The Triumph of Death (4 page)

At 11:55 on the dot, Alex’s phone buzzed on the way out of his Algebra class, jolting his body to readiness just as he was feeling the doldrums of almost no sleep. He was fishing it out of his jacket as Minhi tugged at his sleeve.

BACK GATE, read the text. It was time to meet Sangster. He looked up at Minhi. “Hmm?”

“What are your plans this afternoon?” Minhi asked.

Paul and Sid had pulled up ahead, and Alex was about to call to them and ask. “I don’t know, what are we doing?”

“Just…” Minhi looked ahead. “I wanted to ask you…”

Alex held up a hand as his phone buzzed again.
Okay,
okay.
He looked at her. “I’m sorry, what?”

Minhi shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Okay.” Alex nodded. “Guys! I’ll catch you later.” He shot down the hall, leaving the three of them behind. For a moment he caught a glimpse of Astrid moving into the library. They apparently shared no classes; he hadn’t seen her all morning.

As he passed the library, the cavernous, dark space yawned at him, with its ladders and catwalks and shadows. The girl had been swallowed up completely by it, as he reckoned anyone could be. He hit the side door and was outside, cold air snapping at his chin and ears.

The black Polidorium van that pulled up by the back gate barely slowed as the side door slid open. For a moment Alex’s body tensed at the thought that it could be a decoy, a stolen van full of Scholomance vampires out to capture him—it wouldn’t be the first time—but instantly he saw the extended hand of Mr. Sangster.

“Let’s go, Alex.” Sangster grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. By the time Alex had sat down across from his literature teacher, the van was moving and picking up speed, heading down the road to town.

Wearing chinos and a black sweater and jacket, the man who sat across from Alex was many things, and a teacher was only one of them. An expert in vampire
activity and a well-placed ground leader for the organization, Sangster had been Alex’s entre into the Polidorium, and had taken him under his wing the moment Alex had arrived at Glenarvon Academy. When Alex got to Switzerland, he had known nothing of the secret world that the Polidorium inhabited. He had learned a lot of things in a very short amount of time, including that his own father had been preparing him all his life, without his knowledge, to work with the Polidorium.

Dad had taught Alex how to survive on little sleep and food, how to control the panic that hit people in tense situations, how to fight and ski and (illegally) drive, and even, if necessary, jump out of a plane. But Dad had denied completely the existence of vampires and never let on that soon Alex would be involved in fighting them. It had happened sooner than intended. Dad, it turned out, had actually been an agent for the Polidorium. He had spent his life fighting vampires because it was the calling of his family, the Van Helsings, who had helped found the Polidorium in its early days. And then Dad had met Mom and retired, and lied for all fourteen years Alex and his sisters had been alive.

Only recently had Dad told Alex the truth and laid the burden of deciding what to do next at his feet. “We’re part of a war,” Dad had told him. It was a war with the
vampires on one side and the Polidorium and the dwindling numbers of the Van Helsing family on the other. “Whether you want to join it now is up to you.”

“Are we going to the farmhouse?” Alex asked. Sangster was flipping through a manila folder as the van rocked, and Alex clicked a safety belt over his shoulder.

“There’s been a change of plans.” Sangster looked back at the driver and passenger seat in front. He gestured. “Armstrong?”

Alex didn’t know the driver, but he saw Anne Armstrong, a woman with short blond hair and freckles, climb out of the passenger seat, bobbing slightly as the van moved. She dropped into a seat next to Sangster.

“We read your debrief from this morning,” Armstrong said in her usual business-like American accent. “You’re sure they left the computer on the plane?”

Alex nodded. “The computer they dropped, yeah.” The van swerved around a corner and Alex was momentarily blinded by a streak of sunlight that glinted through the windows. “But the vampire had a connection of some sort—”

“A dongle?” Armstrong asked.

“Yeah, he clicked it in and I would think he downloaded everything on there. But I don’t get it; wasn’t that just a training device?”

Sangster shook his head. “It should have been. It should have been a tablet that was practically empty except for run-of-the-mill low-security info.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the Scholomance needs to know how many different kinds of vampires there are on the planet. Maybe they want to know what we know.”

“First,” said Sangster, “they probably have a decent feel for that. And second, this was a fairly complicated op considering they could have stolen one of those training tablets from any number of places, including half a dozen vans scooting around Europe.”

“Was it a terminal? Maybe hooked into the Polidorium network?” Alex asked.

“Absolutely,” Armstrong said, catching the implication. The vampires could have used the computer to introduce a virus into the system, one the Polidorium had not been alerted to yet.

Alex shrugged, opening his hands. “Sooo…”

“So all this is fascinating, but we already know that they were acting on big plans,” Sangster said.

Alex pursed his lips. “Well, maybe. How do you know?”

Sangster looked over his shoulder as they made another turn, and Alex gasped. Up ahead, the sunlight struck the concrete of the road and made shadows in the
trees, and then the road and the scenery around it all…ended. At once.

They were rolling toward a suspended wall of blackness, a liquid barrier that rippled over the road.

“What
is
that?” Alex asked.

“That is the town of Secheron,” said Sangster. “And it is dark at noon.”

As though going through an invisible tunnel, the van pierced an inky curtain of darkness and entered nighttime on the other side. Alex felt a wave of instinctual revulsion course through his body. Within moments they rolled on to the long, cozy main street that carried traffic into the town square and beyond, and the streets were filling up with people. Alex tried to take in everyone, shopkeepers and shoppers milling about nervously, eyeing the sky and one another, a pair of men fighting on the sidewalk outside a bar. He saw someone about to throw a chair through a window. The village of Secheron, which Alex associated with tourists, bookshops, and bars on piers at the fairly swank marina, was going insane. It looked like—

“It’s a war zone.” Sangster pulled a black hard-sided suitcase out from under his seat. He undid the buckles, the metal clasps clacking loudly. Outside, police sirens blared and darts of red and yellow light flickered through the windows.

“Whoa!” Alex said, scanning the horizon and momentarily confused. “What are those? Buildings?”

Sangster looked out. In the distance, there appeared to be flickering fires coming from cities that were near total destruction. Sangster tapped the window. “Huh.” He shook his head.

“What?” Alex asked.

“That’s due west. You know what’s there? Water. The lake. What you’re seeing is an illusion.” They appeared to be encircled by distant cities on fire. “And this illusion is surrounding us.”

“Like one of those three-hundred-and-sixty-degree movies at Disney World,” Alex said. “Amazing.”

“In as much as it’s big enough to encase this whole town, you bet it’s amazing.” Sangster sounded slightly alarmed.

“Driver, gimme the screen back here,” Armstrong called, and after a moment one of the windows darkened and filled with an image in gray and green, with splotches of orange.

“What’s that?” Alex asked. They passed a police car
parked at the side of the street where a Swiss policeman was getting out, running to one of the shops.

Armstrong put a wireless mobile piece in her ear and swiped a hand over the image. “This is the village, satellite photography. The orangeish images you see are people.” She indicated the clusters of orange blobs on streets that Alex could identify by a faint blue map grid. “They’re gathering in the streets and the square; I see a lot of them at the marina. I don’t see any blues.”

By
blues
, Armstrong was referring to the way vampires appeared on Polidorium infrared systems, which were enhanced to make especially cold creatures pop. You couldn’t photograph vampires, but you could save an infrared image of them, and the Polidorium files were filled with pencil sketches and digital infrared shots. Alex had heard that the earliest attempts at field use of infrared had failed because the vampires simply blended in too much; the enhancements had been a major leap forward.

“There has to be.” Sangster sounded confused. “Could they be camouflaged?”

“Not against us.” Armstrong shook her head and took a heavy jacket that Sangster offered her, slipping it on over her blouse.

The van swerved as a man on an old motor scooter
swooped in front of them, barely missing them. The scooter didn’t have its headlights on. It wobbled across the street and Alex winced as it sideswiped a curb next to a flower shop and toppled over. It wasn’t a fatal fall.

“Blues? You think the Scholomance is behind—what exactly is this?”

“This is nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Sangster said.

“When did it happen?” Alex asked.

“About forty-five minutes ago a cloud, heavy, like a storm cloud, started gathering over Secheron near the marina. Except that it kept growing and expanding.” He gestured out the window. “It’s not just blocking the sun from above—it’s as though the whole town has been encased in nightfall. That perimeter we drove through is the edge of it.”

“It’s magical,” Alex said. “Like the entrance to the Scholomance.” The vampire organization was hidden behind various doors, which boasted similar permeable curtains. “Wait—how do you know we’ll be able to drive back out now that we’re in?”

“We don’t know anything right now,” Armstrong answered. “But we saw some cars speeding out of the city, so it doesn’t look like it’s that kind of seal.”

Alex heard the crash of glass as one of the shop
windows disintegrated. He didn’t see anything that had been thrown, but then he saw someone running out with a cash register.

“Are these people crazy? Are they under some kind of spell?”

Sangster jogged his head back and forth as if he were tossing the idea around. “We can’t tell. What do you feel?”

“What?”

“What do you
feel
?” Sangster repeated the question, and Alex shrank back physically, feeling cornered. The strange skills he possessed were not something for which he had a rule book.

Alex opened his hands. “Why would I feel anything? I can sense vampires, but—”

“Can you sense any right now?”

“I don’t know!”

“Think,” Sangster ordered. “We know you can sense when they’re near or when there’s some sort of dark evil at work. What do you feel now?”

Alex shook his head. “Nothing specific.” He wanted to come up with more, but he couldn’t report what he didn’t understand. “I was…when we got here I felt sick, a little. Is that helpful?”

“Maybe.” Sangster tapped his own forehead. “We
gotta get this thing squared away if it’s gonna be useful in the field, Alex.”

“Yeah, I’m working on that.” Alex looked at them both.

Sangster handed Armstrong an automatic weapon about the size of a briefcase.

“This looks like more than just darkness,” Alex said, indicating the running crowds. “People don’t instantly run through the streets and start attacking people because it’s dark outside. So maybe it’s something like a—”

“A gas, a nerve agent.” Armstrong looked at Sangster. “Get masks.”

Sangster pulled out three lightweight rubber masks and passed them around, and Alex copied the others as they put them over their heads. Like the agents, Alex let his lie on his forehead. He took off his school jacket and pulled on the one Sangster handed him, and felt heavy plates of composite plastic inside the lining thump against his chest. There was a patch on the shoulder that read
TALIA SUNT
.

“If it’s magic, though, there’s no guarantee these will stop it,” Sangster said.

“If it’s a magic fear-maker or whatever,” Alex countered, “wouldn’t we be feeling it already?”

Armstrong shook her head, pointing at the ceiling and walls of the van. “This van is a rolling fortress against that kind of thing. Silver lining in the body, hawthorn wood threaded throughout, holy water injected into a filament mesh layer. Plus a few favors we don’t discuss. We are protected.”

“So I guess just staying in the van isn’t gonna happen.”

Sangster handed him a go package to throw over his shoulders. Alex felt the whole thing over before putting it on, making sure the easy-access pockets were unsecured and filled. “Alex, we’re the first to respond. There won’t be any more agents for at least another fifteen minutes, so we need to be careful. I need you here, though. I’m hoping your skills will give us some kind of edge.”

“My skills that we don’t really know anything about.”

“No time like the present.”

They were moving through the Secheron town square now, a usually pleasant place where people were now running in every direction. Two men were fighting on top of an overturned metal café table. Alex heard more sirens and saw police vans pulling into the square. Police officers in full riot gear leapt instantly from the sides.

“I never knew Secheron had a SWAT team.”

Sangster nodded. “I see four cops in gear and I’m betting that’s all they have.”

The van yanked left and was moving down a street Alex knew well, dotted with restaurants and bars and more shops, sloping downhill. “We’re going to the marina?”

Sangster and Armstrong seemed to exchange silent messages. Alex watched as they both suddenly relaxed, their shoulders rolling down as they sat back in the seat.

Sangster slowly drew a breath. “Civil unrest is not our thing. Be ready, we’re stopping in about one minute.”

Armstrong looked up. “Blue.”

Alex followed her eyes. There on the satellite image, a strange blue emanation was gathering and pulsing right at the edge of the water, among the piers of the marina.

The van screeched to a halt in the cobblestoned drive, and Alex took in the whole scene beyond—a long pier with a two-story restaurant at the end, two more nearly as large with one-story bars of their own, and countless jetties with small boats. All were encased in darkness. He checked his watch; the silver cross in the clasp glinted green as it reflected the satellite screen. It was twenty-five minutes past noon.

The engine idled as they watched people running down the piers. The restaurant at the end of one flickered
now, and Alex saw smoke pouring out of its side. Then his eye caught something else.

“Look.”

“I see it,” Sangster responded. They pulled closer to the window to see water swirling around off the end of the main pier, kicking up a furious foam.

“So what’s the plan?” It occurred to Alex that he hadn’t asked. “What are we doing?”

“We’re the first to see what’s happening.” Armstrong went to the door and prepared to pull it open. She tugged the mask down over her mouth, leaving the top half of her face exposed, and Alex and Sangster did the same. Alex pulled the Polibow out of the side of his go package and looked at it. It was a later model than he often used, with twice as many bolts in the magazine—meaning he had sixteen shots.

Sangster tapped the mobile piece in his ear and Alex heard the tap in his own. Then the teacher briskly nodded at Armstrong.

Armstrong yanked the door open and they hustled out, Alex forming up behind them at the back of the van.

At first there was only the sound of confused people ranging around the jetties and the wind clanking lines against sailboat masts. All three of them kept
their eyes on the water.

The roiling whirlpool at the edge of the marina churned and spewed water, and they heard an almost electric series of cracks and pops that echoed like gunshots. Alex felt a wave of static in his head come hard and fast, roaring insistently. “Here it comes.”

The surface seemed to rip open, and Alex saw a strange shape bursting up around the pier: A latticework of white rolled up out of the lake, like a great, grasping skeletal claw, and grabbed on to the pier. He saw silhouettes moving among the latticework, as if a band of people were climbing quickly up a flight of stairs.

And then the invasion began.