chapter 12
“At this time of day, there is nobody out.” Vienna dragged Alex and Astrid to one of the sets of french doors in the living room of her pensione. She opened the doors, and they stepped out onto the balcony. Alex pulled his jacket a little tighter as the breeze blew in. The mid-morning was cold and gray, and below, a great square was empty except for a newsstand where an attendant rearranged magazines and helped himself to a Fresca from one of the refrigerator units.
Astrid looked around. “I thought these kinds of apartments—uh, pensiones—were usually hotels.”
“This one was.” Vienna nodded. “But when we moved from Seville, my mother fell in love with it.”
The pensione that Vienna Cazorla shared with her parents took up two entire floors of an ancient building in the Chueca neighborhood in Madrid. Vienna’s mother was traveling to visit her brother up north, leaving the place to just Vienna and her dad. It was a cavernous apartment of sculptures and fresh flowers, and Alex heard parrots talking somewhere. He had the sense he could get lost here.
Behind Alex, Sangster and Armstrong were turning Vienna’s dining table into an op center. “Okay,” Sangster called.
Alex turned to see that Sangster had found butcher paper and had laid it out across the table, while Armstrong had a few Polidorium computers plugged in and sitting to the side. The teacher was writing key words with a marker.
“Where did you find butcher paper?” Vienna asked.
“At the butcher’s in the square.” Sangster underlined the word CUSTODIAN. “Your dad pointed it out to me when he went back to work.” He paused. “Okay. Let’s talk about the janitor.”
“Well, he shows up for one reason and one reason only,” said Alex. “Doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to talk. All he does is put an X on the painting.”
“Exactly marking a place where the painting has been altered,” said Astrid.
“Is there something important about the woman in the blue dress?” Alex asked.
Armstrong was tapping away and stopped to scan an article on the painting. She held up a hand. “They’ve actually been written about. There’s a poem—”
“Plath,” Sangster said. “Sylvia Plath, yeah, it was a…that’s right, she wrote a poem called “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” about the couple in the corner. She was impressed with them because they’re blissfully unaware of their approaching death.”
“It’s a common thesis,” Armstrong offered.
“Yeah, but what does it mean?” Alex wrung his hands. “Be of good cheer? Be blissfully unaware? Don’t be blissfully unaware?”
“And, of course, there’s the altered color itself,” Astrid said. “From red, a color of passion, to blue, a color of…what? Cold? Death?”
“We don’t need an alteration to remind us to think about death,” Alex said. “It’s called The Triumph of Death.”
“No, the alteration has to be a pointer to something beyond the painting. Something we would miss otherwise. Someone made this alteration in the last fifty years and someone else marked it for us today. Whoever they are, they are leading us to something.” Sangster sat down, running his fingers through his hair. “Everybody get reading. We’ll break for lunch in an hour.”
They dug into everything they could find on The Triumph of Death. Essays, articles, poems, tribute paintings by modern artists. Alex knew what they were doing—they were swimming through details deliberately, waiting for something to pop. Outside, Alex was aware of the ebb and flow of traffic, bursts of people followed by near-desertion of the streets. By noon the plaza below was filled with people.
Just as Alex felt his brain turning to Jell-O, he heard a knock at the door and Vienna ushered in a full meal, a paella of rice, scallops, chicken, and shrimp, with red wine for the agents. “Take a break,” Sangster ordered.
Alex wolfed down his paella, suddenly aware of his hunger, as Astrid and Vienna chatted.
Astrid asked Vienna a thousand questions, drawing out the girl’s history and her time at Glenarvon-LaLaurie and even a hint of her dark adventure with the vampires. When Vienna grew uncomfortable, Alex saw that Astrid expertly charmed her, touching her shoulder and turning her attention to the pensione. Vienna had a great deal of art of her own, but Alex recalled that Vienna was a writer—or at least had been producing manga with Minhi back at school before her sudden departure.
“What do you write now?” Astrid asked. They had risen and wandered about the room, and Alex joined them.
“What does everyone write?” Vienna’s eyes crinkled. “Some poetry. I’m trying to understand short stories but they’re maddening. It’s a curse that there are so many great Spanish short story writers to contend with.”
Vienna stopped at the window, looking down at the flower vendors on the streets below. “The first time I found out about your strange double life,” she said suddenly, cocking her head at Alex, “we were standing at a window like this.”
Alex did remember. “Yeah, Elle was below, waiting.” It seemed like a long time ago.
Vienna shivered. “I think we need a fire to warm things up in here.”
At one stucco wall next to a case of crystal, a low fireplace sat with a redbrick stoop, the entire fire and chimney recessed behind the stucco. Vienna dropped primly onto a settee by the fireplace. She turned a gas key in the wall and a pilot light ignited a small stack of wood. She stoked the flames lightly.
Astrid looked up at a high-pitched cheeping sound from the chimney. “What is that?”
“Birds—chimney swifts.” Vienna adjusted the logs on the fire. “They’re dear little things.”
Alex joined Vienna by the fire and rubbed his face.
“Your friend follows you everywhere,” Vienna whispered. Alex looked back and saw that indeed Astrid had moved a few steps in his direction.
Alex glanced sideways at Vienna’s scarf and whispered, “So how have you been? Is that thing still…”
Vienna’s eyes reflected the fire, but she didn’t look at him as she smiled. “Alive? Yes. But it no longer holds my head on.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Alex rubbed his hands before the fire. “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. I’m sorry for what happened at the ball. I’m sorry our date got all…screwed up.”
Vienna stood straighter and turned to him, leaning in closer. “We both know I was not the one you wanted to be going with.”
The sound of cheeping chimney swifts above them grew and dropped rhythmically. Alex wondered how birds could comfortably live among the smoke. He shook his head. There wasn’t time for this. They would be living among darkness and vampires soon. He looked back to Sangster. “We have six days. And now we’re wondering about, what—”
Sangster summed it up. “A running conspiracy to alter a sixteenth-century Flemish painting in order to record clues about stopping the catastrophe the painting represents.”
Alex shook his head in frustration. “But where does that leave us? Bruegel the painter is not connected to us. But the custodian, who is also not connected to us, is guiding us to clues about a catastrophe that a powerful sorceress could bring about. According to the spell Astrid did when she touched the painting, Bruegel was put up to painting it, paid by these black tower people. All of whom may be connected. Do you know what that means?” He rubbed his temple. Something was…something was…
He suddenly felt static. Alex looked around, then shook his head to clear it.
“Tell us,” Sangster said.
“It means that someone has been planning all along to warn us but either can’t or won’t.” He paused. “Wait.” The static was there, hissing, the burbling of the birds seeming to grow and join the sound. “Do you hear that?”
Sangster scanned the room. “Yes.”
A scuttling sound, clacking and scraping, grew in the walls themselves.
Flecks of soot began to fall in the fireplace. “Who knows we’re here?”
Armstrong stood. “We ordered the paella in.”
The static began to roar in Alex’s head and he staggered. Stop. Just listen to it. Don’t let it overwhelm you.
Astrid whispered something and then drew what looked like a shimmering green penlight from her coat. She flicked her hand and the thing telescoped, once and again, until it had grown out to the full glimmering green staff he had seen her wield before.
“What’s that?” Vienna looked up as the sound of clacking and creaking echoed through the walls. The stucco in front of the chimney was cracking, bowing out, as if something were struggling to move down inside of it.
Alex heard a ratcheting sound and saw Sangster drawing a Beretta from a go package. Armstrong had one as well and they were backing up, scanning.
A heavy sound smacked into the glass of the french doors, and Alex saw something strike and glance away. He caught the shape of a bird’s wings as it bounced and disappeared.
Bits of stucco began to crumble and fall from the chimney. Alex scrambled for the go package and grabbed a glass ball and a Polibow. He tried to feel the shape of the thing causing his brain to sizzle with static. “Sangster, I don’t know what it is, but it’s big.”
Smoke and fire burst from the fireplace. Soot exploded into the room and suddenly the whole apartment was a cloud. Alex felt more than saw Astrid step forward next to him, her staff raised.
“Everybody fan out so we don’t shoot one another,” Sangster shouted, a shadow in the plumes of soot, as high-pitched cheeping burbled and Alex saw its form slice past Sangster’s head. He hissed in pain, grabbing his forehead.
Alex barely had time to see another bird, slick and narrow and cigar-shaped, dive out and fly right for his face. He put up his hand, brushing at it. “Gyahh!”
Glass crashed as a bird bashed into a lamp, and now the sound intensified, birds and more birds, three and then six and more, pouring into the room. Something sliced past Alex’s ear and he felt a sharp sting and then blood trickling.
Alex spun and saw the creature, a gray bird that seemed to glow with streams of glistening red that enveloped it, swoop out of sight and then come back. It flew for his head, and he saw its open beak, a perversion of a tiny bird’s. It grabbed his shoulder with its claws and started lapping at the blood on his ear.
He swatted it hard and sent it smacking into an end table, losing his footing. A pair of wineglasses burst as he started to fall, and he landed hard on his elbow, glass crunching through his sleeve.
The birds were everywhere.
“Alex!” Vienna called, and he saw her legs against the wall, and she was dropping to the ground. There was a bird at her neck, tugging at her scarf. “No, no, no!”
Alex scrambled up to the table, threw the glass ball he’d been holding, and watched it sail through the cloud and hit the wall above her, glass tinkling and water spraying.
The bird at Vienna’s neck sizzled and dropped away, snarling with a roar most unbird-like as it turned in the air. Its eyes glowed red as it dove for Alex, tiny talons extended.
“Cleanse thee!” Astrid cried from out of the smoke, and her staff came flying, smacking the bird midflight. As she struck it, the thing burst into flame and flopped over Alex’s head to land on the table.
There was a crackling sound as the butcher paper caught fire.
Alex coughed. “What is this?”
“Bloodwork,” Sangster shouted. Bloodwork. That was vampire magic, altering living and dead things with enchanted blood. The most powerful could make almost anything with it.
A muffled chorus of cheeping grew, and there was a burst of glass as the french doors gave way, and now a stream of chimney swifts swarmed in. “Hit the deck!” Armstrong ordered. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Alex lay on the floor and watched maybe twenty birds swarm, zipping through the room, in and out of the smoke. He could hear the birds bashing into cases.
A gun flash drew Alex’s eye and he saw Armstrong, a shadow in the soot, on her stomach, shooting several birds at the doorway, the brief light of her gun followed by the bursts of the creatures. They fell like little firebombs onto the floor. “They’re blocking the door!” Armstrong called.
“Astrid, how many of those magic, uh, cleanse shots do you carry?”
“It’s not a shot; I have to hit them to cleanse them.” Astrid cried out a few feet away as one bird cheeped madly and yanked at one of the ponytails on her head.
Alex coughed and blinked for an instant, seeing bright streaks of light against his eyelids. He opened his eyes, wincing with pain. His contacts were beginning to swim with the soot. The smoke had grown even darker, impenetrable.
Wait, go back, he told himself. He held his eyes closed and forced away the sounds of grunting and cursing and the bashing of glass and wood, filling his mind with static. With his eyes open, the static was just static, but closed, he could see it take shape, and he watched twenty streaks of red light zip across the black underside of his eyelids.
“Stop shooting, you’re going to hit someone!” He held out his hand, groping in the darkness. “Astrid, take my hand.”
Alex heard her crawl beside him and then she had his hand. Astrid’s was cold and small, and the static seemed to dissipate as she drew near. But the streaks were still there.
“I have to keep my eyes closed.” He grabbed her whole arm. “We’re getting up.”
They rose and Alex got behind her, his chest against the bird-like bones of Astrid’s back, holding her hand and her staff. “Okay, move with me.”
“What?”
“Just…trust me, and cleanse.” Soot slid down Alex’s cheek as he put his face next to her. “Move with me.”
Alex brought Astrid’s arm up and felt her body uncoiling as she stretched, but she was stiff. “Let me lead.” He saw a streak coming in fast. She seemed to relax and he began to spin, her leg following his.
“Here!” They swept their arms together, and Alex heard her utter the word cleanse as the staff touched the arc of light just as it reached them.
“Cleanse,” they said together, another step, their arms coming up, a streak coming in fast against his closed eyes. Another burst of flame. “Cleanse,” and another, and another, and another.
He could hear in the background holy water bursting in the fireplace as Sangster destroyed a handful of the creatures, and Armstrong was at the door, shooting at those that were swirling around there. Alex and Astrid concentrated on the streaks, Astrid swinging her staff as he guided her.
Finally they were still and there was a tiny cheep. Vienna gasped somewhere, and Alex saw a bird streaking, and he and Astrid swept toward it. Burst.
In the inky smoke, Sangster clapped out the fire on the table, and Alex felt everyone start to relax. Armstrong threw open the door and smoke began to pour out.
“Come on!” she coughed.
He opened his eyes and stopped, suddenly collapsing into a coughing fit. Astrid dropped next to him and grabbed his hand. “Come on.”
They ran down the stairs as the sound of fire engines filled the air.
On the front stoop of the building, Vienna hugged Alex as Sangster spoke rapidly into a Bluetooth device. Astrid stood by herself, watching them.
“Clearly the Queen’s people are watching us,” Sangster said as he got off the phone. “We need to get out of the street.”
Vienna watched in horror as firemen arrived and ran in and out of her building, and all the residents of the lower floors gathered and watched. “I need to go up there.”
Alex shook his head. “Don’t. Not yet. It’s not a fire anymore—it’s just a lot of smoke. We have to think of what you’re going to say.”
“Oh, who cares what I say?” Vienna said. “It’s what I know. My father will come back tonight, and he’ll see that it’s true.”
“What?”
“That no matter how much you people have helped me, I’m cursed.”
“You’re not cursed. Well, you might be cursed with the wrong friends.” Alex sighed, looking at Sangster and Astrid. “The Scholomance tried to kill us. Why didn’t they just come in themselves?”
“It was dusk,” Sangster said. “Most likely this was safer. Blood-magic-augmented birds. So we know the Scholomance is onto us, in Madrid looking for clues about the Triumph.”
“Just like the guy at the Prado was onto us.” Alex turned back to Vienna. “Listen, I think they wanted us, and when we’re gone they won’t be interested in you.” He said this more because he desperately hoped it was true, not because he had any actual idea.
Alex paused, stood back, and looked around him, silently watching the firemen gathering and scratching their heads. The square near Vienna’s building was crowded, and the coffee and pastry vendors casually moved their stands closer to the building, scavenging for more customers.
What am I doing? Alex found himself asking this again as he had done in the past. Was this his life now? Completely truant from school, off the grid as far as his parents were concerned, and doing life-or-death research in Spain? Getting his friends nearly killed—was there any friend he was going to have whom he wasn’t going to put in danger?
He shook his head, bringing himself back to the present. No, no. Get in the game. “The Scholomance knew we were at the Prado. They’re not stupid; they knew that we’d be looking into The Triumph of Death. But the rest—the altered colors on the lady’s dress in the painting, does the Scholomance know about that?”
“I’m still going with no. The custodian and the color alterers are on our side, in a funny way. There’s no reason to think the vampires would be clued into that.”
“Assuming you’re right,” Alex said, “there could be more.”
“More Scholomance vampires?” Sangster said. “You bet.”
“No, more Strangers,” Alex said. “This morning a man broke into the Prado just to point us in the right way to this painting. There is a conspiracy that the Polidorium has completely overlooked, that started at least as far back as Bruegel’s visit to this…castle of black towers. And that conspiracy knows what you people—what we—are doing.” He pointed at Sangster and Armstrong. “The Scholomance is following us, and there’s a conspiracy that knows what’s going on better than we do. But they don’t get involved.”
“Maybe they’re a rogue element inside the Polidorium,” Astrid said.
Sangster shook his head. “I can totally accept the theory of a rogue element that split off to place clues—but a rogue element that told Bruegel what to paint? That would predate the Polidorium by two hundred years.”
Alex peered down the mental chessboard. The game was all off-kilter now. There were three players. “The vampires put a virus in the Polidorium database to throw us off the trail. And someone else is trying to get us back on track. That supports the theory that they’re friends, at least. Whoever this conspiracy of Strangers is, they’re on our side, not the Queen’s. But they are not talking, and they sure weren’t about to help us survive that attack.”
Armstrong gave it a shot. “Maybe it’s dangerous for them.”
“I don’t accept that,” Alex said. “The Triumph of Death is dangerous for everybody.”
“So they want to help but don’t want to force us to the conclusions.” Sangster shifted his weight.
Alex was looking at his watch. “The Dimmer Switch curse, the Triumph of Death, is a tool for sorcerers. And it’s being used by Claire Clairmont to fulfill a destiny. And we don’t know what’s going through her mind.” He shook his head in frustration. “I’m sick of being in the dark.”
“We’re all working on it, Alex,” Sangster said evenly.
“Well, you have your experts; I have a few of my own,” Alex said. He knew exactly who would be able to work through this stuff. He should have included them from the start. “I’m going back to school. There are some people I’d like to talk to.”