Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,1

was a rare opportunity for Alex to work alongside the Polidorium without his mentor looking over his shoulder.

They had started in a hospital-like building with long rows of glass cases and canisters where specimens floated inside. Alex and twelve other students walked behind a bald, slightly built teacher in a lab coat named Dr. Stu DeKamp, and every now and then DeKamp would stop and point out a specimen.

“This is a Caribbean jumbie skin.” DeKamp pointed to a long, leathery thing with braided hair at the top. “The jumbie is a vampire that can leave its skin behind while it travels on the air at night. Capture the skin and the creature will not survive long.” Nods all around. “This is a chonchon, a Chilean flying head.” The chonchon looked like a normal head with incongruous bat wings growing out of the sides of it. Alex had to stifle a mild laugh.

DeKamp had looked back to where Alex had been walking next to an agent in his twenties who had joined the Polidorium straight out of a police academy in Iowa. “Something you’d like to share?” DeKamp asked.

“Uh, no,” Alex answered. “It’s just that I have a friend who would absolutely kill to be seeing this.” That would be Sid, a classmate of Alex’s who seemed to know everything about vampires. Alex turned to Sid whenever he had a question about anything even remotely vampire-related, and he suspected that Sid would know what a chonchon was and would die to get a look at one.

“A friend at school?” asked the professor. Alex felt his face flush. This group of agents was young, but at fourteen, Alex was the prodigy. Everyone else was doing this as part of his or her job; Alex was still in high school. He shouldn’t have laughed. He’d work on that. “Just be sure you learn it, Agent Van Helsing.”

They saw more that afternoon: a vampiric pumpkin that was actually still alive and tried to attack Alex through the cage, squashing its orange gourd self against the glass, a mouth opening red and mushing as it yearned for his blood. Alex’s brain buzzed with a familiar, humming static, the awareness that something evil and dangerous was near.

They saw a pihuechenyi, a Central American winged snake that had been captured after it crashed into an airliner in the 1980s, dead and suspended from the ceiling.

Then, running around in a closed-off grassy area, they saw a sort of yellow-skinned, vein-covered centaur. It was a Scottish vampire called the nuckelavee and it had killed people all over a small group of islands called the Orkneys.

Dr. DeKamp called a break as they reached a commissary and stewards passed out bottled water. As Alex got his water he held up his hand. “I don’t get it. Are these creatures vampires?”

“Well, it depends what the meaning of the word vampire is.” DeKamp’s holographic ID badge shimmered in the light, and Alex saw that the instructor was from Canada. The Polidorium was diverse, but a lot of the people Alex had met were from the United States, Britain, and Canada. Alex’s friend Sid, also Canadian, would be thrilled to know that the resident creature genius among the Polidorium was one of his countrymen.

“Vampire,” DeKamp continued, “is a word that does a lot of duty. Chiefly it refers to modified post-initial-failure humans; those creatures are generally the smartest ones, the ones calling the shots on the other side. But we can group into the realm of vampires anything that lives off the energy, blood, or flesh of others as long as it’s touched by the curse.”

“The curse?” Alex repeated.

“Any lion or snake, for example, lives off the flesh of others,” explained DeKamp, “but they’re not vampires. What distinguishes a vampire is that it carries what Polidori called the existential seed of corruption. The curse that turns men and creatures against their own souls.”

Alex scrunched his face and DeKamp asked, “You’re uncomfortable with the word curse?”

“Well, it just seems strange to hear a word so…magical.”

DeKamp set down the bottle of water and came close. “You’re the one who killed an augmented dog down in the Scholomance, right? And even you find the discussion of magic uncomfortable. Now think of the rest of the world. That is why our work must remain as secret as we can make it.”

DeKamp turned. “Talia sunt, ladies and gentlemen.” He beckoned them to continue the tour. “There are such things.”

Two days later, Alex found himself actually accepted by the agents.