The Triumph of Death (13 page)

For a moment all Alex heard were voices and the slush of water rushing around his ears as he lay on the floor.

Forget Icemaker—

Kristatos?

Dead—

“Alex?”
He heard Sangster call his name.

He blinked, light blazing into his eyes, and the shapes of Sangster and Astrid were washed out and filtered by light. There were red lamps flashing, and he had the delirious feeling he was in a nightclub.

What’s happening?

“You’re on the ground. Get up.”

His hands slipped under him and he tried to grip the
tiles with his fingers, and his fingers were sausages, bags of peanut butter. He saw the flickering of light as his eyes blinked rapidly, and he was unable to stop them.

“…pressure on it!”
Sangster shouted, and then he saw Astrid move over him, clamping her hand down on his throat. Something that looked black gushed toward her.

He was being carried, then he felt himself slamming down onto something like a bed.

“Out of the way. Where is the infirmary?”
he heard Sangster call. A shadow of a scientist shouted something. There was blood on the walls, and Alex held his eyes open long enough to see a gash in the ceiling tiles, dripping with water, where something had punched clear through and kept going.

They turned a corner and the lights kept flickering.

“I’m sorry!” he rasped. “I’m sorry I went out!”

“Don’t worry about that now,” came Astrid’s voice. She brought her other hand to his forehead and leaned in close. “I’m here because of you. Don’t leave.”

Something squishy and oily crossing his forehead and dissolving under Astrid’s thumb. A flare, a burst of phosphorous. Unknown, ancient words. Then, darkness washed over him.

In the distance he heard voices:

Astrid’s voice.
I have to take him.

Sangster:
Absolutely not—

He has been bitten very badly. I can help him.
We
can help him.

He belongs with us.

You don’t know the first thing about who he belongs with! You have to trust me. There is no time. The poison will start to work the curse, and you know as well as I do that he will not survive it, and we will not allow this Van Helsing
—this
Van Helsing—to die without doing everything in our power.

Where?

The Orchard.

A voice next to his ear.
Alex. Hold my hand. Mother Gretel, we are coming to you.

Darkness stayed. Within it he listened to the hissing of the oil on his forehead. He began hallucinating.

He was falling now, the ground opening up, and he was falling down a tree, sunlight streaming through shadow leaves.

Alex!

Something caustic struck the air under his nose and ignited his sinuses, and his eyes shot open.

Suddenly awake, Alex screamed in pain, trying to reach for his neck as he looked up to see Astrid. He
couldn’t move his arms.

He was outside, in an orchard of red and yellow fruit trees, below a canopy of brightly colored leaves and a cloudless sky. He was lying in a clearing on a tilted wooden table of some kind, and when he tried to move his arms again he saw that they were bound by a rope-like, shimmering green light.

Astrid touched his arm. “It’s for your own good.”

“Tell him not to struggle,” came an older female voice, and Alex’s eyes darted to the edge of the clearing, where a woman with white hair was searching through a brown wooden bureau that had leaves growing out of it. “Tell him it’ll only make the poison move faster.”

Alex studied the bureau and the leaves some more and looked at Astrid. “Where am I?”

“Alex, listen to me,” Astrid said. “You’ve been bitten very badly. Are you listening?”

Alex blinked. “Yes.”

“You were bitten fifteen minutes ago. We got here as fast as we could.”

“Where’s here?” Alex tried to wrestle against the magical cords and suddenly felt achingly weak.

“You’re in the Orchard.”

“The Orchard?”

Leaves whipped up and the woman who had been at
the bureau now stood at his side, across from Astrid. “You’re in the home of Hexen.” The woman appeared old, at first, deep creases around her eyes and mouth, and then when her face moved, the lines seemed to smooth away. She seemed to move in a slow blur.

Ignore that. What’s going on?

“Icemaker bit me on the neck.” Alex’s mind raced. “Am I bleeding out?”

Astrid shook her head. “No, no, no, you really haven’t lost too much—he missed the artery, but the poison will start working on you, and you’re as good as dead if we don’t do what we have to do.”

“That doesn’t sound good at all.” Alex looked down, amazed at the blood that had spilled across his shirt.

The old woman passed a hand over his shirt and the color changed, the blood smoothing away with her touch. “These details will not burden you.”

She moved to the side and turned to another table that he hadn’t noticed before, with a silver tray lying in the center of it. Next to this was a set of small clay pots. Black powder lay in the center of the silver tray, and when she waved a hand, the powder ignited. A black tendril of smoke began to rise and fill the clearing.

“Venus or Mars?” The woman turned to Astrid. “Love or war, which will heal him best now?”

“I don’t know. Why would you ask me?”

“You’re supposed to know him by now.”

“To have protected him, is that what you mean?” Astrid shot back, her face red. “I know.”

Alex felt something sharp race up and down the back of his neck, as though he’d been spattered with fire, and he gasped.

Astrid was at his ear again, whispering.
Mother Gretel, you protect us,
Astrid said.
You take away the pain.
She looked back at the old woman. “The poison is moving fast, Mother Laura.” Her eyes raced. “War, it has to be.”

The woman called Mother Laura clucked her tongue and started moving items from the buckets. “We need euphorbium, bdellium, root of hellebore…got a lodestone here, good.” She looked at Astrid. “Go get me a vial of blood of cat, would you?”

Astrid disappeared to the bureau and shot back with a vial of dark liquid that Mother Laura threw into the silver tray. The smoke had changed now, billowing red.

Astrid turned back to Alex. “This is called ‘suffumigation of Mars’; it will envelop you in healing mist.”

“But it lacks the blood that we need—the blood that matters,” said Mother Laura.

The stinging feeling in Alex’s neck was making his
body shake. He was beginning to hurt more. He was having trouble following what the witches were saying.

Alex looked at Astrid and suddenly she seemed to burble, her skin becoming translucent, and Alex saw blood flowing through her veins beneath her skin.

“I’m seeing blood.” Alex blinked. “I see your blood.”

“That’s the poison working in you.” Astrid’s eyes darted as she studied Alex. “It’s making you see as a vampire sees.”

“Get it out!” he tried to roar, but his voice was hoarse and sounded distant to himself.

“We need the blood of one who loves him,” Mother Laura said. “Even for war, we need love.”

Astrid looked at her. She shook her head. “What, me?”

Mother Laura actually smirked. “Oh, please, child, I don’t mean you.” She turned to Alex, who by now was having a hard time focusing on her, the pain in his muscles screaming, and the woman was flickering into a creature whose blood he could practically taste. “Alex,” Mother Laura said, “you are in the Orchard of Hexen. All who pass through here carry a little of it with them. And they will hear you and come if you call to them.”

Alex couldn’t make her words string together into any kind of thought at all. He arched his back and screamed.

Somewhere, someone heard him.

Alex’s eyes were flickering with pain and darkness as he saw a curtain in the air open up between two fruit trees.

He caught the silhouette of a woman in a leather coat and a floppy brown hat, pulling off a pair of long gloves with a familiar deftness.

“What is it you want me to do?” came the voice of Amanda Van Helsing, his mother, as he lost consciousness.

Alex awoke with a start, looking into a cloudless sky, with a light breeze fluttering across a thin, green wool blanket draped over his body. He found he was able to move, and he sat up and felt the cot he was lying on sag under his body. He was still in the Orchard he had been in earlier, but the wooden table and the bureau were nowhere to be seen.

Without a watch, without a clock, without a phone, he felt thoroughly disoriented. How long had he been asleep? Hours?
Days?

Alex pulled the blanket off his legs. He was wearing a pair of plain black trousers and a cream-colored shirt, and a pair of light slip-on shoes lay at the edge of the cot.

There was a full-length mirror on wooden feet next to the cot, with a small table and washbasin. As he looked in the mirror, Alex saw his neck was covered in a bandage, but as he touched it he found that the wound underneath felt superficial. For a moment he picked at the adhesive edges and began to peel it back, then thought better of it.

He scanned the clearing. “Hello?”

Alex stood up, studying the trees. He was looking deep into the Orchard, trying to find any other people, but he could see no one. He began to walk, moving past the bed and mirror and stepping between two trees.

Suddenly he was standing in a train station and nearly run over by a baggage cart. He spun around and looked at the glass-and-metal station door he’d stepped through and saw the Orchard beyond, and ripped the door back open before he even knew what he was doing.

He was back in the Orchard.

Alex put out his arms, then, feeling for some kind of balance or edge of reality. He felt dizzy and wondered if he’d been given hallucinatory pain medication.

He was injured; he remembered that. And he had been taken…here? He went back to the cot and then looked down at the unfamiliar black pants he was wearing.

“We burned your clothes,” Astrid said, and Alex suddenly turned to see her emerging from between two trees about twenty feet away. “One of the weavers had a set that she’d made for a son of one of the cooks. I hope they fit.”

“Where did you come from?” He stared at Astrid and shook his head. “I don’t understand this orchard,” he said. Then he gestured at the multicolored fruits on one of the trees. “And what’s this fruit?”

“Knowledge.” Astrid laughed. “It’s how we store knowledge.”

“Um,” he ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry. How long was I asleep?”

“About a day,” she said. “It’s Thursday.”

He felt the electric jolt of the lateness of the hour. “Thursday, God, we’re losing time. Where is everyone—I thought I saw…” He wasn’t sure how pathetic this would sound. “I could swear I saw my mother.”

Astrid nodded brightly. “Yes! She’s still here. Come on, we’re having a meeting, and we were hoping you’d be awake and able to join.” She gestured for him to follow, and as they stepped between the two trees from which she’d come, the scene changed.

They were walking down a corridor of marble tile with heavy wood-paneled walls. Alex looked back and
saw that he’d just come through a simple wooden doorway, and beyond it he could still see the trees and the cot. “Was the room an illusion, like a hologram?”

“What?” Astrid stopped next to a painting on the wall, a portrait of a woman with a feathered hat and a blue blouse. Underneath it a plaque read m. brelaz, portugal.

“I mean it was a clearing in an orchard. No walls and no ceiling, and now we’re in a building,” Alex said, working out how he’d try to build such a thing. “So was it, like, a room with holographic walls, maybe a movie screen on the ceiling?”

“Maybe the hallway is the illusion,” Astrid said mysteriously as they walked farther, passing numerous doors, each wooden, each with a silver plate at the center that marked them with what Alex assumed to be numbers, probably in the Hexen language. Astrid stopped finally at a door and turned back. “I’m just teasing you,” she said, opening the door. “It’s all practical and physical, but there’s magic in the way it’s all connected.”

They stepped into an enormous den that reminded Alex of a ski lodge, with huge windows looking out on snowy mountains, large wooden chandeliers, and a massive fireplace. A round table sat on the stone tiles of the room, and Alex saw the white-haired woman he had
met earlier sitting at one of a number of high-backed chairs. In front of her was a plate of fruit, and next to her was a large wheel with an enormous spool of thread perched on top—a spinning wheel.

Alex’s mother, Amanda, was standing at the table sliding her hand over a leather parchment, flicking her fingers the way you might flick the screen on an iPhone. “Look at that, he sleeps late even in the most hidden space in the world.”

“Mom.” Alex smiled at the sight of his mother, and ran and embraced her, and then pulled back and said, “Wait—the way it’s connected?”

Amanda turned to Astrid. “You were explaining the layout of Hexen?”

“I was trying,” Astrid said.

Amanda chewed her lip and turned back to Alex. “You want the spiritual answer or the practical one?”

“Would I understand the spiritual answer?”

“Well, it’s more true, but here’s the practical one,” Alex’s mom said. “The headquarters of Hexen are distributed throughout the world and stitched together through concentrated magical couplings.”

“Is there…a map?”

Mother Laura, the woman who had been there when Alex was writhing with pain, was jotting something in
a notebook and lifted her pencil. “Since you ask, there is a map, but it’s complicated, and we’re a little behind in updating it.”

“Wasn’t the committee…,” Amanda started to ask.

“Oh, they forgot the Pentagon.” Laura waved a hand dismissively.

“That’s a broom closet in the 1940s,” Amanda scoffed.

“It anchors the whole northern edge,” Laura protested. “The map makes no sense without it. It has to be recast entirely.”

“I’ll pass on the map,” Alex said. “I’m sorry—I’m having a hard time understanding any of this. I didn’t even know there was a Hexen until Astrid showed up to help us with Claire. I didn’t know my mother was a part of it.” He looked at his mother. “Or—
is
a part of it. Are you still in this?”

“Sometimes.” Amanda bobbed her head. “I wasn’t born into it, though; I was recruited as a child in New York. But allow me to introduce Mother Laura, who currently leads the organization.”

Laura nodded to Alex. The white-haired woman was wearing a lavender blouse and a cameo like the one that Astrid carried. “Your mother is leaving out that when she came to us she was already one of the most gifted adepts we’d ever seen. I trust you’re doing better?”

Alex nodded. “Are there any others?”

“There are hundreds,” Laura responded. “All over the world, and just through that door.”

“We were founded by Mad Meg,” Astrid said.

“Mad Meg?”

“You know the story of Gretel, like in Hansel and Gretel? Gretel was the one who didn’t give up when she faced the witch. She was the one who figured out how to defeat the witch and finally did the work of kicking her into the furnace. Gretel, the one who decided to use everything she’d learned and form a house of witches who would fight for good. That childhood story, that wasn’t the end of it, you know. When she was an adult she was the one to raise an army of women in Germany to open the gates of hell and win back her loved ones. She had a different name at that time—Mad Gretel. Mad Meg, some called her.”

Alex thought of Astrid’s name. “You’re Astrid Gretelian. So you’re
related
to Gretel?”

“Yes, my family are direct descendants of Mad Meg, the first Gretel.” She smiled, sipping her tea. “Somewhere back there, anyway.”

“Astrid’s one of those born into Hexen,” Amanda said. “Powerful adeptness just flows right down her bloodline.”

“Wait,” Alex said. “When you were here last month, you said you knew I was in trouble because you were meditating with another witch and she called your attention to the danger.”

“That’s right,” his mom answered.

“So you literally could be having a…session with a protégé from anywhere in the world.”

“Right!” Amanda said. “That’s why it’s not so bad living in the middle of nowhere.”

Alex became aware of Astrid smiling next to him and he pointed to her. “And you’re the protégé.” Astrid simply waved.

Alex shook his head. “Oh, come on, Mom! Seriously? You set me up? With a witch?”

“No, Alex,” Amanda said. “It’s not a setup. There was no better person to send to work with you. And only you merited a partner from the Orchard.”

Alex still wasn’t used to the idea that his mom was not just a witch but part of a community, an active part the way his father had been active with the Polidorium. As Alex considered this, he felt once more the mix of anger and betrayal and pride that he’d felt when he first saw pictures of his father fighting vampires before Alex was born. Anger and betrayal because both Amanda and Charles had insisted while Alex was growing up
that there were
no such things
as vampires, werewolves, witches, or anything of that nature. But, in fact,
Talia sunt
,
there are such things.
They had decided to protect him by keeping the truth from him, even as Amanda allowed Charles to train Alex in every skill he would need when the time came to join the war.

That whole jumble of emotion, the anger and betrayal and pride, mixed in a kind of jagged, giddy excitement now. He was too happy to see her to be angry, too proud to be part of them to feel betrayed.

“Only me…because of my power, the static thing I have?”

“Give me some credit, Alex,” Amanda said. “I was also calling in a favor for my son, because the Polidorium was about to go up against Claire Clairmont.”

“You were…worried about me?”

Amanda scoffed. “Oh, come on. Of course I was worried. Just last month I almost forced you to come home. Yes. I was worried.”

“What about Dad…does he know about this whole thing?”

“He knows I’m here, and he knows I’m helping you.”

“He really is serious about staying out,” Alex said. “So you coming here didn’t merit him strapping on the old Polibow?”

“He never had a Polibow, but he’s not strapping anything on as long as we have children at home. That’s the deal.”

Alex was struck by the fact that his father might not have wanted to retire; this had never occurred to him. “What about you?”

“It’s not the same.”

“Well.” Alex looked around at the room. “I mean, the décor is different, but don’t you think it kind of seems the same?”

“It’s not,” Amanda said. “I promise.”

“Shall we get started?” Mother Laura cleared her throat and bade Alex and Astrid sit.

“Lights,” said Laura, and the windows darkened and lights dimmed as she picked up one of the pieces of parti-colored fruit. She turned to her spinning wheel and stabbed the fruit onto a spike above the wheel, and he heard wooden pedals begin to move at her feet.

For a moment the fruit dripped as the wheel spun, and then a line of thread shot through the air and began to mound upon itself at the center of the table.

“What’s this?” Alex whispered to Astrid.

“I said earlier that we store our knowledge in the fruit,” Astrid said. “We read the fruit by extracting the juice onto thread from the wheel.”

“Why can’t you just read the fruit?”

“Can
you
read fruit?” she asked with an arched eyebrow. “It’s easier with the thread.”

“So…what do you do with the thread?” Alex was wondering if Mother Laura was going to knit them a readable sweater.

“Alex, just watch,” Amanda whispered. Then she patted Astrid’s knee as if she felt sorry for her.

The thread stacked, and flowed, and soon formed into an image about three feet high. Washed-out color came into the image, spotted with fluid and bits of wool. It was a three-dimensional model of a woman with curly brown hair, about forty years old. The woman looked like a Russian countess, with a long white coat and white muff.

“Claire Clairmont during her Russia years.” Mother Laura kept pedaling, the thread looping around her, lying in wait. “This is the woman who is currently threatening the world.”

Amanda went on. “Claire came to Hexen in 1827 while she worked in Russia as a governess. She possessed great powers of suggestion and seduction and was trained by the organization to be placed in the Russian court as a spy. But of course she had no intention of continuing with us. What she really wanted was to find
Lord Byron, her lover, who by that time was an active vampire with the Scholomance, and reunite her family. Most of all, she wanted Allegra.”

Another image appeared next to Claire’s, coming to about her waist, a little girl with lush blond curls: Allegra Byron.

Laura picked up the story. “Allegra Byron was born in 1817 and was immediately taken in by Lord Byron, her father, who proceeded to deny Claire any access. He was willing to have Allegra in his life, but he was irritated by Claire and found sadistic pleasure in keeping them apart. But Byron soon tired of Allegra and had the little girl placed in a convent in Italy, where she died at the age of five, of typhus.”

Another image grew, a tall and sneering image Alex knew well. “And this is Lord Byron, the vampire you call Icemaker. We think that sometime in the 1830s, Byron and Claire reconciled. These two people, Byron and the little Allegra, are the most important people in Claire’s life.”

Another image grew, a man with a beard in a simple shirt and floppy hat. “This is Pieter Bruegel, the painter.”

Astrid cut in. “I learned in Madrid that Pieter Bruegel was paid to create a painting to commemorate the actual effects of the spell known as the Triumph of Death. The people who hired him were located in a castle of huge
black towers. The painting contains clues as to how to stop the curse.”

“Yes,” Mother Laura said. “Blacktowers, that’s a group as old as Hexen.”

Alex’s head was spinning with the idea that the Polidorium, whose roots he always regarded as ancient, was actually quite young compared to some of these older players in the game. “We’ve been calling them the Strangers,” Alex said. “And they’re still active. Updating the painting as they go. Even leading us to the clues in case we missed them.”