Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,54

me so know what they have done? What a curse it is to return to this world?

A minor Lazarus, but a shocking one.

“That is one unhappy dead man,” the person behind her said, in perfect Spanish, and that was when she met Elle.

Elle, whose eyes shone brilliantly and huge in a face of chalky white skin. Vienna found herself listening to her. Elle said, “I want to talk to you about your brother.”

It only took an hour. Elle led her to a quiet café where she told her what she had in mind. She did not hypnotize and yet she was hypnotic.

“We can save him,” Elle said, “but of course it’s forbidden, and all forbidden things have a price. There is a curse you must take on yourself in exchange for his.”

Anything. She would do anything.

“And one day, some day, we will ask a favor of you,” Elle said.

An inkling of the limits of her blasphemy flashed across Vienna’s mind. “You’re going to ask me to kill someone,” she said.

“Doesn’t have to be that,” Elle said in her curious casual way. “No, it will be a simple favor.”

“When can you help Carlos?” Vienna said.

“We can do it tonight,” Elle said.

“He won’t die?”

“He won’t,” Elle said, “not for a long time.”

“When will your request come?”

Elle reached under the table and took out a silver box, which she slid across the table, next to Vienna’s water glass. At her request, Vienna opened the box and saw inside, laid in black velvet, a shimmering green scarf. “The first one comes as soon as you say you’re in,” Elle said. “And that’s as simple as putting this little present on. The next request—we’ll let you know.”

Carlos recovered. He recovered fast, with a voracious appetite. He healed like no one the doctors had ever seen before. It was with joy that she bade him good-bye in the fall, he teasing her about her newfound accessory, which she never took off, ever.

And on the evening Vienna heard that the school across the lake had suffered a severe fire, she received her next instructions.

Elle provided Vienna with a target, always intended to be someone who could write and who could get in front of the students of LaLaurie. Elle had a handful of candidates—had even made sure Vienna roomed with one—but none of them was quite the perfect vessel for the Ultravox virus. Within hours of the fire, when it became clear that boys would be moving to LaLaurie, a stack of new dossiers landed in Elle’s lap. And when she came across Sid’s dossier Elle rejected all of the previous candidates. Sid studied vampires, had even read some vampire writing, and his head would already be seeded with keywords and phrases. He would be susceptible, even if only slightly more so, to the kind of subconscious suggestion that Ultravox planned to utilize. And he spent a great deal of time writing. Sid would be perfect. All that was left was for Vienna to watch for an opportunity.

Chapter 23

Vienna and Alex found Sid, Paul, and Minhi coming out of class and hurried them in the opposite direction of the moving crowds.

Sid was already walking with them but looked back. “Don’t we have to get to class?”

“Oh, we’re being all kinds of truant today,” Alex said. They snuck out the side exit and headed across the lawn to New Aubrey House, where no one would be working until the afternoon.

As Alex started a fire in the fireplace of the small, dusty study, Minhi beheld the scuffs and smudges all over Vienna with shock. “What happened to you?”

“I lost my head,” said Vienna.

Alex stoked the fire and looked back at Sid and his backpack. “Do you have the book?”

Sid somehow knew the one he was talking about and fished it out. It was dog-eared and full of papers he had stuck in it. Sid laid it on the table. “Yep.”

Alex explained bluntly. “The book is a plant,” he said. “It’s magic, vampire magic. The kind that powerful vampires have access to, just as powerful as the spells that keep the Scholomance entrance hidden. But this magic was aimed at us—at students. Sid, I’m really sorry, but the book has a sort of virus in it, and it’s been passing through you to students at LaLaurie.”

“It’s my fault,” Vienna said. “I gave you the book.”

“Randomly?” Sid asked evenly. He had a pale, sick look about him.

“No,” she said. “The vampire girl—Elle—made me do it. She saved my brother’s life and