Class went by in a flash—the minutes warping by as Alex tried to concentrate, flying forward, relentlessly carrying him toward Secheron.
He rose as class ended, having absorbed nothing. He made his way to the front, daring to peek at the note still on Mr. Sangster’s desk as the teacher erased the writings on the board that Alex had not bothered to copy down.
On the paper was a picture of Alex—he could tell by the crazy, black locks of hair—and a puddle of something that could have been blood, could have been urine, encircling him as he kneeled in the street.
“What’s going on?” asked Mr. Sangster, not looking away from the board.
“Nothing.”
Mr. Sangster turned, raised an eyebrow. “It’s never nothing, Van Helsing,” he said.
It occurred to Alex that Mr. Sangster could stop the whole thing. He might even know the whole plan about the fight already. He had to—every boy in the school was planning to caravan to Secheron after classes were out; by now every teacher had to know. Mr. Sangster could stop it.
But if he wouldn’t stop it on his own, Alex would have to ask. And he was being given a chance to do that now.
Mr. Sangster was loading books into an attaché. “I trust the family has taught you to take care of yourself,” he said.
Alex stared. “I’m sorry?”
Mr. Sangster looked up and studied Alex for a long moment. He seemed to be trying to suss out whether Alex were telling the truth about something, as if Alex had been asked a question. What did he mean, the family taught him?
“Use what you’ve learned,” Mr. Sangster said. Then he snapped shut his case and walked out, slapping the note against Alex’s chest as he went.
The end of the day roared toward him and arrived, and Paul and Sid were there outside the school, leading him to the bike rack.
There were dozens of students on the move, many of them headed for the bus, some on bikes. Alex had no idea where Bill was.
Alex, Paul, and Sid rode in silence down the paved road to Secheron village. Alex wobbled as he rode, his legs made of jelly. He could not have described the bike if he had wanted to. He was remembering something almost exactly like this that had happened before, and he ached to stop it.
Secheron’s town square was a picture of Swiss loveliness, with a grand clock rising above an old church, bookstores, and the ice-cream shop open and inviting to the crowd that had already gathered. As Alex parked Sid’s old bike next to some twenty others at the bike rack, he realized the square had formed into a boxing ring. He also noticed that there was an emergency clinic across the square. Convenient.
The boys of Glenarvon were bouncing with excitement and Alex could see heads turning in the crowd toward him. Incongruously, tourists still moved about the square. Beyond the gathered boys, three uniformed school girls—there were girls in Switzerland!—sat at an iron table outside the ice-cream parlor working on homework. All of this Alex took in until he permitted himself to move his eyes to the ring, the clearing in the square. Bill Merrill waited, wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of fingerless leather weight gloves. The absurdity of the gloves and the ugliness of the protection they gave, the extra damage Bill’s knuckles could do wrapped in leather, filled Alex with more disgust than fear. At his side, Paul and Sid tensed up. “Easy,” muttered Paul.
Somewhere through the dread he felt, Alex found the strength to move, stepping forward, the boys parting for him. Fight. Fight. Fight! The chant began, the boys winding themselves up, visibly churning their fists, and Alex realized how much they were all animals. It didn’t matter whether he was new or not, or whether they liked him or not. They wanted a fight. “You ready?” Bill said, and he stepped forward, bouncing. Alex couldn’t will his legs to move, and he saw Paul edging toward the inside of the circle. No, I’m not ready. This is crazy. You just want me out of your room? Is that all? You’re gonna get us kicked out of school!
Then Alex saw Steven Merrill sucker-punch Paul in the side of the head, taking the big boy down, jumping on top of him. And while Alex was watching Steven and Paul, Bill attacked.
All chants, all bouncing spectators disappeared as Bill’s gloved right fist smacked hard against the side of Alex’s head. Alex spun, buckling, and they were alone, as if in darkness and lit only by a spotlight that shone on just the two of them. Alex reeled with pain and tried to swing, but Bill was coming forward, throwing him to the ground. Alex felt his shoulders take the brunt of the fall, and his sides were shooting with pain as he realized Bill was landing blow after blow.
For a moment he allowed his hesitation to remain. He wasn’t going to do this again. Surely he could figure a way forward in which he didn’t have to give this boy what he deserved.
And then he balled up his fists. Let’s go.
Bill gave a sharp scream and Alex realized he had closed his eyes. He opened them and saw that someone had Bill by the ear, green nails drawing blood as they yanked against the lobe and cartilage. Alex’s eyes focused and refocused, his contacts swimming. He scrambled up and saw the new attacker dragging Bill back.
The attacker was a girl, about Alex’s age and height, with olive skin and shoulder-length brown hair. Vaguely Alex realized she was one of the girls from the ice-cream parlor. As Bill staggered back, stunned, she let him go and dropped back. Alex could barely take in how she pivoted on her front foot and spun, driving her other foot hard into Bill’s chest. Bill sprawled back and flopped into some of the spectators.
Paul was up on his feet now, behind the girl. He had scratches on his face and neck, and Steven was staggering, clutching a bloodied nose. Bill stared in wonder, clutching his bleeding ear.
“What is this?” Bill screamed. “Your girlfriend is fighting for you?”
Alex’s heart was pounding. I don’t know her, he wanted to say, as if that would make a difference.
“Get out of here,” the girl snarled at Bill as if she were addressing a dog. “Get on out.”
Bill seemed to size up the situation. The energy of the crowd had flowed out with the burst of violence and now his moment was gone. Bill nodded sarcastically, pointing at Alex as he backed away, as if to say something meaningful but not finding sufficiently nasty words.
And like that, with a ghostly passing, the lusty energy and the crowd dispersed.
Alex was still breathing hard, staring at Bill and Steven as they got on their bikes and pedaled away. He felt his fists relaxing. Nothing he had predicted had happened. He had looked down the chessboard, made his decision, and then someone had come and kicked the board off the table. He turned to see the girl, who stood like a character in a Japanese cartoon, her arms folded.
“Idiots,” she said.
He searched for words. “Who are you?”
The girl looked at Alex, and Paul and Sid, who had gathered to gawk.
“Minnie, with an h,” she said with a sudden brightness. She waved her hand. “Want some ice cream?”
As Minnie-with-an-h found a table where they could sit, Alex watched her—the way she marched up to the counter and grabbed a handful of menus with cheery but aggressive confidence, the way she immediately started grilling the three of them.
“So is this something you have planned for every Friday, or was it just a limited engagement?” she asked after they ordered sundaes.
“Whuh? Oh,” Alex said.
“Our friend Alex here is a pain in the behind to the wrong people,” Paul said. “I’m Paul—this is Sid. You said your name was Minnie?”
“M-i-n-h-i. Minhi. So that’s Hindu, rather than Mouse.” Minhi spoke in perfect idiomatic American English, and yet underneath lay the subtlest hint of an Indian accent that Alex found entrancing. At that moment he would have been glad to ask her to read from the phone book. “Are you from Secheron?” he asked.
Minhi shook her head. “Is anyone? I’m actually from Mumbai. I’m a student at LaLaurie School,” she said, tilting her head in the general direction of Lake Geneva. “It’s a girls’ school acr
oss the lake from you guys. So were those like the school bullies or something?”
Alex grimaced at the word bullies; it sounded like something out of a film they made you watch in the cafeteria. “Actually, they’re my roommates.”
The sundaes came, and they tore into them greedily.
Alex continued, “In all fairness, I did ask to be transferred to another room.”
“They make his life hell—and this is just a week in,” Paul added. “Tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
“I…” Alex shook his head, embarrassed. “You know, broken alarm clocks, tripping, leaving some…really unpleasant stuff in my bed.”
“Eww,” said Minhi. “So you can’t move out?”
“Apparently it’s complicated,” Alex said, thinking of Otranto.
Minhi had laid her bag on the table and Sid spied something. “Are those manga?”
“Yeah.” She grew a little red at the temples. “Yeah, I read about three a week.”
“What are you on right now?” He was visibly aching to see the books, which Minhi ably recognized. She handed them over.
“Mostly shojo,” she said.
Alex nodded. “Shojo, that would be girl comics, right?”
She raised her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
He smiled. “I mean the lead is a spunky, spiky-haired girl with big eyes. Also there are a lot of hearts. Sometimes everyone has magical powers.”
“Way to diss my manga,” she said, squinting at him.
“I’m not dissing; I have four sisters, so I’ve read like a million of them.”
“I didn’t know that about you,” said Paul.
Alex shrugged. He was feeling better. Maybe it would work out. He hadn’t been creamed—and he hadn’t done anything crazy, after all.
As though Alex had said his thought aloud, Paul cleared his throat. “So,” he said, looking at Alex. “Why did you leave your old school?”
Alex took a moment. The Merrills could think anything they wanted, but he actually cared how Sid and Paul felt—they were the closest thing he had to friends so far. Probably it could stay that way. And here was another one, Minhi, who he could already tell was one of the coolest people he’d ever met. And in the next sentence he could blow it, feel them move away from him from there on out. But he wanted to tell the truth.
“I was kicked out,” Alex said finally. “I was asked to leave.”
The three others shifted, listening. Sid asked, “Why?”
“I got into a fight,” Alex said plainly. “It went pretty bad.”
Paul wrinkled his brow. “I thought you said you couldn’t fight.”
Alex looked down. “He was a…yeah, a bully. Pretty much like these guys. They’re all the same guy.” He replayed it briefly in his head. There wasn’t much to tell, not that he remembered clearly. He had started feeling snippy and paranoid, had even confided in his father about the paranoia, but in the end he had been cornered one night and snapped. It had been as shocking and frightening to him as to everyone else. “But that one went to the hospital.”
Minhi churned at her ice cream. “So you could have protected yourself.”
“Well,” Alex said, embarrassed, trying to change the subject, “if I had, we wouldn’t have met you.”
They sat in silence for a second, and then Paul spoke. Alex could not have been more grateful. “So, Minhi. Where did you learn to fight?”
Before Minhi could answer, Alex heard a noise and looked up.
Paul followed Alex’s eyes, saying, “What is that?”
The looping sound of a Swiss ambulance filled the air. Within moments a couple of police motorcycles and a white van tore in from the main road, scattering pigeons as they shot across the square to the clinic.
Alex was rising. He thought he knew what this was.
“They’re bringing someone in,” he heard Minhi say. Alex left the table area and moved across the square almost against his will as a crowd began to gather. He heard whispers from the bystanders: Another one. Another one.
Alex stopped at the wall next to the clinic entrance as two men in white wheeled a gurney to the van, yanking open the vehicle doors. Inside the van was a stretcher covered in a sheet. Another man in white ran back from the van and helped.
Alex wanted to look away, but something urged him to watch as they slid the stretcher out and onto the gurney.
He could see nothing of the person underneath until the gurney jolted over a bump in the entryway.
Drained, completely drained, the man from the ambulance was saying in French.
For a moment the patient’s arm, delicate and female, fell down from under the sheet. One of the orderlies reached down and slipped it back in. Within seconds, they had all disappeared into the clinic.
The person’s arm had been white as bone.
Alex closed his eyes and turned away finally. When he opened them, Paul and Sid and Minhi were there.
“You don’t need to be seeing this stuff,” Minhi said. “We don’t.”
Alex composed himself. He nodded, and they all stood around for a moment.
Paul looked up at the clock tower. “We need to get back.”
“No kidding,” Minhi said. “With all this…with the attacks around the lake, they don’t really like us going out at night.”
Alex felt depressed and sickened. Why did I barge over here?
“Look,” Minhi was saying, changing the subject.
She pulled a notebook and pen out of her bag and started writing something. “This is my address at the school, and this is my email—okay? We should get ice cream again sometime when there’s, you know, not a fight.”
She tore out the sheet and stuck it in a manga. Paul took the book with a smile. “We thank you.”
She slung her bag over her shoulder. “You guys be safe.”
They watched her go. Paul was clearly impressed by Minhi. The unpleasantness of the ambulance had passed from his mind completely. “All told, mate, this was a fantastic afternoon. But no kidding, we gotta hustle.”
Then Alex remembered his roommates. “They’re going to be waiting for me.”
“Forget it,” said Paul, glancing at Sid.
“What?”
“Forget going back there. I don’t care what Otranto says, from here on out you’re bunking in our room.”
CHAPTER 6
Unlike Bill and Steven, Paul and Sid did not have a three-man room. Theirs was smaller: smaller window, smaller shelves, smaller bathroom, and with only one bunk set, so they had to make out a pallet for Alex on the floor.
It was perfect.
As they prepared for bed, Alex wondered if the Merrills would report him, but then he realized they were unlikely to—they were still bruised and now they would have to answer questions. Besides, they wanted the room to themselves.
“You can go back in the daytime tomorrow and collect your stuff. I hope you don’t have much,” joked Paul as he handed over some extra sheets and towels that had been in the closet. Yeah, ’cause the Merrills will probably destroy it, Alex thought.
“Not much,” he said, folding some extra blankets to make a pillow.
“Didn’t leave like a Nintendo or something?”
“I wish.” Alex shook his head. No video games were allowed at Glenarvon. Alex went to the sink in the bathroom and took out his contacts, emerging with his glasses on.
Alex on the floor, Paul and Sid on the bunks—lights out and they went to sleep, and Alex slept like a baby.
Until one thirty.
Alex must have been subconsciously listening for the sound of the garage door, because he was lost in a strange dream of the woman in white who fell to dust, and then came the gravelly roll of the garage door, far below. Alex blinked awake.
He grabbed his glasses and rose, pulling on his clothes and, this time, shoes. Downstairs and outside in seconds.
Huddling close to the school walls, Alex saw Sangster pushing a motorcycle across the yard tow
ard the gate, moving faster than seemed possible as he walked the large machine on its sparkling wheels.
As he hustled around the building, Alex could hear the motorcycle starting. He rushed to the bike rack for Sid’s extra bike, unchaining it and hopping on. He headed for the road, listening for the sound of Sangster’s much faster machine. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with the instructor, obviously, but the roads were long and he might get lucky.
Sangster seemed to be headed for Secheron. Even with the muffling trees lining the winding road, Alex could see and hear the motorcycle ahead for a longer time than he expected. Then, after a few minutes, the noise was too far away.
But it was lovely on the road at night—the sound of frogs and owls and the gentle creak of the bicycle. He would head back into the tiny town and ride around, see if he could spot the motorcycle parked outside somewhere. It was a mission of curiosity, but he was so trans-fixed by the beauty of the ride that he realized he didn’t care whether he learned anything or not. Why does Sangster sneak out at night? Well, why do I?
Then his head filled with static and warning—quiet at first but building more rapidly than it ever had. In less than a minute the pitch inside his mind became almost deafening.
Ice-cold air shot down the road from behind and enveloped him, a cold front dropping in so suddenly that Alex nearly fell over as his muscles tensed. His breath became visible as he kept pedaling. Then he became aware of a rumbling that he felt in his bones, vibrating up from the road and through his feet.
He heard what he thought was Sangster, a motorcycle engine’s roar, but then realized it was coming from behind, from the other direction.
The sound grew louder and Alex stopped, putting down his legs and standing on the bike at the side of the road, just around a curve.
He heard three, four, maybe even six motorcycles. There were no headlights visible anywhere. But they were coming fast.
Black shapes tore around the bend. Two motorcycles roared toward Alex, ridden by men in dark red clothes and face covers. Realizing he was still partly in the road, Alex dragged the bike off the shoulder, dropping it as he scrambled to crouch behind some bushes. The rumble was now insanely loud, and two motorcycles shot past, giving way to four, and then eight.
Alex Van Helsing Page 4