Alex Van Helsing

by Jason Henderson

  “Yeah, it was called the Scroll of Hermanubis,” Alex said.

  “That makes sense,” Sid said. “Hermanubis was an Egyptian god who could move between the world of the living and the dead.”

  Rather than feeling as though all had gone smashingly—as Alex was inclined to think it had—Sid seemed more ill at ease than ever.

  “What is it?” Alex insisted.

  Sid heaved a sigh and stared at the desk where he’d tossed every book he could find on Icemaker, his poems, the Haunted Summer, all of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Everything in the story in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in the introduction—it means something. The skull-headed lady. The keyhole. All of it was a clue. The skull-headed lady is Claire, whom Icemaker wanted to raise. The demon he needed to help him came through the keyhole.”

  “Right,” said Alex.

  “Which makes sense. But we’ve got a problem.”

  Paul sat up from where he’d been lying on his bed. “What?”

  “If everything in the clue means something, then everything in it means something.”

  “Okay…”

  Sid opened his copy of Frankenstein, thumbing back to the 1831 introduction. “So what about the Tomb of the Capulets?”

  “I don’t follow.” Alex rubbed his eyes with his palms, suddenly feeling very much like he wished he followed even less.

  Sid was holding up the book, reading. “The Tomb of the Capulets. Mary Shelley says that after Polidori started writing about the skull lady, he—that’s Polidori—‘did not know what to do with her and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.’”

  “So?”

  Sid picked up another book, this one on the Villa Diodati party of 1816. “You saw Icemaker down in the Scholomance at a keyhole window; that’s where Nemesis came. But…that was a castle, not a tomb. So there was no Tomb of the Capulets. And it…here”—he went to another book and flipped the pages for a moment—“there was a collection of art in 1816, in the house Icemaker rented. The Villa Diodati. There was a painting of the death of Romeo and Juliet.”

  “The Tomb of the Capulets,” repeated Paul.

  “Icemaker,” Sid said, “when he was Byron, wrote a poem about going to Nemesis. And the whole point of it was that he was a greater kind of being, that he alone was sufficient. I have no doubt that he needed the ritual to perform, and that the scroll held that ritual. But I don’t think he needed the captives—the sacrifice—at all.”

  “What do you mean he didn’t need us?” Paul demanded.

  “It’s—” Sid stood up, pacing. He looked at Alex. “Look, I hate to break this to you, but vampires aren’t stupid. This was a trick. He knew you were watching him. When did the Polidorium start tracking Icemaker?”

  “The moment he started moving up Italy. He travels with an army, so the Polidorium can’t miss him.”

  “Right—if you’re Icemaker, you know you’re being watched. He had to come to Lake Geneva because the Scholomance was the place to do his ritual, but he knew the heat would be on the moment the caravan started moving. The good guys would want to stop him, to disrupt whatever he was planning. So he made you all part of the plan: stole some captives so you could rescue them and think you disrupted his ritual. You’d go away satisfied. But you didn’t disrupt him at all. You gave him time to finish.”

  “What do you mean, ‘to finish’?” Alex asked.

  “A vampire rises fully formed out of the grave,” Sid said. “But raising a dead human, from dust to bones, to a new being—that takes time, like a day, and room. He triggered it all on midnight of the feast day. It’s not done. Claire will rise at The Tomb of the Capulets—the painting—you see?”

  “See what?” demanded Alex.

  “Claire will rise at the Villa Diodati,” Sid said. “She’s probably rising now.”

  CHAPTER 23

  A hard, pelting rain began to fall as Alex hurtled down the road, the sound of the gunmetal gray Ninja a distant roar inside his muffling helmet. He spoke into the mouthpiece again as he headed north back toward the Villa Diodati. “Sangster, this is Alex. Sangster!”

  He cursed as it went to voice mail. Of course, because the job was over. Chains of lightning began to dance across the sky.

  Alex left the Ninja against a tree in the vineyard, stopping to grab what he could out of the saddle case. He found the Polibow and what appeared to be a wrist guard lined with silver knives. He wound his way to a basement window and gingerly forced it open.

  There was a moment, as Alex dropped down and peered through the window, rain beating on his shoulders, that he doubted his purpose. But it was just a moment. See this through. He felt this to be his calling as surely as he felt he had ended up here for a reason. Sangster had said his father had no idea the Polidorium was even at Lake Geneva. So he was here by destiny. His very name had led him here.

  Alex’s feet struck the floor and he allowed his eyes to adjust to the faint light that came in through the window. For a moment his heart raced as he saw a tall, rakish figure in the corner. He felt himself crouch and then realized it looked rakish because it was, in fact, a rake.

  Save your mad skills for the actual monsters, Alex.

  This basement room was around the back of the house, and after a moment he could see that it was used primarily for gardening supplies—in the corner he could see a wheelbarrow, some large plastic bags of mulch, various shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction.

  Alex stepped out of that room into a basement hallway, where almost no light intruded.

  At the other end of the hall Alex saw a dim red light glowing, casting strange shadows across the darkened floor.

  In the distance he heard a deep, smooth voice calling:

  “But first, on earth as vampire sent,

  Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent…”

  Alex moved toward the end of the hall and stopped, looking slowly around the corner. This hallway was wide, and at the end was a painting.

  It covered the entire wall at the end of the corridor: Romeo and Juliet lay in each other’s arms before the door of the tomb of the Capulets, with lilies strewn about at their feet. And the door to the tomb was an actual door. Below the door, burning bright, was the eerie red light that filled the hallway.

  The mellifluous voice continued:

  “Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

  And suck the blood of all thy race.”

  Staring at the door, Alex felt all of his certainty drain away. The whispering static in his brain and the smell of decay hit him and he lost it, retreating and smacking his back against the wall. He started to gasp and couldn’t breathe.

  The world won’t slow down, but your mind can. Ask the questions.

  What’s going on?

  There’s something going on through that door. Something awful and dark.

  What do you have?

  I have myself, my bow, and my wits.

  Can you turn back?

  Yes.

  Do you want to turn back?

  Absolutely not.

  Forward. Alex moved rapidly down the hall until he reached the faux tomb door, and found that it had no handle, but pushed, like a kitchen door.

  He put his shoulder to the door and swung it open, bracing himself against the growing smell. Inside, at the far wall, he saw two figures immersed in a deed of strange horror.

  In a circle of glittering blood that glowed with its own vampiric force, one figure kneeled on the ground, bent and drinking from what Alex took at first to be a bird feeder, it was such a large, wide goblet. The figure wore a shroud and veil. Her face inside the veil, eyeless and skinless—Skull-headed, Alex thought—was dipped in the blood and drinking.

  The second figure was tall, with hooflike legs of ice, clad in red, his long hair now pulled back, his hand on the veiled woman’s shoulder. Icemaker. The pose of the vampire and the skull-headed lady suggested nothing so much to Alex as a child co
mpelling a kitten to partake of a saucer of milk.

  “My ichor, my body,” whispered the clan lord. “Take it in, beloved, O Claire, take it in and join me.”

  Shaking, Alex raised the Polibow and cocked it, getting Icemaker’s attention.

  Claire, the newly raised, looked up. Her skull face, obscured by the gauzy veil, dripped with the glittering blood of Icemaker. Alex shot one bolt and caught the skeleton in the sternum, sending it tumbling back.

  Icemaker looked in horror at the fallen skeleton and then turned to Alex, baring his fangs. Alex fired again and Icemaker held out his hand. A bolt of air as cold and hard as a hammer smacked Alex’s arm, tossing the weapon aside.

  The lord shot forward in a single, fluid motion, grabbing Alex up like a puppy. Alex felt his skin pulled tight as the vampire’s claws dug into the back of his neck, dragging him across the floor.

  “You think this is your destiny, is that it?” the nobleman said as Alex fought against his iron grip. The skin of Alex’s neck was screaming in pain. “That you were put on this earth to vex me?”

  His voice had that strange sound of raggedness, ice and water.

  Alex sucked in air, then managed to say, “You have vexed yourself. You have damned yourself.”

  “If I have damned myself then God does not need warriors like you,” the vampire replied. He stopped, holding Alex a few inches off the ground. “If Heaven is His to rule then the suffering wrought by my kind should be of no concern to Him.”

  “And yet,” Alex said, managing to shrug, “here we are.” The vampire was going to kill him. Think. What do you have?

  Icemaker brought Alex close and spoke to him. Not a jot of breath came from him as he rasped, “You don’t understand. Polidori did not understand. No Van Helsing could understand. This earth, cold and desolate though it is, is ours to rule. Come, and find your reward in the next world.”

  Icemaker dragged Alex over to the gauzy skeleton he had just raised, who lay there on the floor, staring eyeless.

  Icemaker held Alex aloft, and now brought up a razor-sharp thumb. “My companion needs more blood,” he whispered.

  What do you have?

  I don’t have a damn thing.

  Alex felt the thumb make contact with his neck and dig in. He started to scream when suddenly Icemaker himself hissed in pain as a grappling hook dug into his hand and he yanked it back.

  Alex fell to the ground next to the skeleton, slamming into the wide feeder of the Byronic blood and spilling it. Icemaker roared wordlessly, looking up from where the bolt had come.

  Paul was peering through a basement window. He had shot a grappling gun and now was pulling with all his might at the cord. Sid, behind him, waved Alex toward them.

  “Alex! Let’s go!”

  Alex was drenched, sickened by the powerful, sweet scent of the clan lord’s own glistening, cold ichor wafting up as it soaked through his pants and shirt. He ran out through the painting’s door back into the dark hallway, finding stairs up into the main foyer of the villa.

  Alex could hear a helicopter out on the lawn. They had gotten his message.

  When he got upstairs, Alex dashed toward Sangster, who was running in the front entrance. Behind Sangster, Alex saw Agent Armstrong in the doorway quickly working with some kind of metal tank, using a drill to bolt it to the doorjamb.

  “Icemaker’s down there!” Alex shouted to Sangster, who was nodding that he knew. “He didn’t need the blood of the captives after all; he just needed his own blood. It was enough of a sacrifice for Nemesis and enough to do the raising. But he didn’t finish. She’s just a skull-headed lady!”

  Sangster pointed him out the door. Alex headed past Armstrong in the doorway with the drill, and now he saw that it wasn’t just a single tank but several, situated all around the entrance. Armstrong signaled him to keep moving, and he did, out the front, to where a Polidorium Black Hawk rested on the lawn.

  Alex ran around to the low basement-access window to find Paul and Sid standing back, while Polidorium agents clustered around the opening to keep Icemaker from coming out.

  “You followed me?” Alex said, still shocked.

  “Of course,” Paul said.

  “Where did you get a grappling gun?” Alex exclaimed.

  “Out of your amazing Technicolor dream backpack,” Sid answered, handing it to Alex. “You left it on that motorcycle. And since when do you have a motorcycle?”

  Looking into the window of the basement, Alex could see Icemaker still tugging against the cord when Sangster came in through the door from the hallway. As Sangster entered, firing, Icemaker sent an angry blast of ice that covered over the basement window.

  “Hey!” Alex heard Sangster shout. They heard two more shots.

  A few moments later, Alex heard Sangster running for the door. “Here he comes!” the agent shouted as he moved across the marble floors toward the entrance.

  Sangster hit the entryway and leapt out, past Armstrong, who now rolled away from the doorway with a large metal switch in her hand. Inside, the vampire was coming up the stairs, roaring. Alex left Paul and Sid and moved toward the helicopter, gripping his Polibow.

  “He is hauling ass,” Sangster said.

  Alex saw Armstrong look back through the doorway one last time. Just as Icemaker’s head was topping the stairs that ran down to the lower level, the vampire saw her, and as his arms came up he fired a blast of ice, hitting Armstrong hard in the shoulder and sending her flying off the porch.

  Armstrong lay on the ground, stunned, her shoulder frozen. Sangster swore loudly as Icemaker started making his way across the enormous foyer. The vampire looked down at his chest as Sangster’s hawthorn bullets smacked into his armored doublet and he again held up his hand, raging. Air swirled and froze around his hand. He sent another blast.

  Sangster caught the column of ice on the arm, and it forced him back a dozen yards into the chopper, freezing his hand and forearm there. His Beretta clattered uselessly to the grass.

  Alex had no time to worry about Sangster—his eyes drew toward the switch Armstrong had dropped. They were going to lose Icemaker. Alex reached into the door of the Black Hawk and scanned. Against the wall was a netting laced with straps of glass balls. He grabbed a glass ball and bounded for the porch, taking two steps at a time. For a moment he took shelter behind a column on the porch and judged the distance. Then he jumped out, throwing. The ball sailed in a clean arc toward Icemaker.

  It landed smack against Icemaker’s chest, tinkling into shards and sending deadly rivulets of holy water against the vampire’s neck and face.

  Icemaker staggered back. “You!” he cried.

  Alex brought the Polibow up and fired, striking Icemaker twice in the shoulder. The shaft s stuck there, steam rising off Icemaker as angrily he held up his hand. The air started to cool and swirl. He was going to fire. Alex dived across the porch for the switch as a cold blast of ice shot past, shattering the tips of his hair. He landed next to the door and smacked the switch just as Icemaker leapt across the entryway of the house. As the vampire crossed the threshold, the tanks Alex triggered struck the vampire with a burst of nitrogen. Huge blasts showered down at once, enveloping him.

  The vampire moved across the porch, slowing as he looked around in shock.

  Icemaker let out a painful howl that shook the porch. The vampire made eye contact with Alex for a moment. Alex studied him—the look he saw was not fear, not pain, but raw frustration and anger. That’s right, thought Alex. A Van Helsing has beaten you.

  Icemaker seemed to make up his mind, growing eerily defiant and calm as he stopped fighting the nitrogen. Suddenly he looked Alex again in the eye, calmly. The air froze around him. Layer upon layer built up at once, until he was not to be seen. He would hibernate rather than suffer direct nitrogen encasement, which might freeze the vampire’s cells more deeply than even he could deal with. Within moments, Lord Byron, the Icemaker, had become a block, Lord Byron, the Ice.

  CHAPTER 2
4

  Speaking of ice…Alex sat in Secheron’s ice-cream parlor for the second time in his life, this time joined not just by Minhi, Paul, and Sid but also by Sangster.

  “So where is he being kept?” Alex asked.

  “We have refrigerated places,” Sangster said. “You don’t want to know where.” Sangster had decided he would speak as plainly as possible about his second job with the present company, mainly because they had already witnessed most of the pertinent stuff. He was protected by the insanity of what they might try to reveal—for who would believe any of it?

  “Is this like in The Blob,” Alex asked, “where you attach a parachute to him and drop him in the Arctic?”

  “The Blob?” Minhi said, as she sat holding hands with Paul. Alex felt an utterly tiny pang of jealousy. “That’s the best you can do, a fifty-year-old movie reference?”

  “The Arctic is a lot warmer than it was when that movie was made, so any frozen monster dropped off there runs the risk of not staying frozen long.” Sangster sighed. “But that reminds me that we need to be on the lookout for the Blob. There’s always one more thing.” He laughed.

  Alex nodded. One more thing. The Polidorium had discovered that the lake entrance to the Scholomance near the Villa Diodati was gone. The demonic school was unreachable for now.

  Carerras had agreed not to call Alex’s father, after Alex pleaded with him. For now, that was a favor the Polidorium was willing to extend in thanks for his help stopping a clan lord. Alex himself would have to decide how to proceed with Dad. Since Dad had gone to so much trouble to cover up Alex’s first (unknowing) attack on a supernatural creature, he would surely whisk Alex out of here as well. And Alex wanted anything but that. Not with the Polidorium still in place. Not with these friends.

  “What about the skeleton?” Alex asked. It was something that had been bothering him since that night, and of course he had not been able to go back down into the Villa Diodati, which had been cordoned off. The Polidorium’s cover story was that a tree had damaged the porch in the storm. “What about Claire?”