Alex caught a glimmer of green in the waiting room above—Vienna. She was standing next to a man who must be Mr. Cazorla.
And there was Minhi—next to a tall, olive-skinned woman who looked like her, but with a pixie cut and a little more fullness. And now as he scanned he saw the rest—Ilsa behind them, Paul and Sid, waiting in the wings, and next to them a boy Paul was talking to. Javi, the RA from school. An escort in a pinch for Vienna. They both spoke Spanish. What luck.
The wet coat was bulky and annoying and he stripped it off, letting it fall at his feet, his lapel pin clacking on the boards.
The woman announced that each debutante would be met with a gift, a pen—a gleaming platinum Montblanc, in fact, commemorating the upcoming international meeting this ball was intended to kick off. Although of course Glenarvon was accepting offers of support, Alex figured that one of those pens could pay for most of the books in the library. What are you doing, Alex? You’re here on a hunch. You should be here for real. You should be up there. The mission was a fake and Elle was just playing along when you stretched it out into a threat against the ball. You’re as much a chump as the Merrills.
He thought all of this with a blistering honesty. No, wait. He thought that he thought that.
The man standing behind him had said it.
Alex felt static, finally, far away and muffled.
“Let’s take a walk, Alex,” said Ultravox. “There’s something you’ll want to do.”
Chapter 30
Minhi received her Montblanc from Paul and held on to it as she took his hand and they stepped down the rest of the stairs.
They began to dance as the announcements went on, and she watched the crowd. Her mom was on the side, talking to Mr. Otranto, and she was nodding in a way Minhi had seen before: It was the serene look of a woman hearing a pitch. There were stations around the ballroom where people gathered for fun or for paying a lot of money. Not far from the bar near a side door, there was a table where Ms. Daughtry was taking pledges for the rebuilding of Glenarvon. The punch bowl (for the students) was on the other side of the room where a representative from the upcoming Ministers’ Conference was working the same angle. Minhi’s mom would stop at one or the other soon, probably just to shut Otranto up.
The orchestra segued into calypso again. Javi and Vienna came into view over Paul’s shoulder, Vienna looking charming, smiling as any deb should, but not all the way to her eyes. “You have to admit, this is better than the cages down in the Scholomance,” Paul said.
Minhi laughed. They were swaying, dancing about as much as Paul could manage. “And I got a pen,” she said.
She dropped the pen into her tiny handbag before taking his hand again. That was better.
“What?” Paul asked, looking at her.
“Just . . . enjoying the music,” she said. The dancing was to go on for a few numbers and then there would be a switch; the hostess would announce that they should each dance with their parents, which was charming except that Minhi was there with her mom and she wasn’t sure if they could just sit it out or decide who should lead.
“Damn cell phone,” she said aloud, not intending to.
“Yeah,” Paul said as kindly as he could. He looked around. “You want me to get you some punch?”
She smiled. “Sure.”
Paul gallantly bowed and she curtsied, and he was off, showing some measure of relief. None of this felt quite right.
For a moment she did listen to the music, the rhythmic xylophones and bongos thrumming in her head. She turned around and looked at Ms. Daughtry, who smiled back and waved.
Behind Ms. Daughtry she saw a glint of metal on the floor, shimmering like a jewel in a mound of dark cloth. She waited for Paul and studied the ballroom banners for a moment.
She shot her eyes back to the glint.
Minhi found herself walking toward it and coming around the open doorway, staring at the jewel. Her heart began to thump against her chest as she knelt, reaching out to touch a soaking tuxedo jacket that had been tossed on the floor, water streaming around it.
It was Alex’s lapel pin.
Minhi stood up as the hostess started to announce the parental dance. She followed the stream of water with her eyes and began to run.
“You’ve done very well,” said Ultravox, who still wore a peasant shirt and casual pants, no slave to fashion. Down in the bowels of the ship, in a hold about the size of a two-car garage, the man’s voice echoed off metal walls as they strolled past pallets of cardboard and bins of glass and aluminum. They were walking through a hold where trash and recyclables would be processed, Alex dimly realized. Then the realization drifted away.
“You’re probably wondering why I don’t have an army,” Ultravox said. “The Scholomance is so obsessed with making its point with droves of soldiers, but I find a little bit of leadership can go a long way.”
The vampire was just behind Alex and to the side. Alex started to break free of the voice, when Ultravox said again, “No, you don’t want to raise your hands. You’re tired of all that. Look what it’s got you.”
They were approaching an open door at the end of the room. For a moment it looked strange and unfamiliar, and then Alex blinked and saw that it was a bunk, not full-size, but the kind you’d find on the train from Munich to Rome, decent enough to doze for a few hours after you’ve been walking all day. Ultravox’s voice went on, outside yet somehow inside his head.
“Alex, I told you before that this was as good as it’s going to get, but you’ve only made it worse. Isn’t that just terrible? You have all of these opportunities around you, but you’ll bungle them. The young ladies around you, you can’t seem to decide what to do about them. And I’ll tell you,” the man with the scratchy face and liquid voice continued, “that’s really just as well. You can believe that you would have found happiness, but most people don’t. You won’t; at this rate you’ll be a slave to what you really want to be doing, running around playing cops and robbers. It’s not going to get any better, and it will only get worse. But that’s all right. Tomorrow you can think about it some more.”
Ultravox came around and patted him firmly on the shoulder. “What you want to do now is get some rest.”
It was true. Ultravox was working for the Scholomance but you had to hand it to the guy, what he said always made sense. Alex had allowed Steven to be hurt, had allowed both Merrills to become vampires. He hadn’t prevented his school from burning up. He had disappointed his friends tonight, and for what? There wasn’t any stopping beings that were always going to be stronger and smarter and . . .
Ultravox stepped ahead of him and reached into the bunk. A block of shiny metal sat on the bed, and then as Ultravox spoke Alex realized he had been wrong. “Someone left some bedding here,” said Ultravox. The block of metal shimmered and Alex blinked, and it was just a pile of blankets and pillows. “Let me get it out of the way.”
Ultravox picked up the bedding and set it aside—Alex saw it shimmer, flashing with metal and then smoothing over again—and the vampire put his hands in his cotton pockets.
“It’s a universal feeling, you know. We all ruin our lives in our own ways. I myself had the greatest voice ever known, and I squandered it quietly, living in the shadows. Letting people like Icemaker take all the glory, letting people like your various relatives—few of whom were nearly as resourceful as you, by the way—disrupt any little plan I had going. Your family has certainly been . . . a constant joy, to me and to the Scholomance.
“Six months ago I was offered the ball project. Big targets, and a noble cause. The Scholomance didn’t want the treaty and they knew I’d be the best choice for finding a way to eliminate the key players. And this will come to pass. But a month ago, the richest target of all came along: another Van Helsing. An active one.” The vampire came closer and spoke in his ear. “I can do with my voice what Icemaker couldn’t do with an army of thousands: eliminate you. The Scholomance will have no choice but to finally give m
e the recognition and authority I deserve.”
Ultravox patted Alex on the shoulder. “Bury all that now. Rest,” he said. “Your limbs are heavy and none of it matters anyway.”
The mellifluous voice dripped through Alex’s body, moving him, of course. He stepped forward, grabbed the inside of the bunk, and hauled himself up, lying down. He wanted to sleep. Otherwise he would just keep thinking about how it wasn’t going to get any better.
“I had heard that you might be the exception,” Ultravox was saying. “The only one of your family in generations who had that extra something that your ancestor and his mad son had. But no, you’re just another adventurer, like your father. Not unimpressive—but hardly my problem.” He sighed. “If you think about your life, you will see a fog crossing, enveloping you. It’s better in the fog, where you can rest, and all of this goes away. It should be just a moment.”
Alex barely heard Ultravox say, as he was walking away, “Good night, Van Helsing.”
Chapter 31
In the ballroom Paul returned from the punch bowl to find a blank space where Minhi had been standing.
He kept his chin up—not one to go about slouching was Paul—but he had to admit this date was going poorly.
“Is that champagne?” Vienna spoke, and Paul looked up to see her standing with her father, who was the ministro de something or other.
Paul held out one of the glasses. “It’s, ah, sparkling . . . fruity something or other.”
She took the glass. “And to think the crystal is Lalique,” she said. “This just seems wrong.”
Vienna’s father was round at the middle and mustachioed, and he could have passed either for an aged matinee idol or a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Paul turned to him and offered the other glass. “Care for one?”
“Sparkly fruity something or other?” said the man, with the same accent as Vienna’s. “No, that’s for recovering alcoholics and teenagers.”
“Wouldn’t care to live like a teen?” Paul smiled.
“Wouldn’t care to recover,” the Spaniard said. He didn’t wink but his mustache sort of danced. “I’m off to find the real thing. Let me know if anything interesting happens.”
Minhi’s mother approached. “Have you seen Minhi?”
Paul shrugged.
“It’s a small ship,” Mr. Cazorla said to Minhi’s mother. “She can’t have gotten far. Join me, I’m looking for something stronger than sparkly fruity something or other.”
Minhi’s mother rolled her eyes exactly, precisely the way that Minhi often did, and the two of them headed off for the good stuff.
“Where did your girlfriend go?” Vienna said, watching the parents wander away.
“Is that what she is?” Paul asked. “I sort of wonder.”
“That’s a terrible answer,” Vienna said. “That’s an American answer; I’d expect that from Alex, not from you.” She laughed, and Paul found her teasing very soft edged and infectious.
Vienna went on, “You’re supposed to say ‘But of course! She is my girlfriend!’ Or, ‘No, you fool! I would not have her!’ Leave the half answers and melancholia to the Americans. And the French. They hate one another but they are alike in those ways.”
Paul took a sip of the sparkling whatever and blanched. Syrupy stuff. “I don’t know. She wandered off.”
“My date wandered off before we got in the car,” answered Vienna.
“That’s . . .” Paul shook his head, suddenly defensive of Alex. “He can’t help that. The bloke’s on a short leash.” And that was the truth. Alex was always going to be half there. “He’s another bloody tennis player.”
“A what?”
“Tennis players. Gymnasts, speed skaters, prodigies. The professionals. They look like high school students, they talk like them, but they catch whatever bug, get nabbed by some agent, and you’ve lost them as a friend, or lost a lot of them. That’s what Alex is. Think of him as a speed skater.”
“Eh, I look around this room and I will bet the speed skaters were able to make it,” Vienna said. “I think it’s absurd. You’re only supposed to be married to your work when you have an actual marriage to ruin; when you’re fourteen it’s simply ridiculous.”
“Boy,” said Paul, “get a few sparkling ciders in you and you’re a Spanish Audrey Hepburn all of a sudden. Where’s Javi?”
“Around here somewhere,” Vienna said.
“I love Audrey Hepburn,” said Ilsa as she appeared with Sid in tow. Paul had noticed Sid gamely attempting to keep up with his taller, more graceful date. Not so bad when the band was playing calypso, but when they took a break and the PA started pumping French techno, Sid was lost. “Did you know she grew up in the Netherlands?”
“Who’s that?” Sid asked.
“Audrey . . . someone who was never in a vampire movie,” Paul said.
Sid looked around. “Where’s Minhi?”
Paul and Vienna shrugged, and then the music cut out.
It happened suddenly—one minute the PA system playing an appalling French cover of Rammstein’s “Du Hast,” and the next the heavy bass and French singing stopped, interrupted by a sudden high-pitched whistle.
“May I have your attention,” came a mellifluous voice speaking in English with an untraceable accent. Paul watched as the entire crowd stopped, listening, some in curiosity and some in anger.
“Some of you are prepared for this night. If so, there is something that you will want to do.”
Paul looked at Vienna and Sid. “Oh, no.”
Most of the crowd was listening to this new voice with complete incredulity, but Paul noticed a subtle shift among a few of them—among the debutantes. The debs had frozen, and appeared to be in full receiver mode next to their parents.
Paul saw a tall chestnut-haired deb step forward, her head lifted toward the sound. Another girl near her, a senior by the look of her, had also tilted her head up, eyes glassy and wide.
They were the same girls who had gone gaga over Sid’s stories. They were still poisoned.
“You have in your hands a symbol of your own slavery,” said the voice. “It is time to make yourself free.”
Suddenly the daughters lashed out with the pens, leaping behind their parents, each bringing one arm around the parent’s waist, the other bringing her newly received, sharp-as-a-knife Montblanc pen up to the mother’s or father’s throat.
“Come with us,” said the voice on the intercom.
“Come with us,” said the daughters.
Paul saw Vienna running. She grabbed her own father, but she was dragging him away from the others. “I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “Hurry, we have to get out of here.”
Chapter 32
Alex lay in the bunk, thinking about the night he had spent with his father in the Munich train station as he began to drift to sleep. He shifted his head. He didn’t really need anything more than a light pillow, but the one on the bunk was less than ideal. It seemed hardly there.
The words of Ultravox were still looping in his head, repeating in multiple threads of sound, urging him to rest, to sleep, to give up, to let it go.
The words seemed quiet and yet they were so constant that they blocked out everything, even blotting out the thought of the train station in Munich, the thoughts of his family. Every thought that was not still echoing the voice of Ultravox seemed dulled and distant, and it made him tired to think.
Far in the back of Alex’s brain, a lion was moaning, quiet and far-off, muffled and blanketed.
Alex felt himself drifting to sleep but his head wasn’t perfectly comfortable, the pillow was too thin. Ultravox had picked up some extra bedding and moved it away. Had there been another pillow?
The moaning was rumbling, far-off, like a jackhammer a mile away, a jackhammer he couldn’t hear because the millions of whispers of Ultravox drowned out those troublesome sounds.
Jackhammers and lions . . . all the noise . . . Alex’s life was made up of noise and conflict and constant moveme
nt. But Ultravox had explained to him that there was a better path: sleep. Don’t listen to the jackhammer, to the lion.
His head was miserably uncomfortable. He couldn’t even accomplish sleeping right. Alex opened his eyes slightly, looking for the stack of bedding Ultravox had set aside.
It sat there on a small table, the stack of blankets and pillows Ultravox had pulled out.
No one can overcome it, Alex. His voice threads the brain with his will, until you can’t hear anything else.
In the distance, he heard trees falling and roots being pulled aside. Giant paws slapping earth. Faraway trees in the back of the woods, where the lion growled, barely audible.
The stack of bedding seemed strange and dull. Alex looked at it.
There’s something special about you, and it has them worried.
The whispering of Ultravox, the echoes in his head, increased, and for a moment he lost the sound of the falling trees. But suddenly the distant noise was there again, growling and pounding.
The bedding stacked on the table looked strange and shimmering. For a second it changed and Alex saw a block of aluminum cans, pressed by thousands of pounds of force into a perfect and portable block.
Now the sound of the pounding was growing, and Alex saw the bedding and then he blinked on purpose and saw the block, and tried to think.
There was a clicking sound, a machine, and Alex started to feel the bunk vibrating.
The lion—his own brain, his own Alex Van Helsing static—was running desperately toward him, wake up, the trees falling with wrenching and tearing sounds, and now Alex did something he had never done before.
He saw the static. He was aware of it, he reached out to it and beckoned to it, and like a lion of legend it burst through and uprooted trees and roared.
The lion roared and Ultravox whispered in his brain until the lion opened its jaws and sucked the whispering wind away.
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