By blues, Armstrong was referring to the way vampires appeared on Polidorium infrared systems, which were enhanced to make especially cold creatures pop. You couldn’t photograph vampires, but you could save an infrared image of them, and the Polidorium files were filled with pencil sketches and digital infrared shots. Alex had heard that the earliest attempts at field use of infrared had failed because the vampires simply blended in too much; the enhancements had been a major leap forward.
“There has to be.” Sangster sounded confused. “Could they be camouflaged?”
“Not against us.” Armstrong shook her head and took a heavy jacket that Sangster offered her, slipping it on over her blouse.
The van swerved as a man on an old motor scooter swooped in front of them, barely missing them. The scooter didn’t have its headlights on. It wobbled across the street and Alex winced as it sideswiped a curb next to a flower shop and toppled over. It wasn’t a fatal fall.
“Blues? You think the Scholomance is behind—what exactly is this?”
“This is nothing we’ve ever seen before,” Sangster said.
“When did it happen?” Alex asked.
“About forty-five minutes ago a cloud, heavy, like a storm cloud, started gathering over Secheron near the marina. Except that it kept growing and expanding.” He gestured out the window. “It’s not just blocking the sun from above—it’s as though the whole town has been encased in nightfall. That perimeter we drove through is the edge of it.”
“It’s magical,” Alex said. “Like the entrance to the Scholomance.” The vampire organization was hidden behind various doors, which boasted similar permeable curtains. “Wait—how do you know we’ll be able to drive back out now that we’re in?”
“We don’t know anything right now,” Armstrong answered. “But we saw some cars speeding out of the city, so it doesn’t look like it’s that kind of seal.”
Alex heard the crash of glass as one of the shop windows disintegrated. He didn’t see anything that had been thrown, but then he saw someone running out with a cash register.
“Are these people crazy? Are they under some kind of spell?”
Sangster jogged his head back and forth as if he were tossing the idea around. “We can’t tell. What do you feel?”
“What?”
“What do you feel?” Sangster repeated the question, and Alex shrank back physically, feeling cornered. The strange skills he possessed were not something for which he had a rule book.
Alex opened his hands. “Why would I feel anything? I can sense vampires, but—”
“Can you sense any right now?”
“I don’t know!”
“Think,” Sangster ordered. “We know you can sense when they’re near or when there’s some sort of dark evil at work. What do you feel now?”
Alex shook his head. “Nothing specific.” He wanted to come up with more, but he couldn’t report what he didn’t understand. “I was…when we got here I felt sick, a little. Is that helpful?”
“Maybe.” Sangster tapped his own forehead. “We gotta get this thing squared away if it’s gonna be useful in the field, Alex.”
“Yeah, I’m working on that.” Alex looked at them both.
Sangster handed Armstrong an automatic weapon about the size of a briefcase.
“This looks like more than just darkness,” Alex said, indicating the running crowds. “People don’t instantly run through the streets and start attacking people because it’s dark outside. So maybe it’s something like a—”
“A gas, a nerve agent.” Armstrong looked at Sangster. “Get masks.”
Sangster pulled out three lightweight rubber masks and passed them around, and Alex copied the others as they put them over their heads. Like the agents, Alex let his lie on his forehead. He took off his school jacket and pulled on the one Sangster handed him, and felt heavy plates of composite plastic inside the lining thump against his chest. There was a patch on the shoulder that read TALIA SUNT.
“If it’s magic, though, there’s no guarantee these will stop it,” Sangster said.
“If it’s a magic fear-maker or whatever,” Alex countered, “wouldn’t we be feeling it already?”
Armstrong shook her head, pointing at the ceiling and walls of the van. “This van is a rolling fortress against that kind of thing. Silver lining in the body, hawthorn wood threaded throughout, holy water injected into a filament mesh layer. Plus a few favors we don’t discuss. We are protected.”
“So I guess just staying in the van isn’t gonna happen.”
Sangster handed him a go package to throw over his shoulders. Alex felt the whole thing over before putting it on, making sure the easy-access pockets were unsecured and filled. “Alex, we’re the first to respond. There won’t be any more agents for at least another fifteen minutes, so we need to be careful. I need you here, though. I’m hoping your skills will give us some kind of edge.”
“My skills that we don’t really know anything about.”
“No time like the present.”
They were moving through the Secheron town square now, a usually pleasant place where people were now running in every direction. Two men were fighting on top of an overturned metal café table. Alex heard more sirens and saw police vans pulling into the square. Police officers in full riot gear leapt instantly from the sides.
“I never knew Secheron had a SWAT team.”
Sangster nodded. “I see four cops in gear and I’m betting that’s all they have.”
The van yanked left and was moving down a street Alex knew well, dotted with restaurants and bars and more shops, sloping downhill. “We’re going to the marina?”
Sangster and Armstrong seemed to exchange silent messages. Alex watched as they both suddenly relaxed, their shoulders rolling down as they sat back in the seat.
Sangster slowly drew a breath. “Civil unrest is not our thing. Be ready, we’re stopping in about one minute.”
Armstrong looked up. “Blue.”
Alex followed her eyes. There on the satellite image, a strange blue emanation was gathering and pulsing right at the edge of the water, among the piers of the marina.
The van screeched to a halt in the cobblestoned drive, and Alex took in the whole scene beyond—a long pier with a two-story restaurant at the end, two more nearly as large with one-story bars of their own, and countless jetties with small boats. All were encased in darkness. He checked his watch; the silver cross in the clasp glinted green as it reflected the satellite screen. It was twenty-five minutes past noon.
The engine idled as they watched people running down the piers. The restaurant at the end of one flickered now, and Alex saw smoke pouring out of its side. Then his eye caught something else.
“Look.”
“I see it,” Sangster responded. They pulled closer to the window to see water swirling around off the end of the main pier, kicking up a furious foam.
“So what’s the plan?” It occurred to Alex that he hadn’t asked. “What are we doing?”
“We’re the first to see what’s happening.” Armstrong went to the door and prepared to pull it open. She tugged the mask down over her mouth, leaving the top half of her face exposed, and Alex and Sangster did the same. Alex pulled the Polibow out of the side of his go package and looked at it. It was a later model than he often used, with twice as many bolts in the magazine—meaning he had sixteen shots.
Sangster tapped the mobile piece in his ear and Alex heard the tap in his own. Then the teacher briskly nodded at Armstrong.
Armstrong yanked the door open and they hustled out, Alex forming up behind them at the back of the van.
At first there was only the sound of confused people ranging around the jetties and the wind clanking lines against sailboat masts. All three of them kept their eyes on the water.
The roiling whirlpool at the edge of the marina churned and spewed water, and they heard an almost electric series of cracks and pops that echoed like gunshots. Alex felt a wa
ve of static in his head come hard and fast, roaring insistently. “Here it comes.”
The surface seemed to rip open, and Alex saw a strange shape bursting up around the pier: A latticework of white rolled up out of the lake, like a great, grasping skeletal claw, and grabbed on to the pier. He saw silhouettes moving among the latticework, as if a band of people were climbing quickly up a flight of stairs.
And then the invasion began.
CHAPTER 5
“Everyone, get away!” Sangster waved his arms as they moved forward from the van, closing the distance to the long boardwalk that connected with the main pier. A man and woman running out of the restaurant nearly collided with him.
Armstrong spoke rapidly into her Bluetooth. “Farmhouse, this is Armstrong, Sangster, and Van Helsing. We are at the pier—we have an incursion of Scholomance vampires emerging from the water.”
Alex heard another female voice, farther away, click on. “Acknowledged. Reinforcements are on the way.”
“How many?” They reached the edge of the pier, watching a steadily approaching crowd of white-clad vampires with something strange about their faces, something Alex still couldn’t make out.
“Four vans, just now entering Secheron by the main road. ETA five minutes.”
“We’re going to need more than that, and faster,” Sangster cut in.
One of the vampires on the pier caught a woman in a blue coat, biting viciously at her throat. The woman went down and the vampire rose again, moving on.
The team hugged a wide telephone pole and Sangster watched the advancing horde tear into the crowd of townspeople. “They’re not feeding, just attacking. We can’t get a clean shot until these people are clear,” he added in frustration.
The group was still a hundred yards off, and Alex nearly ran into another pedestrian. The look in the man’s eyes was a confused sort of terror. “That way!” Alex shouted, waving him off.
Now Alex saw what was strange about the vampires’ faces. The nearest one, the one who had attacked the woman in the blue coat, would normally have looked like a flash of white in the darkness, skin all alabaster save for sparkling eyes. But this one wore heavy black splotches of paint around his eyes and over his nose. He looked like a skeleton.
“They’re painted like skeletons.” Alex scanned the others he could see. “Why?”
“It’s odd. I don’t remember them painting that way.” Sangster’s voice on the radio had a strange detachment that only he seemed to be capable of in times like this. Sangster was filing it away in the way he was teaching Alex to do. Pay attention. That was the rule that applied over all others.
Alex heard a splash as one of the pedestrians fell off the pier into the water. There had to be a hundred people running pell-mell between the three agents and the invaders. He couldn’t get a good count of the vampires because they were still bunched up at the back where they climbed onto the pier next to the restaurant, and much of the activity there was obscured by guardrails.
Sangster ran to the end of the pier and leaned over, aiming for the ladder of white latticework that was attached. He began to shoot in rounds of three.
Alex reached the edge of the humans and faced an advancing group of vampires, all with their faces painted. “There’s too many.”
“Pick one,” Armstrong said.
Alex chose a vampire that was thirty yards away and closing in. He pulled the trigger on his Polibow and saw the bolt sizzle and smoke as it struck the vampire in the chest, missing the heart. He fired again, this bolt finding its mark, and the creature exploded.
He aimed at another target that had slowed up as he shot the first. Alex watched the vampire come close to the first and fired, and got lucky. As the first went up he caught the second and they exploded together.
Armstrong was clear of pedestrians now and let loose with rounds from her machine gun.
Then there was an all-new sound, something strange howling from the edge of the pier.
Alex and the two agents stopped, huddling together. In the distance behind them, over the din of screams, they could hear heavy engines, likely Polidorium vehicles moving down the long avenue toward the pier.
But out on the pier there was a loud, echoing, popping sound, like something solid and slightly wet smacking into place, pieces clunking together.
The sound of an engine, heavy and churning, came across the waves. Below the machine-like sound, Alex detected an undercurrent of deep growling, one powered by angry spirits and growing louder.
“Behind the restaurant!” Sangster called Alex’s attention to the activity at the far end of the pier. Alex could barely understand what he was seeing emerge from the water, but it was coming fast.
Like grasping fingers, long cords of bone-like white material scuttled out from around the restaurant in jointed, moving sticks. As vampires with skull faces continued to advance, all but ignoring the three agents gathered on the pier, Alex saw the strange bone sticks stack themselves deliberately into shape.
As they found available space on the boards, the bone sticks formed wheels the size of men, then a long, flat chassis, and finally a great coach. In front of the coach, a small set of bones flipped and rolled into place and grew into something that resembled a pair of skeletal horses.
“What the—?” Alex whispered in shock.
A new scream cut him off. A vampire emerged on the roof of the restaurant. Alex recognized the shrieking voice instantly, and as he looked up, he saw the female vampire with blazing yellow hair, her eyes and nose painted over with black. “Now!” she cried, and leapt into the driver’s seat of the coach.
“That’s Elle,” said Alex. Sangster nodded. The vampire called Elle, who looked about sixteen but was possibly hundreds of years old, was well known to the Polidorium. At least by name and reputation: They didn’t have much on her background, but Elle seemed to occupy a place of some trust in the Scholomance. She had also been a thorn in Alex’s side, assigned to keep tabs on him. Elle whipped the reins and the carriage began to move, great skeletal horse hooves clapping on the boards as they went.
The vampires now formed up around her as the carriage picked up speed.
Sangster whipped his arm over his head. “Fall back.”
They broke and ran for their van as Armstrong shouted into the radio, “Farmhouse, they’ve got a…” She took a moment to look at Sangster and then went ahead choosing whatever seemed to come to mind. “They’re using some kind of system of vampire magic to power a mock horse-drawn carriage. I think it’s made of bone.”
“Copy that,” came the disconnected voice.
“It might be the same bone spell that they use to reinforce the roof of the Scholomance,” Sangster mused as they ran. Alex had seen the vast latticework that stretched for miles inside the organization, creating the structure of its highest ceilings, allowing them to have a sort of cavern that encased a whole city.
“And why does this matter?” Alex asked. He wasn’t being sarcastic. If Sangster was bothering to say it, he had a reason.
“Bone work of that sort is not a specialty of the Scholomance; it would have to be brought in by someone new,” Sangster said as he ran. They reached the van and hunkered behind it and Sangster rapped on the door four times, hard and fast. “It’s very rare. Extremely dark power.”
Alex glanced around the van, parked in the cobblestone street like a sitting duck. The carriage was moving at a steady clip now, with the vampires no longer charging on their own but formed up around it. The army of skulls seemed to be jogging beside the carriage, reminding him of the parade of a circus.
The van door didn’t open. Alex looked at Sangster and ran to the front of the van.
The window of the driver’s side was tinted. “Hey!” he yelled.
A hand, red with blood, slapped against the glass, and Alex saw it, darkened and clouded behind the tinting. He made out the slumping form of the driver and shrank back as a skull-faced vampire thrust its face against the glass.
Alex shrieked even as he brought up the Polibow, pumping a bolt through the window. The window shattered and the creature exploded, fire filling the inside of the van.
Alex staggered back.
Armstrong looked at the smoke pouring out of the van window and opened her hands as if to say, What’d you have to go and do that for?
“The—there was a vampire in there.”
“How?” screamed Armstrong. “Those doors are protected.”
“We left the door cracked so we could fall back into it,” Sangster said.
“Okay, okay, new plan,” Alex said.
“We are way outnumbered,” Sangster said. The sound of the carriage and the incessant, unholy whine of its magic engine came fast with the advance of bone hooves and vampire boots. “Come on, keep moving.”
They waited a moment as the army advanced, and Alex watched Elle at the reins, whipping long tendrils of leather, a wild look in her blackened eyes.
As soon as the procession passed, the three followed. There was nothing else they could do until reinforcements arrived.
Halfway up the avenue there was a crowd of people, bunched up near cars that had run into one another and stalled.
When the carriage arrived at the throng of people, they heard the ratcheting sound again. Behind the carriage, more bone rods shot out, latching onto one another and building until it formed a sort of trailer, with white bars.
From the shelter of a shop entrance Alex asked, “What’s that?”
“It looks like a cage,” Sangster said.
The vampires moved out, this time grabbing people. A man in a leather coat screamed as one of the skull-faced vampires picked him up by the shoulders and threw him. He landed in the cage, rolling across the bumpy floor. They were gathering up captives.
No, no, this is not gonna happen.
Alex heard Sangster yell, “Wait!” but he was already moving.
The darkened street was bedlam, lit up by the glow of lampposts and the glistening bone of the carriage. Alex scanned the street as he ran. He looked up at Elle, who had stopped to yell instructions to the vampires.
The Triumph of Death Page 4
