Alex and Sid hurtled down the road in the back of a Glenarvon Academy van with Sangster at the wheel. Periodically the teacher looked at both of them through the rearview mirror as trees zipped by.

“I told you!” Sid said desperately. He jumped up, shaking Alex. “I told you vampires were real! Those were—”

“Sid,” Sangster called, “I need you to sit down.”

“All right, what was that?” Sid demanded. “Who were those people?”

“I don’t know,” Sangster called back, locking eyes with Alex through the mirror for a second. “I don’t know. We need to get back to the school. They need to know that there’s been a kidnapping and you guys need to be back in your rooms.”

“They came from the lake,” said Sid, nearly delirious. “They were vampires.”

“Terrorists,” Sangster said evenly. “I think they were terrorists. My concern is getting you guys to safety.”

Alex said nothing. He watched the horizon in front of the van, the dark road lit up by high beams, trees flying past on either side.

Within minutes they ripped off the road to the front gate and Sangster was hustling them out.

Mrs. Hostache was waiting in a housecoat by the door. “I got your call,” she said. “What do we know about Paul?”

“All I know is what I told you,” Sangster said, guiding Alex and Sid inside. “I was watching all three. The terrorists came up off the water. They did a lot of distracting stuff and grabbed two people—one was Paul.” Alex noted that Sangster was using the word terrorist every chance he got, and he understood why: Sangster was making sure the word would be seeded into the narrative and get repeated often.

She shook her head gravely. “Come on, come in,” she said.

“Did you speak with the police?” Sangster asked.

“Oui,” Mrs. Hostache said, nodding. “They are at LaLaurie. They should have questions for us in the morning.” Now she turned to Alex and Sid and knelt slightly, as though they were eight. “How are you two?”

Alex opened his hands, as if to say, “I have no idea.” Sid had no response.

“To bed with you,” Mrs. Hostache said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

Sangster was standing next to the stairs as Alex and Sid went up, and he stopped them, patting both their shoulders firmly. As he did so, Alex felt Sangster slip a note under the collar of his jacket.

After he and Sid numbly went to bed, unable to form words, Alex unfolded the note. It said: Midnight.

“What is that?”

When Alex snuck out an hour and a half later, Sangster was waiting just outside the school gate. Alex found the teacher seated on his motorcycle. Next to him, lit by moonlight dappling through the trees, was a new gunmetal gray—

“Kawasaki Ninja,” said the teacher. “It’s not as big as most of the bikes we use, but it’s more powerful than most of your smaller motorcycles out there.”

Alex approached the bike, moving slowly around it. On the gray right flank he saw the emblem of the Polidorium, which he had seen before on the vans and other vehicles. There was that motto in Latin, Talia sunt. “What do these words mean, anyway? ‘Talia sunt.’”

“It means ‘there are such things.’” Sangster tossed Alex a pair of night-vision GPS goggles. “Come on. Let’s go figure out how to get Paul and Minhi back.”

Alex was glad he was wearing his contacts, because he doubted he could wear the goggles over his glasses. They were tighter than the ones he had worn last night—Was it only last night? Next he donned the gray helmet he found resting on the seat of the bike.

Once the helmet was on, Alex could hear Sangster in his ear through the onboard speaker. “Copy?”

“I thought you didn’t want me in on this stuff?”

“Icemaker spoke to you, Alex,” said Sangster, as he started his own bike and began to roll. “You’re in it. Plus…I think I could use your ability to sense them.”

They eased out onto a two-lane highway that ran along the lake and began to lay down tracks, heading south.

They traveled about ten kilometers in silence with nary a car in sight, the world dark but for the occasional zip of a street lamp, and then flew off the road down the dirt track that led to the farmhouse.

Past the ornamental tin wall of the farmhouse and down into the earth once more. Within minutes they were in Director Carerras’s conference room.

“All right,” Sangster said, bringing up a map of Lake Geneva. “What is he up to?”

“First things first,” Carerras barked. “I agreed to let you bring the Van Helsing boy here, but you had better come up with a reason.” Armstrong, who sat to the director’s right, leaned back, raising her eyebrow in agreement.

Alex preempted Sangster. “I got face-to-face with Icemaker,” he said. “He spoke to me.”

Carerras leaned forward. “What did he say?”

“He asked if I was joining the family business,” Alex said. “And he suggested that I wasn’t going to be any good at it.”

“They were watching him at Glenarvon,” Sangster ticked off. “And they attacked us in full view of everyone tonight. They know who he is, and they know he’s here. Icemaker wants that family. It was Charles’s father who stopped him at the Louvre Museum, remember? And Charles destroyed nearly five hundred of Icemaker’s disciples in Cuba. I’m willing to bet they got wind of Alex the first time he swept his passport at Geneva airport.”

“Do you think he kidnapped Minhi and Paul because they were with me?” Alex asked in horror. They had been dragged away before his eyes.

Sangster sighed. “I—Alex, that’s not how it looked. I think taunting you was just a bonus. But this was about getting attention. He wanted us to see him. This was a big move.”

“We’ll have to pay a lot of people to smooth this over in the press,” Carerras grumbled.

Seriously, you do that?

“So Icemaker now has hostages,” Sangster continued. “Why? What do we know about him—why would he come back here, and what is he going to do here that he would need hostages?”

Sangster brought up Icemaker’s dossier on the screen, and Alex saw there a stippled drawing of Icemaker where a photograph would normally be, followed by dates and other information. It looked like one of Sid’s characters.

“The last time he was here was when he first began to succumb to vampirism, that Haunted Summer when Polidori was still his friend,” Sangster said. “When they were staying at the Villa Diodati.”

Sangster scrolled down the dossier. Remembering, Alex said, “You said something about Icemaker destroying a ship.”

“Yeah.” Sangster reached the most recent activity in the dossier. “He plundered and sank a Polidorium cargo vessel called the Wayfarer, and immediately started heading this way.”

“And you have no idea what he got off that ship?”

“We have a manifest of a thousand items,” Sangster responded. “Books, scrolls, statues, gauntlets. It’s all lost. Anything could be useful to him, but nothing we can narrow down.”

“We can assume,” interjected Armstrong, “that someone leaked him the manifest, which would suggest he knew what he was looking for.”

“So,” said Alex, “he stole something or learned something on the ship. He comes here to the…”

“Scholomance,” said Carerras.

“…The Scholomance. And now he’s kidnapped two of my friends. I’ll tell you what I think it means.”

“What’s that?”

Alex wrung his hands. “It means what in the name of all that is holy are you people wasting time for? Go get them!”

“We have to find it first,” said Sangster. “And we’re trying.”

“You may have a new lead,” interjected Carerras, who appeared completely unfazed by Alex’s emotion. “Armstrong?”

Armstrong tapped a key in front of her and a new image came up on the screen—the lake, overlaid by wavy, undulating lines labeled WIND PATTERN.

“When Icemaker struck we turned one of the satellites on the lake. We lost track of him in a burst of cold air and clouds, but we noted key disruptions in the normal wind pattern here,” she said, indicating a point along the shore.

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

“That,” said Sangster, leaning forward, “would be the Villa Diodati, where it all began.”