“Up and at ’em, hero,” Paul was saying. Alex lay in his makeshift bed, wincing against the light, as Paul and Sid moved about the room, the morning sun streaming in. He blinked awake.

“What?”

Paul was looking in the mirror at the bruise that shone bright blue on the side of his head. “You don’t want to miss breakfast this morning,” he said. “Everyone is going to be cheering after yesterday.”

Alex was confused for a moment and then it all came flooding back. After the woods and the motorcycles and the vampires and the cave, he had completely forgotten that the evening had begun with the Secheron fight. In fact, he had almost gone back to the Merrills’ room after Sangster had dropped him off, wordlessly, at the gate.

Alex moved like a zombie through washing up and putting in his contacts as Paul and Sid lingered near the door, ready to go down to the refectory.

Sid was watching him. “You look terrible,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the sleeping on the floor,” Paul said. “I can see if we can add more blankets.”

“No, no.” Alex waved a hand, his mind still racing through everything he had seen. “No, it’s fine.” He splashed his face again. His eyes were a little sore, but he was getting better at putting his contacts in. He was thinking of the moment when the creatures had spotted him, as he crouched next to…next to Sid’s bike.

He slapped his forehead in disgust. “The…” He turned around, reaching for his sneakers and jamming his feet into them. “You guys go on.”

“What are you doing?” Paul stared.

“I forgot—I wanted to go for a walk. You know…think,” he said awkwardly.

“You wanted to…think?” Paul repeated the words as though he had never heard them before. He pointed to the scratches on his face and neck. “People will be cheering. Look at my face! This is like a medal.”

Alex smacked Paul on the shoulder as he ran out the door. “Enjoy it.”

He raced down the stairs, past bleary-eyed students on their way to breakfast. Headmaster Otranto was coming in from outside and Alex nearly bumped into him, eliciting a short, disapproving look.

Out the door, onto the path, through the gate, a steady pace to the road. He had forgotten Sid’s bike, left it in the woods halfway to Secheron. He was glad for the mistake—he wanted to go back into the woods. Unlike school, the woods were a clearer world, of hooded monsters and agents on motorcycles. Every inch of the area crawled with the kind of energy that he barely felt in his everyday school life. Out here there was energy with purpose. Heroes on a mission. Alex found himself thinking hard as he ran.

The trees looked unfamiliar in the daylight, but after a while he felt he was reaching the bend where he had left the road, where the caravan had started to pass. Finally he saw the glint of the reflector on Sid’s bike as it lay in the leaves.

Alex froze. There, leaning against a tree, arms folded, was Sangster, wearing a navy blue jogging suit. “We need to talk,” he said.

Alex went to the bike and lifted it. “I want in,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘in’?” Sangster asked.

“You showed me pictures of my father. I can do it. I want in.”

“Are you sure that’s what you need to be doing right now?” Sangster asked. “You’re skilled and you’re lucky, but I gotta admit, I’m worried that you shouldn’t even stay in the area.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” Alex asked, and he meant the question sincerely. “Even if I wanted to be normal, to lead a normal life—I’ve got these vibrations in my head when I see these—oh, wait, right—monsters.”

“And they know you have that,” Sangster said. “I’m willing to bet that the Scholomance got wind that a Van Helsing was in Geneva.”

“Last night when you guys were checking out my glasses, you were acting like you thought maybe I was spying on you,” said Alex. “Spying for my dad, I guess.”

“Right.”

“Why would he want me to do that?”

“The relationship is complicated,” Sangster said.

“You gotta understand that’s just not part of what I know of my father. I want to learn about that. I want to learn to do what he did.”

“Alex,” Sangster said soothingly, “this stuff takes years to learn. And you have years.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Alex said. Sangster was calling him a kid basically. That was what this was about. Alex was furious. Last night Sangster had sounded ready to hand him a machine gun. “First, I’ve already killed one of those things without any of your training. And second, I can learn to do what you do. You think I can’t ride through trees?”

Sangster tilted his head. “I didn’t say I don’t think it will happen. I already told you that. Someday.”

Alex started rolling the bike. “I have to go. Paul and Sid are waiting.”

“Be careful on these roads,” Sangster called, adding to Alex’s irritation.

Alex returned the bike and made it to the refectory just as Paul and Sid were getting up from breakfast. Sure enough, there was a crowd of admirers gathered around, who indeed regarded Paul’s scratches and wounds as badges of honor. Alex’s bruises ran up and down his body but were generally invisible, and he felt a twinge of jealousy.

“How was your walk?” Sid asked. Alex shrugged.

A hand clapped down on his shoulder from behind. Alex spun, anticipating a fanged demon that would bite his head in half. Close enough. It was Bill Merrill.

“You didn’t come in last night,” Bill said.

Behind Alex, Paul and Sid grew serious. Steven Merrill, nursing his own wounds, lingered nearby.

“I was there,” Alex said evenly. “Don’t you remember?”

This answer caught Bill by surprise—he was about to respond, then stopped and seemed to chew on it. Get there faster, Bill, thought Alex. Bill looked back at Steven, who pursed his lips.

“Yeah,” Bill said finally. “Maybe so. But don’t think for a minute we’re done.”

“Okay,” Alex said.

Paul made a time-out gesture with his hands. “It’s Saturday, mates. Saturday. For the love of God. Let’s all do something else.”

Bill and Steven consulted each other and reached an agreement. “See you tonight, roomie,” said Bill.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Alex said, knowing they were glad to be rid of him. He hoped that would be the end of it.

Alex, Paul, and Sid spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly about the grounds. After lunch they spent some time on the battlements, sprawled out and reading stacks of Sid’s comics and magazines.

Alex was reading a vampire comic called Tomb of Dracula and despite the events of the past week his first feeling was guilty thrill. His father had always forbidden books on the supernatural—for the first time, Alex thought, he had a clue as to why. But still he couldn’t help trying to compare the pale figures of the comic with those he had seen, even if he could not discuss them aloud.

“What was the first vampire book?” Alex asked.

Sid leaned back against the wall. “Modern vampire?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean there were always stories about family ghosts that came back to haunt sons who’d embarrassed them,” Sid said. “A modern vampire, that’s the Dracula kind, a revived human who, you know, sucks blood and chases women.”

“Okay.”

“You have two important works in 1816—Christabel by Coleridge, but that’s a poem and you want books,” Sid went on, “so that brings us back to The Vampyre by John Polidori. Of course that one was really about Lord Byron.”

“Lord Byron, the poet?” Paul asked. Alex remained quiet.

Sid nodded. “He was called Ruthven in the book, but it’s about how he would seduce and destroy everyone he met. It was clear to everyone that Polidori was writing about Byron. Byron was cruel, man. That girl Claire, Mary Shelley’s half sister? She was obsessed with Byron and followed him everywhere, but when they had a child, Byron insisted on taking it and not letting Claire anywhere near it. Then he got tired of raising the baby and stuck her in a convent, where she died before she was six. He was a narcissist and a sadist. This guy was so bad, some people believe Polidori’s vampire metaphor wasn’t a metaphor at all.”

Alex shook his head, impressed. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Sid stood up and looked over the battlements at the woods and the lake. “We have vampires here.”

“Come on,” Paul said, snorting. “There are no such things. Not in real life.”

“What do you think happened to that woman in the square?” asked Sid insistently. “Just don’t go in those woods at night, is all I’m saying.”

Paul started snickering and Alex tried to join him. After a moment Paul said, “Do you ever look anything but sad?”

Alex smiled awkwardly. “Is that how I look?”

Paul rested his great forearms on his knees and said, “When I got here—this is three years ago—I spent all my time thinking about Ealing. That was my neighborhood. I thought about it all the time. The parks where I rode my bike, my friends. It got where if I wasn’t thinking about it I felt guilty for not thinking about it.”

Sid nodded to Alex, indicating this was true.

Paul said, “So Count Dracula here started bugging me about London. Had I been to where they filmed those Hummer movies.”

“Hammer,” said Sid. “That’s a vampire series.”

“Hammer movies. Whatever. And there’s classes, and there’s answering all these bloody questions. And sooner or later, I realized that my life was here, at least for now.”

“Your life was talking about your home instead of thinking about it?”

“My life was whatever was going on,” Paul said. “What do you miss?”

“I don’t know,” said Alex, trying to think. “We watch a lot of old movies, that’s my mom’s thing. And I miss skiing with my sister.” That wasn’t quite accurate, unless one understood skiing to mean rescue skiing. His little sister Ronnie, although twelve, was already an enthusiastic search-and-rescue aficionado, and when they had lived in Wyoming she and Alex had both thrown themselves into the training they were lucky enough to receive. Ronnie was the most daring of his four siblings.

“So I have news for you, mate,” Paul said. “You can keep that. But everybody back home would probably want you to make the best of your life here.”

They cracked into the shojo that Sid had borrowed from Minhi.

When Alex looked at the first shojo, emblazoned with a great, black-winged angel holding a guitar, he saw her name scrawled on the back cover. “Minhi with an h,” he said. He opened up the book and a slip of paper fell out, jagged and torn from Minhi’s pink notebook. He picked it up. After reading it for a second, Alex asked, “Did you guys see this?”

Paul and Sid shook their heads. “What?” Paul asked.

Below the phone number and email address, the note said: FALL RECITAL AND MIXER. SATURDAY AT 8. LALAURIE SCHOOL.

“It’s an invitation,” Alex said, as he stood up. For a moment he leaned on the battlements, watching the lake, feeling a bit like a knight.