Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,53

have happened.”

Alex had to nod. “Yeah, I know. Vienna? Seriously. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

She said in frustration, “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“So tell me you’re not working for the Scholomance.”

“I’m not working for them,” Vienna said at last. “But I guess you could say that I am in their thrall.”

And then she told her story.

Chapter 22

Vienna Cazorla was rowing at dusk in the pond at Retiro Park when she first saw the vampire. It was summer in Madrid, and the evening air was cool, the water dark and motionless as her rowboat slowly edged across it. It was strange to be rowing alone, but then she felt strange.

Rowing was the only thing she had thought to do, the only thing that made sense. Vienna had rushed out of the hospital, feeling sick herself. She had been to see her brother, and now she wanted to do something that he should be doing with her. She was aching and wanted to act out the ache with her arms, using oars he should be using.

Carlos was dying. He was a National Guardsman and that had always been such a glorious thing; she had loved to see him in his dashing uniform, loved the chocolates he brought back from wherever he went. But he had been caught in a blast when terrorists in the north blew up a car next to a small bodega where he had been getting a take-out order of paella. Carlos had not even been on duty. It was chance alone that had struck him with chunks of concrete and fire and bashed in his skull. He lingered in the hospital in Madrid, maybe aware of his parents, maybe aware of Vienna. Maybe.

She had run from the hospital and rented a boat and furiously swept herself to the center, in the shadow of the Prado Museum, surrounded by trees and dying light.

The sound of tourists and picnicking families, the chirping of birds, the quiet stroke of the oars, all of it mocked her, normal and everyday, obscenely oblivious to her pain. Nothing was normal anymore.

She barely noticed the girl on the shore; with her eyes she swept over the spiky blond hair and the white coat and didn’t look again. Vienna may have been aware the girl was watching her, but maybe that was something she realized only later. Vienna swore angrily as she rowed. There was no one to talk to. Her parents were in their own world. Her friends at school—there really wasn’t such a thing at the moment, because school was over, and when she returned she’d be at a new place, at LaLaurie School for Girls, and the cast would change.

She missed Steven, the American she had known at Vogler Academy, her primary school in Switzerland. Steven was quiet, and he had always listened, but recently she had sent letters and he hadn’t failed to answer so much as failed to answer in any meaningful way. He was changing, and what had been silence in person had become a distant dryness on paper. No. There was no one left but her brother, and he was dying.

Vienna moored the boat as it grew dark and walked past the Prado, down thin Madrid streets, past restaurant owners beckoning tourists to dinner, the expensive menús del día around the park, and farther back, where the locals gathered and drank and ate, better menus and better prices.

She found herself in a small, cramped museum that had been a favorite of Carlos’s, one they had visited just before he headed north. She found herself wandering through the etchings of Goya, Los Caprichos, the capricious, the random, and evil. Garish faces and unhappy people, the accidents of life.

And then she found herself in front of The Resurrection of Lazarus. It was a painting in the style of El Greco, elongated figures and vibrant, garish color. Vienna had seen countless paintings on the subject, but it had been Carlos who had drawn her to this one: Jesus before the tomb, Lazarus the dead, standing barely inside behind the rolled-away stone. Lazarus was wrapped head to foot in white shrouds, and as he looked out, walking toward the beckoning Christ, his face was ghoulish and green, and full of horror. It was a painting that spoke of shock and blasphemy. Lazarus was risen, barely able to comprehend: Who has done this thing? You who are so powerful, why have you done this? Did the people who love