The Triumph of Death

Alex Van Helsing leapt from the plane without another thought, and in the corner of his eye he saw the black shape of the aircraft zip away, leaving him to plummet to earth or find a better option. As the ground roared toward him, Alex scanned the sky for vampires.

This was not how the end of the weekend was supposed to go. He should be doing flash cards right now. He should be trying to recognize the obscure names of monsters rather than diving after them.

“What is a stikini?” the computer voice had asked on the monitor earlier that evening. The word floated in silver on the screen, and Alex sat forward in the window seat, staring at the letters and searching his brain.
Beside him in the aisle seat, a broadly built Swedish agent named Hansen crossed his arms and threw a glance to see if maybe Alex had the answer. There was no one else who might know it; they were the last two agents on the flight.

Hansen and Alex were flying back from Anzio, Italy, where Alex and several other agents of the Polidorium—a secret organization funded by the black budgets of more than a dozen nations—had been studying at what everyone called Creature School. The school’s actual name was P6 Identification Readiness Training, or PIRT, but Alex had tried using that acronym once and everyone had laughed at him. The purpose of Creature School was to familiarize the agents with the entities they might meet in the field. There were vampires out there, but those intelligent, dangerous beings were extremely varied, and Alex was only familiar with the most common kind. And of course there were plenty of other things to worry about.

Like everything else about Alex’s time in the Polidorium, Creature School felt like a dream. His mentor in the Polidorium, Agent Sangster, had come to Alex just a few days before with news that he had pulled a few strings and gotten Alex a spot.

Alex’s parents had given Sangster permission to create
excuses for getting Alex out of classes at his boarding school whenever it made sense—as long as Alex kept up his grades. This time the cover story was a soup kitchen dedication ceremony in a poor village in Romania, where Alex would supposedly be representing his own family’s Van Helsing Foundation.

With time off from school procured, Alex flew out on a Friday morning from a military strip near Geneva, Switzerland, not far from his school, and by that afternoon he was walking through a secret lab hidden in the cliffs of the Italian shore.

Sangster himself hadn’t come—the agent was also Alex’s literature teacher and still had classes to teach. Besides, Sangster had already been through the training, so it was a rare opportunity for Alex to work alongside the Polidorium without his mentor looking over his shoulder.

They had started in a hospital-like building with long rows of glass cases and canisters where specimens floated inside. Alex and twelve other students walked behind a bald, slightly built teacher in a lab coat named Dr. Stu DeKamp, and every now and then DeKamp would stop and point out a specimen.

“This is a Caribbean jumbie skin.” DeKamp pointed to a long, leathery thing with braided hair at the top.
“The jumbie is a vampire that can leave its skin behind while it travels on the air at night. Capture the skin and the creature will not survive long.” Nods all around. “This is a chonchon, a Chilean flying head.” The chonchon looked like a normal head with incongruous bat wings growing out of the sides of it. Alex had to stifle a mild laugh.

DeKamp had looked back to where Alex had been walking next to an agent in his twenties who had joined the Polidorium straight out of a police academy in Iowa. “Something you’d like to share?” DeKamp asked.

“Uh, no,” Alex answered. “It’s just that I have a friend who would absolutely kill to be seeing this.” That would be Sid, a classmate of Alex’s who seemed to know everything about vampires. Alex turned to Sid whenever he had a question about anything even remotely vampire-related, and he suspected that Sid would know what a chonchon was and would die to get a look at one.

“A friend at school?” asked the professor. Alex felt his face flush. This group of agents was young, but at fourteen, Alex was the prodigy. Everyone else was doing this as part of his or her job; Alex was still in high school. He shouldn’t have laughed. He’d work on that. “Just be sure
you
learn it, Agent Van Helsing.”

They saw more that afternoon: a vampiric pumpkin
that was actually still alive and tried to attack Alex through the cage, squashing its orange gourd self against the glass, a mouth opening red and mushing as it yearned for his blood. Alex’s brain buzzed with a familiar, humming static, the awareness that something evil and dangerous was near.

They saw a pihuechenyi, a Central American winged snake that had been captured after it crashed into an airliner in the 1980s, dead and suspended from the ceiling.

Then, running around in a closed-off grassy area, they saw a sort of yellow-skinned, vein-covered centaur. It was a Scottish vampire called the nuckelavee and it had killed people all over a small group of islands called the Orkneys.

Dr. DeKamp called a break as they reached a commissary and stewards passed out bottled water. As Alex got his water he held up his hand. “I don’t get it. Are these creatures vampires?”

“Well, it depends what the meaning of the word
vampire
is.” DeKamp’s holographic ID badge shimmered in the light, and Alex saw that the instructor was from Canada. The Polidorium was diverse, but a lot of the people Alex had met were from the United States, Britain, and Canada. Alex’s friend Sid, also Canadian, would be
thrilled to know that the resident creature genius among the Polidorium was one of his countrymen.

“
Vampire
,” DeKamp continued, “is a word that does a lot of duty. Chiefly it refers to modified post-initial-failure humans; those creatures are generally the smartest ones, the ones calling the shots on the other side. But we can group into the realm of vampires anything that lives off the energy, blood, or flesh of others as long as it’s touched by the curse.”

“The curse?” Alex repeated.

“Any lion or snake, for example, lives off the flesh of others,” explained DeKamp, “but they’re not vampires. What distinguishes a vampire is that it carries what Polidori called the existential seed of corruption. The curse that turns men and creatures against their own souls.”

Alex scrunched his face and DeKamp asked, “You’re uncomfortable with the word
curse
?”

“Well, it just seems strange to hear a word so…magical.”

DeKamp set down the bottle of water and came close. “You’re the one who killed an augmented dog down in the Scholomance, right? And even you find the discussion of magic uncomfortable. Now think of the rest of the world. That is why our work must
remain as secret as we can make it.”

DeKamp turned. “
Talia sunt
, ladies and gentlemen.” He beckoned them to continue the tour. “There are such things.”

Two days later, Alex found himself actually accepted by the agents. They all suffered together through lectures on human vampires and their many variations—zombies, werewolves, and such—plus the myriad others broken into various parts of the plant and animal kingdoms. DeKamp also told them they all should take the training on vampire organizations, politics, and clans. Oh, and apparently witchcraft would take years.

This was a
great
weekend, and not a single thing that wasn’t already behind glass actually tried to bite him, which was a nice change for an Alex/Polidorium activity.

And then on the plane ride home it all came crashing down.

The cabin of the Polidorium C-130 in which Alex and six of his fellow agents began the flight home did not have the battered metal interior that Alex had seen in the movies, with long benches and no frills. The plane was dressed up for comfort, with TVs on shiny gray walls; big, padded seats; and thick gray carpet bearing the
stitched-in Polidorium crest and the words
Talia sunt
. Like DeKamp had said, this motto meant, “There are such things.” It was an answer to a question, an answer to a doubt.
Don’t tell yourself there are no such things. Of course there are, and we keep track of them.

Agent Hansen and Alex sat together in front of a middle wall, or bulkhead, so they could take the PIRT creature quiz on a Polidorium computer mounted on the wall. When they left Anzio there had been five more agents spread out across the plane, but they had departed in Venice. It was eleven forty-five
P.M
.; with the layover, Alex had been traveling for about six hours.

“I know this one.” Gunnar Hansen sat forward, wagging his finger. He had slightly curly, receding blond hair and a pug nose, and cheeks that were perpetually flushed. Alex always had the impression that Hansen was a Viking that someone had captured and shaved.

“Stikini.” Alex repeated the word, watching the silver letters rotate on the screen. A thirty-second clock had begun to count down. Stikini. “It sounds like pasta.”

“You’re just hungry.” Hansen gestured toward a go package, a Polidorium backpack usually filled with all manner of lethal and not-so-lethal stuff, which hung on a peg across from them, next to an emergency exit. “I have some granola bars.”

“Wasn’t there a steward?” Alex asked, looking up.

Hansen nodded. “That’s right; where is he?”

Alex looked over the back of the seat toward the rear of the plane. “No one in the galley.”

His neck was bugging him—Alex tugged at a collared shirt he had been wearing since Friday morning, a flexible polyvinyl “turtleneck” that was slightly bulky, threaded with strands of silver, and etched with crosses. They wore them all weekend at Creature School in case one of the captured creatures broke out. He’d need scissors to cut it off and hadn’t gotten around to it. A vampire, meanwhile, could probably tear it loose if sufficiently motivated. So Alex was uncomfortable.

And hungry. When he was twelve, on a dare from his father, Alex had survived three days on only what he could catch or pick near their farm in Oklahoma, one of a handful of estates his family had in the United States. This was in January, when the trees were frozen black and snow blanketed the ground. And he had done fine. But now it seemed like every three hours his stomach grumbled, making him distracted and angry.

Stikini
, the silver circling word continued. Five seconds. Then they would see the answer and lose points.

As if hearing Alex’s mental howls, the cockpit door opened and a tall, wiry man with wisps of light brown
hair and glasses emerged with an empty tray. When Alex saw the steward’s glasses, his own eyes itched; he was longing to take out his contacts.

“There he is,” said Hansen. The steward shut the cockpit door and glanced at them, heading toward the galley, presumably to get some food.

An image lit up in Alex’s brain, a vampire image that faded into view. “Choctaw.” Alex spoke to the computer. “Stikini is a Choctaw vampire that usually disguises itself as an owl.”

As soon as the keywords Alex spoke registered with the computer, the countdown stopped and a diagram of the owl-vampire appeared.

“Not bad,” Hansen said. “But it looks to me like an owl.”

“It’s an evil vampire owl.” Alex smiled. But there was something wrong.

When Alex had thought of the owl, it had come to him in a rush, as if a part of his brain had opened up and growled at him. Alex looked back at the steward, who was bent over pulling plastic-wrapped sandwiches out of a cooler in the galley. He got nothing off the steward.

Alex rose from his seat and brushed past Hansen, stepping into the aisle. “Excuse me.”

“Want me to pause it?” Hansen asked.

Standing in the aisle next to the emergency exit, Alex didn’t answer. Maybe he was crazy, but he touched the wide gray cockpit door and felt the thin plastic bend slightly under his fingertips. If he understood the
static
in his brain at all—and really, he could not claim to understand it much—he could surely sense something evil through a plastic door.

He felt nothing.

Alex turned back and shrugged at Hansen as he reached the bulkhead seats.

“You okay?” Hansen asked, looking only a little concerned.

“Fine. Sorry. I think the steward is getting sandwiches.”

As Alex sat, Hansen got up and reached for his go package. “You know, I want a granola bar anyway.”

“Get me one, too.” Alex turned back to the screen. “Let’s see the next vamp—”

The cockpit door suddenly burst open and fell into shards.

A blurred, dark image ripped through the air, tearing into Hansen as it collided with him, sending the huge agent spinning end over end down the cabin. Alex saw Hansen’s legs hit a set of seats in the back and the man cartwheeled with his own weight, finally
crashing into the rear bulkhead.

The blur in the cabin slowed and became what Alex already knew it was—a vampire, though not one that Alex had met. The vampire’s muscles strained against the borrowed Polidorium pilot’s uniform he wore, and Alex saw dingy gray hair under the vampire’s pilot cap as he whipped his head up and down the cabin, surveying his opponents.

Alex looked back at the cockpit and saw the mistake he’d made. The bent pieces of the door still stuck in its frame were about two inches thick and made of steel, with a thin plastic layer on top. When the door had opened once before, he had felt something briefly, some whiff of evil flowing from the cockpit. But otherwise the door was too thick to sense anything through, even when he touched it.

Alex could see another vampire, human-looking except for the alabaster skin and eyes that seemed to sparkle black, still sitting inside the cockpit at the controls of the plane.

“Get it under control!” came a roar from the cockpit.

Adrenaline rushed through Alex’s body, tingling in his fingers, and he felt the edge of panic. He was on a plane with vampires, and—and then the questions began.

The tingling in your chest is a temptation to lose control. Don’t listen to it. Ask the questions. What’s going on?

The pilot vampire now emerged from the cockpit and ran to the back, and Alex heard a scream as the steward, who was already stammering into a radio, suddenly went quiet.

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