Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,7

felt the shock in his knees and ran through it, releasing the straps and tottering forward, flipping end over end until he finally rolled to a stop, singed and bruised but alive.

Near the horizon, a second fireball erupted with a distant boom as the plane slammed to the ground, lighting up the clouds with orange and yellow.

Alex sat for a moment and caught his breath. He then fished a cell phone out of his pocket and punched in some numbers. Within half an hour, the air filled with the sound of rotor blades.

CHAPTER 2

Six hours later, he was back at Glenarvon-LaLaurie School on the banks of Lake Geneva as though nothing unusual had occurred.

“You’ve got to tell me everything,” Sid Chamberlain, Alex’s ginger-haired Canadian roommate, said as he walked with Alex to the cafeteria. Alex still felt a twinge of pain in his knees, but all told, the worst he had to deal with were some mild burns on his forearms. Paul Messina, his other roommate, was walking ahead of them, so broad of shoulder that he acted as a human icebreaker, spreading the traffic of students in the halls out around them.

Alex picked up a nervous sort of buzz in the air, most of it about upcoming travel. As he sped through the busy halls of the school in the morning, his stomach raging with hunger, he could hear people exchanging plans. Two weeks to the fall break, Alex still had not decided if he would be going home.

“I think they just wanted the computer.” Alex answered when Sid asked why the attack on the plane had happened.

“So what about this creature school?” Sid’s eyes were on fire with the idea of a deep study of the races of vampires. When he wasn’t working on his own fiction, Sid spent every remaining waking minute studying vampires for Scarlet World, a game that he liked to play. Sid had stacks of characters he had designed based on the reference books he kept.

“Oh, that.” They were turning into the cafeteria now, and Paul led them straight to a table in the back right corner. There she was. Minhi Krishnaswami was wearing a sweater jacket and waving to them.

Minhi gave Paul a chaste peck as they took a seat in a clatter of chairs and dropped backpacks. “You’re back!” Minhi called, and Alex wanted to hug her, but he was already engaged in sitting down and had blown the chance. Wasn’t right to want to anyway. She was Paul’s girlfriend and there was nothing else to say.

Minhi placed her palms flat on the table and leaned forward, eyes crinkling with her smile. “So?”

Alex said to everyone, “Did you know that there’s a vampire that’s just a head, but it has bat wings coming out of its ears?”

“Yeah, that’s the chonchon.” Sid nodded. “Did you see one?”

“A dead one.”

“Oh my God,” Sid practically panted.

Paul chuckled. “Yes, yes, oh my God. Did you know,” he repeated in his London accent, slapping the table and looking at Minhi, “that our man in Switzerland threw himself out of a bloody plane last night?”

Minhi’s mouth formed a confused O. “What?”

“In my defense, that was really the strongest option on the table.” Alex looked around. “I’m starving.”

“Here, here,” Paul said, and they stood and headed to the front of the cafeteria. They dropped all talk of planes and bat wings for the duration. These were Alex’s…what were they? Confidants? Friends, but friends that knew his secrets.

Alex had a lot of secrets to keep, but to be fair he’d been playing fast and loose with all of them. In the past three months since he had come to Glenarvon Academy, which had since merged with their sister school, LaLaurie, Alex had learned to walk a daily tightrope that relied very much on the completely unsupervised discretion of the circle of friends he had entrusted with the details of his second and more unusual life. These three, Paul and Sid and Minhi, knew how much time Alex spent training with the agents of the Polidorium and they took it in stride, as Paul explained it, the way they might accommodate an Olympic speed skater with a demanding coach.

A discreet part of Alex wondered if he had made some mistake sharing so much with them, but he couldn’t have it any other way. He would have liked to have been a loner and kept it all to himself, but he needed the feeling of acceptance and normalcy they brought. He tried