chapter 2
Within two minutes Alex had ditched the motorcycle in the woods across the road from the main gate of Glenarvon Academy and covered it over with leafy cut limbs. He switched to a regular bicycle, a more appropriate vehicle for a freshman heading into town, and pedaled through the gate. He was a little shocked to see his hands were shaky. The Scholomance had come for him. He had been genuinely surprised, and Alex Van Helsing was not used to being surprised.
No time for that now—he’d come this far and wasn’t about to get busted yet. Dusty, jittery, and still ink-stained on the neck, he locked the bike at the rack and headed into the shadows of the hulking, forbidding castle that was Glenarvon’s main house, Aubrey House, where he shared a room on the third floor. He hustled through the side entrance and bounded up the dim stairs, taking the steps two at a time.
As he came out the door into the third-floor hallway, Alex heard voices coming from the lounge and hesitated before moving past the door. He saw a room full of boys, all classes, gathered on couches and dragged-in extra chairs. Javi Arroyo, a senior and the RA for Aubrey House, had his back to the door as he fiddled with the DVD player next to the giant TV in the lounge.
“So I know everyone was hoping for Doctor Zhivago,” Arroyo was saying as he plugged in an A/V wire, “but all we have is this thing about guys in metal suits.” Arroyo turned around, holding up a copy of Iron Man 2. The crowd let it be known that they were duly appreciative not to be watching a three-hour movie about the Russian Revolution.
Alex hovered by the door until he saw Sid and Paul. Paul had commandeered a couch with Sid and had a giant bowl of popcorn. He was wearing a sweatsuit and sneakers, while Sid was still in his school uniform, his tie loosened. Alex remembered that Sid had been doing Academic Decathlon that afternoon. He caught their eyes and Sid made a gesture with open hands that somehow perfectly conveyed that Alex was cutting it a little close.
“Unfortunately it’s dubbed in French,” Javi said loudly, and the group groaned. Europe—you take what you can get.
Alex shrugged at his roommates and felt the jitteriness wearing off. He moved past the door and down the hall to his room. There, Alex threw his jacket and shirt on his bed and splashed at the sink in the tiny, white-plaster bathroom, scrubbing away at the ink on his neck. The room filled with steam from the hot water.
The vampires had tried to kill him. He’d lost his radio; he needed to call Sangster and do a debrief or an after-action or whatever the heck they would call it. He needed to talk.
A slight movement caught Alex’s eye in the mirror, barely visible through the fog on the glass. Alex turned off the water and swiped at the condensation. He saw the silver gray of his jacket glinting in the dim light. Nothing. Satisfied with the now-nearly-invisible ink stain, he yanked a towel off the rack and patted his neck.
His jacket moved.
Alex turned, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, brushing his head against a baseball cap of Sid’s that hung from the upper bunk next to the bathroom door. Across slick, tan-colored floor tiles strewn with the shoes, underwear, socks, wadded-up jeans, and sundry detritus of three fourteen-year-old boys stood Alex’s bunk. And on it, his jacket sleeve was moving.
Worms.
Elle had thrown those things on him and he thought he had gotten them all, but now he realized one of the critters must have made it into his jacket somehow. He padded in bare feet across the room, grabbed a hockey stick from under the bookshelf next to the window, and turned to face the jacket.
Alex reached out with the hockey stick and touched the jacket sleeve. He saw it creep on the bed, wrinkling and bowing a bit. Alex put the stick against the collar of the jacket and dragged it onto the tiles.
The sleeve danced and wriggled. The bulb in the center where the creature lay began to move faster. Alex looked around to see if there was anything better he could use, past Sid’s model kits and stacks of books. He could look through the go package, which lay on the floor.
No, that was ridiculous. He’d seen these things. They were worms. Be a man, for Pete’s sake.
The sleeve danced again and Alex smacked it hard with the hockey stick. Whunk. The bulge in the jacket seemed to undulate and for a moment lay still. He whacked it again.
“That’s more like it,” Alex said.
The sleeve split and bloomed like a rose, cotton flying as the worm shot into the air. Alex was barely able to follow it as it zinged, spinning. It didn’t look like a worm anymore: It was growing. The worm landed on Alex’s headboard and grabbed on, because not only had it gotten bigger and split five or six ways, but it now had arms.
The creature appeared to be made of some dense, dark reddish material that reminded Alex of congealed blood. It was about eight inches tall, with claws for hands and claws for feet on four spindly limbs, and a face comprised of a single, swiveling set of teeth.
For a moment Alex stared at the blood-thing. Then it hissed, whipping its toothy head toward him, and he swiped hard at it with the stick. It leapt. The stick caught it at what Alex could only take for shoulders and it zinged through the air, landing on the door. Alex’s stick followed through and took out a lamp his mom had sent him. The air filled with hundreds of multicolored glass shards.
The creature sprang with a whiny squeal and was on his chest, tiny claws crawling up his breastbone. Alex grabbed it, holding it out and away from him, and the tiny head whipped around and tried to chew at his thumbs. As it brushed its teeth against his hand, just missing his flesh, Alex saw the creature’s back swell out like the throat of a frog in anticipation. It was ready to start sucking him dry. Alex gulped down his revulsion and threw the creature across the room.
The thing spun and slammed against Sid’s bookshelf, sending plastic model airplane parts and brushes and tiny paint tubes flying. It dropped to the tile, limbs scrambling against the slick stone as it tried to find purchase. Running, Alex grabbed a handful of Sid’s books and slammed them down on top of the creature. One hard lunge and he was sure he felt the thing squish under the stack.
Drops of sweat fell from his brow onto the copy of Strange Creatures: Anthropology in Antiquity under his hands.
No movement. Alex grabbed a couple more books, blinking against the smell of spilled turpentine, and stacked them on top of the rest.
Someone was pounding at the door. Javi, Alex thought.
Alex backed away from the bookshelf, watching for movement as the pounding grew louder. “Who is it?”
“Open up!” It was the voice of Bill Merrill, another student. “Student” wasn’t really an apt label. Bill Merrill was . . . a nightmare, a jerk, an old-fashioned bully. And he was rarely alone. What could he possibly want?
“I want our DS!” Bill shouted. He pounded again at the door.
Alex glanced around the room, taking his eyes off the stack of books. He called to the closed door, “Aren’t those things against the rules?”
“Don’t give me that,” Bill retorted loudly, pounding the door again. “Open up.”
Alex pulled on a T-shirt that said MY OTHER SHIRT BEARS AN ANTISOCIAL SENTIMENT and yanked the door open. “What?”
Bill Merrill, not as tall as Paul but bigger in every way than Alex, stood in the hallway. He was flanked by his silent brother, Steven. Bill did most of the talking, and most of it was hostile.
Bill pushed his way in and Steven followed. “We’ve been good to you, haven’t we? We let you leave our room without a fuss,” Bill said, shaking his head as he looked around. He was referring to the fact that Alex had originally been assigned to room with Bill and Steven, but they had made his life miserable until Alex moved out. This apparently qualified as a shared history. Bill touched some of the lamp’s shattered glass with his shoes. “What are you doing in here?” He kicked at some random airplane parts.
“It’s—”
“Never mind. Steven has a Nintendo DS that he thinks you took, and by you I don’t mean you, I mean the person who does your fighting for you.”
“You mean Minhi?” Alex asked, referring to Minhi Krishnaswami, a girl from LaLaurie School across the lake. Minhi was a kung fu expert and had beaten Bill once.
Mentioning Minhi made Steven, the silent brother, laugh. Bill frowned. “I mean Paul. Where did he put it?”
“Why would Paul want your DS?” A Nintendo DS—or any other gaming system—was strictly verboten at Glenarvon. But some students broke the rules, and the Merrills definitely fit that category. Alex couldn’t think of a reason why his roommate would want to steal a game system from the Merrills, nor had he seen Paul playing on one.
“Maybe he just thinks it’s funny,” Bill said. He and Steven were idly searching the room, more with their eyes than anything.
Alex had had enough. “Look. I have to get changed.”
Steven froze, staring up at the ceiling. Bill seemed to sense his brother’s stopping and turned, looking up.
Alex saw it now, too. Neatly glued to a ceiling tile was a Nintendo DS.
Bill looked back at him, crossing his arms and blinking with something like innocence.
Alex said, “You have to admit, that is pretty funny . . .” but then he noticed that the books on the floor were starting to wobble the tiniest bit.
Steven looked at him silently and stepped up on the stack of books. He swiped up with one long arm, yanking the DS from of the ceiling. A puff of tile chalk ripped free as the DS came loose, and then Steven was falling.
Something was churning through the books and now Strange Creatures: Anthropology in Antiquity was dancing on end. It exploded in a burst of paper. The red worm creature, a starfish spinning in the air, soared and bounced off the wall. It landed on Steven’s back as he found his footing.
“What the hell is that?” Bill yelled, momentarily shocked. Alex balled his fist into a towel and swiped at it across Steven’s back, feeling it protest as it yanked free and flopped on the floor, spreading its starfishlike arms and breathing. “It’s like a—what is that, a bat?”
Bill was already raising his dress shoe to stomp on it.
Yes, kill it, Alex thought. Squish it before you get a good look at it. Bill’s foot came down and just caught it by the tail. The creature hissed and leapt, latching on to Bill’s shoulder and springing out the open door.
Bill turned, seeing the red-brown creature clinging to a bulletin board filled with sheets of paper offering guitar lessons and begging rides into town from upperclassmen. Someone was putting together a rugby team and there was a sign-up sheet, with a pencil on a string.
With its upper arms spread and flattened, it did look vaguely batlike for a moment. Bill moved with a speed Alex would not have expected from him. He took less than a second to yank the pencil free and jam it through the creature, impaling it in corkboard.
Bill glanced back at his brother with an expression of satisfaction. Steven was coming out of the room with the DS, trying to see around his own shoulders.
“Come on. Are you all right?”
“I don’t know, it bit me,” Steven said again.
The brothers began to stomp back toward the lounge. Bill called back without looking, “I’m telling Otranto.” Watching them go, Alex saw a slight trickle of blood on Steven’s back.
Alex looked back at the impaled creature. He would need to clean it up. At least it hadn’t—
It burst into flame.
Burst, just like a vampire, fwoosh, hot and fast, with flames spattering out and catching all the paper and even the cork of the bulletin board instantly. Alex gasped.
Fire. Put it out. Smother it. His first thought was to yank the board down; the board was wide and flat and if he got it smack against the floor it would probably go out. He lost that plan in two seconds, because he yanked at the board and found it to be bolted in place.
Need a new plan. Alex turned, running into his room and grabbing his damp towel. He came back and tried patting at the board. But as it howled and crackled, Alex realized that already the cork had caught deep. Years of glue and ground-up corkboard where pushpins had entered and exited thousands of times had created a porous, well-oxygenated sheet of kindling. The towel had no effect other than to be singed by the flames.
Need a new plan. Fire extinguisher.
He started to run down the hall in the direction of the lounge, where students were watching the movie. He thought he heard Bill Merrill, angry about something. About ten or fifteen feet past the lounge was the stairwell where, he remembered, there was a fire extinguisher.
Alex passed a red fire-alarm handle on the wall. He grabbed it and yanked it down, and all at once alarms filled the air, heavy-sounding klaxons that split his ears.
Past the DVD watchers in the lounge. His mind registered that Steven was lying on the ground but only Bill had noticed, and everyone else was looking up at the sudden alarm sounds. Alex flew through the door into the stairwell, finding the lean yellow fire extinguisher and sliding it off its hooks. He booked it back down the hall, realizing he was running out of time.
PASS.
Pull-Aim-Squeeze-Sweep, he heard his father say in his mind.
Pull. As he ran, he yanked the metal safety pin that held the operating lever in place. Students were pouring into the hall behind him, shouting. Flames from the board had spread to the wallpaper and now were licking against the ceiling tiles.
Aim. He stopped and picked the base of the fire as his target, which in this case was still the board.
The flames began to spread across the ceiling tiles. Maybe they weren’t past the tipping point yet, though. Maybe. Squeeze. He squeezed the handle up, waiting for the propellant to push back and up against his hands.
It did no such thing. Alex looked down at the markings on the extinguisher and read an expiration date that roughly coincided with one of his sister’s births.
So there would be no sweep of the extinguisher’s contents because the propellant inside had dissipated years ago. Also, the ceiling was on fire.
Alex turned and ran, meeting Javi Arroyo next to the stairwell entrance, where he was shouting orders for everyone to move steadily down the stairs.
Bill was walking Steven with his arms under his shoulders. Steven looked pale. “What’s wrong with him?” Alex called.
“I don’t know,” Bill said. Smoke was coming faster now.
A terrible thought occurred to Alex. “Is it because of the bite—” Alex said quickly.
“If it is, Van Helsing, I will kill you,” Bill said, and disappeared down the stairwell, charging past several others, including Paul and Sid.
Great.
Alex looked back and saw flames licking across the ceiling, and starting to come out of his room.
“Alex, what are you doing?” Sid called.
The overhead lights began to flicker. Alex heard what must have been tubes of paint exploding in their room.
Javi slapped him on the back. “Come on, look alive,” he said.
“There might be more we can do. . . .”
Javi shook his head. “The alarm is linked to the village and the fire department can take it. Let’s go.”
Dismayed into silence, Alex joined Sid and Paul. Down the stairs the students moved as the alarms rang out, deafening them all.
Out at the gate, the whole school gathered and watched. Alex heard the RAs counting off students in the dark. Standing together, Alex, Paul, and Sid watched the upstairs, where the fire had moved from one room to at least two or three adjacent.
Alex heard Bill Merrill shouting and turned to look. A pair of teachers bent over Steven, who lay unconscious and deathly pale.
Paul tore his eyes away from the fire to nod toward Steven. “What happened to him?”
Elle. Elle. Freaking Elle.
“Something meant for me,” Alex said.
There was a screeching of tires and Alex saw a racing green convertible scrape across gravel and stop near the gate. A man in his mid-thirties wearing a sport coat bounded out of the car. It was Sangster, with a look of horror. He saw Alex and relief crossed his face. The sounds of fire trucks filled the air.