Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,11

however much it can take, and oh, it poisons and kills you.”

“Poisons? It bit one guy, Steven Merrill. He was in my room.”

“Did you find him being bitten? How much blood—”

“I was there when it jumped on him and I pulled it off almost immediately,” Alex answered. “Steven collapsed a few minutes later. He’s in the hospital.”

“How’s he doing?” Armstrong asked.

“We won’t know until tomorrow,” Sangster said, shaking his head. “What will the effect of the worm look like?”

“Something like malaria,” Armstrong said. “A blood disease. It’ll try to kill his white blood cells. It sounds like the bite was very brief. With any luck they’ll treat him at the hospital and he’ll pull through.”

“You think so?” Alex asked.

Armstrong paused. “I guess I kind of hope so, Alex.”

“So they hit him with an expensive and exotic weapon,” Sangster said. “Doesn’t that seem a little overboard for a retaliation?”

“What are you thinking?” Armstrong asked, searching Sangster’s face. Alex watched her eyes dart; she had this way of scanning you like a map.

“I don’t know. Tell me about the escalation you’re seeing,” Sangster replied. “It’s a stretch, but maybe it’s connected.”

Armstrong turned her attention back to the keyboard and tapped some more. Information began to scroll down the wall, codes Alex could not read except that each was appended with a date and time down to the thousandth of a second. “When it comes to Scholomance activity, there absolutely has been an escalation,” she said. “Just a week ago, Chatterbox looked pretty normal.”

Alex raised a hand. “Chatterbox?”

Armstrong nodded. “This is something new we’ve been working on. It’s still in its early stages—we have the main architect coming in to do some tweaks. Okay, actually, it’s way beyond me, but it is very cool.”

Now the screen began to arrange itself into a dynamic map of information—circles connected by dotted lines. As Armstrong swiped her hand, the map swiveled on its axis, showing more and more circles. She swiped her hand again and it stretched out chronologically; swiped again, and Alex saw topics laid out in idea groups and time.

“All of the information you see here,” Armstrong said, “is compiled by computer, with human agents tweaking as they go. It’s sweeping up emails, phone calls, texts, whatever we’ve managed to pick up. It’s not easy because vampires tend to use phones and email addresses the way most criminals do—they keep them for a short time and toss them. Forums and chat rooms pop up and come down, and we at the Polidorium dedicate a lot of time to trolling all of these. Chatterbox looks for patterns.”

As admirable as this was, Alex felt a little queasy. This was a scary tool.

Armstrong continued, “Anyway, Chatterbox as of last week was showing no particular focus for the Scholomance here. As of yesterday there was more chatter about Mira, which is their code for Lake Geneva.”

“Why now?” he asked.

Armstrong tapped another key, and the line of communications grew into a map, with small red blips where different messages had appeared. As she trailed a finger over the tabletop, he saw each blip explode with information and keywords, Mira, Polidorium, and a plethora of other targeted phrases.

“Maybe they wanted you out of the way,” Armstrong said, “because someone is coming to the Scholomance.”

“Another clan lord?” Sangster asked.

Armstrong shook her head. “None of the clans have been chattering the way you’d expect if a lord was on the move—the way we knew Icemaker was coming. No, it’s someone called by this other code word, Ultravox.” She indicated the idea map, and swished her hand to now show ideas mapped in time and tagged geographically—circles moving up and down a map of Europe, building toward Switzerland. The keyword Ultravox glowed again and again.

“Who is Ultravox?” Alex asked.

Sangster said, “Well, for one thing it’s the name of a New Wave band.”

“What’s New Wave?”

Armstrong pursed her lips, a kind of choked smile.

Sangster continued, “But it means the Voice, the Super Voice, I guess.”

“Do you have any data on a vampire called the Voice?” Alex asked hopefully.

“We’re looking,” Armstrong said.

Carreras cleared his throat. “It is time we consider the wisdom of returning Van Helsing to the school. For his own safety.”

All were silent.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Alex. “And then what? What does that mean? Without a school to go to, I got no reason to be here.”

He realized he was bringing to the surface a matter that had not really been discussed. Alex was being trained and allowed to work for the Polidorium because they