chapter 5
“Everyone, get away!” Sangster waved his arms as they moved forward from the van, closing the distance to the long boardwalk that connected with the main pier. A man and woman running out of the restaurant nearly collided with him.
Armstrong spoke rapidly into her Bluetooth. “Farmhouse, this is Armstrong, Sangster, and Van Helsing. We are at the pier—we have an incursion of Scholomance vampires emerging from the water.”
Alex heard another female voice, farther away, click on. “Acknowledged. Reinforcements are on the way.”
“How many?” They reached the edge of the pier, watching a steadily approaching crowd of white-clad vampires with something strange about their faces, something Alex still couldn’t make out.
“Four vans, just now entering Secheron by the main road. ETA five minutes.”
“We’re going to need more than that, and faster,” Sangster cut in.
One of the vampires on the pier caught a woman in a blue coat, biting viciously at her throat. The woman went down and the vampire rose again, moving on.
The team hugged a wide telephone pole and Sangster watched the advancing horde tear into the crowd of townspeople. “They’re not feeding, just attacking. We can’t get a clean shot until these people are clear,” he added in frustration.
The group was still a hundred yards off, and Alex nearly ran into another pedestrian. The look in the man’s eyes was a confused sort of terror. “That way!” Alex shouted, waving him off.
Now Alex saw what was strange about the vampires’ faces. The nearest one, the one who had attacked the woman in the blue coat, would normally have looked like a flash of white in the darkness, skin all alabaster save for sparkling eyes. But this one wore heavy black splotches of paint around his eyes and over his nose. He looked like a skeleton.
“They’re painted like skeletons.” Alex scanned the others he could see. “Why?”
“It’s odd. I don’t remember them painting that way.” Sangster’s voice on the radio had a strange detachment that only he seemed to be capable of in times like this. Sangster was filing it away in the way he was teaching Alex to do. Pay attention. That was the rule that applied over all others.
Alex heard a splash as one of the pedestrians fell off the pier into the water. There had to be a hundred people running pell-mell between the three agents and the invaders. He couldn’t get a good count of the vampires because they were still bunched up at the back where they climbed onto the pier next to the restaurant, and much of the activity there was obscured by guardrails.
Sangster ran to the end of the pier and leaned over, aiming for the ladder of white latticework that was attached. He began to shoot in rounds of three.
Alex reached the edge of the humans and faced an advancing group of vampires, all with their faces painted. “There’s too many.”
“Pick one,” Armstrong said.
Alex chose a vampire that was thirty yards away and closing in. He pulled the trigger on his Polibow and saw the bolt sizzle and smoke as it struck the vampire in the chest, missing the heart. He fired again, this bolt finding its mark, and the creature exploded.
He aimed at another target that had slowed up as he shot the first. Alex watched the vampire come close to the first and fired, and got lucky. As the first went up he caught the second and they exploded together.
Armstrong was clear of pedestrians now and let loose with rounds from her machine gun.
Then there was an all-new sound, something strange howling from the edge of the pier.
Alex and the two agents stopped, huddling together. In the distance behind them, over the din of screams, they could hear heavy engines, likely Polidorium vehicles moving down the long avenue toward the pier.
But out on the pier there was a loud, echoing, popping sound, like something solid and slightly wet smacking into place, pieces clunking together.
The sound of an engine, heavy and churning, came across the waves. Below the machine-like sound, Alex detected an undercurrent of deep growling, one powered by angry spirits and growing louder.
“Behind the restaurant!” Sangster called Alex’s attention to the activity at the far end of the pier. Alex could barely understand what he was seeing emerge from the water, but it was coming fast.
Like grasping fingers, long cords of bone-like white material scuttled out from around the restaurant in jointed, moving sticks. As vampires with skull faces continued to advance, all but ignoring the three agents gathered on the pier, Alex saw the strange bone sticks stack themselves deliberately into shape.
As they found available space on the boards, the bone sticks formed wheels the size of men, then a long, flat chassis, and finally a great coach. In front of the coach, a small set of bones flipped and rolled into place and grew into something that resembled a pair of skeletal horses.
“What the—?” Alex whispered in shock.
A new scream cut him off. A vampire emerged on the roof of the restaurant. Alex recognized the shrieking voice instantly, and as he looked up, he saw the female vampire with blazing yellow hair, her eyes and nose painted over with black. “Now!” she cried, and leapt into the driver’s seat of the coach.
“That’s Elle,” said Alex. Sangster nodded. The vampire called Elle, who looked about sixteen but was possibly hundreds of years old, was well known to the Polidorium. At least by name and reputation: They didn’t have much on her background, but Elle seemed to occupy a place of some trust in the Scholomance. She had also been a thorn in Alex’s side, assigned to keep tabs on him. Elle whipped the reins and the carriage began to move, great skeletal horse hooves clapping on the boards as they went.
The vampires now formed up around her as the carriage picked up speed.
Sangster whipped his arm over his head. “Fall back.”
They broke and ran for their van as Armstrong shouted into the radio, “Farmhouse, they’ve got a…” She took a moment to look at Sangster and then went ahead choosing whatever seemed to come to mind. “They’re using some kind of system of vampire magic to power a mock horse-drawn carriage. I think it’s made of bone.”
“Copy that,” came the disconnected voice.
“It might be the same bone spell that they use to reinforce the roof of the Scholomance,” Sangster mused as they ran. Alex had seen the vast latticework that stretched for miles inside the organization, creating the structure of its highest ceilings, allowing them to have a sort of cavern that encased a whole city.
“And why does this matter?” Alex asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic. If Sangster was bothering to say it, he had a reason.
“Bone work of that sort is not a specialty of the Scholomance; it would have to be brought in by someone new,” Sangster said as he ran. They reached the van and hunkered behind it and Sangster rapped on the door four times, hard and fast. “It’s very rare. Extremely dark power.”
Alex glanced around the van, parked in the cobblestone street like a sitting duck. The carriage was moving at a steady clip now, with the vampires no longer charging on their own but formed up around it. The army of skulls seemed to be jogging beside the carriage, reminding him of the parade of a circus.
The van door didn’t open. Alex looked at Sangster and ran to the front of the van.
The window of the driver’s side was tinted. “Hey!” he yelled.
A hand, red with blood, slapped against the glass, and Alex saw it, darkened and clouded behind the tinting. He made out the slumping form of the driver and shrank back as a skull-faced vampire thrust its face against the glass.
Alex shrieked even as he brought up the Polibow, pumping a bolt through the window. The window shattered and the creature exploded, fire filling the inside of the van.
Alex staggered back.
Armstrong looked at the smoke pouring out of the van window and opened her hands as if to say, What’d you have to go and do that for?
“The—there was a vampire in there.”
“How?” screamed Armstrong. “Those doors are protected.”
“We left the door cracked so we could fall back into it,” Sangster said.
“Okay, okay, new plan,” Alex said.
“We are way outnumbered,” Sangster said. The sound of the carriage and the incessant, unholy whine of its magic engine came fast with the advance of bone hooves and vampire boots. “Come on, keep moving.”
They waited a moment as the army advanced, and Alex watched Elle at the reins, whipping long tendrils of leather, a wild look in her blackened eyes.
As soon as the procession passed, the three followed. There was nothing else they could do until reinforcements arrived.
Halfway up the avenue there was a crowd of people, bunched up near cars that had run into one another and stalled.
When the carriage arrived at the throng of people, they heard the ratcheting sound again. Behind the carriage, more bone rods shot out, latching onto one another and building until it formed a sort of trailer, with white bars.
From the shelter of a shop entrance Alex asked, “What’s that?”
“It looks like a cage,” Sangster said.
The vampires moved out, this time grabbing people. A man in a leather coat screamed as one of the skull-faced vampires picked him up by the shoulders and threw him. He landed in the cage, rolling across the bumpy floor. They were gathering up captives.
No, no, this is not gonna happen.
Alex heard Sangster yell, “Wait!” but he was already moving.
The darkened street was bedlam, lit up by the glow of lampposts and the glistening bone of the carriage. Alex scanned the street as he ran. He looked up at Elle, who had stopped to yell instructions to the vampires.
Find somewhere high.
Not far from her was the second-story window of a shop, and it had a small balcony with flowerpots. At the edge of that building Alex saw a stalled car that had rammed into a drainage pipe.
Heavy static throbbed in his brain as he cut around the vampires who were grabbing people.
“Alex, get back and wait for backup!” Sangster called.
“I’m going after Elle!” Alex shouted. There was a chance that without their leader in the operation, they might slow down in confusion. It would buy the agents time. Alex leapt onto the hood of the car, which was parked under the store’s balcony, and then grabbed a drainpipe at the corner of the building, yanking at it to see if it would hold his weight. Satisfied, he scrambled up until he was across from the balcony.
It was just out of reach.
Six inches. Leap, grab, hold on. Do it now.
His arm sang with pain as he grabbed the rusted metal and swung wild beneath it, his legs churning in the air until he brought them up and stilled himself. He climbed up onto the outside of the balcony railing and began walking sideways along it.
When he was about even with Elle, who was four feet down and fifteen feet out into the street, he brought his Polibow up. He was ready to pump a bolt into her heart as soon as his arm found her chest. He turned to shoot.
Suddenly she was already in midair, a flash of white as she leapt across the distance, hitting him like a sledgehammer to the chest. Her white hands grabbed his throat and he felt weightless for a second. Then the wooden frame and plate glass of the shop’s french doors burst apart behind his shoulders, and they tumbled together into a storage room, landing in sacks of flour and glass.
“Alex!” Elle laughed. “I was genuinely wondering when you were gonna show up.”
Alex rolled away from her and grabbed a sack of flour, hurling it into her face. It hit her hard and she flipped back, the flour exploding around the room. Alex looked around quickly.
Mixer, metal bowls, flour, sugar, desk, letters, letter opener.
Alex reached for the desk, lifting himself up and grabbing the letter opener. He got to his feet and backed up. He had a stake in his go package, but he would have to reach around for it and she was fast.
Elle took a moment to brush the flour off, waving in the air in front of her.
“This is a new look for you,” Alex said.
“Don’t you just love it?”
“Is the whole Scholomance dressed up like the Day of the Dead now or just this crew?”
“This is a vanguard, Alex. We’re the front line. You are so screwed I can’t even tell you.”
“Come on!” Alex held out the letter opener. “Elle, what is going on? The Scholomance is supposed to be secret, right? You can’t take over a town and keep a low profile.”
“I’m sure you’ll clean it up.” Her legs coiled as she leapt. He thrust up with the letter opener and caught the folds of cloth under her arms. She flipped over him and brought him down to the ground, her arm around his throat. She whispered in his ear as she lifted him up off the ground. She was so incredibly strong. Elle dragged him toward the window. “Look.”
Down below, the cage was nearly full of captives. He heard the rumbling of trucks as a pair of Polidorium vans pulled onto the street behind the crowds farther up the avenue.
“Yeah, that’s the cavalry,” Alex said, his voice raspy from being in a choke hold. There were gunshots now, as agents poured into the streets from the vans. Alex watched puffs of fire go up as skull-faced vampires exploded.
“Aren’t you going to ask,” Elle whispered, “what it means?”
“What what means? The people, the captives?” Alex said, his mind racing. He felt compelled to play her game, if nothing else, to see if she would relax enough that he could reach into the go package she was smashing him against and grab the handle of his stake. “Are they sacrifices?”
“No.” She spoke as if she planned to count his answers.
“Hmm. You’re replenishing your stock.” Down in the Scholomance the vampires fed off captives, but they were usually carefully chosen from among people reported missing or otherwise already given up. It would be strange to grab a bunch of people off the street.
“No, for all the reasons you’re smart enough to figure out,” Elle said, as though she could read his mind.
Alex listened to the whine of the infernal engine of the carriage and the false, panting skeletal horses. The bone power was new, a big deal, Sangster had said. “It’s a show. A show of power.”
“Not bad,” she said.
“But what power?”
“The one you thought you could stop.” Elle seemed to shiver for a moment as a reedy, high-pitched call cut through the street, and the procession of vampires below parted.
Alex had his shot. As her body momentarily relaxed, he reached back with his right hand and found the hilt of his special silver-laced stake. He grabbed it and slammed it into her side, the nearest point he could. She shrieked as it hissed against her flesh.
He didn’t waste time once she let go of him. Alex climbed over the balcony and jumped, aiming for a skull-faced vampire and hitting him in the back with his knees. Alex rolled to the ground and got up, vampires jostling around him. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the emerging, reedy call.
Then he saw it: As the crowd parted there came a long horse, this one not made of bone but instead somehow worse, alive and elongated, skeletal but stretched with skin. The horse was the length of the carriage Elle had driven.
Riding atop the horse was a figure in white, wearing a thin veil that shimmered in the darkness. One arm gripped a long, narrow, bony scythe.
Beneath the veil he could see a strange white visage, very nearly a skull, with shining glimmers where its eyes should be. It was Claire, the Queen of the Dead.
“It’s impossible.” Alex spoke into his microphone. “She’s supposed to be stuck and unable to come back. They needed my blood.”
“Looks like they got what they needed,” Sangster guessed.
The Queen swept her arms and Alex started at the sound of a cracking whip. Elle was back in the carriage now, and the Queen remained as Elle guided the carriage toward the marina.
The Queen drew what looked like a reddish spear and threw it to the ground, and Alex watched the staff stick there and vibrate.
After a second it grew taller, flowering out into a wagon-wheel-like shape at the top. The wagon wheel tilted and then began to revolve, suggesting a mechanism.
“It looks like a satellite dish.” Alex’s brain blazed with powerful energy passing over him as the “dish” swiveled.
A pair of heavily armed Polidorium agents pushed past Alex and aimed at the Queen and began firing. Vampires scattered and the Queen looked down, her skull-like face behind the veil leveling its gaze on them. She rode forward, their bullets pounding against her, sizzling but not exploding.
She whipped the scythe, catching vampires and agents alike. Screams rang out only to be cut short.
Alex moved backward, stumbling and falling to the ground.
He got to his feet and reached back, finding a silver knife and throwing it in one move. The knife bounced off the scythe as it came around, and then the Queen brought it around again, this time to strike him down.
No time to leap, no place to move.
He heard another high-pitched whine, like a motorcycle.
The scythe came sweeping down and a four-foot-long green staff flashed before his eyes, coming from nowhere. The metal staff parried the scythe’s blow, and the Queen jolted her head sideways in surprise.
Alex felt someone grab him by the collar and pull him back, and a green motorcycle of no make he had ever seen before whipped around and in front of him.
The rider wore a blue helmet and was obviously female, wearing a light-colored jacket over her thin frame. Her back turned to Alex, the rider shrieked at the Queen in a language he couldn’t identify.
Suddenly the figure cried in English, “Traitor!”
Silence. The Queen brought her free hand up to her scythe and touched her fingers, almost shrugging. There was a hint of merriment in her blazing veiled eyes.
“No traitor,” she said thickly, in English. “Triumphant.”
Something in the air popped, and Alex felt light filtering into his eyes from above. A great hole had opened where the dark curtain of night was retracting, and light clouds crossed the daytime sky as the great reddish horse turned, and the Queen galloped toward the lake like a fluid and screaming ghost. The last of the vampires that had not retreated with Elle’s carriage went with the skull-headed lady, surrounding the horse and moving just as fast. Within moments, the streets were empty of the dead and gleamed with sunlight.
All that remained were the Polidorium agents and the rider of the green motorcycle, which churned with a muffled softness as near-organic as the engine of the Queen’s carriage. Alex saw that other than handlebars, the bike was devoid of controls.
The girl on the bike flipped her staff and it collapsed to about a foot long, and she stuck it in a saddlebag.
“Who are you?” Alex asked. But already he had a suspicion, an inkling he could not explain.
The girl took off her helmet, turned her head, and smiled. It was Astrid.