“Rehearsal for what?” Alex was puzzled.
Minhi looked at Paul. “You still on?”
“Rehearsal for what?” Alex and Sid said together. Suddenly there was something only half of them were aware of?
Paul looked down, rubbing the back of his neck. “Did I not—it’s . . . it’s a little stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.” Minhi frowned.
“It’s a BALL,” Paul said, looking to Alex for sympathy.
“You’re going to a ball?” Alex smiled. “Like a . . . pumpkins-and-carriages-and-tuxedos ball?”
Minhi laughed. “A rehearsal, Alex, I mean, seriously, do you think there’d be a ball tonight and you’d somehow miss that fact? It’s on Friday.”
Alex allowed that that had to be true; he could pretty well ignore most of the goings-on at this new, weirdly merged school, but yeah, if there were a big dance tonight there would at least be . . . streamers. Or something.
Vienna brightened. “This Friday there will be a benefit ball for LaLaurie. It includes a debut of the daughters of governmental ministers here for the InfoTreaty.”
“InfoTreaty?”
Sid looked up. “Oh, yeah. That’s an international treaty to modernize biographical information and make it easier to share.”
Alex said, “How does that translate into a . . . dance?”
Minhi nodded. “There’s an international conference on the treaty in Geneva this month, attended by government officials from around the world. The Ball is a black-tie event timed to coincide with that. Of course the talk now is that it’ll also be used to raise money for the reconstruction of Glenarvon in addition to the LaLaurie endowment, since the schools were founded by the same board.”
Alex was trying to put this together. “A debut of daughters—Minhi, do you have a parent who’s like a government minister?”
“Deputy minister,” Minhi responded.
“Your dad?”
“My mom.”
“And my father,” Vienna piped up.
“Okay, I get it,” Alex said. Really this wasn’t so shocking; Glenarvon and LaLaurie were a couple of the most prestigious boarding schools in the world. “So this is a big deal. Is there a ballroom at LaLaurie?”
“We do have a ballroom,” Vienna said, “so the rehearsals are here. But the actual event . . .”
“It’s going to be on a boat,” Minhi finished excitedly.
“A boat?”
“A big one. On the lake.” She seemed to bounce.
Alex still didn’t get something. “Why do you have to rehearse?”
“Well,” Vienna explained, “you don’t just show up and know how to walk down a flight of stairs and dance.”
“You don’t know how to walk down a flight of stairs?” Alex and Sid folded their arms and looked at their roommate, and Alex said accusingly to him, “How do you figure into this?”
“Immunscorrrr,” Paul muttered.
“What was that, I couldn’t . . .” Alex shook his head, laughing. Minhi raised an eyebrow.
“I’m an escort,” Paul said finally. “Every debutante has an escort.”
“Technically, junior debutantes,” Minhi said. “We don’t make a formal debut; we’re introduced, but the focus will be on the true debs, the older girls.”
True debs. This was a strange new taxonomy. Wow. Minhi and Paul at the ball, that was . . . “Why didn’t you mention this?”
Minhi looked sheepish. “Tonight is the first rehearsal. And we didn’t . . . there wasn’t really an opportunity.”
At once flush with the same tinge of jealousy he had felt before, Alex looked at Minhi. He got it. Slightly serious step, sort of romantic, heck, very romantic. He got it. They hadn’t mentioned it because they were afraid he’d be jealous. Or, let’s face it, because they simply had plans and not everything revolved around Alex Van Helsing.
Alex looked at Vienna. “What about you? Who’s your escort, the prince of Spain?”
Vienna glanced down, saddened. “My escort is in the hospital.”
Ah. Steven Merrill. Alex thought again of Steven, the one casualty of the fire, and determined that he needed to go see how he was doing. He felt responsible. “I’m sorry.” He shook his head honestly. “Jeez, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” she said.
“We’ll need to find her an escort, Alex,” Minhi said meaningfully.
See how this works? She’s giving you a shot. Go ahead, make up for putting your foot in your mouth at every opportunity.
Alex’s cell phone started buzzing in his pocket. He took it out and read a text that displayed on the screen:
You’re needed. Back gate. 8 P.M.
Alex blinked at the message and he felt an electric flood pulse through his body. He cleared his throat. “Well, uh, you guys have—I hope it goes great. I have to study, I’ve completely lost my way in Sangster’s class.” He looked at Paul and Sid.
Minhi understood, but she looked a little saddened. “Remember you don’t have to give us that stuff.”
“Yeah, okay,” Alex said. “It’s Sangster.”
“All right,” Minhi said finally. “We’re rehearsing. Sid? You want to come?”
Sid looked as though he’d been jumped. “Me?”
Alex was rising. He had to head back to the Kingdom of Cots and get his go package and his Bluetooth. “I think Vienna needs an escort.”
“Excuse me, I do have a say in this,” Vienna said, amused. “Sid, would you be my escort for the evening?”
“I have no idea what that—”
“Just come with us and we’ll tell you what to do.”
Alex smiled, but to do so he had to force the ends of his mouth up. He wanted to learn how to walk down a flight of stairs. “Go crazy, Prince.” Alex slapped Sid on the back. “I gotta hustle.”
Vienna looked at Alex. “Oh, Alex—Ah. My grandmother.”
He turned. “Your what?”
“My name is unusual. It’s Austrian. My grandmother was named Vienna,” she said.
Alex felt himself blush despite himself. “Thank you.”
Chapter 8
Alex was standing alone at the gate for only about thirty seconds when he heard the sound of a van approaching. In the darkness it was invisible at first, coming around the bend, and then he saw the shape of a black Polidorium van bearing down on him. It pulled between him and the gate—he had to step out of the way to give it a few feet of room, though he suspected the driver had measured his space with expert accuracy—and the van slowed to a stop.
A side door rolled open and Sangster was inside with a headset on, motioning quickly. “Come on, come on.”
The slam of a door and they were zipping into the darkness again, no lights, the road illuminated by night vision on the windshield.
“What’s all this?” Alex asked.
Armstrong swiveled around in the passenger seat up front and addressed them both. “Alex, we haven’t yet had an appropriate time to actually ask you to do something for us, but there’s an opportunity coming up that calls for your special—skills.”
“I know you’re not talking about my awesome karaoke skills,” Alex said.
“Ultravox is on a train,” Armstrong said. She was surveying a wide printout—a schematic of some kind—and folded it, setting it on her lap. “After days of chatter, Polidorium agents spotted several vampires, security types, the types that guard an important figure, getting off the English Channel ferry and disappearing into a train station in Calais, France. That’s where we lost them. But the Scholomance is expecting the crew—they’ve prepared a meal to greet him; we picked up a call for human gang leaders to turn over members they’d like to get rid of, calls to kidnap, etc. By our estimation Ultravox and his entourage crossed into Switzerland this afternoon, and the Scholomance is expecting them to reach Lake Geneva tonight by train.”
Alex felt that adrenaline rush again and instantly scanned the van for materials. He spotted a go package netted to the w
all behind Sangster. “Is that where we’re headed—we’re gonna grab him in Geneva?”
“They never make it to Geneva,” Sangster said, and Alex felt the van lurch as it took a hairpin turn. “Every time we have one of these high-level visitors, they jump before they reach Geneva Station.”
“Icemaker came in with his own caravan,” said Alex, remembering the miles of trucks and other vehicles on the road when the clan lord came to the Scholomance.
“Icemaker was moving a whole army; whereas Ultravox is a high-level operative,” Sangster explained, “a sort of master consultant. A string puller. He’ll be in the luxury cars. So if we know he’ll get off before Geneva—and he will, because they’ll leap and head for some magical entrance to the Scholomance—”
“I might have something on that,” Alex interrupted, thinking of Elle diving headlong into the water. The water hadn’t opened up right there, no magic door—meaning whatever door she headed for was not on the surface.
Sangster leaned forward, and there was an edge of delight in his voice that Alex had never observed before. “Alex, with you—with you—we just might be able to catch one of the masters before he jumps.”
Alex looked from one agent to the other. So this was the measure of his value to the Polidorium now; he was a vampire detector. Good enough for me.
“Where are we going?” Alex asked. Before Sangster could answer he felt himself thrown violently sideways as the van pulled into the driveway of what appeared to be a park or soccer field.
“Let’s go,” Sangster said. Armstrong slid out of the passenger seat and pulled open the side door. Outside, the air thrummed with the loud, whipping sound of a helicopter dropping onto the field.
“We’re going to Zimeysa Station!” Sangster said as they ran. “Keep your head down.”
The three of them crossed the forty yards or so to the waiting Black Hawk, which, like the van, bore a Polidorium emblem on its flank. “Why the chopper?” Alex yelled.
“It’s forty-five miles west,” Sangster shouted back. “We need every second we can get.”
Alex had ridden in helicopters before—he and his sister had tagged along numerous times on rescue flights in the mountains of Wyoming—but the Black Hawk was a different affair. The heavy craft rumbled and ripped off the deck and suddenly they were shooting west. Alex was strapped into a seat along the wall.
“Alex! Look alive,” Armstrong shouted from where she sat across from him. Behind her in the distance, the trees were dropping down as they rose. Alex felt the nose of the chopper dip as they picked up speed. He looked down and she was handing him the large printout. He unfolded it to see a map of what Alex judged to be a medium-size train station—nothing on the level of Geneva’s or Rome’s, but much bigger than a neighborhood station.
“This is Zimeysa Station!” Armstrong pointed. “It’s the last major stop. There will be a lot to watch. Four platforms. Six tracks. There are arrivals and departures every fifteen minutes. He’s gonna stop tonight, on the way to Geneva. Every train does.”
“I don’t get it!” Alex yelled, studying the map. “You expect him to hop off and grab a Snickers bar?”
“He’s not gonna hop off,” Sangster said, next to him. “We’re gonna follow your lead. You’re going to need to check every train that goes in or out.”
“The window of opportunity is eight thirty to eleven thirty,” Armstrong said.
“I don’t know—I don’t know if I can do this,” Alex confessed. “I’ve never tried anything like this.”
“Alex, this is the closest we’ve ever been to being able to catch one of these guys before they get to Demon Central,” Sangster said, referring to the Scholomance. “And we know he’s planning something. The closest. You are the closest. So I don’t want to hear, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘what if whatever.’ I want to hear, ‘I’ll do this damn thing.’” Sangster locked eyes with Alex, and they were crinkling at the edges—that strange mixture of hardness and mirth.
Of course. This was what he was here for. “I’ll do this damn thing,” repeated Alex. Armstrong nodded.
“Here we go!” shouted the pilot from up front.
Armstrong threw back the door of the Black Hawk, and wind instantly began churning through the craft. Alex saw the cement roof of a building coming up faster and felt the chopper pitch and slow.
“Zimeysa Station,” Armstrong said, gesturing down. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 9
The Zimeysa Station reminded Alex of the train station in Munich, Germany, where he and his father had once spent the night. That had been awful: The whole family had been vacationing in March, and it was very cold; and on this day Alex and his father had missed the last train out of Munich, which they were supposed to catch in order to meet up with Mom and the girls, who had moved on to a villa south of Rome. He and his dad had gone to visit the concentration camps in Dachau, a bus trip, and the Dachau bus had been late getting back.
Missing the train meant that they had to cool their heels till early in the morning, which meant walking. They visited a local university and watched some TV in the student union, moved on to watch the last round of the Glockenspiel in a square called Marienplatz, and then settled in at the station itself. Alex and his father had huddled together against a brick wall next to a closed postcard-and-soda kiosk, Dad’s jacket thrown over them. The gaping maws at either end of the station, where trains entered and departed, let the air in, and no amount of heat lamps stopped the sensation that they were on the streets. Sleeping on tile, backs against the bare wall, the cold leached into Alex’s entire body. It made socks and underwear, layers of shirts, gloves, all seem to disappear. They shivered together until seven in the morning, heading to Rome with the first train. Alex had been eight years old.
It had not occurred to him until he was ten that Dad was not without means and probably could have found them a hotel room if he had so desired. Alex actually asked his father about this—catching him as he was heading out to teach at Boston University, where they had been at that time. Dad had mumbled something about how fun it had been to relive his misspent youth, which was a terrible excuse for misspending Alex’s youth as well, but then Dad had been out the door.
Of course now Alex knew that just as likely, Dad had spent many of his train-station-huddling days in the employ of the Polidorium, a fact he had decidedly failed to mention.
At any rate, even in October, the Zimeysa Station was frozen stone cold, and as Alex walked up and down the platforms, he was glad that whatever else may occur, he would not be sleeping here. He’d been trained to survive in Wyoming blizzards, but anyone who felt like doing that by choice had to be crazy.
Oh, what he could have done then with what he had now—even without his backpack, his go package, Alex’s pockets were lined with useful accoutrements: Besides wooden stakes, hydraulic-powered Polibows, and grappling guns, he had nifty stuff like space blankets that folded into the size of a deck of cards and small canisters of styrene that could be lit to provide warmth. And his dad probably had as well. Madman.
Nothing, not a whisper, not a bleat of static, no reverberations in his head, nothing. The only static Alex heard as he walked along the trains came off the occasional announcements, as a chipper female voice announced in French and lovely British English each arrival and departure and change of track.
Alex stopped at a magazine rack underneath an enormous white clock at the end of the station, pretending to scan the covers. He turned around to look down the six tracks. He glanced up to a spiderweb of stairs at the far end of the terminal, which allowed passengers to travel up over the tracks and down to the central platforms. At the top of the stairs, on a sort of marble terrace, Alex saw Sangster sitting at a small table with Armstrong, sipping a coffee and reading a book. Alex went to the right and started walking down the line again, down one platform, up the next, and down. Nothing through the whole sweep, and the trains emptied out. In came the next batch.
Sangster spo
ke through the Bluetooth in Alex’s ear. “Eastbound trains on tracks two, three, and six,” he said. Alex nodded. Sangster was saying that those trains were likely to stop at Geneva next.
Alex headed for track 2. People were striding across the platforms and he bumped into a woman by mistake. He kept moving. He lingered for a moment next to the first entrance to the train, where a station official eyed him for a moment and then ignored him, taking him for just another confused kid looking for his train. Alex could count on the man to not only ask him no questions, but to be silently hoping Alex wouldn’t ask for any help, either.
Alex climbed up the stairs at the end and headed down to the center platforms, passing Sangster and Armstrong as he went. Sangster didn’t even glance up at him from his coffee and his copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As Alex began to walk along track 3 on his left, he tried to reach out, cut away all noise and distraction. Nothing. Past the first ticket master and the next. Nothing.
Then he felt a whisper, a jagged hiss in his mind. Alex looked up the platform as various patrons of the station moved back and forth. “I felt something,” he said, and Armstrong responded. “Where?” he heard her say in his ear.
There was a pale man in a coat at the end of the platform, just under the terrace where Sangster and Armstrong sat. He was holding a cell phone, and now took it away from his ear, staring at its screen.
Make that very pale. The static hissed, but the guy was fifty feet away and so close to Armstrong and Sangster that they could spill their coffee on him.
Sangster spoke sharply. “Turn around and walk, Alex, that guy is taking your picture.”
Alex swiveled and started moving, scanning the trains. “How do you know?”
“He keeps sweeping the area with his phone.”
“Maybe it’s him I sensed,” Alex whispered.
“Just look for the train.”
Alex reached the end of the station, the end where he’d begun, and turned to begin the walk down the next couple of trains.
The clock chimed and the chipper voice bellowed across the cold station: “Attention: tracks two, four, and six departing immediately.”
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