Find somewhere high.
Not far from her was the second-story window of a shop, and it had a small balcony with flowerpots. At the edge of that building Alex saw a stalled car that had rammed into a drainage pipe.
Heavy static throbbed in his brain as he cut around the vampires who were grabbing people.
“Alex, get back and wait for backup!” Sangster called.
“I’m going after Elle!” Alex shouted. There was a chance that without their leader in the operation, they might slow down in confusion. It would buy the agents time. Alex leapt onto the hood of the car, which was parked under the store’s balcony, and then grabbed a drainpipe at the corner of the building, yanking at it to see if it would hold his weight. Satisfied, he scrambled up until he was across from the balcony.
It was just out of reach.
Six inches. Leap, grab, hold on. Do it now.
His arm sang with pain as he grabbed the rusted metal and swung wild beneath it, his legs churning in the air until he brought them up and stilled himself. He climbed up onto the outside of the balcony railing and began walking sideways along it.
When he was about even with Elle, who was four feet down and fifteen feet out into the street, he brought his Polibow up. He was ready to pump a bolt into her heart as soon as his arm found her chest. He turned to shoot.
Suddenly she was already in midair, a flash of white as she leapt across the distance, hitting him like a sledgehammer to the chest. Her white hands grabbed his throat and he felt weightless for a second. Then the wooden frame and plate glass of the shop’s french doors burst apart behind his shoulders, and they tumbled together into a storage room, landing in sacks of flour and glass.
“Alex!” Elle laughed. “I was genuinely wondering when you were gonna show up.”
Alex rolled away from her and grabbed a sack of flour, hurling it into her face. It hit her hard and she flipped back, the flour exploding around the room. Alex looked around quickly.
Mixer, metal bowls, flour, sugar, desk, letters, letter opener.
Alex reached for the desk, lifting himself up and grabbing the letter opener. He got to his feet and backed up. He had a stake in his go package, but he would have to reach around for it and she was fast.
Elle took a moment to brush the flour off, waving in the air in front of her.
“This is a new look for you,” Alex said.
“Don’t you just love it?”
“Is the whole Scholomance dressed up like the Day of the Dead now or just this crew?”
“This is a vanguard, Alex. We’re the front line. You are so screwed I can’t even tell you.”
“Come on!” Alex held out the letter opener. “Elle, what is going on? The Scholomance is supposed to be secret, right? You can’t take over a town and keep a low profile.”
“I’m sure you’ll clean it up.” Her legs coiled as she leapt. He thrust up with the letter opener and caught the folds of cloth under her arms. She flipped over him and brought him down to the ground, her arm around his throat. She whispered in his ear as she lifted him up off the ground. She was so incredibly strong. Elle dragged him toward the window. “Look.”
Down below, the cage was nearly full of captives. He heard the rumbling of trucks as a pair of Polidorium vans pulled onto the street behind the crowds farther up the avenue.
“Yeah, that’s the cavalry,” Alex said, his voice raspy from being in a choke hold. There were gunshots now, as agents poured into the streets from the vans. Alex watched puffs of fire go up as skull-faced vampires exploded.
“Aren’t you going to ask,” Elle whispered, “what it means?”
“What what means? The people, the captives?” Alex said, his mind racing. He felt compelled to play her game, if nothing else, to see if she would relax enough that he could reach into the go package she was smashing him against and grab the handle of his stake. “Are they sacrifices?”
“No.” She spoke as if she planned to count his answers.
“Hmm. You’re replenishing your stock.” Down in the Scholomance the vampires fed off captives, but they were usually carefully chosen from among people reported missing or otherwise already given up. It would be strange to grab a bunch of people off the street.
“No, for all the reasons you’re smart enough to figure out,” Elle said, as though she could read his mind.
Alex listened to the whine of the infernal engine of the carriage and the false, panting skeletal horses. The bone power was new, a big deal, Sangster had said. “It’s a show. A show of power.”
“Not bad,” she said.
“But what power?”
“The one you thought you could stop.” Elle seemed to shiver for a moment as a reedy, high-pitched call cut through the street, and the procession of vampires below parted.
Alex had his shot. As her body momentarily relaxed, he reached back with his right hand and found the hilt of his special silver-laced stake. He grabbed it and slammed it into her side, the nearest point he could. She shrieked as it hissed against her flesh.
He didn’t waste time once she let go of him. Alex climbed over the balcony and jumped, aiming for a skull-faced vampire and hitting him in the back with his knees. Alex rolled to the ground and got up, vampires jostling around him. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the emerging, reedy call.
Then he saw it: As the crowd parted there came a long horse, this one not made of bone but instead somehow worse, alive and elongated, skeletal but stretched with skin. The horse was the length of the carriage Elle had driven.
Riding atop the horse was a figure in white, wearing a thin veil that shimmered in the darkness. One arm gripped a long, narrow, bony scythe.
Beneath the veil he could see a strange white visage, very nearly a skull, with shining glimmers where its eyes should be. It was Claire, the Queen of the Dead.
“It’s impossible.” Alex spoke into his microphone. “She’s supposed to be stuck and unable to come back. They needed my blood.”
“Looks like they got what they needed,” Sangster guessed.
The Queen swept her arms and Alex started at the sound of a cracking whip. Elle was back in the carriage now, and the Queen remained as Elle guided the carriage toward the marina.
The Queen drew what looked like a reddish spear and threw it to the ground, and Alex watched the staff stick there and vibrate.
After a second it grew taller, flowering out into a wagon-wheel-like shape at the top. The wagon wheel tilted and then began to revolve, suggesting a mechanism.
“It looks like a satellite dish.” Alex’s brain blazed with powerful energy passing over him as the “dish” swiveled.
A pair of heavily armed Polidorium agents pushed past Alex and aimed at the Queen and began firing. Vampires scattered and the Queen looked down, her skull-like face behind the veil leveling its gaze on them. She rode forward, their bullets pounding against her, sizzling but not exploding.
She whipped the scythe, catching vampires and agents alike. Screams rang out only to be cut short.
Alex moved backward, stumbling and falling to the ground.
He got to his feet and reached back, finding a silver knife and throwing it in one move. The knife bounced off the scythe as it came around, and then the Queen brought it around again, this time to strike him down.
No time to leap, no place to move.
He heard another high-pitched whine, like a motorcycle.
The scythe came sweeping down and a four-foot-long green staff flashed before his eyes, coming from nowhere. The metal staff parried the scythe’s blow, and the Queen jolted her head sideways in surprise.
Alex felt someone grab him by the collar and pull him back, and a green motorcycle of no make he had ever seen before whipped around and in front of him.
The rider wore a blue helmet and was obviously female, wearing a light-colored jacket over her thin frame. Her back turned to Alex, the rider shrieked at the Queen in a language he couldn’t identify.
Suddenly
the figure cried in English, “Traitor!”
Silence. The Queen brought her free hand up to her scythe and touched her fingers, almost shrugging. There was a hint of merriment in her blazing veiled eyes.
“No traitor,” she said thickly, in English. “Triumphant.”
Something in the air popped, and Alex felt light filtering into his eyes from above. A great hole had opened where the dark curtain of night was retracting, and light clouds crossed the daytime sky as the great reddish horse turned, and the Queen galloped toward the lake like a fluid and screaming ghost. The last of the vampires that had not retreated with Elle’s carriage went with the skull-headed lady, surrounding the horse and moving just as fast. Within moments, the streets were empty of the dead and gleamed with sunlight.
All that remained were the Polidorium agents and the rider of the green motorcycle, which churned with a muffled softness as near-organic as the engine of the Queen’s carriage. Alex saw that other than handlebars, the bike was devoid of controls.
The girl on the bike flipped her staff and it collapsed to about a foot long, and she stuck it in a saddlebag.
“Who are you?” Alex asked. But already he had a suspicion, an inkling he could not explain.
The girl took off her helmet, turned her head, and smiled. It was Astrid.
CHAPTER 6
The avenue was awash in radio chatter as Sangster and Alex approached Astrid. “Who are you?” Sangster asked again, yanking off his gas mask. Alex was stunned and silent.
“Astrid Gretelian. I’m here about Claire.”
“About Claire?” Sangster repeated the name incredulously. “How did you even know there was a Claire?”
She looked around as though it might not be safe to talk. Sangster cast a glance back at the restaurant behind them. The door was open and he nodded in that direction. They began to walk, Astrid keeping her distance as she rolled her bike. Sangster shouted into his Bluetooth to the others.
“See if there are any vampires left in the village. I doubt it because of the sunlight, but make sure there aren’t any hiding indoors. Armstrong? Get with communications; find out what the deal was with that dish thing.”
The three of them gathered in the restaurant and stood next to a brick wall, surrounded by empty tables with white linens. Some of them had been overturned.
“All right, Astrid Gretelian,” Sangster said. “Answers.”
“You don’t have to talk to me that way.” Astrid frowned. “I just saved your friend.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Astrid—”
“She’s new at school,” Alex interrupted. “I met her this morning. She said she’s from the Netherlands, and I think that’s right.” He watched the girl with a mixture of distrust and admiration. She had saved his life, surely, but this morning she had pretended to be…what? Had she pretended anything at all?
“And she’s a witch,” Sangster said evenly.
A witch. Alex took the word like a slap to the face even though it wasn’t aimed at him, because it was the second time that word had come into his life in any real, magical way in a short time. His mother was a witch.
Alex thought of his mother, Amanda, who had the tall, blond model good looks of a Swedish pop star—the same good looks his own twin sister had, but of which he judged he had inherited precisely none. His mom was many things—a charitable organizer, a professor sometimes, a deft manager of five children, and through it all she carried an ironic and whimsical tone that seemed to armor her against any kind of upset. She could be funny and sometimes cruel, but she was loving.
And yes, a witch, and not the let-me-figure-out-who-you’re-going-to-marry-with-this-Ouija-board kind, but a let-me-shut-these-windows-with-my-mind kind. But Amanda had given up an active life of witchcraft when she had married an agent of the Polidorium, Alex’s dad.
Astrid was a witch like his mother. She had beaten back the Queen with magic words and swung a weapon that didn’t act like anything he’d ever seen.
But Alex didn’t sense any static coming off Astrid. If she were evil, somehow, if she were something dark, wouldn’t his brain be buzzing?
He looked at her again, his eyes suddenly widening. Holy crap, do you know my mom?
“What is Claire?” Sangster asked, bringing Alex back to reality. Alex wasn’t sure if Sangster was testing her or trying to figure out the real answer.
“Claire Clairmont,” Astrid said. “Born in 1798, half sister of Mary Shelley and lover of Lord Byron.”
“And according to history, she died an old spinster governess,” Sangster added.
Astrid put her bony hands on her hips, looking impatient. “Well, according to history, John Polidori died a feeble drug addict in 1821, but we know better, don’t we?”
Sangster betrayed no emotion, but Alex knew the gears in Sangster’s head had to be turning as much as his own were. The fact that John Polidori, a British writer who had first identified Lord Byron as a vampire, had gone underground and founded the organization they worked for was far from common knowledge. How could she know this? But by itself it didn’t prove anything; even Minhi knew that much about the Polidorium, and Astrid had spent the night talking to Minhi.
Astrid went on. “Claire Clairmont was obsessed with Lord Byron, and after his death traveled to Russia in the 1820s. There she allowed herself to be recruited based on the power of her inborn abilities to seduce, and she learned the magical arts. But it was all for her own purposes: she wanted eternal life, with Byron, with whom she made an undead, unholy pact. She made him a more powerful vampire and sacrificed herself. But at the right time, he would revive her and they would rule together.”
“Rule together?” Sangster seemed to be trying to decide whether he found that plausible. “Yeah, lemme throw out history again. Byron hated Claire.”
“Well.” Alex shrugged, but that was as far as he got.
“Oh, please.” Astrid turned to her reflection in a large glass wine jug against the wall and started unraveling one of her pigtails and rebanding it. As she held a rubber band in her mouth she went on. “Are you going to stand there and tell me that Lord Byron himself did not just three months ago attempt to resurrect Claire to be the Queen of the Vampires?”
Alex turned to Sangster with his hands open, as if to say, So she knows everything. “But that didn’t work,” Alex said. “Byron failed and he’s locked away. And then Byron’s disciple, Elle, tried her damnedest to get my blood to finish resurrecting her, and she failed.”
“Wait, she needed your blood, why?” Astrid asked.
Alex glanced at Sangster—was this secret? Did it matter? Sangster nodded and Alex continued. “Byron used some of my blood to start bringing Claire back from a pile of bones he’d summoned. But he didn’t get enough, so Elle came for more.”
“And that wasn’t enough, either?” Astrid kept her eyes on the glass jar, then took another pigtail apart and twisted it, splaying the rubber bands in her fingers. Her accent was so…odd and yet normal, just a hint of non-English, causing enough to come out ee-nahff.
“Well, I mean, I didn’t let her actually have any of it. It’s not free.”
Astrid chuckled, a high, cheery laugh that snorted out quickly as she finished rebanding the last stray pigtail. She tilted her head, surveying all of them in the curvature of the giant jug. “So it looks like they managed anyway—maybe they took a sample of your blood while you were sleeping?”
Sangster rubbed the back of his neck and turned to Alex, considering it. “Wouldn’t have to be blood. They have labs at the Scholomance; they might have used your DNA. All it would take is a strand of hair.”
“Not a strand of hair,” Alex said, sighing. “I lost a contact case with my lenses in town a few weeks ago. There could have been stuff on the lenses.”
“Right.” Astrid smiled awkwardly. “So however they got it, they got your DNA and used it to finish raising Claire. And now she’s back. And let me tell you, the moment she hit this realm,
we heard about it. And I was sent to look into it.”
“We?” Alex asked. “Who’s we?”
Armstrong stuck her head through the front door of the restaurant. “Sangster? Come look at this.”
They followed her to the Polidorium van that still sat in the center of the road. Inside, a technician was attaching long cables to a computer panel he’d opened in the side door. Over his head, on the screen, two lines shimmered. Alex did not recognize the language.
Sangster looked around, then at Astrid. “Can you read that?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You spoke a language to Claire. Was it this one?”
“I spoke the language of Dulle Grit,” she said.
“What’s Dulle Grit?” Alex asked.
“Dulle Grit is fascinating.” Astrid’s shoulders bobbed with excitement, and she momentarily returned to the girl he had met a few hours before. “You’re going to love—”
Sangster held up a hand. “Save that for study hall, okay? So you spoke a language shared by your organization.”
“Doesn’t your organization have a language?”
“English.”
“Ours is a little older.” Astrid looked at the words. “But this isn’t Hexen verbiage. This is…coded.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Alex said. “Who’s the we you said, who’s your organization?” This was very strange.
“Hexen,” Sangster answered before Astrid could open her mouth again. “She works for an organization called Hexen.”
“See? Aren’t you glad we met?” Astrid said, touching him on the shoulder. “You’re going to need my help.”
“I’ve never heard of Hexen.” Alex eyed her warily.
“That surprises me.”
“Why?”
“He’s new,” Sangster explained. “But I don’t understand. We haven’t heard from Hexen in years. And as I recall you want it that way.”
“We protect the world in very different ways.”
“And they sent you to beat back an invasion from the Skull-Headed Lady? What are you, fourteen?”
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