Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,17
it hissed against her flesh.
He didn’t waste time once she let go of him. Alex climbed over the balcony and jumped, aiming for a skull-faced vampire and hitting him in the back with his knees. Alex rolled to the ground and got up, vampires jostling around him. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the emerging, reedy call.
Then he saw it: As the crowd parted there came a long horse, this one not made of bone but instead somehow worse, alive and elongated, skeletal but stretched with skin. The horse was the length of the carriage Elle had driven.
Riding atop the horse was a figure in white, wearing a thin veil that shimmered in the darkness. One arm gripped a long, narrow, bony scythe.
Beneath the veil he could see a strange white visage, very nearly a skull, with shining glimmers where its eyes should be. It was Claire, the Queen of the Dead.
“It’s impossible.” Alex spoke into his microphone. “She’s supposed to be stuck and unable to come back. They needed my blood.”
“Looks like they got what they needed,” Sangster guessed.
The Queen swept her arms and Alex started at the sound of a cracking whip. Elle was back in the carriage now, and the Queen remained as Elle guided the carriage toward the marina.
The Queen drew what looked like a reddish spear and threw it to the ground, and Alex watched the staff stick there and vibrate.
After a second it grew taller, flowering out into a wagon-wheel-like shape at the top. The wagon wheel tilted and then began to revolve, suggesting a mechanism.
“It looks like a satellite dish.” Alex’s brain blazed with powerful energy passing over him as the “dish” swiveled.
A pair of heavily armed Polidorium agents pushed past Alex and aimed at the Queen and began firing. Vampires scattered and the Queen looked down, her skull-like face behind the veil leveling its gaze on them. She rode forward, their bullets pounding against her, sizzling but not exploding.
She whipped the scythe, catching vampires and agents alike. Screams rang out only to be cut short.
Alex moved backward, stumbling and falling to the ground.
He got to his feet and reached back, finding a silver knife and throwing it in one move. The knife bounced off the scythe as it came around, and then the Queen brought it around again, this time to strike him down.
No time to leap, no place to move.
He heard another high-pitched whine, like a motorcycle.
The scythe came sweeping down and a four-foot-long green staff flashed before his eyes, coming from nowhere. The metal staff parried the scythe’s blow, and the Queen jolted her head sideways in surprise.
Alex felt someone grab him by the collar and pull him back, and a green motorcycle of no make he had ever seen before whipped around and in front of him.
The rider wore a blue helmet and was obviously female, wearing a light-colored jacket over her thin frame. Her back turned to Alex, the rider shrieked at the Queen in a language he couldn’t identify.
Suddenly the figure cried in English, “Traitor!”
Silence. The Queen brought her free hand up to her scythe and touched her fingers, almost shrugging. There was a hint of merriment in her blazing veiled eyes.
“No traitor,” she said thickly, in English. “Triumphant.”
Something in the air popped, and Alex felt light filtering into his eyes from above. A great hole had opened where the dark curtain of night was retracting, and light clouds crossed the daytime sky as the great reddish horse turned, and the Queen galloped toward the lake like a fluid and screaming ghost. The last of the vampires that had not retreated with Elle’s carriage went with the skull-headed lady, surrounding the horse and moving just as fast. Within moments, the streets were empty of the dead and gleamed with sunlight.
All that remained were the Polidorium agents and the rider of the green motorcycle, which churned with a muffled softness as near-organic as the engine of the Queen’s carriage. Alex saw that other than handlebars, the bike was devoid of controls.
The girl on the bike flipped her staff and it collapsed to about a foot long, and she stuck it in a saddlebag.
“Who are you?” Alex asked. But already he had a suspicion, an inkling he could not explain.
The girl took off her helmet, turned her head, and smiled. It was Astrid.
CHAPTER 6
The avenue was awash in radio chatter as Sangster and Alex approached Astrid. “Who are you?” Sangster asked again, yanking off his gas mask. Alex was stunned