Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,22
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?”