The Triumph of Death

by Jason Henderson

  Paul seemed to be thinking and then he deferred to Alex. “But you don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Alex shrugged. “What would you say? ‘Hi, Mom, my friend the vampire-hunting spy wants you to know that there might be a global catastrophe next week?’ Without proof?”

  “Right.” Paul nodded. “So that’s not the plan. But what is the plan?”

  “We have to solve it.” Sid rose and went to a whiteboard, and the other two instantly seemed to snap into a different mode, going around to take seats and pop open laptops. From the whiteboard Sid said, “What do we know?”

  Without hesitation, Alex began to pour out the facts and soon the whiteboard filled with key words, CLAIRE and TRIUMPH OF DEATH and STRANGERS and HEXEN.

  All horrible, all awful, of course, but even so, a wave of relief washed over Alex because he was sharing it with them. They were his team. As sure as Armstrong was Sangster’s partner, he needed Paul, Sid, and Minhi to feel less alone and to think.

  “Hexen?” Minhi raised a hand. “I don’t recognize that.”

  “Ah. Right,” Alex said. “That’s a whole other organization, made up of witches.”

  “Wait. Astrid is one of them, isn’t she?” Minhi guessed this before any evidence had been laid before her. “That’s why she just turned up when Claire did. And so…that’s why she’s been missing, too.”

  “Yes. Did you happen to cover for her?”

  Minhi shook her head. “No—maybe if you’d asked. Maybe if you’d said, ‘Hey, Astrid and I are hopping over to Spain to see if Vienna can order us some paella.’”

  “I totally did not know Astrid was involved,” Alex said. “But she was here to investigate Claire.”

  “Claire,” Sid said. “There’s a nightmare.”

  Alex turned his chair and rested his hands on the back, looking at Sid. “You told us some stuff about Claire when Icemaker was here,” he said. “Can you bring me up to speed?”

  Sid leaned back and seemed to flip through pages in his mind. The boy was an encyclopedia of knowledge on vampires and everything related to them, and the group of vampires that circled around Lake Geneva was a favorite topic. “Well, we all know that she was the queen that Byron, or Icemaker, was trying to raise when he came back. But at first, Claire Clairmont was just a young woman who followed Lord Byron here from England with Mary Shelley and John Polidori. And Byron was cruelest with her—they had a baby, Allegra, who Byron took with him even when he turned his back on Claire. And then he got sick of taking care of the baby and had her put in a convent.”

  “Did Claire ever get to see either of them again?”

  “No, and she was…enraged. But there was nothing she could do. And then she got word that Allegra had died without even hearing from her father. The girl died among strangers and was buried without Claire ever getting to see her again.”

  “But we know that Icemaker went through an awful lot to bring Claire back to life to rule as his queen,” Alex said. “Why would that be? If he hated her so much.”

  Minhi glanced at Alex. “Sometimes we’re obsessed with things we shouldn’t be. Maybe his hatred of her turned into a kind of obsessive love.”

  “And he was a vampire,” Alex said. “His empathy centers are all damaged, and obsession is what you get instead of love. So: we’ve got Icemaker, obsessed with Claire and bringing her back—and he’s now safely locked away. And we’ve got Claire, obsessed with Icemaker as far as we know, but also hating him. And now she’s trying to set off the Triumph of Death.”

  “What did Claire’s warning say? What is lost will be found? And you said this spell would give her command over the dead. She’s lost Byron, but she also lost Allegra, her daughter,” said Sid.

  Minhi said, “If she encases the world in darkness, maybe she can bring her daughter back.”

  “Look, I feel as sorry for this lady as anybody. But sometimes we don’t get what we want.” Alex looked back at Minhi. “Sometimes we want something and the time for it just…passes. The thing we have to worry about now is how to stop it.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Minhi offered.

  “I’m worried we’ll be too slow. We don’t have the tools. It’s like we’re being played. The custodian at the Prado knew something, but he’s part of the big conspiracy of not talking, the rogue element, the Strangers. Screw that. They’re playing with us, and we need to stop playing.”

  Alex’s phone buzzed and he looked at it, then stepped to the window.

  Down at the edge of the courtyard, Astrid was waiting on her Hexen motorcycle. Minhi and Paul looked over Alex’s shoulder.

  “You want to ask her in?” Paul said.

  Alex shook his head. “I gotta go. There’s one more person who should know what the clues mean and can tell us how to stop the Triumph of Death,” Alex said. “We need to get the answers from him.”

  “Alex,” Sid said, still at the table. “I know what you’re thinking and it’s crazy. ‘Too dangerous’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  “What?” Paul and Minhi asked at the same time.

  Alex looked back at Sid. “He’s the only one who will know how to deal with her.”

  Minhi asked, “Who?”

  “Icemaker,” said Alex. “I need to talk to Lord Byron.”

  CHAPTER 14

  They called it Icemaker Station.

  Very near the house on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had almost ended Alex Van Helsing’s life, the immortal vampire once known as Lord Byron and code-named Icemaker waited and slept in a chunk of ice. The curse that Byron had taken on himself near the end of his mortal life, the magic that enabled him to use and freeze the liquid in the air around him, had provided a final retreat when the Polidorium had caught up with him and doused him with liquid nitrogen, one of the coldest substances on earth. Byron opted to continue the process and encase himself in a protective chunk of ice, and there he stayed.

  His captors didn’t take him very far. The seven-foot-tall, four-foot-wide chunk of ice that held Lord Byron rested in silence in a liquid-helium-cooled refrigerator the size of a small house securely reinforced in a cell built just for him, half a mile below Lausanne, Switzerland. Manned twenty-four hours a day by chemists and security guards, with extra chambers and cells both under construction and ready for future prisoners, Icemaker Station occupied three city blocks’ worth of space below the Olympic Museum, an access point chosen in part for its outward serenity and its complete lack of connection to either the world of anti-vampirism or the world of ultra-low-temperature experimentation. The fact that there were five world-class high magnetic field laboratories around Lake Geneva, providing a rich source of new hires to work on Icemaker Station, was a bonus.

  Within seven hours of leaving Vienna Cazorla behind, Alex was getting out of a van at the edge of Lake Geneva at the Olympic Museum, a severe white-stone building set off by a much more inviting park. As Alex ran up the granite steps in a leather jacket that did nothing to stop the leaching cold coming off the lake, he took in a whole garden of sculpture dedicated to the constant search for human physical perfection.

  “Every cell in my body is telling me this is a bad idea, so pay close attention.” Sangster was rattling off instructions as they walked. “Do everything the staff tells you. If a rule sounds stupid, do it anyway. Polidorium Incarceration are the most competent jailers on the face of the earth, so respect every word they say.”

  “I got it,” Alex said, freezing.

  “Astrid?” Sangster said.

  She nodded. “Sure.”

  Fir trees and rich green shrubbery nestled against the cold and blinding-white concrete museum. Around it, Alex saw huge gray figures that held aloft the Olympic circles and cyclists arrested forever in bronze and, of course, the Olympic torch. When he beheld a gray sculpture of a pistol with its barrel twisted into uselessness by the Olympic Spirit, Alex briefly envisioned the Olympic Spirit as some shot-putting Jolly Green Giant, thundering across the countrysid
e, throwing train cars and spitefully knotting the barrels of perfectly good gun sculptures.

  This was the kind of place where, as a young man of certain expectations sent overseas, Alex was supposed to be spending his time. If he were to call his mom right now and tell her that he was visiting Le Parc Olympique, Lausanne, she would think that he had finally become the student she’d always wanted him to be. Extra points maybe if he said he was with the new girl from the Netherlands.

  As Alex, Astrid, and Sangster walked swiftly through the glass doors and into the sweeping rotunda of the museum, where twenty-foot-tall wall screens ran constant loops of human victory, his heart sank.

  They walked past the screens to a stairwell, to a staff elevator only Sangster could unlock.

  “Here we go, then,” Sangster said, and they plunged liked stones into the secret world they had chosen.

  The door of the elevator opened, and they stepped into a stark white hallway where a Polidorium security guard examined Sangster’s credentials before they could move on. Sangster was putting away the security card he carried in his wallet when they heard the approach of heavy heels smacking against tile.

  All three turned around to see a tall woman with tightly curled short hair, wearing a white coat, approaching, swinging her arms like an automaton. “Agent Sangster, we’re almost ready for you,” she said. “You’re early. I don’t remember you ever being early for anything.”

  Sangster’s mouth curled only slightly into a smile, and it might actually have been more of a grimace. “Alex, Astrid, this is Dr. Bella Kristatos. She’s our director of cryogenics and altered states.”

  “Altered states?” Alex asked.

  Dr. Kristatos turned to Alex. “My field is cryogenics, but I have fifteen years in the study of matter transformation—werewolf stuff, teeth into fangs, and so on. So I’m covering the department.” She turned to Sangster. “But we do have an opening if you know an altered-state scientist who’d like to work underground on Lake Geneva.”

  Sangster put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Most of my friends are teaching Huckleberry Finn.”

  “And most of my friends are cutting his class,” Alex said, shaking the woman’s hand. Kristatos was two inches taller than Sangster and projected an air not unlike an Olympic giant herself. As she lowered her arm he saw her sleeve flutter and he caught a glimpse of the veins and sculpted muscles of her forearm.

  “Where is he now?” Sangster asked.

  Kristatos was shaking Astrid’s hand, and Astrid seemed to bounce with extra enthusiasm as if to make up for the doctor’s dryness; she kissed the woman on both cheeks, and Kristatos had to almost peel Astrid’s hand off hers. “We’re just transferring him to the interview tank.” She gestured and urged them all to follow. “If we hurry you might get to see the heat vent.”

  At once they were rushing to follow Kristatos’s long strides as she unlocked and moved through three different metal-mesh-windowed doors. They passed labs and double doors to what Alex briefly made out to be holding cells.

  Now the doctor stopped at a final blue door and looked at them, a darkened window revealing distant track lighting over her shoulder. “Check it out; I really think this is pretty amazing.” She was human after all.

  She pushed through the door and they all walked into a room the size of a two-car garage, with blue-gray concrete walls except for the back wall, which was glass. Alex stepped closer and saw that a glass wall separated them from the other half of the room.

  Beyond the glass partition, the ceiling and floor were concrete but for a series of heavy-looking vents. It was a cage.

  Alex saw what looked like scuba gear attached with suction cups to the inside of the cage. A mask with straps hung there, like he’d seen fighter pilots wear in the movies.

  Within this room-within-the-shaft, visible through the glass partition, sat a tall chunk of ice that Alex had last seen on the night Icemaker almost killed him.

  “Is that shatter-resistant glass?” Sangster asked.

  Kristatos shook her head. “Plexiglas, and reinforced with silver.”

  “What’s that?” Alex indicated a round black suction cup on the inside of the cage wall.

  “It’s a microphone.”

  “Don’t forget,” Sangster told Alex, “the quarry has been unconscious for three months, so remember this when you talk to him. Don’t reveal any events he wouldn’t already know about.”

  Alex nodded. He got it: As far as Icemaker was concerned, the Queen was still dead.

  Kristatos spoke a code, fished a headset out of her pocket, recited another series of numbers and letters, and put the device away.

  Alex went over to the wall and tapped on it, confused. “We’re going to talk to the chunk of ice?”

  Suddenly there was a sharp, loud crack, and Alex looked at the glass case in alarm.

  “That’s the heat from the air in the shaft,” said Dr. Kristatos. “You might want to stand back.”

  “What? Why?” Alex stepped back, trying to follow the sounds. He saw water beginning to trickle out of a vent in the ceiling.

  “Because I hate to admit it, but this is the first time we’ve ever tried this.”

  Water sprayed from the ceiling as though a pipe had burst, and Alex heard an audible crack, distant and then sharpening as steam began to rise. A machine gun–like series of cracking sounds rattled beyond the glass as that section filled with steam.

  Vents slammed open in the floor along the walls near Alex’s feet, and Kristatos said, “Don’t be alarmed. We’re just venting the steam to relieve pressure so the cage doesn’t explode.”

  For a moment, they were all enveloped in steam. Alex made out Astrid pulling out her staff and he tensed himself, feeling as though they were back in the soot and smoke of Vienna’s pensione. A minute later, the steam began to thin, the haze opening, and the glass cage came once more into view.

  Now it was full of milky fluid, mostly water, and there seemed to be water streaming down the front of it as well, maybe in some thin track between two panes. This gave the cage an even more dreamy appearance, and as Alex looked down at the vapor that still surrounded his feet, he felt completely isolated from the world as he knew it, even the crazy world he had come to know.

  Alex heard Sangster blow out a long, steady breath he had clearly been holding in. Dr. Kristatos stood with them, and now even she seemed hesitant.

  The milky, hazy cage, full from top to bottom with water now, seemed empty, but the shadow moving in the back and the static howling in Alex’s brain told him otherwise.

  Astrid and Alex each stepped forward, reaching out an arm to block the other. The milky substance began to churn.

  The creature that was Lord Byron slipped like a shark through the water and crashed into the glass wall. His black hair swirled in the water as he flattened his claw-like hands against the glass. His eyes were open, and he was looking straight at Alex.

  Kristatos held out a small microphone to Sangster and the agent shook his head, gesturing toward Alex.

  Alex tentatively took the device in his hand, running his finger over a talk button. He looked up at the vampire, who whipped his head slightly to whisk away a strand of hair. He seethed, his unbreathing mouth open in the milky water. He had his nails against the glass as though he were planning to claw through it.

  “Well,” Sangster said to Alex. “You wanted to talk to him. So talk.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Tell me again why the guy who uses water as his main source of power is in a water tank?” Alex whispered to Sangster and Kristatos.

  “He uses ice as his power,” Kristatos corrected him.

  “Yeah, so shouldn’t he be in, like, a dry sauna?”

  “You don’t need to whisper.” The scientist looked at the vampire floating against the glass, watching them. “He can’t hear us. But to answer your question, it’s actually safer this way. By encasing him in a full tank, any freezing he does is likely to surround him with ice
and overwhelm him.”

  “Likely?”

  Kristatos breathed deeply and crossed her arms. “Well—”

  “Look, we tried the sauna in the fifties, okay?” Sangster cut in.

  “Okay, okay.” Alex looked at his hands and thumbed the microphone. It was now or never. If he waited any longer, he was going to lose his nerve. The last time he had been this close to the vampire, Icemaker had been holding him aloft and starting to cut Alex’s throat.

  Click. “Hi, Byron.”

  In the water tank, the vampire looked startled for a brief moment, then recovered. He flapped his arms, floating back and searching the wall with what appeared to be an amused curiosity. Then Byron spotted the black apparatus and pilot’s mask and floated toward it. He smiled a cruel, thin smile and made no attempt to respond.

  Alex continued. “Long t—”

  “Careful,” Sangster whispered, and Alex keyed the mike off.

  “What?”

  “Byron has no idea how long he’s been frozen; it’s better not to reference time.”

  “Do you want to do this?”

  “No. I’m actually sort of enjoying it like it is,” Sangster replied.

  Click. “I’d like to say I’m sorry to wake you.”

  “He can talk,” Kristatos said. “If he puts on the mask.”

  Alex nodded, wondering how strange his voice must sound coming from a speaker under the water. He looked at Byron. “If you want to answer—”

  “Van Helsing.” The voice came reedy and wet, burbling out of Byron’s mouth as he held the mask to his face. He had figured it out instantly, and sounded bored already. Alex shuddered, feeling as though his name had just been spoken by an evil wave.

  Don’t you want to ask where you are? Alex thought, but he was looking in Byron’s red eyes and realized that even if Byron did, he wouldn’t ask outright. That would show vulnerability. Byron was determined to show that they had him exactly where he wanted them.

  Byron drew back at once and tucked his head, preparing to ram the wall. Sangster quickly snatched the mike.