t reproduce—at least not like that,” Sangster said.

“But they do travel fast.”

“They do travel fast.” Sangster nodded.

“You’re not going to tell me why you heal faster than normal.”

“Not right now, I’m not.”

“So what is this?” Alex asked. Sangster was opening the door into the conference room, and Alex saw Carerras and Armstrong waiting.

“This is a debriefing.”

“So you got them out,” Carerras said flatly. Alex could not tell if he was impressed. “What about Icemaker’s plan?”

“He was going to make a sacrifice,” Alex said evenly.
“He wanted to raise someone called Claire.”

Sangster looked down. “That would be Claire Clairmont, a woman who probably matched Icemaker in life for deviousness. But I had no idea he was so obsessed. If you had asked me what woman did he despise most in his life, I would have said Claire. But then again, if you were to ask me which one would haunt him, the answer would probably be the same.”

Armstrong shrugged. “That is how it goes.”

Sangster looked back at Alex. “How was he going to do it?”

“There was a ritual,” Alex said, finding a seat. A cup of hot chocolate was sitting waiting for him.
Unbelievable
. “In front of a giant keyhole, like in the Polidori story in
Frankenstein
. On the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Icemaker had a scroll, with an animal scepter head on it. He said it had shown him how.”

“Aha,” Armstrong said. She tapped some keys in the table and brought up an image on the screen. “Is this it?”

The scroll Alex had last seen in the hands of Icemaker was spinning slowly in a 3-D image. “Yes.”

She nodded. “Yep. The Scroll of Hermanubis. This was on the
Wayfarer
, the ship Icemaker hit.”

Carerras leaned forward. “So Polidori had found the
scroll Icemaker wanted and hidden it away, because he somehow learned that Icemaker would want to use it to cast a spell to raise the dead.”

“I think we’ve been wrong about
Frankenstein
,” Sangster said thoughtfully. “I think Polidori had Mary Shelley put the reference to Icemaker’s plan, in the guise of the keyhole story, into
Frankenstein
when she reissued it, just in case we lost any other hints. And over the course of time, we
did
lose the other hints.”

“Well, Icemaker was furious that we disrupted his ritual,” Alex said. “He managed to raise his demon to do this favor, to raise the dead. Nemesis. But I stole the sacrifice.”

“Hmmm,” Carerras said, folding his arms. “Then I suppose that’s it. Rituals require their proper time. If he was supposed to do it on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, he missed his opportunity.”

“That’s it for now,” Sangster agreed.

Alex sipped the hot chocolate. He was famished. “So, is there anything else?”

“There’s a lot,” Sangster said. “You’re the first agent to make it in and out of that place alive in nearly fifty years.”

Alex’s heart sank. He was tired. He didn’t want to spend another six hours describing the whole ordeal.

And then he realized what Sangster had just called him. An
agent
.

“Not now, though,” Sangster said. “Go home. It’s done. We’ll get the details later.”

“Hermanubis, huh?”

Early the next evening, Sid paced the three boys’ room as he stared at a mound of books.

Alex had crashed and slept for about seven hours. Paul had been returned to the school in a limo the school sent to the hospital, where he was greeted with cheers and applause by his fellow students—even Merrill & Merrill—all relieved to have him back from his “kidnapping by terrorists.” True to his word, Paul stuck to the story. Until he, Sid, and Alex headed back to the room, where they told Sid everything, from the vampire in the woods to the tunnel out of the Scholomance.

“Yeah, it was called the Scroll of Hermanubis,” Alex said.

“That makes sense,” Sid said. “Hermanubis was an Egyptian god who could move between the world of the living and the dead.”

Rather than feeling as though all had gone smashingly—as Alex was inclined to think it had—Sid seemed more ill at ease than ever.

“What is it?” Alex insisted.

Sid heaved a sigh and stared at the desk where he’d tossed every book he could find on Icemaker, his poems, the Haunted Summer, all of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Everything in the story in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, in the introduction—it
means
something. The skull-headed lady. The keyhole. All of it was a clue. The skull-headed lady is Claire, whom Icemaker wanted to raise. The demon he needed to help him came through the keyhole.”

“Right,” said Alex.

“Which makes sense. But we’ve got a problem.”

Paul sat up from where he’d been lying on his bed. “What?”

“If everything in the clue means something, then
everything
in it means something.”

“Okay…”

Sid opened his copy of
Frankenstein
, thumbing back to the 1831 introduction. “So what about the Tomb of the Capulets?”

“I don’t follow.” Alex rubbed his eyes with his palms, suddenly feeling very much like he wished he followed even less.

Sid was holding up the book, reading. “The Tomb of the Capulets. Mary Shelley says that after Polidori started
writing about the skull lady,
he
—that’s Polidori—
‘did not know what to do with her and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.’
”

“So?”

Sid picked up another book, this one on the Villa Diodati party of 1816. “You saw Icemaker down in the Scholomance at a keyhole window; that’s where Nemesis came. But…that was a castle, not a tomb. So there was no Tomb of the Capulets. And it…here”—he went to another book and flipped the pages for a moment—“there was a collection of art in 1816, in the house Icemaker rented. The Villa Diodati. There was a painting of the death of Romeo and Juliet.”

“The Tomb of the Capulets,”
repeated Paul.

“Icemaker,” Sid said, “when he was Byron, wrote a poem about going to Nemesis. And the whole point of it was that he was a greater kind of being, that he alone was sufficient. I have no doubt that he needed the ritual to perform, and that the scroll held that ritual. But I don’t think he needed the captives—the sacrifice—at all.”

“What do you mean he didn’t need us?” Paul demanded.

“It’s—” Sid stood up, pacing. He looked at Alex. “Look, I hate to break this to you, but vampires aren’t stupid.
This was a
trick
. He knew you were watching him. When did the Polidorium start tracking Icemaker?”

“The moment he started moving up Italy. He travels with an army, so the Polidorium can’t miss him.”

“Right—if you’re Icemaker, you
know
you’re being watched. He had to come to Lake Geneva because the Scholomance was the place to do his ritual, but he knew the heat would be on the moment the caravan started moving. The good guys would want to stop him, to disrupt whatever he was planning. So he made you all part of the plan: stole some captives so you could rescue them and think you disrupted his ritual. You’d go away satisfied. But you didn’t disrupt him at all. You gave him time to finish.”

“What do you mean, ‘to finish’?” Alex asked.

“A vampire rises fully formed out of the grave,” Sid said. “But raising a dead human, from dust to bones, to a new being—that takes time, like a day, and room. He triggered it all on midnight of the feast day. It’s
not
done. Claire
will rise
at
The Tomb of the Capulets
—the painting—you see?”

“See what?” demanded Alex.

“Claire will rise at the Villa Diodati,” Sid said. “She’s probably rising
now
.”