“I’m kind of new at this—I only got changed recently,” the boy said. “But I’m getting better. Some of us are going to sneak out later and go hunting.”
Alex said, choking back the itch in his eye, “Hunting?”
“Absolutely,” said the boy. “But don’t tell anyone. One girl didn’t come back after we hunted this painter the other night. It’s against the rules, you know. But still.”
“But still,” Alex repeated. Don’t let him see your face. Don’t touch your face. The contact rolled in his eyelid as he blinked uncontrollably and felt it pop out.
He was blind in the right eye. Half his vision, including the boy, went into a dull, indecipherable blur.
He panicked for a second; he hated being blind, he couldn’t be blind here, not now. The contact hadn’t fallen—he felt it resting on his cheek, slick and stuck for a moment.
“You know, you kind of smell funny,” the vampire boy said.
Get away. He shrugged as a response to the boy, reaching inside his pocket for the stake and dropping back.
The crowd was moving toward the next corner, but on his left, in his clear vision, Alex spotted a large, black door along the hallway. He prayed that the contact would stay stuck to his face if he just moved steadily enough. As he passed the door, he slid in one quick movement to the wall, grasped the brass handle, and opened the door, slipping out of the hall into a room.
He immediately grabbed the contact, knowing his hands were filthy but having no other choice, and hurriedly popped the lens into his mouth. He kept it on his tongue, willing himself not to swallow, not to allow his mouth to fill too much with saliva. He could wash it with his tongue if he was careful enough.
Alex looked around and nearly gulped in surprise.
The room was entirely made of gold—actual, literal gold, with a golden slab at the center. Instantly he saw that the slab was not resting on any support; it floated in the air as if suspended from invisible wire. Something the size of a birdcage, two feet tall and rounded at the top, sat on the slab, covered in a golden blanket.
Alex kept his mouth shut, tumbling the contact lens around on his tongue as he spun back. The door behind him appeared as a thinly demarcated line engraved in a wall that shimmered in gold as well. The walls shone and went on in a circle. No right angles. No decoration.
Fix your eye.
Alex furiously rubbed his hands as clean as he could get them on the tunic, swishing the contact against the roof of his mouth. After a moment he stuck out his tongue, grasping the lens tenderly between his right thumb and forefinger.
He held it up, using his good left eye to visually inspect the outline of the contact. Alex frowned—he had it turned inside out. It didn’t look like a bowl. The curve of the contact lens was lipped out at the edges. Alex popped it back into his mouth and moved his tongue, feeling it switch its orientation. He stuck out his tongue again and grabbed it.
Alex looked close with his good eye. The contact was mottled with spit, but unblemished and whole. He pried open his right eye and pressed the contact in, wincing as he swirled his eye around, letting the lens settle back into place. After a moment he was able to blink. Man, I hate these things.
Alex swiveled in a circle. What is this place?
The birdcage with the blanket stared back at him in silence.
He had no choice. He had to see.
Slowly, stepping on a soft golden floor that was burnished to an extreme shine, Alex approached the slab. As he drew near he became aware of a dull thrumming sound.
Alex reached for the blanket, watching his own human hand as if stunned that he dared. He grabbed the top of the blanket and ripped it back.
Before him lay the world.
It spun slowly in the air, the vaguely misshapen world itself. As Alex peered closer he saw that this was not simply a globe—it was the earth, in some magical way. He saw textures and crevices, vast swaths of white concrete stretching through North America, glass and steel towering in the Northeast.
He circled the globe, tracing the line of the Great Wall of China through Asia.
There were golden dots shining from the globe, groups of them in Europe, America, Asia, everywhere.
He circled a second time against the slow revolution of the earth, peering closely at Europe, trying to find Switzerland.
A large glob of gold shone from Lake Geneva.
This was a map of vampires. In his mind he remembered the slogan of the Polidorium: There are such things.
Alex reached out a finger to touch the Atlantic.
It felt wet to the touch and he scoffed lightly. Then the room erupted with alarms.
As blaring horns rang out, Alex threw the blanket back over the vampire earth and bolted for the door. He pushed at it, and in a second was out in the hallway.
The door slid back into place, looking no more impressive than it had before.
He took a half second to study the hall and saw now that fewer vampires were passing. Out here, he couldn’t hear the alarm. He kept moving.
Down the hall Alex stopped at another bulletin board with little note cards that read things like MUSICAL TRYOUTS and NEED A ROOMMATE/NONSMOKING ONLY. He turned his hood to the wall to lessen the exposure of his face to the passing students.
On one side of the board was a calendar with upcoming and current events listed, and Alex silently read them off.
His eyes landed on a notice that filled him with alarm: MIDNIGHT TONIGHT: PRESENTATION OF THE KEYHOLE SACRIFICE. DUNGEON AUDITORIUM. ALL WELCOME.
Keyhole sacrifice?
Keyhole?
His mind raced. There was something Sid had said, something Mary Shelley had put into Frankenstein when she revised it. Mary Shelley said Polidori had told a story about a skull-headed lady looking through a keyhole. And Sid had said that was made up, because Polidori was working on a story about Byron. Alex shook his head, wishing he could get Sid on his useless Bluetooth to talk him through it. Too many coincidences. Was it possible that somehow Frankenstein carried a clue?
Alex snuck a look at his watch: 11:42 P.M.
He had to move.
In the corner of the bulletin board Alex saw a campus map. The Dungeon Auditorium. He found its location and headed for the interior of the castle back the way he’d come.
Alex walked as quickly as he dared through the hallways, passing the golden map room and the cafeteria, until he entered darker, older interiors. The tile of the new buildings gave way to the rough-hewn stone of the castle. He joined a steady flow of vampires all heading in the same direction. Alex reached an open door into a circular stairwell that traveled down several flights. No one was paying attention to him as he descended, and after a moment he understood why. As he reached a large entryway where many vampires were entering, he felt the temperature drop mightily.
He pushed silently into an auditorium, past rows and rows of seats that were filling up.
Toward the front, with a backdrop of curtains, was a tower of ice that flattened out at the top into a circular raised stage. From the stage of ice rose a tombstonelike monolith, also ice, some ten feet high.
In the center of the monolith was a window, cut in the shape of a keyhole and framed by stone set into the ice. Before it stood Icemaker himself.
Alex stuck to the wall, reaching the corner and trying to melt into it. The lights dimmed.
“My children, what is your suit?” came the voice of Icemaker.
“We seek everlasting life,” the crowd responded.
“The time has come to become something new,” he said. “To speak to the demon-goddess Nemesis and beg her for our queen. All has been prepared.”
He held up a scroll. Alex stared at it, the carved animal head atop it—a fox? “In a few minutes’ time, at the start of what the mortals call the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows”—Icemaker looked up at the enormous clock, which read ten to midnight—“we will summon her and make our sacrifice.” He gestured dramatically toward the curtains in the back
of the auditorium.
The crowd roared in approval.
Minhi and Paul had not been among the captives at the cafeteria. They were probably about to be the main course here. That meant they might be backstage even now. Alex started moving along the wall.
CHAPTER 20
Minhi awoke in the dark and had no idea what time it was. For the first several hours of her captivity she had wrestled, she had pleaded and screamed. Then had come the—how best to call it? That pep rally of the damned? And since that moment she had sat in her cage, waiting, watching.
Now she could hear a great gathering in the auditorium and he was speaking again.
A great, thick curtain had been drawn on the backstage, so that she and Paul were hidden, as though awaiting the applause that would open the curtains once more.
Minhi was not accepting her fate. She was accepting only that she lacked immediate options. Fate was far from decided.
Paul, meanwhile, had also awoken and was now pressing his back against the bars and trying to break the cage open.
“Are you really trying that again?” Minhi asked.
Paul dropped back to the floor of his cage. “I have to try something.”
“We’ll get a chance to try something,” said Minhi, “but it’ll happen when there’s a change.”
“What do you mean, a change?”
“Listen to that,” she said, indicating the muffled noise of what sounded like a call-and-response meeting. “I mean, we’re not going to sit here forever. They’re going to have to move us eventually.”
“I have news for you; that will not be a good time for us.”
“But,” she said, “that’s when lots of things will happen. Locks will be unlocked, and so on. It won’t be easy, but we might have a chance then.”
Paul looked at Minhi. “So how do we deal with them?”
Minhi was thinking. “What do we know about vampires?” she said, daring to use the word neither seemed comfortable with. “They’re strong, for one thing, like superhero strong.” She sounded like she was making a list.
“They don’t like sunlight,” Paul said. “In those movies Sid makes me watch, the vampire always gets burnt up when the sunlight hits him.”
“That’s in movies,” Minhi said. “We don’t know if that’s true. I mean, for instance, in movies nobody ever has caller ID or cell phones that work. Do you have a cell that works, by the way?”
“Not down here. Are you suggesting that the movies are not a guide for life?” Paul asked. “Whatever will I do now?”
Minhi smirked. “Okay, so that’s an idea, though—if we can trick them into the sunlight—”
A sour, female voice hissed, “That only works sometimes.”
Minhi looked up in horror as a female vampire dropped silently from the rafters to the floor.
She had spiky yellow hair and white robes that fluttered as she descended. She looked no more than sixteen, but Minhi knew that vampires tended to measure their years in decades or even centuries. The vampire girl began to walk in front of the cages. Her bone white skin almost glowed in the dim light behind the stage.
“What’s the game we’re playing, chiclets? How to kill a vampire? You can forget sunlight—the old ones can handle it—and anyway, you’re about two miles underground, sweetheart.”
“Who are you?” Minhi demanded.
“My name’s Elle,” she said.
“So sun doesn’t burn you?” asked Paul, defiant.
Elle raised an eyebrow and came close to Paul’s cage, showing her fangs. “Burn? Me? I’m not telling. Not as much as I’ll bet you do; you’re paler than Casper—but maybe that’s just fear.”
“What do you want?” Minhi asked.
“I’m watching over you,” the vampire answered, “until the moment you’re needed.”
Elle took a moment to study them silently, and then she spoke again. The lusty look in Elle’s eye suggested that she yearned to devour them herself.
Elle licked her lips, looking back and forth, then said, “Let’s play another game.”
Minhi crouched, watching, as Elle continued, “You’ve made me really curious about how much you all know, so I’m going to ask each of you a question: myth or reality.”
“About what?” asked Paul.
“About vampires!” Elle shook her head in disbelief that Paul would even ask. “Vampires are like Americans, we love to talk about ourselves. Myth or reality?”
Paul asked, “What do we win if we get it right?”
“You get to live,” she snarled.
Minhi felt her eyes grow wide but she controlled her fear. “Oh, now, I know we’re here for something more than that. Sounded to me like your fearless vampire leader wants to use us for something else. I’ll bet his instructions were pretty clear.”
Elle looked thoughtful. “It’s amazing, you know; I have the hardest time with clear instructions.” She went back to Paul’s cage. Paul sat there with his arms folded, looking down, and she crouched to his level. “Man, you’re a big dude,” she offered. “You’ll be like two sacrifices’ worth of sacrifice. You’re like a supersize sacrifice. Myth or reality, big guy.” She leaned in. “Vampires can fly.”
Paul stared at her. Minhi started to whisper something and Elle turned around, holding up a shiny black fingernail. “No helping!”
Paul looked around him, then said, “Myth.”
“Not bad.” Elle stood up. “That’s another tough one, so I would have accepted ‘it depends,’ because there are some special cases.”
She went back to Minhi’s cage. Elle poked her through the bars. “Hey. Myth or reality?”
“Come on…”
“Vampires are burned by crosses.”
Minhi shut her eyes, then said, “Reality.”
“Wow,” Elle said. “Usually everyone gets that wrong these days. Yeah. Holy stuff burns like crazy; go figure.” She walked back to Paul.
“This game is totally not fair,” Paul spat.
“Why?” Elle asked, amused.
“Because we’ve seen everything in movies, and it’s all different from movie to movie.”
“Well, then why don’t you just restrict yourself to answers that reflect reality. Myth or reality: Vampires have to sleep in coffins.”
Minhi watched Paul catch this question and stop. He backed up, his eyes flying back and forth. Elle waited a few seconds, then put her hands on the bars, leaning toward him, her long black nails glistening in the dimness. “Well?”
“Myth.”
Elle reached out her arm and grazed a fingernail along Paul’s cheek. “Very good. Mounds of earth, yes—but there’s nothing special about a coffin. Some of the old-timers still like them, though.”
Elle moved again to Minhi. “That brings me back to you. Myth or reality.”
“That’s a stupid name,” Minhi said. “It sounds like Truth or Dare, like you’re asking me to choose. I’ll do a myth, please.”
“Myth or reality,” Elle said, wagging her finger. “Vampires can fall in love.”
Minhi stared for a long moment. “Reality.”
Elle clicked her tongue. “Ohh. No, no. Obsession, but not love. It’s just not there. It’s all burned out. No pity, no empathy. You’d be surprised how much you don’t miss that.”
Then, like a snake striking, Elle reached out, her steely fingers grabbing Minhi by the neck, dragging her to the front of her cage. Minhi was clawing at Elle’s pale arm and Elle hissed as her nails started to draw along Minhi’s neck.
“So let me ask you something,” came the voice of Alex Van Helsing.
Elle gasped and stared up into the rafters. Minhi twisted away from Elle as Alex dropped to the floor.
Alex continued, “Do you paint those nails black, or is that just a bonus that comes with the fangs?”
On the platform, Icemaker stood, the curtains behind him, vampire guards on either side.
“Now you will witness destiny,” he cried, and he reached out his hand,
his eyes on the keyhole. With one razor-sharp thumb he cut his hand, and soon a glittering kind of blood, his own cursed clan lord ichor, dripped down into the circle before him, flowing in grooves carved in the ice.
“This blood is not mortal blood,” said he. “It is not the blood you remember.” And he continued:
“Ye know what I have known; and without power
I could not be amongst ye: but there are
Powers deeper still beyond—I come in quest
Of such, to answer unto what I seek.”
After a moment a whisper came, lighting on the frozen air. Frost rose and swirled, up to the keyhole window, swirling in the stone and then bursting out. And then the demon Nemesis herself appeared, robed and winged, a glowing goddesslike humanoid form of clouds and ice. Her eyes were a deep void.
The demon said:
“Prostrate thyself, and thy condemned clay,
Child of the Earth! or dread the worst.”
Icemaker smiled. And stood, coming to his full height before the circle. He looked the demon in the void eyes and said, “I know it, and yet ye see I kneel not.”
“Thou art changed,” said Nemesis. “What wouldst thou?”
Icemaker beheld the grooves and said, “This is not the blood of a mortal, nor the blood of a lowly undead. It is the ichor of a lord, of one who has been tinged with that of the ancients. I make a sacrifice to receive what I desire.”
“And what is it that you desire?” responded the demon.
“At this proper time, at this hour of the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, I wish power over life and death,” he said, “beginning with my beloved, Claire.”
In the air the vampire formed a small image, a cameo of ice and blood that he held in his hand: Claire, treacherous mistress, mother of a child he had taken and then had taken from him, bearer of a love he no longer felt except as obsession.
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