chapter 3
As alarms continued to flood the area with noise, paramedics burst through the crowd. Alex watched a young man in scrubs size up the situation instantly; almost no one needed help except for Steven, still prone.
Alex moved to Steven’s side and found himself across from Bill, who looked up at him with disgust and worry.
“What happened to him?” the ambulance guy said in heavily accented English as he felt for a pulse. Steven’s head was already elevated. He was unconscious but breathing. “Did he inhale smoke?”
“I don’t think so,” Bill said.
A woman in scrubs showed up with a gurney and the two paramedics lifted Steven’s body and laid it on the gurney.
“He was bitten,” Alex volunteered.
The woman touched a metal lever next to the wheel base and the gurney popped up to waist height. “Bitten?” she asked, with the same French accent. “By what?”
“I don’t know, it was a freakin’ bat, I think,” Bill said. “I’ve seen ’em in the rafters.”
The paramedics nodded as they began to hurry with Steven. Bill ran with them.
The rest of the gate area was bedlam. Students were gathered in excitable groups. As the last of the fire trucks arrived and the ambulance sped away, Alex saw Headmaster Otranto talking intensely on a cell phone.
He was calling for buses. That was Otranto’s skill: arranging things.
Even so, at eleven P.M. on a Friday this was not an easy task. They waited numbly for an hour until buses rolled in next to the fire trucks. The first order of business was loading the two hundred students of Glenarvon Academy onto the buses and getting them away from the academy itself, now soaked and smouldering.
From the back of his bus, Alex turned and watched out the glass window as the school gave off plumes of smoke. The entire upper story of the main house—where all the bedrooms were—was a wreck.
Alex realized that not listening to his own mind had done himself and his school a lot of damage. If he’d only noticed the worm in his jacket before he got back to the school . . . He had felt jittery when he got back and hadn’t listened to the feeling. He had ruined everything.
The bus was full of chattering students borrowing one another’s cell phones and calling America and Germany and Canada and the United Arab Emirates. Alex heard the phrase going home time and again.
Alex needed to call his own home, but he had left his cell in the saddlebags of his motorcycle in the trees across from the school, and the Polidorium Bluetooth was useful only for calling within and through the organization. After Paul had finished calling London, Alex borrowed his phone and called his family in Wyoming, where it was about four forty-five P.M.
His sister Ronnie answered. When she heard his voice, her first words were “Why are you calling from London?”
Alex scrunched back into the seat, looking at Paul. “What?”
“Your country code came in as London.”
“I’m borrowing a cell phone.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. Ronnie was twelve, Alex’s closest friend in the world before he had left for one boarding school and then another. In the background he heard deafening music—classic rock, sounded like. She had to be in her room, tucked in the converted attic of a shambling Victorian monster that housed his parents and his four sisters. He could picture her, wavy black hair tucked into a wool cap, denim jacket. She was forever bundled up and guarded.
“It’s a long story,” Alex said, trying to sound serious but calm. “There’s been an . . . are Mom and Dad home?”
“There’s a thing at the university,” Ronnie said. “Dad was actually wearing a bow tie. You can catch Mom on her cell if . . .”
There was a sharp click and he heard a second voice, also female. “Who’s calling from London?” demanded Judith, who was fourteen and Alex’s fraternal twin. The Sony cordless phones in the house had caller ID on every handset, so she was curious. That and she was nosy.
“NO ONE,” Alex and Ronnie said immediately.
“Alex?” Judith snorted. “What did you do?”
“Why would you even say that?” Alex demanded.
“Because you usually call on Sundays and you’re not using your own phone,” Judith said evenly. She had her own soundtrack behind her, pulsating trip-hop and the persistent mechanical roar of a treadmill that was dwindling to a hum. She must be in the cavernous den of the house. Alex could picture her as well, probably in sleek Adidas sportswear, blond hair perfect and flowing, a picture of his mother.
Behind Judith, Alex could hear his little sisters, Frankie, who was ten, and Bobbi, who was eight, and the sounds of dishes being put down; this would be right off the den. “Is that Alex?” Bobbi shouted.
“You keep setting the table,” Judith ordered.
“Judith would like to inform you that she is in charge,” Ronnie said wryly.
“Which is why you’re hiding out in your room?” Alex asked.
“What did you do?” Judith demanded again. “If Dad has to find another school to take you in . . .”
Ugh. She was just trying to goad him into fessing up to something, and there was nothing to fess up to. He chose to ignore the question. “There’s no emergency right now,” he said. “There’s been an incident, a fire, so we’re going somewhere else for the night. I don’t know where. Just tell Mom and Dad I’ll call when I get the chance.”
“Have you been arrested?” Judith asked.
“Seriously, what is the matter with you?” Alex asked his twin. She had always been like this, a mental jujitsu artist, always pushing, then tugging, twisting, and trying to get you off balance.
“Whatever,” Judith said. “I’ll tell them you called. Ronnie, I know eating is important to you, so if you plan to join us I’ll keep a place set for five minutes after the rest of us sit down.”
“Don’t you have a run to finish?” Ronnie asked. “Good-bye, Judith.” After a moment they could hear Judith snort derisively and hang up.
Ronnie asked Alex, “Does all this have to do with the thing you haven’t told Dad?” Alex winced at her straightforwardness. Ronnie never minced words.
What she meant was this: When Alex had arrived at Glenarvon Academy on Lake Geneva, he had learned a number of things he had not known before.
First, whereas Alex believed he had been going insane at Frayling Prep in the United States where he had gotten involved in a fight that left the other boy seriously injured, at Lake Geneva he had learned that he wasn’t going crazy at all. Instead, he was beginning to be visited by a sense for evil, a static that grew and warned him of supernatural danger. The boy he’d fought had turned out to be particularly, supernaturally, dangerous.
Second, following the trail of this static had led Alex to discover that his father, a rather boring but renowned philanthropist and university lecturer on history and mythology, had fudged the truth during Alex’s entire childhood. He had always insisted that the supernatural—vampires, zombies, the whole B-movie greatest-hits scene—were not real, were “not how things happened.” Fudged as in lied. There were such things, and in Geneva, they had sought Alex out.
Third, his father should have definitely known better, because Dr. Van Helsing had actually been an agent for the organization that now called Alex one of its off-the-books fellows: the Polidorium. Apparently Dad had not known his old colleagues—and old enemies—were at Lake Geneva. But the memory of the vampires ran deep, and they had a special hatred—and a strange modicum of respect—for Alex’s family.
Alex hadn’t told his father about any of this. In the month since he’d made these discoveries, he had found a certain sense of belonging and peace in his new role. The Polidorium blanched at his youth but were training him because they seemed to believe his latent skill for finding and fighting the vampires could be a benefit to them, and therefore to their clients, which apparently extended to every government on the planet.
But he had told Ronnie.
“I think it’s connected,” Alex said now, and he looked around to make sure no one was listening. No one was—an evacuation after a fire had a way of putting everyone in an overexcited but unfocused state. As Alex ran his eyes up and down the bus—and out the window at the bus next to them—he saw dullness and confusion. He could have walked up and down the aisle stealing everyone’s wallets and he doubted anyone would notice.
“People are going to know it started by my room,” he said. Whispering, Alex gave Ronnie a brief run-down of the whole business of the evening. “I don’t know what the school is going to do, but I’m gonna try to ride it out. I really need to stay.”
“Ride it out?” Ronnie asked. “Okay. So you’re going to tell Dad that you burned down your school, but assuming you don’t get kicked out, ‘don’t worry about it because I like Switzerland so much’?”
He chuckled. “How did you so perfectly predict my line of argument?”
“We all live sprawled across one another,” Ronnie grumbled. “Even in a house this big, even across the Atlantic.” She seemed to consider the chessboard that lay before Alex. “It will work for now, but you have to cut them in soon.”
“Why would you say that?”
“The best time to tell the truth is always soon,” Ronnie said.
“Okay,” Alex answered, looking out the window again. “Anyway. We’re off to—” Alex looked at Paul, who was talking to Sid, and raised his voice. “Where are we going?”
“Village Hall,” Paul said.
Alex nodded and spoke to Ronnie. “Uh, Village Hall. In a place nearby called Secheron. I heard them saying we have to sit there while Otranto figures out where we can go for a few days. Or weeks. I don’t know,” he said again.
The only place that could hold them was the main room of the Secheron Village Hall, which would suffice for a few hours. The hall was big enough to hold two thousand citizens, with long rows of tables and metal chairs. The students filed in according to their houses and classes, and the administrators went about the business of keeping them occupied, with drinks and snacks being prepared in an industrial kitchen in the building.
While Otranto conferred with several of the other instructors, Sangster tapped Alex to go with him to pick up extra supplies from one of the few late-night grocery stores in town—an American-style superstore of the kind that was slowly infiltrating Europe. That errand was their way to escape and figure out what on earth was going on.
Into the woods the Glenarvon van shot with Sangster at the wheel, heading toward Polidorium HQ. Alex was astonished that the instructor was able to find a path through the trees big enough for the van, but within ten minutes they were into the clearing he had come to know well, through the false door of the farmhouse, and down into the bowels of the earth.
Sangster brought the van to a stop in what amounted to a vast garage, big enough to house Humvees and cars and motorcycles and trucks with helicopters on their trailers. They bounded up the metal stairs at the back of the garage as Sangster gestured to a large clock on the wall. “We have an hour; that’ll leave half an hour to get the supplies.”
Through the doors at the top of the stairs lay a world of carpeting and glass walls. Alex heard the familiar clamor of agents moving from room to room, some listening to radio chatter, some drawing lines on enormous glass maps. Alex and Sangster moved past the commotion to a conference room, where two people waited impatiently.
At the head of a long, shiny black table sat Director Carreras, whose balding head and heavy-set frame fit his suit perfectly and made him look like the senior partner of a law firm. As they entered, Alex caught the eye of Agent Anne Armstrong, who was pacing near the projection screen at the front. She wore standard Polidorium togs, black pants and shirt, with shoulder holster. At least once in the month he’d been around, Alex had seen her in a U.S. Air Force uniform, and she had informed him she was actually a captain on detached assignment from that service. That was the way it worked, apparently. Some of these people were on loan.
“Can anyone tell me what is going on?” Sangster asked as Carreras bade them sit, and Armstrong’s look indicated she had hoped to ask the same thing.
“We think it’s retaliation against Van Helsing,” said Carreras in a smooth British accent. “For the attack on the Scholomance last month.”
For a moment Alex allowed it all to come back—the journey under the lake to reclaim his friends. But that adventure hadn’t ended with a daring escape, the way he had expected it to when they managed to bash their way out alive.
No, the adventure had ended, truly ended, with Alex alone, a heavy vampiric hand wrapped around his throat. For a moment Alex saw again the flicker of red light, felt the nail of the vampire called Icemaker digging into him. Icemaker had been trying to raise a long-dead woman who would be the new queen of the vampires, and at that moment, with everything in his plan falling apart, she needed more blood. Alex was their last chance and he had almost died right there. The inch-long cut on his throat had only healed recently.
Alex shook the memory away and shared what had happened, from the Mercedes to the fire. Sangster said, “Tell us more about the worm.”
Alex continued talking as Armstrong typed away. “It was about yea big,” he said, holding out his hands. “It started out small and then it split into kind of a starfish.”
“Did it have circular jaws?” Armstrong asked, not looking up. She tapped a key and on the screen appeared a three-dimensional diagram of the worm itself, slowly spinning, diagrammatic lines pointing to various parts of the creature.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Alex said.
“You ever seen one of these?” Armstrong said to Sangster.
“Only in Anzio,” Sangster said, looking at the diagram.
“It’s Italian?” Alex asked. Anzio was a coastal city where an enormous military cemetery stood. He had been there with his family.
“No, it’s—Sangster is talking about the Polidorium’s creature school in Anzio,” Armstrong told him. “Anyway: the worm is called a Glimmerhook. This is a very unusual thing for the Scholomance to haul out and throw at you. They would have had to procure it from one of the heavy-duty blood-wielding clans, the kind that can make enhanced creatures using blood. They come in an egglike, ah, grenade—so there are usually a handful of them, like you said. There’re only one or two clan lords who can make them, so it would be an expensive get.”
Alex remembered the worms crawling into his jacket. “What does it do?”
“Just two things,” Armstrong said. “It sucks your blood and expands to carry back however much it can take, and oh, it poisons and kills you.”
“Poisons? It bit one guy, Steven Merrill. He was in my room.”
“Did you find him being bitten? How much blood—”
“I was there when it jumped on him and I pulled it off almost immediately,” Alex answered. “Steven collapsed a few minutes later. He’s in the hospital.”
“How’s he doing?” Armstrong asked.
“We won’t know until tomorrow,” Sangster said, shaking his head. “What will the effect of the worm look like?”
“Something like malaria,” Armstrong said. “A blood disease. It’ll try to kill his white blood cells. It sounds like the bite was very brief. With any luck they’ll treat him at the hospital and he’ll pull through.”
“You think so?” Alex asked.
Armstrong paused. “I guess I kind of hope so, Alex.”
“So they hit him with an expensive and exotic weapon,” Sangster said. “Doesn’t that seem a little overboard for a retaliation?”
“What are you thinking?” Armstrong asked, searching Sangster’s face. Alex watched her eyes dart; she had this way of scanning you like a map.
“I don’t know. Tell me about the escalation you’re seeing,” Sangster replied. “It’s a stretch, but maybe it’s connected.”
Armstrong turned her attention back to the keyboard and tapped some more. Information began to scroll down the wall, codes Alex could not read except that each was appended with a date and time down to the thousandth of a second. “When it comes to Scholomance activity, there absolutely has been an escalation,” she said. “Just a week ago, Chatterbox looked pretty normal.”
Alex raised a hand. “Chatterbox?”
Armstrong nodded. “This is something new we’ve been working on. It’s still in its early stages—we have the main architect coming in to do some tweaks. Okay, actually, it’s way beyond me, but it is very cool.”
Now the screen began to arrange itself into a dynamic map of information—circles connected by dotted lines. As Armstrong swiped her hand, the map swiveled on its axis, showing more and more circles. She swiped her hand again and it stretched out chronologically; swiped again, and Alex saw topics laid out in idea groups and time.
“All of the information you see here,” Armstrong said, “is compiled by computer, with human agents tweaking as they go. It’s sweeping up emails, phone calls, texts, whatever we’ve managed to pick up. It’s not easy because vampires tend to use phones and email addresses the way most criminals do—they keep them for a short time and toss them. Forums and chat rooms pop up and come down, and we at the Polidorium dedicate a lot of time to trolling all of these. Chatterbox looks for patterns.”
As admirable as this was, Alex felt a little queasy. This was a scary tool.
Armstrong continued, “Anyway, Chatterbox as of last week was showing no particular focus for the Scholomance here. As of yesterday there was more chatter about Mira, which is their code for Lake Geneva.”
“Why now?” he asked.
Armstrong tapped another key, and the line of communications grew into a map, with small red blips where different messages had appeared. As she trailed a finger over the tabletop, he saw each blip explode with information and keywords, Mira, Polidorium, and a plethora of other targeted phrases.
“Maybe they wanted you out of the way,” Armstrong said, “because someone is coming to the Scholomance.”
“Another clan lord?” Sangster asked.
Armstrong shook her head. “None of the clans have been chattering the way you’d expect if a lord was on the move—the way we knew Icemaker was coming. No, it’s someone called by this other code word, Ultravox.” She indicated the idea map, and swished her hand to now show ideas mapped in time and tagged geographically—circles moving up and down a map of Europe, building toward Switzerland. The keyword Ultravox glowed again and again.
“Who is Ultravox?” Alex asked.
Sangster said, “Well, for one thing it’s the name of a New Wave band.”
“What’s New Wave?”
Armstrong pursed her lips, a kind of choked smile.
Sangster continued, “But it means the Voice, the Super Voice, I guess.”
“Do you have any data on a vampire called the Voice?” Alex asked hopefully.
“We’re looking,” Armstrong said.
Carreras cleared his throat. “It is time we consider the wisdom of returning Van Helsing to the school. For his own safety.”
All were silent.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Alex. “And then what? What does that mean? Without a school to go to, I got no reason to be here.”
He realized he was bringing to the surface a matter that had not really been discussed. Alex was being trained and allowed to work for the Polidorium because they believed he had something to offer. But would he be working with the Polidorium if he was no longer attending school nearby? Did they value him enough—and that was the way he was thinking of it, as though he were a really great car—to find some excuse to keep him around if he wasn’t in school here? The answer had to be absolutely not. No organization was going to just take in a fourteen-year-old. If the school was gone, or he was gone from the school, he was as good as gone to the Polidorium.
“You’re not my parents,” Alex said when he finally decided on his line of reasoning. “I’ll decide if I’m at that school.”
Sangster clawed at his own forehead. “If the Scholomance is serious, serious enough to try to get rid of Alex, then he’s important to our mission.”
Armstrong turned to Carreras. “As much as I hate to say it, I agree. Look, they’re already gonna try to kill him every chance they get, so that’s nothing new.”
“Yeah,” said Alex brightly. “That’s nothing new.”
Armstrong seemed to think of a new angle. “Could this be about Montrose?”
“What’s Montrose?” Alex asked.
“That would be the man behind Chatterbox,” Sangster said. “And I have no idea if it’s related or not.”
Carreras nodded and finally said, “We need to find out what this Voice is up to. Alex stays with the school—wherever the school is.”
Alex opened his hands, Whaa? “I just said it’s my decision. . . .”
“Very good, sir,” Sangster said.
The supplies Sangster and Alex had to get were actually bigger than the van: a trailer full to the brim of cots and bedding, which they loaded from the dock of a store warehouse in Secheron with the help of various workmen brought in at Otranto’s behest.
When they left the warehouse, Alex saw that they were headed out of town. “This isn’t the way back to Village Hall,” he observed as Sangster drove.
“We’re not going back to Village Hall,” said the instructor.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe.”
Twenty minutes later the van fell in line behind the caravan of buses pulling down a long, manicured drive that Alex recognized. He read the stone sign as they passed it on the driveway.
“LaLaurie School for Girls,” he said thoughtfully. “Of course.”
“Our sister school. It’s temporary,” Sangster said, “just long enough to see what kind of damage the fire caused and get us back open. But this was the only place available.”
Sangster drove around the buses and parked in the circular drive at the front of the mansionlike building. Alex blinked in wonder at a strange vision. A line of ten or so old-fashioned oil lanterns threaded out the entrance, held aloft by women and girls in uniform coming down the wide front steps. The light from the lamps danced across the courtyard and his heart leapt at the warmth of the gesture.
As Alex got out of the van, he paused.
Standing on the steps before him, holding up a lantern like a beacon at sea, was Minhi Krishnaswami.
“Welcome,” she said.