Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,48

were hoping you’d be awake and able to join.” She gestured for him to follow, and as they stepped between the two trees from which she’d come, the scene changed.

They were walking down a corridor of marble tile with heavy wood-paneled walls. Alex looked back and saw that he’d just come through a simple wooden doorway, and beyond it he could still see the trees and the cot. “Was the room an illusion, like a hologram?”

“What?” Astrid stopped next to a painting on the wall, a portrait of a woman with a feathered hat and a blue blouse. Underneath it a plaque read m. brelaz, portugal.

“I mean it was a clearing in an orchard. No walls and no ceiling, and now we’re in a building,” Alex said, working out how he’d try to build such a thing. “So was it, like, a room with holographic walls, maybe a movie screen on the ceiling?”

“Maybe the hallway is the illusion,” Astrid said mysteriously as they walked farther, passing numerous doors, each wooden, each with a silver plate at the center that marked them with what Alex assumed to be numbers, probably in the Hexen language. Astrid stopped finally at a door and turned back. “I’m just teasing you,” she said, opening the door. “It’s all practical and physical, but there’s magic in the way it’s all connected.”

They stepped into an enormous den that reminded Alex of a ski lodge, with huge windows looking out on snowy mountains, large wooden chandeliers, and a massive fireplace. A round table sat on the stone tiles of the room, and Alex saw the white-haired woman he had met earlier sitting at one of a number of high-backed chairs. In front of her was a plate of fruit, and next to her was a large wheel with an enormous spool of thread perched on top—a spinning wheel.

Alex’s mother, Amanda, was standing at the table sliding her hand over a leather parchment, flicking her fingers the way you might flick the screen on an iPhone. “Look at that, he sleeps late even in the most hidden space in the world.”

“Mom.” Alex smiled at the sight of his mother, and ran and embraced her, and then pulled back and said, “Wait—the way it’s connected?”

Amanda turned to Astrid. “You were explaining the layout of Hexen?”

“I was trying,” Astrid said.

Amanda chewed her lip and turned back to Alex. “You want the spiritual answer or the practical one?”

“Would I understand the spiritual answer?”

“Well, it’s more true, but here’s the practical one,” Alex’s mom said. “The headquarters of Hexen are distributed throughout the world and stitched together through concentrated magical couplings.”

“Is there…a map?”

Mother Laura, the woman who had been there when Alex was writhing with pain, was jotting something in a notebook and lifted her pencil. “Since you ask, there is a map, but it’s complicated, and we’re a little behind in updating it.”

“Wasn’t the committee…,” Amanda started to ask.

“Oh, they forgot the Pentagon.” Laura waved a hand dismissively.

“That’s a broom closet in the 1940s,” Amanda scoffed.

“It anchors the whole northern edge,” Laura protested. “The map makes no sense without it. It has to be recast entirely.”

“I’ll pass on the map,” Alex said. “I’m sorry—I’m having a hard time understanding any of this. I didn’t even know there was a Hexen until Astrid showed up to help us with Claire. I didn’t know my mother was a part of it.” He looked at his mother. “Or—is a part of it. Are you still in this?”

“Sometimes.” Amanda bobbed her head. “I wasn’t born into it, though; I was recruited as a child in New York. But allow me to introduce Mother Laura, who currently leads the organization.”

Laura nodded to Alex. The white-haired woman was wearing a lavender blouse and a cameo like the one that Astrid carried. “Your mother is leaving out that when she came to us she was already one of the most gifted adepts we’d ever seen. I trust you’re doing better?”

Alex nodded. “Are there any others?”

“There are hundreds,” Laura responded. “All over the world, and just through that door.”

“We were founded by Mad Meg,” Astrid said.

“Mad Meg?”

“You know the story of Gretel, like in Hansel and Gretel? Gretel was the one who didn’t give up when she faced the witch. She was the one who figured out how to defeat the witch and finally did the work of kicking her into the furnace. Gretel, the one who decided to use everything she’d learned and form a house of witches who