Sangster shook his head in something like wonder and addressed the others. “I did some research when I saw his name on my roster of students. He climbs mountains. He rescues hikers. He’s been taught to survive on little or no rest or food. He can drive a combine and ride a motorbike, and he once survived a snakebite by applying a tourniquet to his own leg, nearly causing him to lose a foot.” Alex felt a tinge of pride and fear as his literature teacher recited a litany of things that, over the years, Alex had indeed been taught to do. His father had encouraged all of his children in these things. Well, not the tourniquet. “And yet not a single thing does he know about the one thing he should know most: vampires. He hasn’t been trained to fight them. As far as I can tell he knows nothing of the business.”
Carerras asked, “Have any of the Van Helsings been active?”
“Charles is inactive. We all know about Amanda,” Sangster said, “and—”
“What does that mean?” demanded Alex.
Sangster said evenly, “All it means is that without your mother, your father would probably still be on the payroll.”
“This is crazy,” Alex said, rising and shaking his head.
“Can you give us a minute or two?” Sangster looked at the others.
A moment later Sangster and Alex were alone in the conference room and Sangster was pressing buttons on an invisible keyboard in the table. As a projection screen dropped down from the ceiling, he spoke into the table-top. “Gimme a club soda.” He turned to Alex. “You want a Dr Pepper?”
“What are you trying to say about my mother?” Alex said, frowning.
Sangster had an open expression that Alex took to be one of peacemaking. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked again.
“Whatever.”
Sangster made the order and turned his attention to the keyboard. He hit a button and a jagged, infrared image filled the screen on the wall: a man leaping toward a camera on a balcony somewhere as a politician’s motorcade rolled in the streets below. The attacker’s nails were sharp and his teeth—fangs—were bared.
“We kill vampires, Alex.” Sangster hit the button again and now showed another infrared image, a different vampire leaping onto a car in the motorcade, ripping back the windshield like paper. “Guys like us, some of us hunt terrorists; some of us fight wars. The Polidorium was founded to hunt vampires.”
“Just vampires?”
“Eh,” Sangster said noncommittally. He tapped the invisible keyboard and now brought up an image of a young Italian man in a painting. “This is Polidori.”
Alex tried to remember details of the lecture on Frankenstein. That all seemed like a year ago. “We talked about him in class. Mary Shelley makes him sound like an idiot. You said that guy seemed like a loser.”
“Here is what you must know if we are to go forward,” Sangster said seriously. “There are two Polidoris. The one we read about and the one we honor by serving this organization.”
Now below the portrait of Polidori appeared two columns—two sets of biographical data points.
The door opened and an agent brought a tray with their drinks. Sangster indicated the Dr Pepper and Alex took it as his mysterious teacher continued.
“According to the accepted literature, John Polidori fell out with his friend Lord Byron in 1816, shortly after they stayed here at Lake Geneva. Broke and depressed, Polidori supposedly died of a drug overdose just a few years later.
“Here is what any agent of the Polidorium will tell you if you have the right to hear it, and God help me, whether your father likes it or not, you do.”
As Sangster spoke, he tapped a button and another screen lit up, flashing images: helicopters and motorcycles, machinery and computers, the screens with GPS coordinates of agents moving across the globe.
“John Polidori was not a fool. He altered his life, starting after his book, The Vampyre, the first modern book on vampires.
“In 1818, as his book was coming out, Polidori faced his first coven of vampires, a group running an opium den in London. He traced those vampires to a clan running a newspaper and a publishing house. He killed several but the vampires began to turn public opinion against the doctor, who was obliged to keep his activities a secret. Polidori soon found his bad reputation useful. By now, he had a mission. He faked his own death and went underground.
“By 1831, when Mary Shelley wrote her revised Frankenstein, everyone remembered Polidori as an idiot—Mary included. She even changed her description of what he was writing about—nowhere does she use the word vampire; instead she makes up a story about a skull-headed lady.
“But Polidori made friends. Among other people, in the late 1830s he met the young Abraham Van Helsing, who was a real person, despite what you’ve heard. Bram Stoker met him when Van Helsing was an old man and wrote his book Dracula based on Van Helsing’s story. A long time before that, Van Helsing had used some of his own considerable wealth to help Polidori create this organization. When Polidori did die—in 1851, thirty years after his reported death—the Polidori Society stretched across Europe and the United States and was receiving money from the black budgets of every nation. From time to time they continued to work with the Van Helsing Foundation—your father’s research foundation.”
“The VHF is made up of scholars and doctors,” said Alex. “They make malaria vaccines and run clinics in third-world countries. I don’t see any of those guys chasing vampires through the woods.”
“They do more than that, but the activities you are talking about give them reason to operate across the planet,” said Sangster. “And when they need firepower, they call the Polidorium.”
Alex stared at the image of the Italian doctor who had worked with his—what would it be? “So Abraham Van Helsing was my—”
“Great-great-great-grandfather,” said Sangster. “That would be three greats.”
“Do you know my father?”
“Not personally.”
“But he was an—he was what you are.”
“He was an agent, yes.”
“He never told me any of this,” Alex said, and now he flashed on the white-fanged creatures pursuing him through the woods.
And then on something else.
“If you did research on me,” Alex asked slowly, “then do you know about…”
“About your old school?” Sangster asked calmly, when Alex found that he couldn’t complete the sentence. Alex nodded.
Back at Frayling Prep, Alex had felt the jagged static for the first time. At the beginning he had put it down to being away from home at boarding school, the ache of homesickness for the six family members he’d left behind. But then he noticed that the static only seemed to occur in the presence of one fellow classmate, a guy named Max Pierce. Pierce seemed harmless enough—sure, he picked on some of the younger students, but he was nowhere near as mean as Merrill & Merrill, despite what Alex had told Paul, Sid, and Minhi in Secheron earlier that day. But Alex couldn’t get over his unease. He’d confided in his father, who told him he probably wasn’t getting enough sleep, and that it was just migraines. “They run in the family,” his father had said.
And then the incident. Studying late one night in the library, Alex had looked up at the window in time to see a figure hurry out of the chapel on the Frayling campus. At that moment Alex felt that static again, pounding in his brain, driving him out onto the grounds.
He had found Pierce, in a tree, peeping into one of the girl’s dorms. Pierce’s shoes were off and he was using his toes to balance, and when Alex called out to him, Pierce had swiveled toward him with a lustful, drooling look. It was as though Pierce were possessed by some animal part of himself. Pierce launched himself at Alex.
Pierce hadn’t fought like a kid; he fought like a maniac, clawing and biting. Alex defended himself using the techniques he had been taught—and a quickness of reflex that seemed to come out of nowhere. The fight was brutal and fast, and accompanied by a sound that Alex could only define as “snarling”
—animal-like snarling, coming from Pierce’s snapping mouth. And at the end of it, Pierce lay there, bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious. Horrified at what he had done and unsure of what he had seen, Alex had begun to shudder uncontrollably, and that’s when the dean came out of his office on his way to his car and found them.
“Pierce was a werewolf, Alex,” Sangster said. He tapped some keys on the keyboard in the table and there Alex’s face was on the screen, next to the Frayling expulsion report. And more: a picture of Pierce. No, two pictures. One was Pierce’s student ID photo and the other was a photo of a wolflike head with eyes that looked familiar. Pierce’s.
“Why do you have this?”
“This entry in the database is on our American servers; it was triggered by an anonymous tip. We can keep an eye on him now. Your fight was in the middle of the lunar cycle—Pierce was itching for a change but wouldn’t have undergone a full transformation for another week. During the day he was normal, so no one but you ever noticed.”
“The school called my father,” Alex said, almost to himself. “He came right away. He was furious. He talked to the counselors and police and got me out with only an expulsion and no jail time, no newspaper stories. I gotta say that I got off easy. But when we were finally alone and I told him what I—what I felt, the way Pierce acted, he made me promise not to mention it ever again. He said people would think I was crazy. It even sounded like he thought I was crazy. But if what you’re saying is true, he probably knew all about it. That Pierce was a werewolf.”
Alex couldn’t help feeling betrayed by this realization. His father had lied to him, and worse, made him question his own sanity. How could he—what would be worth that? “So…why didn’t he tell me?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know why he didn’t tell you,” said Sangster. “But he’s been preparing you. All your life. Self-defense. Mountain rescue. Whether he likes it or not, he knows what you’re going to be.”
Alex wondered if Dad knew he had spent a considerable part of the past week running for his life. “Who was that on the road tonight?”
“Icemaker,” Sangster replied. He tapped at the keys again, and now a new sketch appeared—a cruel-eyed man with swept-back hair. “That was the arriving caravan of a clan lord, a big boss, that we call Icemaker.”
“You call him that because of the cold?” Alex asked.
“That’s right.”
“You give all the vampires cool superhero names?”
Sangster smiled.
Alex went on. “So who is this Icemaker?”
“Polidori knew him as, believe it or not, Lord Byron,” Sangster said. The sketch morphed into an older image: The eyes and face remained, but now the hair was longer and the man’s clothes were in the ruffled, nineteenth-century style. “The poet…and the first vampire Polidori ever faced. That last summer when the whole group of friends was together, the Haunted Summer, is the summer that Byron began to consort with vampires. Byron was an arrogant man, attractive to every woman he met and able to best any man in any contest, but he was plagued by self-consciousness, about his club foot, his height, his reputation as a writer. Vampirism attracts people who want to become something greater than themselves. It took years before Byron became a full vampire, but Polidori saw it coming. Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing I would ever teach in class.”
Too bad for Sid, Alex thought. Sangster went on.
“Today Icemaker controls thousands of vampire soldiers. He’s very secretive, even for a clan lord. But know this: He is extraordinarily dangerous. When he needs blood, he doesn’t just come in and kill a few, he kills hundreds. He’ll attack, freeze the town, then reduce it to shards.”
“Do you know why he’s here?” Alex asked.
“Nope. We got word that he destroyed one of our ships, the Wayfarer, which had a cargo of relics and other holdings on its way to a warehouse in the States. Then suddenly we started tracking him here. Something got his attention and drove him back to Lake Geneva.”
“Where would they be going? Where would they put all of those vehicles?”
“In a place we can’t find,” Sangster said. “A place even better hidden than this: a place called the Scholomance.”
Alex nodded. He had heard that word. “That’s a hideout?”
“It’s a school, more a university, like an MIT for vampires.”
“And it’s around here?”
“We think so,” Sangster said. He tapped another key and Alex nearly choked on his drink.
There, in a blurry photograph, was a shot of his own father, that skinny, seldom-exercised man, here twenty years younger, fitter, and hunkered down behind a crumbled wall as he talked on a radio. “Where was this taken?”
Sangster looked up. “Hmmm…I’d say Prague.”
“When was this taken?”
“I would figure not long before you were born.” Sangster looked at Alex searchingly. He smiled and then said, “Come on, Alex.”
“What?”
“One more time: It’s really your position that you have never heard of the Polidorium or the work it does? And that your knowledge of the Van Helsing Foundation is restricted to its charitable activities?”
“Yes! Everything you said.” Alex couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. Incredible. Dad was an honest-to-God, hunkering-down-behind-crumbling-buildings-and-shooting-things spy. “Doesn’t happen,” Alex muttered.
“What?”
“All my life my dad brushes off anything that he thinks sounds like nonsense with ‘that doesn’t happen.’ But it turns out that everything that doesn’t happen actually does.”
“Probably not everything,” Sangster said. “Anyway, we can’t keep you from talking. Even if we tried, drugs wear off. I have no idea what we’re going to do with you.”
“Can I learn this stuff?” Alex said, stepping closer to the screen.
“Maybe you should ask your dad that,” Sangster said, studying Alex.
“I don’t get it. Why would he send me here? If he didn’t want me involved with this.”
“He didn’t send you here,” Sangster responded, “he sent you to one of the most prestigious private schools in the world.” The teacher/agent bit his lip. “I don’t think he knows the Polidorium has a location at Lake Geneva. It’s top secret, and it’s only been here since we started focusing our search for the Scholomance. We don’t share that kind of information with former agents.”
“If you tell him, he’ll drag me out of here,” Alex said seriously. “That’ll be it for me. I don’t want that. This is too much to turn my back on.”
Sangster rose, tapped a key, and the screen went dark. Then he turned back to Alex with a serious look. “Alex, can you sense them?”
Alex sat silently for a moment. “I think so. When they’re close. I felt it the other night in my room.”
“At school?”
“Yes, and then it—she—was there, outside my window. And…I felt it at Frayling, too.”
Sangster was weighing something in his head.
“You tired?”
Alex had to admit he was.
“Let’s go back to school. It’s going to be morning in a few hours.”
They exited the boardroom and Armstrong and Carerras were down by the foyer in conversation.
Sangster went to find a jacket and helmet for Alex. As Alex waited, he watched the other commandos going about their business, putting back their weapons, fooling around.
Armstrong was talking to Carerras, who was puffing away at his pipe. “Still have no idea where they are,” Carerras was saying.
“We might have found out tonight.”
“Never can tell.”
Sangster returned and handed Alex the helmet. “If you felt it the other night before it chased you at the school, then it’s worse than I thought,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“They know you’re here.”
CHAPTER 9
“Up and at ’em, hero,�
� Paul was saying. Alex lay in his makeshift bed, wincing against the light, as Paul and Sid moved about the room, the morning sun streaming in. He blinked awake.
“What?”
Paul was looking in the mirror at the bruise that shone bright blue on the side of his head. “You don’t want to miss breakfast this morning,” he said. “Everyone is going to be cheering after yesterday.”
Alex was confused for a moment and then it all came flooding back. After the woods and the motorcycles and the vampires and the cave, he had completely forgotten that the evening had begun with the Secheron fight. In fact, he had almost gone back to the Merrills’ room after Sangster had dropped him off, wordlessly, at the gate.
Alex moved like a zombie through washing up and putting in his contacts as Paul and Sid lingered near the door, ready to go down to the refectory.
Sid was watching him. “You look terrible,” he said.
“Maybe it’s the sleeping on the floor,” Paul said. “I can see if we can add more blankets.”
“No, no.” Alex waved a hand, his mind still racing through everything he had seen. “No, it’s fine.” He splashed his face again. His eyes were a little sore, but he was getting better at putting his contacts in. He was thinking of the moment when the creatures had spotted him, as he crouched next to…next to Sid’s bike.
He slapped his forehead in disgust. “The…” He turned around, reaching for his sneakers and jamming his feet into them. “You guys go on.”
“What are you doing?” Paul stared.
“I forgot—I wanted to go for a walk. You know…think,” he said awkwardly.
“You wanted to…think?” Paul repeated the words as though he had never heard them before. He pointed to the scratches on his face and neck. “People will be cheering. Look at my face! This is like a medal.”
Alex smacked Paul on the shoulder as he ran out the door. “Enjoy it.”
Alex Van Helsing Page 6