Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,52

large section of its barrel hollowed out. She held up a glass vial next to the weapon. “You’re right, Alex, the weapon will be DNA, shot straight into the heart of Claire. To do that, this is what we would use: It’s a vial gun—you load it with vials that hold a compartment of holy water and a compartment of whatever you want to mix the water with.” She tilted it sideways. “There’s a hammer in here that breaks the vials, mixing them and then pressurizing the mixture for firing.”

Alex nodded.

“We would like to see this body of Allegra as well,” Mother Laura said, nodding to Astrid. “We might learn things from it.”

“Okay, so you have your reasons, and we have something to shoot—we just need to find Allegra,” Alex said. “And we have—ugh—three days. Where was the body sent?”

“To the churchyard of Byron’s school in England, a place called Harrow,” Sangster said.

Alex had heard of Harrow. That was a boys’ school in England, one of the very best. He didn’t know much else.

Sangster nodded. “And there’s another word for Harrow.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “The one thing the painting points to: a hoe.”

CHAPTER 18

Alex and Astrid’s trip back to the Polidorium took no time. One minute, they were saying good-bye to Amanda and hurrying back to the Orchard, and the next minute, they stepped through a pair of trees and emerged near the public library in Secheron village.

“It’s useful to have a drop-off point here,” Astrid said.

“Conveniently near school but not so close as to be suspicious. It’s like a bus stop. When you brought me to the Orchard before, did we come through here?” He was so out of it when his blood was draining away after Icemaker’s attack that he had no memory of the trip.

“No,” Astrid said. “I used a more powerful and tiring spell, a direct jump to the Orchard. It takes a lot out of you. This is easier.”

Astrid summoned her motorcycle near their drop-off point and they rode from the village back to the farmhouse. Alex felt a throb of guilt as they headed into the woods, leaving the road that he would have used on a normal day to go back to school. He needed to call Paul, Sid, and Minhi. But there wasn’t time. From conference table to conference table, from the world of magic to the world of spies, the trip took twenty-six minutes.

It was then another three hours flying from the airfield near the farmhouse before they reached the final resting place of Allegra Byron. With a cold gray wind sweeping off the Thames, Alex rested his hand on a low stone wall and took in the trees that curled over the graveyard like arthritic fingers.

In the months that Alex had been chasing vampires, he had rarely had occasion to visit that eternal vestige of vampire films and books—the churchyard. Now, as he, Sangster, Armstrong, and Astrid got out of the Polidorium van, he found himself in the kind of churchyard seen in movies—tombstones hundreds of years old and creeping with moss, scattered shade from London ash trees, and a massive, crawling, weeping elm that threatened to swallow the graveyard whole. Alex shivered and brought his jacket closer against the wind that snapped over the crumbling walls around St. Mary’s Churchyard at Harrow in northwest London. Not counting wherever the Orchard was, this was the fourth country he had visited in under a week.

His mother had left the Orchard the same way Alex and Astrid had, and he assumed she had stepped out in either Wyoming or a broom closet in the Pentagon in the 1940s; at this point, he had no way of knowing. But it was no wonder to him that Hexen didn’t let the Polidorium come visit. That place could have dangerous uses.

“Over here,” Sangster called. Alex followed Sangster’s voice and found the agent standing next to a low-slung tombstone erected against a wall. Astrid and Armstrong followed, and Alex dropped down to read the inscription on the stone:

In memory of Allegra, daughter of G. G., Lord Byron, who died at Bagna Cavallo in Italy, April 20, 1822, Aged Five Years and Three Months. “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

—2 Samuel, xii, 23.

Alex sighed.

“That was put up in 1980 by the Byron Society,” Sangster said.

“Nineteen eighty? So what was here before?” Alex asked.

Astrid cut in. “Nothing. There was no marker for Allegra’s grave because Lord Byron refused to pay for