Alex Van Helsing (8 page)

“No!” Alex yelled, running flat out. But he was losing ground already. Behind him Sangster struggled to rise, beset by yet another attacking vampire in red. Alex sprinted as hard as he could.
This doesn’t happen. Minhi and Paul are being carried away.

The tall vampire, the one floating over the shore while his minions did their work, whipped his head around to Alex, settling a glowing pair of eyes upon him.
Icemaker.
The clan lord sent a boulder-size chunk of ice directly toward Alex, who threw himself to the side just in time.

Icemaker had flowing black locks that curled over his shoulders, and Alex realized his great height owed to legs that were distended unnaturally, iced over at the
calves, giving him the appearance of a hoofed demon. He wore an armored doublet of red, and his eyes blazed with cold. Alex caught a glimpse of Paul and Minhi being dragged out onto the iced-over lake. He picked himself up, thinking only of getting past this vampire, of getting to his friends. He began to move.

There was a
fwooshing
sound as Sangster destroyed the vampire he was fighting. A hail of bullets rained past Alex as Sangster came running, firing at Icemaker. The bullets blew chunks of ice off the armor on the vampire’s shoulders and chest. “Alex, get back!” Sangster shouted. Icemaker swept toward Alex, freezing and shattering the blades of grass as he went. The vampire ignored Sangster’s bullets and stopped mere feet from Alex, who likewise found himself halting, unable to look away.

“Joining the family business, are we?” Icemaker snarled. His voice sounded brittle, low, and ragged. “Do you seriously think you pose any threat to me at all?”

The vampire lifted off the ground and began to swoop backward toward the water as the air swirled and congealed up and down the beach. Alex was staring at a wall of ice.

They were gone.

Alex fell to his knees.

Sangster reached Alex’s side. “Minhi and Paul?”

“Yes,” Alex groaned. “What about Sid?”

“He’s safe. He’s inside.” Sangster stepped back, surveying the wall of ice. “Look!”

Alex rose and staggered back to read the words carved into the icy wall.

WELCOME TO THE COLD
.

Minhi lost her balance the moment she felt her ankle yanked out from under her and she fell back, catching the porch with her shoulders. She tried to use her moves, twisting and kicking at the woman who was dragging her off. She saw Paul’s head bounce on the grass and then on
ice
as he was dragged beside her.

They were being towed onto the lake itself, moving fast. The woman who had Minhi slacked her grip a bit as she began to “skate” with her feet across the ice. Minhi took the advantage to twist, hard, and suddenly she was free.

Minhi sprawled out, spinning on what she now saw was actually an ice road that stretched across the lapping
waves of Lake Geneva. She found her footing, glancing back at the shore. She slipped as she started to run, then gingerly looked for cracks and crevices in the ice, picking up the pace.

Suddenly the attacker came at her again. The villain laughed, tuft s of dark hair sticking out from the red wrap around her head. Her teeth showed, long and glistening.
Vampires?
Shocked, Minhi missed her opportunity to dodge the woman.

This time the creature wrapped one arm around Minhi’s torso, grabbing her tight. Minhi was no match for her.

“What are you—where are we going?” Minhi begged.

“We’re going home,” hissed the vampire.

After a few minutes of seeming to fly over the frozen road, a voice filled the air, cold as ice.
“Though I be ashes, a far hour shall wreak the deep prophetic fullness of this verse.”

Minhi could see a man, floating on the air, surrounded by icy wind, the moon behind him. They were nearing another shore. She saw a great house there, a ghostly manor surrounded by trees, and at the shoreline, the sculpture of an angel, its arms held wide.

They were headed for the sculpture. Now just at the
edge of the shore the ice disappeared, and there were waves churning.

The man was enjoying himself.
“And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!”

They rapidly approached the sculpture and then plunged down through the churning water. Minhi’s vision was swimming as the water
disappeared
and they entered a dry tunnel. Down into the tunnel, down over dank and shimmering stone, down past support beams of skull and bone, down past torches the vampires ran, their feet light, running like wolves.

And then they arrived, far below, coming to a stop in what Minhi could only call a courtyard, vast and groomed with spiny grass as white as bone.

The vampire holding Minhi threw her to the ground and she rolled to a stop, coming to her knees. She was shaking in terror.

Paul was nearby. In his eyes Minhi could see the same fear that she felt. She stood, dizzy, and looked up to see an enormous castle, all under the lake—under the very lake! Up to the dark sky of rock the walls reached, rock and mud reinforced with latticeworks of more bone.

The captors stood around them, waiting. Minhi became aware of more figures, standing on the battlements of the castle and lining the edges of the court-
yard. Many of them, like Minhi’s attackers, wore red, but the vast majority wore white tunics and hoods. Beneath those hoods, white, white skin glowed in the darkness. And their eyes reflected the light of the torches, so that as Minhi looked out, she saw hundreds upon hundreds of pairs of glowing eyes.

“What is this?” Minhi whispered.

“This,” the voice boomed from behind her. She turned slowly, petrified to look. A great vampire with long hair and wearing red armor was drifting to the ground on an icy wind. “This…is the Scholomance!”

Alex and Sid hurtled down the road in the back of a Glenarvon Academy van with Sangster at the wheel. Periodically the teacher looked at both of them through the rearview mirror as trees zipped by.

“I told you!” Sid said desperately. He jumped up, shaking Alex. “I told you vampires were real! Those were—”

“Sid,” Sangster called, “I need you to sit down.”

“All right, what was that?” Sid demanded. “Who
were
those people?”

“I don’t know,” Sangster called back, locking eyes with Alex through the mirror for a second. “I don’t know. We need to get back to the school. They need to know that there’s been a kidnapping and you guys need to be back
in your rooms.”

“They came from the
lake
,” said Sid, nearly delirious. “They were
vampires.
”

“Terrorists,”
Sangster said evenly. “I think they were terrorists. My concern is getting you guys to safety.”

Alex said nothing. He watched the horizon in front of the van, the dark road lit up by high beams, trees flying past on either side.

Within minutes they ripped off the road to the front gate and Sangster was hustling them out.

Mrs. Hostache was waiting in a housecoat by the door. “I got your call,” she said. “What do we know about Paul?”

“All I know is what I told you,” Sangster said, guiding Alex and Sid inside. “I was watching all three. The terrorists came up off the water. They did a lot of distracting stuff and grabbed two people—one was Paul.” Alex noted that Sangster was using the word
terrorist
every chance he got, and he understood why: Sangster was making sure the word would be seeded into the narrative and get repeated often.

She shook her head gravely. “Come on, come in,” she said.

“Did you speak with the police?” Sangster asked.

“Oui,”
Mrs. Hostache said, nodding. “They are at
LaLaurie. They should have questions for us in the morning.” Now she turned to Alex and Sid and knelt slightly, as though they were eight. “How are you two?”

Alex opened his hands, as if to say, “I have no idea.” Sid had no response.

“To bed with you,” Mrs. Hostache said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

Sangster was standing next to the stairs as Alex and Sid went up, and he stopped them, patting both their shoulders firmly. As he did so, Alex felt Sangster slip a note under the collar of his jacket.

After he and Sid numbly went to bed, unable to form words, Alex unfolded the note. It said:
Midnight.

“What is
that
?”

When Alex snuck out an hour and a half later, Sangster was waiting just outside the school gate. Alex found the teacher seated on his motorcycle. Next to him, lit by moonlight dappling through the trees, was a new gunmetal gray—

“Kawasaki Ninja,” said the teacher. “It’s not as big as most of the bikes we use, but it’s more powerful than most of your smaller motorcycles out there.”

Alex approached the bike, moving slowly around it. On the gray right flank he saw the emblem of the
Polidorium, which he had seen before on the vans and other vehicles. There was that motto in Latin,
Talia sunt.
“What do these words mean, anyway? ‘
Talia sunt
.’”

“It means ‘there are such things.’” Sangster tossed Alex a pair of night-vision GPS goggles. “Come on. Let’s go figure out how to get Paul and Minhi back.”

Alex was glad he was wearing his contacts, because he doubted he could wear the goggles over his glasses. They were tighter than the ones he had worn last night—
Was it only last night?
Next he donned the gray helmet he found resting on the seat of the bike.

Once the helmet was on, Alex could hear Sangster in his ear through the onboard speaker. “Copy?”

“I thought you didn’t want me in on this stuff?”

“Icemaker spoke to you, Alex,” said Sangster, as he started his own bike and began to roll. “You’re in it. Plus…I think I could use your ability to sense them.”

They eased out onto a two-lane highway that ran along the lake and began to lay down tracks, heading south.

They traveled about ten kilometers in silence with nary a car in sight, the world dark but for the occasional zip of a street lamp, and then flew off the road down the dirt track that led to the farmhouse.

Past the ornamental tin wall of the farmhouse and down into the earth once more. Within minutes they were in Director Carerras’s conference room.

“All right,” Sangster said, bringing up a map of Lake Geneva. “What is he up to?”

“First things first,” Carerras barked. “I agreed to let you bring the Van Helsing boy here, but you had better come up with a reason.” Armstrong, who sat to the director’s right, leaned back, raising her eyebrow in agreement.

Alex preempted Sangster. “I got face-to-face with Icemaker,” he said. “He spoke to me.”

Carerras leaned forward. “What did he say?”

“He asked if I was joining the family business,” Alex said. “And he suggested that I wasn’t going to be any good at it.”

“They were watching him at Glenarvon,” Sangster ticked off. “And they attacked us in full view of everyone tonight. They know who he is, and they
know he’s here.
Icemaker wants that family. It was Charles’s father who stopped him at the Louvre Museum, remember? And Charles destroyed nearly five hundred of Icemaker’s disciples in Cuba. I’m willing to bet they got wind of Alex the first time he swept his passport at Geneva airport.”

“Do you think he kidnapped Minhi and Paul because
they were with me?” Alex asked in horror. They had been dragged away before his eyes.

Sangster sighed. “I—Alex, that’s not how it looked. I think taunting you was just a bonus. But this was about getting attention. He wanted us to see him. This was a big move.”

“We’ll have to pay a lot of people to smooth this over in the press,” Carerras grumbled.

Seriously, you do that?

“So Icemaker now has hostages,” Sangster continued. “Why? What do we know about him—why would he come back here, and what is he going to do here that he would need hostages?”

Sangster brought up Icemaker’s dossier on the screen, and Alex saw there a stippled drawing of Icemaker where a photograph would normally be, followed by dates and other information. It looked like one of Sid’s characters.

“The last time he was here was when he
first
began to succumb to vampirism, that Haunted Summer when Polidori was still his friend,” Sangster said. “When they were staying at the Villa Diodati.”

Sangster scrolled down the dossier. Remembering, Alex said, “You said something about Icemaker destroying a ship.”

“Yeah.” Sangster reached the most recent activity in
the dossier. “He plundered and sank a Polidorium cargo vessel called the
Wayfarer
, and immediately started heading this way.”

“And you have no idea what he
got
off that ship?”

“We have a manifest of a thousand items,” Sangster responded. “Books, scrolls, statues, gauntlets. It’s all lost. Anything could be useful to him, but nothing we can narrow down.”

“We can assume,” interjected Armstrong, “that someone leaked him the manifest, which would suggest he knew what he was looking for.”

“So,” said Alex, “he stole something or learned something on the ship. He comes here to the…”

“Scholomance,” said Carerras.

“…The Scholomance. And now he’s kidnapped two of my friends. I’ll tell you what I think it means.”

“What’s that?”

Alex wrung his hands. “It means what in the name of all that is holy are you people wasting time for? Go get them!”

“We have to find it first,” said Sangster. “And we’re trying.”

“You may have a new lead,” interjected Carerras, who appeared completely unfazed by Alex’s emotion. “Armstrong?”

Armstrong tapped a key in front of her and a new image came up on the screen—the lake, overlaid by wavy, undulating lines labeled
WIND PATTERN.

“When Icemaker struck we turned one of the satellites on the lake. We lost track of him in a burst of cold air and clouds, but we noted key disruptions in the normal wind pattern here,” she said, indicating a point along the shore.

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

“That,” said Sangster, leaning forward, “would be the Villa Diodati, where it all began.”