The Triumph of Death

by Jason Henderson

  Alex and Astrid both stared.

  Armstrong talked more to the engineer than to them. “We can get these lines analyzed. We’ll figure out what it says. The Queen showed up and sent us a message. She won’t make it impossible to read.”

  “Oh, hold on.” Astrid held out her hands excitedly. “Maybe I can do this.” She reached into a pocket and drew out a small bead, very light and waxy looking, like a soft jelly bean.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a spell. We prepare our tools with spells beforehand because sometimes they can get complicated and it’s useful to…how would you say it?—concentrate them in the field. But I might be able to use it.”

  “You have a code-cracking spell in a jelly bean?” Alex asked.

  “Not so much; it’s a spell of seeing—you know, in case someone’s around a corner. But it might be close enough.”

  She whispered something into the small bead and blew on it, and Alex watched the ephemeral material fly with her breath toward the screen and fluff away into nothing.

  Astrid bounced expectantly. “I love puzzles.”

  The green lines shimmered briefly and started to change, but then the screen went dark and cloudy. After a moment it returned, and Astrid frowned and harrumphed.

  Armstrong nodded. “We’ll give it a shot.”

  “Good, because I only have one of those.”

  Alex was looking out into the street. Civilians were moving about, beginning to sweep up. An air of calm had taken over, and the place looked like it had been hit by a storm, nothing more. “What now?”

  Sangster thought for a moment. “You’re undercover in the school?” he asked Astrid.

  “Yes.”

  “When do you have to report in?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Okay,” Sangster said. “I’m taking the day off. I’ll call in sick. You two need to go back to the school.”

  “What?” Astrid cried. “We don’t know what she’s planning.”

  “Look,” said the teacher. “I don’t know how you work, but do you understand that you’ve put us at risk? If your cover is blown, Alex’s could be, too. Until we have a chance to sort this out, you both need to get back.”

  “Those are not my instructions.”

  “Yeah, but are you here to cooperate with us or not?” Sangster demanded.

  “With all due respect,” she replied, “I’m here to make sure you don’t foul this up.”

  Sangster actually laughed. “Right. Right. Of course.” He looked at Alex. “Keep her out of trouble. You’re gonna be late, so the story is that you decided to cut class together.”

  “What?” Alex asked. His mind spun. That wasn’t something he did every day. Plus another thought that didn’t have any business there at all.

  “Just if anyone asks. Reveal her nature to no one. You liked her, you went for a ride. I’m not causing an incident between us and Hexen within four hours of contact. The story is simple and it works; you have an iffy reputation anyway.”

  “I’m working on my reputation,” Alex responded. “What the heck kind of thing is that for a teacher to say?”

  “Cut me some slack.” Sangster paused and looked at them both. “Midnight. Farmhouse.”

  “You’re letting her in the farmhouse?”

  “She could get in the farmhouse on her own,” Sangster said. Astrid shrugged.

  Alex thought maybe that was the case and maybe it was not. Maybe she had another jelly bean that would open the false tin door in the front of the old house in the woods, the one that took you into a path that led a mile down into an underground bunker, or maybe she was not so prepared. Sangster clearly had decided that she was something to be treated gingerly.

  Alex raised a hand. “I have a question. How are we getting back?”

  Astrid turned to him. “You want a ride?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Alex rode to Glenarvon-LaLaurie on the back of Astrid’s motorcycle, which seemed to be a modified Italian design that she handled with expert efficiency.

  Alex kept his fingers locked at Astrid’s waist as they rode, and he tried to process her presence in Secheron. Too much was happening too fast for him to follow it all. The girl had come into the school, bouncy and brash and strange, and all along she had been harboring a secret—a secret mission, in fact. There was nothing to hang on to here, he felt, nothing to trust. And Sangster had handed Alex over to her care as if everyone knew that she wasn’t a thrall, like Vienna Cazorla had been—a servant of the Scholomance, out to betray them. No one could know if that were the case. And yet here they were.

  And the bike—the strangest thing about Astrid’s motorcycle was not the complete lack of controls but rather the unearthly sound the engine made, which he couldn’t get used to. She had almost parked it in front of the school before he had advised her that the proper way to deal with your undercover transportation was to stash it in the woods, which she did, right next to his own motorcycle.

  “A Kawasaki Ninja.” She watched Alex drag several rough-cut limbs and cover up both bikes. “You go to a lot of trouble to hide what you are.”

  Alex blinked. “I don’t think so.” He watched her standing there, her hands clasped together. He had a thousand questions and no idea where to start.

  Astrid shrugged and began walking, and Alex followed. When they reached the school, they went in through separate doors. Alex waited in the stairwell for the bell to ring, and at three P.M. he made his way into his European History class.

  He slid into his seat next to Sid, who brightened but also shook his head with an apparent array of questions.

  A moment later, Paul and Minhi came in, holding hands briefly before they separated, Paul next to Sid and Minhi in front of them. Just his luck he had all three of his friends in one class. He prayed class would start before he had to get into the whole business about Secheron.

  Minhi turned and looked at him. “I thought you were just going to be gone during lunch.”

  “Yeah, it, uh, went long.”

  The door opened and Astrid came in, finding a seat at the far end of the class. She waved at them and smiled. Alex watched her sit and then turned back to Minhi, who looked like she was doing math in her head, sizing up Alex’s story.

  Alex asked brightly, “How are things going with, uh, Astrid?”

  “I don’t know. She’s been missing for a couple of hours.” The same distrust. Minhi would make a crackerjack detective, Alex thought.

  Paul was listening and pursed his lips. “No way.” He laughed, his giant frame shaking. “Is that where…Blimey. Nice.”

  “Come on.” Alex opened his hands. “What?”

  Minhi looked at him more coldly than he felt he probably deserved as the teacher came in and put him out of his misery.

  As Alex melted into the rhythm of class, he felt again the strangeness of a double life. Only hours ago, he had been nearly cut in half by a skull-headed lady on horseback, and now he was listening to something about the start of World War I that he could barely find the needed concentration to follow. He felt the mantle of Student Alex slide over him, and he forced all thoughts of the undead into the recesses of his mind as he opened his history book and began to take notes.

  At dinner, the four friends met up in the cafeteria, taking their seats near high windows that looked out onto the grounds.

  Astrid joined them, and this time her kiss on Minhi’s cheek was met rather more slowly than it had been in the morning.

  They chatted as Astrid sketched in a notebook, peppering Minhi with questions about LaLaurie.

  All through dinner and after, Alex kept looking out the window, as if he could spot the skull-faced army that had melted away after the attack. Astrid put down her pencil and looked out, observing to the others, “It should be snowing soon. The woods will be lovely. You’re so lucky to be here.”

  Minhi nodded. “It will be lovely! You’ll see. I can take you out in the morning if you want to see the woods before th
e snow.”

  “Oh, I have, when we walked this afternoon,” Astrid said excitedly. She cast her eyes at Alex. “We spent hours exploring. Alex is a gallant tour guide.”

  “Ah,” Minhi said evenly. “Yeah, that’s what my old roommate said.”

  Alex briefly considered pounding his head against the table but decided it wouldn’t help. It was the story, after all. “I’m getting a soda,” he said, rising and walking to the back of the room.

  At the drink dispensers, in the upper end of the cafeteria where the kitchen had been closed and the shadows were growing long, Minhi appeared next to him.

  “So you move fast.” Minhi busied herself getting a glass of orange juice.

  “It’s not really like that,” Alex said.

  “Oh? So you didn’t cut class with a girl you just met this morning?”

  “No, I—well, yeah, but it was…” He looked at Minhi. Her brown eyes were wide and expectant. “Um, there was something you wanted to…ask. Before I left earlier.”

  She watched him for what seemed like a long time. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s probably not the time.”

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Your juice, it’s overflowing,” he said, pointing to her glass.

  “Oh!” Minhi turned and pulled the glass away from the dispenser. “God, I’m so stupid.”

  “No,” Alex said. This was all wrong. “No, it’s…let’s go back.”

  “To what?” Minhi’s mouth curled into a thin frown.

  “Okay,” Alex said. “Look. I can’t keep being jealous.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t…” He searched for words, looking back at the table. “You know what I mean. I don’t know what else to say, but I can’t keep being jealous of you and one of my best friends, and, Minhi, you can’t keep encouraging me to be. Okay?”

  She stopped and looked at him for a long time. Then she said, “Okay. I get it.”

  “Yeah? Okay?”

  “Okay,” Minhi said definitively.

  Alex nodded. “So we’re done with this?”

  “We’re done.” Minhi nodded. Then she smiled, smirking at him. “You really do think you’re something.”

  “It’s only what everybody tells me.”

  They went back to the table and sat, and Paul reached for Minhi’s hand.

  Minhi looked down at a sketch Astrid was absently making on a napkin with her pen: the tall staff with the circular dish, the horse with the scythe-wielding skeletal figure. Minhi tapped it. “That’s interesting. Are you drawing The Triumph of Death?”

  Alex looked at her. “The what?”

  “The Triumph of Death,” Minhi said. “The painting.”

  “Triumph,” Alex repeated. The Queen had spoken that very word—no, but close to it, she’d said Triumphant when Astrid had challenged her.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of amazing. You should check it out,” Minhi said.

  Sid started to say something when Alex held up a finger. “Do you have an image of it?”

  Minhi seemed to suddenly engage, tilting her head as if she could tell he was thinking something important. As she reached down and pulled a tablet computer out of her bag, Alex felt a mix of emotions—excitement that Minhi might help shed some light on the events of the day, and intense relief after the conversation they’d just had. Like maybe they could go back to being normal.

  Minhi brought the tablet to life and spoke into a microphone symbol. “Triumph of Death, painting.” She lay the tablet down as a series of images appeared on screen, and she expanded one of them to fill the whole display.

  The image that filled the screen, though, was a horrific nightmare. Alex’s eyes widened as he took in the painting.

  The Triumph of Death illustrated in monstrous detail the slaughter of humankind by an army of skeletal beings: the army of death itself.

  Across the foreground of the painting, people ran from skeletons that trampled them, cutting their throats, choking them, and dragging them away. A whole slew of people were being herded into a holding cell, like a huge cage or trailer. Dogs chewed on the remains of the fallen. In the distance, ships smoked on the water and cities burned. A great leader of the skeletons, astride a bone-thin, reddish horse, swung an enormous scythe: Death. Alex saw again and again the shock and horror on the faces of the people, their mouths open in cries of agony and despair. All around in the background of the painting was black destruction, buildings and ships burning, little specks of fire floating on the wind.

  “Oh my God,” Alex whispered under his breath as he started running his fingers over the painting, zooming in and scanning across. The Triumph of Death looked like the scene that he had just observed on the curtain of night that surrounded the town of Secheron.

  “What is it about?”

  “Death wins,” Minhi said. “Death has dominion over all.”

  Dotting the scene were tall staffs with circular wheel-like constructions on the top, very much like the satellite dish–type device the Queen had used. Alex tapped those and looked at Minhi. “What are these?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? In the painting they’re used as gallows to hang people on.”

  This was unreal. The vampires were copying a painting, exactly as it appeared.

  Alex looked into Astrid’s eyes and she seemed to reflect back his own thoughts.

  We are in trouble.

  CHAPTER 8

  Back in his room, Alex could barely contain his need to get back to the Polidorium, and he paced the floor until it was time. Paul and Sid were still awake when he snuck out to, as Paul put it, “go protect us all from art history.”

  The woods across from Glenarvon-LaLaurie were pitch black at 11:45 P.M. Alex stood in darkness and watched the condensation of his breath cross the thin crescent moon in the sky beyond the trees. He lit up his watch to check the time. Astrid wasn’t there.

  Alex wasn’t going to wait for her. Possibly she had gotten caught trying to sneak out or disappeared into whatever cave she had emerged from that morning, but as he stood next to his bike, he tried to make any sense out of Sangster’s curious deference to her. That deference was because she claimed to represent an organization Alex did not know existed.

  “Hexen,” Alex muttered aloud, shaking his head.

  “That’s right,” said Astrid as she stepped out of the shadows, her pale face barely visible in the darkness. “What about Hexen?”

  “Just that I’ve never heard of it until today.”

  “Alex, I really don’t want to keep you in the dark.” Astrid looked genuine and sweet in the speckled moonlight, and he distrusted her even more. The sunnier she acted, the more clouded his vision of her became. She must be keeping secrets under that pout-like smile. “What do you want to know?”

  Alex wanted to say Everything, but that would have sounded desperate. He didn’t know if he wanted to know everything anyway. He wanted to know everything so he could dismiss it again and go back to a world of him and the Polidorium and no weird, sudden Hexen girl, and while they were at it, no upset Minhi. Not that that was even his problem. It was Paul’s problem, wasn’t it?

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Whatever’s necessary, I guess, but right now we don’t have time.”

  “I’m very sorry to keep you waiting. I had to make sure everyone in the girls’ dorm was asleep. So do you want me to follow you?”

  “Why don’t you ride with me this time?” Alex asked Astrid. She had her own helmet but he held an extra Polidorium helmet forward. “Take this one so we can hear one another.”

  Astrid put on the helmet as he got on the Ninja. Alex indicated the seat behind him as he slid on his goggles and the helmet and tapped a button on the side. Inside his goggles, the trees lit up bright white against the dark spaces of the infrared. Alex started the Ninja, and spoke into a mike inside the helmet.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “You Polidori
really are about the technology. Aren’t you going to use headlights?”

  “Just put your arms around my…”

  But she already had, her bony arms folding around him and clasping together at his stomach. Even through the jackets, she felt warm. He throttled the Ninja and took off into the woods.

  With Astrid behind him, Alex threaded the motorcycle through the forest, picking up speed as he went. Unnaturally white trees zipped past on either side.

  He became aware of the vibration in Astrid’s helmet before he heard her erupt in laughter. “You really know these woods!”

  “Believe me, if I were starting from anywhere else but the school I’d need the GPS.” The bike jolted as it went over some fallen branches. “But by now I have this route down. Should be just a few minutes.”

  After a while he saw a clearing of darkness beyond the trees, and then the glowing image of a building.

  They broke through the tree line and the farmhouse came into view, a small, unassuming shack with a battered sheet-metal garage door to the side. The moment they passed into the clearing, as the wheels began to churn over soft earth, Alex saw tiny red lights shining, cameras perched overhead in the trees beyond the clearing, watching their progress.

  Astrid gasped, the sound echoing in his ear as he gunned the engine and headed straight for the sheet-metal door. As he drew within a few yards, it swung up fast, and he zipped inside.

  Track lights came on as they moved on to a concrete drive at a thirty-degree grade, and now more obvious cameras swung toward him.

  They passed wooden beams and swiftly responding gun emplacements that swiveled and idled, vibrating on their struts as the Ninja moved past. Down, down, half a mile, until they emerged into a giant concrete hangar, moving past trucks with helicopters on the backs of them and all manner of vehicles.

  “This,” said Alex, “is the farmhouse.”

  He came to a stop next to a bike he recognized as Sangster’s black Triumph Speed Triple with the Polidorium emblem on the back of the seat.

  Astrid looked around as she took off her helmet. For once, she seemed impressed. Alex led her up the metal stairs at the back and through a door. They stepped into the carpeted corridor, past offices of agents working at computer screens and drawing on enormous glass maps. “I had no idea.”