“How do you know who I am?” said Alex, coming to stand on legs that, he was proud to note, were only slightly shaky. “And what is this?” He looked around at the vehicles, noticing that at the end of the “garage” was a set of metal staircases leading up into doors in the rock wall. He had no way of guessing how much more space there might be on the other side of the doors.

He looked back at the ramp they’d come down as the contingent of commandos returned with the heavy, staccato sound of boots on concrete.

“Did you get them all?” Sangster asked.

“We got those around the perimeter,” replied the woman Alex had seen as they’d come through the door. She strode up and laid down her weapon on a table with a number of other rifles like it. The woman was about half a head shorter than Sangster but all muscle, with shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair and a healthy smattering of freckles. “But you gotta figure one or two made it back to the caravan.”

The older man in the suit frowned. “Either way, the caravan will surely be intrigued that they sent a handful of vampires to kill a human witness and the party never returned.” He was watching Alex now, running his eyes up and down. “Let’s not talk here,” he said, looking around. Besides the commandos, there was a lot of activity in the garage, crews working on vehicles and milling about.

Sangster nodded and they all began to move up a flight of metal stairs to a door. Sangster and the woman kept Alex between them as they came through the door and into a carpeted foyer of the kind you’d find in an office building. They moved swiftly, Alex silently taking it all in as they walked past rooms that even at this late hour were filled with men and women busy at workstations, studying dots on massive maps displayed on glass walls.

They filed into a conference room and Sangster indicated a chair halfway down the length of the table. Alex took it. Sangster sat across, with the woman at Sangster’s right and the older man at the head.

Alex leaned in for a closer look at the long, black table. There were computer screens inlaid in its slick surface. In the center of the table was a sort of crest or shield, a circular symbol that bore a Latin phrase: Talia sunt. Below that a single word:

“‘Polidorium,’” Alex read aloud. He looked up. “Who are you people?”

The older man gestured at the other two. “This is Agent Armstrong,” he said, and the blond, freckled woman nodded, not smiling. “You’ve met Agent Sangster. My name is Carerras.” He turned to Sangster. “Do his parents know he’s here?”

Sangster shook his head. “He must have snuck out; I think he followed me.”

“We have to decide what to tell the Van Helsings.”

“Hang on,” Alex interrupted, infuriated. “Stop. What do you mean, what to tell the Van Helsings—I’m sorry, I—what is this? I mean, those were—those things on the road were…”

“Technically, modified post-initial-failure humans,” said Sangster. “Vampires. What, you’ve never seen them before?”

Alex paused. He came to a decision. “No, actually I’m starting to see them a lot. I saw one in the woods. It attacked me. I killed it.”

“Really? How did you kill it?”

“Luck,” Alex said tiredly. “Luck. Those things aren’t supposed to exist. And then there was another one.”

“Where?”

“The school. It was outside my window, looking in at me. It chased me across the roof.”

Sangster folded his arms. “Hmmm.” Alex’s eyes fell again on the crest on the table and he thought back to the snatches of conversation he’d caught at the gate. “What is the Polidorium?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know,” Sangster said. After a moment, looking at Carerras and Armstrong, Sangster went on, “We are the Polidorium. Founded by Dr. John Polidori in 1821.”

“John Polidori?” Alex asked, thinking of the introduction to Frankenstein and the notes about it. “The guy from the Frankenstein party?”

Armstrong ran her fingers through her hair. Even across the table, Armstrong and Sangster still smelled like gunpowder, and it suddenly made Alex feel like heaving. “We like to think of it as the Polidori party,” said Armstrong.

“So,” said Carerras, pulling out a pouch and a pipe. As he began to prepare his pipe he summed it up. “You don’t know much about vampires, or about us. What can you tell us about you?”

Alex looked up. “What do you mean?”

“How old are you? Where did you live before now? And if you’re not up on us, what do you know about the Van Helsing Foundation?”

Alex spoke slowly, wondering this time if the truth were the right answer. He told it anyway. “I’m fourteen, and my parents and my sisters live in Wyoming right now. The Van Helsing Foundation, that’s a charitable organization my dad runs as chairman.”

“Wait a second.” Armstrong leaned forward, taking Alex’s glasses off his face in a quick swipe. She held them up to the light, studying them.

“Hey, I need those,” Alex protested. She was a blur now. He couldn’t even make out her face, and the sudden blindness made him feel trapped and claustrophobic.

“He doesn’t wear those in class,” Sangster said. “I’ve never seen you wear glasses.”

“I wear contacts,” Alex snapped.

Armstrong was still peering intently at the pair of glasses. “Why aren’t you wearing contacts now?”

“It’s like three A.M.!” he said.

Armstrong pursed her lips, then handed them back. “They’re normal,” she said, satisfied. Alex put the glasses back on, very slowly.

Carerras spoke. “You’re aware, no doubt, of the associations of your family name?”

Alex chewed on this, on the absurdity of all of this, the G.I. Joe figures studying his glasses as though they might be made of kryptonite, a man in a suit a mile underground asking this or any question in the middle of the night. “You mean, ‘vampire hunter’? Like in the movies? There are worse names to have,” Alex said. “But yes, I hear a lot about it. My dad gets annoyed every time someone even mentions that character. It’s like running around with the name Hannibal.”

Sangster shook his head in something like wonder and addressed the others. “I did some research when I saw his name on my roster of students. He climbs mountains. He rescues hikers. He’s been taught to survive on little or no rest or food. He can drive a combine and ride a motorbike, and he once survived a snakebite by applying a tourniquet to his own leg, nearly causing him to lose a foot.” Alex felt a tinge of pride and fear as his literature teacher recited a litany of things that, over the years, Alex had indeed been taught to do. His father had encouraged all of his children in these things. Well, not the tourniquet. “And yet not a single thing does he know about the one thing he should know most: vampires. He hasn’t been trained to fight them. As far as I can tell he knows nothing of the business.”

Carerras asked, “Have any of the Van Helsings been active?”

“Charles is inactive. We all know about Amanda,” Sangster said, “and—”

“What does that mean?” demanded Alex.

Sangster said evenly, “All it means is that without your mother, your father would probably still be on the payroll.”

“This is crazy,” Alex said, rising and shaking his head.

“Can you give us a minute or two?” Sangster looked at the others.

A moment later Sangster and Alex were alone in the conference room and Sangster was pressing buttons on an invisible keyboard in the table. As a projection screen dropped down from the ceiling, he spoke into the table-top. “Gimme a club soda.” He turned to Alex. “You want a Dr Pepper?”

“What are you trying to say about my mother?” Alex said, frowning.

Sangster had an open expression that Alex took to be one of peacemaking. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked again.

“Whatever.”

Sangster made the order and turned his attention to the keyboard. He hit a button and a jagged, infrared image filled the screen on the wall: a man leaping toward a camera on a balcony somewhere as a politician’s motorcade rolled in the streets below. The attacker’s nails were sharp and his teeth—fangs—were bared.

“We kill vampires, Alex.” Sangster hit the button again and now showed another infrared image, a different vampire leaping onto a car in the motorcade, ripping back the windshield like paper. “Guys like us, some of us hunt terrorists; some of us fight wars. The Polidorium was founded to hunt vampires.”

“Just vampires?”

“Eh,” Sangster said noncommittally. He tapped the invisible keyboard and now brought up an image of a young Italian man in a painting. “This is Polidori.”

Alex tried to remember details of the lecture on Frankenstein. That all seemed like a year ago. “We talked about him in class. Mary Shelley makes him sound like an idiot. You said that guy seemed like a loser.”

“Here is what you must know if we are to go forward,” Sangster said seriously. “There are two Polidoris. The one we read about and the one we honor by serving this organization.”

Now below the portrait of Polidori appeared two columns—two sets of biographical data points.

The door opened and an agent brought a tray with their drinks. Sangster indicated the Dr Pepper and Alex took it as his mysterious teacher continued.

“According to the accepted literature, John Polidori fell out with his friend Lord Byron in 1816, shortly after they stayed here at Lake Geneva. Broke and depressed, Polidori supposedly died of a drug overdose just a few years later.

“Here is what any agent of the Polidorium will tell you if you have the right to hear it, and God help me, whether your father likes it or not, you do.”

As Sangster spoke, he tapped a button and another screen lit up, flashing images: helicopters and motorcycles, machinery and computers, the screens with GPS coordinates of agents moving across the globe.

“John Polidori was not a fool. He altered his life, starting after his book, The Vampyre, the first modern book on vampires.

“In 1818, as his book was coming out, Polidori faced his first coven of vampires, a group running an opium den in London. He traced those vampires to a clan running a newspaper and a publishing house. He killed several but the vampires began to turn public opinion against the doctor, who was obliged to keep his activities a secret. Polidori soon found his bad reputation useful. By now, he had a mission. He faked his own death and went underground.

“By 1831, when Mary Shelley wrote her revised Frankenstein, everyone remembered Polidori as an idiot—Mary included. She even changed her description of what he was writing about—nowhere does she use the word vampire; instead she makes up a story about a skull-headed lady.

“But Polidori made friends. Among other people, in the late 1830s he met the young Abraham Van Helsing, who was a real person, despite what you’ve heard. Bram Stoker met him when Van Helsing was an old man and wrote his book Dracula based on Van Helsing’s story. A long time before that, Van Helsing had used some of his own considerable wealth to help Polidori create this organization. When Polidori did die—in 1851, thirty years after his reported death—the Polidori Society stretched across Europe and the United States and was receiving money from the black budgets of every nation. From time to time they continued to work with the Van Helsing Foundation—your father’s research foundation.”

“The VHF is made up of scholars and doctors,” said Alex. “They make malaria vaccines and run clinics in third-world countries. I don’t see any of those guys chasing vampires through the woods.”

“They do more than that, but the activities you are talking about give them reason to operate across the planet,” said Sangster. “And when they need firepower, they call the Polidorium.”

Alex stared at the image of the Italian doctor who had worked with his—what would it be? “So Abraham Van Helsing was my—”

“Great-great-great-grandfather,” said Sangster. “That would be three greats.”

“Do you know my father?”

“Not personally.”

“But he was an—he was what you are.”

“He was an agent, yes.”

“He never told me any of this,” Alex said, and now he flashed on the white-fanged creatures pursuing him through the woods.

And then on something else.

“If you did research on me,” Alex asked slowly, “then do you know about…”

“About your old school?” Sangster asked calmly, when Alex found that he couldn’t complete the sentence. Alex nodded.

Back at Frayling Prep, Alex had felt the jagged static for the first time. At the beginning he had put it down to being away from home at boarding school, the ache of homesickness for the six family members he’d left behind. But then he noticed that the static only seemed to occur in the presence of one fellow classmate, a guy named Max Pierce. Pierce seemed harmless enough—sure, he picked on some of the younger students, but he was nowhere near as mean as Merrill & Merrill, despite what Alex had told Paul, Sid, and Minhi in Secheron earlier that day. But Alex couldn’t get over his unease. He’d confided in his father, who told him he probably wasn’t getting enough sleep, and that it was just migraines. “They run in the family,” his father had said.

And then the incident. Studying late one night in the library, Alex had looked up at the window in time to see a figure hurry out of the chapel on the Frayling campus. At that moment Alex felt that static again, pounding in his brain, driving him out onto the grounds.

He had found Pierce, in a tree, peeping into one of the girl’s dorms. Pierce’s shoes were off and he was using his toes to balance, and when Alex called out to him, Pierce had swiveled toward him with a lustful, drooling look. It was as though Pierce were possessed by some animal part of himself. Pierce launched himself at Alex.

Pierce hadn’t fought like a kid; he fought like a maniac, clawing and biting. Alex defended himself using the techniques he had been taught—and a quickness of reflex that seemed to come out of nowhere. The fight was brutal and fast, and accompanied by a sound that Alex could only define as “snarling”—animal-like snarling, coming from Pierce’s snapping mouth. And at the end of it, Pierce lay there, bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious. Horrified at what he had done and unsure of what he had seen, Alex had begun to shudder uncontrollably, and that’s when the dean came out of his office on his way to his car and found them.

“Pierce was a werewolf, Alex,” Sangster said. He tapped some keys on the keyboard in the table and there Alex’s face was on the screen, next to the Frayling expulsion report. And more: a picture of Pierce. No, two pictures. One was Pierce’s student ID photo and the other was a photo of a wolflike head with eyes that looked familiar. Pierce’s.

“Why do you have this?”

“This entry in the database is on our American servers; it was triggered by an anonymous tip. We can keep an eye on him now. Your fight was in the middle of the lunar cycle—Pierce was itching for a change but wouldn’t have undergone a full transformation for another week. During the day he was normal, so no one but you ever noticed.”

“The school called my father,” Alex said, almost to himself. “He came right away. He was furious. He talked to the counselors and police and got me out with only an expulsion and no jail time, no newspaper stories. I gotta say that I got off easy. But when we were finally alone and I told him what I—what I felt, the way Pierce acted, he made me promise not to mention it ever again. He said people would think I was crazy. It even sounded like he thought I was crazy. But if what you’re saying is true, he probably knew all about it. That Pierce was a werewolf.”

Alex couldn’t help feeling betrayed by this realization. His father had lied to him, and worse, made him question his own sanity. How could he—what would be worth that? “So…why didn’t he tell me?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know why he didn’t tell you,” said Sangster. “But he’s been preparing you. All your life. Self-defense. Mountain rescue. Whether he likes it or not, he knows what you’re going to be.”

Alex wondered if Dad knew he had spent a considerable part of the past week running for his life. “Who was that on the road tonight?”

“Icemaker,” Sangster replied. He tapped at the keys again, and now a new sketch appeared—a cruel-eyed man with swept-back hair. “That was the arriving caravan of a clan lord, a big boss, that we call Icemaker.”

“You call him that because of the cold?” Alex asked.

“That’s right.”

“You give all the vampires cool superhero names?”

Sangster smiled.

Alex went on. “So who is this Icemaker?”

“Polidori knew him as, believe it or not, Lord Byron,” Sangster said. The sketch morphed into an older image: The eyes and face remained, but now the hair was longer and the man’s clothes were in the ruffled, nineteenth-century style. “The poet…and the first vampire Polidori ever faced. That last summer when the whole group of friends was together, the Haunted Summer, is the summer that Byron began to consort with vampires. Byron was an arrogant man, attractive to every woman he met and able to best any man in any contest, but he was plagued by self-consciousness, about his club foot, his height, his reputation as a writer. Vampirism attracts people who want to become something greater than themselves. It took years before Byron became a full vampire, but Polidori saw it coming. Obviously this isn’t the kind of thing I would ever teach in class.”

Too bad for Sid, Alex thought. Sangster went on.

“Today Icemaker controls thousands of vampire soldiers. He’s very secretive, even for a clan lord. But know this: He is extraordinarily dangerous. When he needs blood, he doesn’t just come in and kill a few, he kills hundreds. He’ll attack, freeze the town, then reduce it to shards.”

“Do you know why he’s here?” Alex asked.

“Nope. We got word that he destroyed one of our ships, the Wayfarer, which had a cargo of relics and other holdings on its way to a warehouse in the States. Then suddenly we started tracking him here. Something got his attention and drove him back to Lake Geneva.”

“Where would they be going? Where would they put all of those vehicles?”

“In a place we can’t find,” Sangster said. “A place even better hidden than this: a place called the Scholomance.”

Alex nodded. He had heard that word. “That’s a hideout?”

“It’s a school, more a university, like an MIT for vampires.”

“And it’s around here?”

“We think so,” Sangster said. He tapped another key and Alex nearly choked on his drink.

There, in a blurry photograph, was a shot of his own father, that skinny, seldom-exercised man, here twenty years younger, fitter, and hunkered down behind a crumbled wall as he talked on a radio. “Where was this taken?”

Sangster looked up. “Hmmm…I’d say Prague.”

“When was this taken?”

“I would figure not long before you were born.” Sangster looked at Alex searchingly. He smiled and then said, “Come on, Alex.”

“What?”

“One more time: It’s really your position that you have never heard of the Polidorium or the work it does? And that your knowledge of the Van Helsing Foundation is restricted to its charitable activities?”

“Yes! Everything you said.” Alex couldn’t take his eyes off the picture. Incredible. Dad was an honest-to-God, hunkering-down-behind-crumbling-buildings-and-shooting-things spy. “Doesn’t happen,” Alex muttered.

“What?”

“All my life my dad brushes off anything that he thinks sounds like nonsense with ‘that doesn’t happen.’ But it turns out that everything that doesn’t happen actually does.”

“Probably not everything,” Sangster said. “Anyway, we can’t keep you from talking. Even if we tried, drugs wear off. I have no idea what we’re going to do with you.”

“Can I learn this stuff?” Alex said, stepping closer to the screen.

“Maybe you should ask your dad that,” Sangster said, studying Alex.

“I don’t get it. Why would he send me here? If he didn’t want me involved with this.”

“He didn’t send you here,” Sangster responded, “he sent you to one of the most prestigious private schools in the world.” The teacher/agent bit his lip. “I don’t think he knows the Polidorium has a location at Lake Geneva. It’s top secret, and it’s only been here since we started focusing our search for the Scholomance. We don’t share that kind of information with former agents.”

“If you tell him, he’ll drag me out of here,” Alex said seriously. “That’ll be it for me. I don’t want that. This is too much to turn my back on.”

Sangster rose, tapped a key, and the screen went dark. Then he turned back to Alex with a serious look. “Alex, can you sense them?”

Alex sat silently for a moment. “I think so. When they’re close. I felt it the other night in my room.”

“At school?”

“Yes, and then it—she—was there, outside my window. And…I felt it at Frayling, too.”

Sangster was weighing something in his head.

“You tired?”

Alex had to admit he was.

“Let’s go back to school. It’s going to be morning in a few hours.”

They exited the boardroom and Armstrong and Carerras were down by the foyer in conversation.

Sangster went to find a jacket and helmet for Alex. As Alex waited, he watched the other commandos going about their business, putting back their weapons, fooling around.

Armstrong was talking to Carerras, who was puffing away at his pipe. “Still have no idea where they are,” Carerras was saying.

“We might have found out tonight.”

“Never can tell.”

Sangster returned and handed Alex the helmet. “If you felt it the other night before it chased you at the school, then it’s worse than I thought,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“They know you’re here.”