chapter 3
At 11:55 on the dot, Alex’s phone buzzed on the way out of his Algebra class, jolting his body to readiness just as he was feeling the doldrums of almost no sleep. He was fishing it out of his jacket as Minhi tugged at his sleeve.
BACK GATE, read the text. It was time to meet Sangster. He looked up at Minhi. “Hmm?”
“What are your plans this afternoon?” Minhi asked.
Paul and Sid had pulled up ahead, and Alex was about to call to them and ask. “I don’t know, what are we doing?”
“Just…” Minhi looked ahead. “I wanted to ask you…”
Alex held up a hand as his phone buzzed again. Okay, okay. He looked at her. “I’m sorry, what?”
Minhi shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Okay.” Alex nodded. “Guys! I’ll catch you later.” He shot down the hall, leaving the three of them behind. For a moment he caught a glimpse of Astrid moving into the library. They apparently shared no classes; he hadn’t seen her all morning.
As he passed the library, the cavernous, dark space yawned at him, with its ladders and catwalks and shadows. The girl had been swallowed up completely by it, as he reckoned anyone could be. He hit the side door and was outside, cold air snapping at his chin and ears.
The black Polidorium van that pulled up by the back gate barely slowed as the side door slid open. For a moment Alex’s body tensed at the thought that it could be a decoy, a stolen van full of Scholomance vampires out to capture him—it wouldn’t be the first time—but instantly he saw the extended hand of Mr. Sangster.
“Let’s go, Alex.” Sangster grabbed his hand and yanked him inside. By the time Alex had sat down across from his literature teacher, the van was moving and picking up speed, heading down the road to town.
Wearing chinos and a black sweater and jacket, the man who sat across from Alex was many things, and a teacher was only one of them. An expert in vampire activity and a well-placed ground leader for the organization, Sangster had been Alex’s entre into the Polidorium, and had taken him under his wing the moment Alex had arrived at Glenarvon Academy. When Alex got to Switzerland, he had known nothing of the secret world that the Polidorium inhabited. He had learned a lot of things in a very short amount of time, including that his own father had been preparing him all his life, without his knowledge, to work with the Polidorium.
Dad had taught Alex how to survive on little sleep and food, how to control the panic that hit people in tense situations, how to fight and ski and (illegally) drive, and even, if necessary, jump out of a plane. But Dad had denied completely the existence of vampires and never let on that soon Alex would be involved in fighting them. It had happened sooner than intended. Dad, it turned out, had actually been an agent for the Polidorium. He had spent his life fighting vampires because it was the calling of his family, the Van Helsings, who had helped found the Polidorium in its early days. And then Dad had met Mom and retired, and lied for all fourteen years Alex and his sisters had been alive.
Only recently had Dad told Alex the truth and laid the burden of deciding what to do next at his feet. “We’re part of a war,” Dad had told him. It was a war with the vampires on one side and the Polidorium and the dwindling numbers of the Van Helsing family on the other. “Whether you want to join it now is up to you.”
“Are we going to the farmhouse?” Alex asked. Sangster was flipping through a manila folder as the van rocked, and Alex clicked a safety belt over his shoulder.
“There’s been a change of plans.” Sangster looked back at the driver and passenger seat in front. He gestured. “Armstrong?”
Alex didn’t know the driver, but he saw Anne Armstrong, a woman with short blond hair and freckles, climb out of the passenger seat, bobbing slightly as the van moved. She dropped into a seat next to Sangster.
“We read your debrief from this morning,” Armstrong said in her usual business-like American accent. “You’re sure they left the computer on the plane?”
Alex nodded. “The computer they dropped, yeah.” The van swerved around a corner and Alex was momentarily blinded by a streak of sunlight that glinted through the windows. “But the vampire had a connection of some sort—”
“A dongle?” Armstrong asked.
“Yeah, he clicked it in and I would think he downloaded everything on there. But I don’t get it; wasn’t that just a training device?”
Sangster shook his head. “It should have been. It should have been a tablet that was practically empty except for run-of-the-mill low-security info.”
“Yeah, I don’t think the Scholomance needs to know how many different kinds of vampires there are on the planet. Maybe they want to know what we know.”
“First,” said Sangster, “they probably have a decent feel for that. And second, this was a fairly complicated op considering they could have stolen one of those training tablets from any number of places, including half a dozen vans scooting around Europe.”
“Was it a terminal? Maybe hooked into the Polidorium network?” Alex asked.
“Absolutely,” Armstrong said, catching the implication. The vampires could have used the computer to introduce a virus into the system, one the Polidorium had not been alerted to yet.
Alex shrugged, opening his hands. “Sooo…”
“So all this is fascinating, but we already know that they were acting on big plans,” Sangster said.
Alex pursed his lips. “Well, maybe. How do you know?”
Sangster looked over his shoulder as they made another turn, and Alex gasped. Up ahead, the sunlight struck the concrete of the road and made shadows in the trees, and then the road and the scenery around it all…ended. At once.
They were rolling toward a suspended wall of blackness, a liquid barrier that rippled over the road.
“What is that?” Alex asked.
“That is the town of Secheron,” said Sangster. “And it is dark at noon.”