Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,75

to the blubbery, bony mass that remained of Claire. She threw herself at the feet of Lord Byron, her father.

“How much do you remember?” Alex yelled out. “Do you remember Polidori? There’s no record of you before about sixteen, so do you remember that human life? Did you know that these were your parents? Because I’ll tell you one thing.” Alex pointed at Lord Byron. “He did.”

And Byron, true to form, took one look at his child, shot out a blast of ice, lifted off the platform, and fled into the winds.

Moments later, one of the vampires leaning over Alex exploded as Astrid’s staff went through him, and Alex got to his feet. They stood back to back as the vampires surrounded them.

“Ooookay.” Alex drove the silver-and-wooden dagger into the heart of one and turned, keeping his back to Astrid’s. Far behind them, Elle was sobbing alone on the stage. Sociopaths or not, they could be felled by betrayal.

“Okay,” Astrid echoed as she swiped with the staff, impaling a vampire. Fwoosh and fwoosh and fwoosh, and still they came. They were awash in a sea of skull-faced ghouls.

Not good. “I…,” Alex said, feeling her bony shoulders against his. A vampire nearly caught his hand and he yanked free. “Okay.”

“Yep.” She made a fireball and pushed through a bunch of them, and still they came.

Something whistled in the air, high and growing. Not far away there was an explosion of ice and holy water, with shimmering streaks of silver flying out, and Alex watched twenty of the vampires burst into flame and explode, setting off several more until the explosion dissipated.

“Alex,” Astrid called.

The sound of rotor blades filled the air over his shoulder, and Alex turned with Astrid. Now he saw them, a streak of smoke as a missile emerged from the wing of a gunship helicopter. The missile struck the crowd, and Alex saw more vampires explode.

Four gunships, all told, and one of them swooped low. Alex saw the insignia of the Polidorium on the outside.

“Well, they could have been faster.” Astrid fought on, but already the crowd was running for the ocean.

“Yeah, but I’ll take it.” Alex saw Armstrong, her leg still bandaged, and Sangster hanging out of the side of one of the gunships, firing away with machine guns. He watched all four mighty steel machines as they swooped like birds of prey, and the panicking, abandoned followers of the Queen began to run and die in disarray.

Alex and Astrid tore and shot and kicked as the gunships swept around them, scattering fire and ashes over the Brough of Birsay.

CHAPTER 27

The following morning, winter came to Lake Geneva with a sudden and unstopping sprinkling of snow, bringing an end to the strangest autumn of Alex Van Helsing’s life. Alex was silent all during the ride with Sangster into the clearing in the woods and down into the recesses of the farmhouse.

Astrid had disappeared when they landed at the airstrip, off to the Orchard. He hadn’t had the nerve to ask her when or if he would see her again.

It wasn’t until Sangster had parked the van and they were walking through the hangar that he spoke.

“It eats you alive, doesn’t it?” Alex said, stopping next to a Humvee, putting his hand on the hood just below a TALIA SUNT decal.

Sangster paused and looked back. “What?”

Alex was looking at the staircase that led up to the metal door, beyond which lay the secret world of the Polidorium. It was cold in the hangar and his words seemed to echo. For a moment he toyed with the clasp on his watch, which had a little silver cross, so that if he had no other weapons he could at least slap a vampire across the face and cause it pain. “There’s nothing in the world I can imagine that is more horrible than vampirism, to see a person perverted and changed and made evil, and still have their brains and pieces of their personality.”

“Yeah,” Sangster agreed, but he seemed a little suspicious. “Yeah, that’s fair. It’s horrible.”

“It was a trauma so great that Allegra Byron completely forgot her childhood when she became Elle.”

“About that.” Sangster looked genuinely puzzled. “How did you know that Elle was Allegra?”

Alex thought for a moment. “Actually, it was something that Ultravox said to me last month.”

“Last month? You knew last month?” Sangster looked shocked.

“No, no,” Alex said. “But Ultravox, when he wasn’t busy telling his own lies, said something amazing that I remembered when Elle was