They were approaching an open door at the end of the room. For a moment it looked strange and unfamiliar, and then Alex blinked and saw that it was a bunk, not full-size, but the kind you'd find on the train from Munich to Rome, decent enough to doze for a few hours after you've been walking all day. Ultravox's voice went on, outside yet somehow inside his head.

"Alex, I told you before that this was as good as it's going to get, but you've only made it worse. Isn't that just terrible? You have all of these opportunities around you, but you'll bungle them. The young ladies around you, you can't seem to decide what to do about them. And I'll tell you," the man with the scratchy face and liquid voice continued, "that's really just as well. You can believe that you would have found happiness, but most people don't. You won't; at this rate you'll be a slave to what you really want to be doing, running around playing cops and robbers. It's not going to get any better, and it will only get worse. But that's all right. Tomorrow you can think about it some more."

Ultravox came around and patted him firmly on the shoulder. "What you want to do now is get some rest."

It was true. Ultravox was working for the Scholomance but you had to hand it to the guy, what he said always made sense. Alex had allowed Steven to be hurt, had allowed both Merrills to become vampires. He hadn't prevented his school from burning up. He had disappointed his friends tonight, and for what? There wasn't any stopping beings that were always going to be stronger and smarter and . . .

Ultravox stepped ahead of him and reached into the bunk. A block of s.h.i.+ny metal sat on the bed, and then as Ultravox spoke Alex realized he had been wrong. "Someone left some bedding here," said Ultravox. The block of metal s.h.i.+mmered and Alex blinked, and it was just a pile of blankets and pillows. "Let me get it out of the way."

Ultravox picked up the bedding and set it aside-Alex saw it s.h.i.+mmer, flas.h.i.+ng with metal and then smoothing over again-and the vampire put his hands in his cotton pockets.

"It's a universal feeling, you know. We all ruin our lives in our own ways. I myself had the greatest voice ever known, and I squandered it quietly, living in the shadows. Letting people like Icemaker take all the glory, letting people like your various relatives-few of whom were nearly as resourceful as you, by the way-disrupt any little plan I had going. Your family has certainly been . . . a constant joy, to me and to the Scholomance.

"Six months ago I was offered the ball project. Big targets, and a n.o.ble cause. The Scholomance didn't want the treaty and they knew I'd be the best choice for finding a way to eliminate the key players. And this will come to pa.s.s. But a month ago, the richest target of all came along: another Van Helsing. An active one." The vampire came closer and spoke in his ear. "I can do with my voice what Icemaker couldn't do with an army of thousands: eliminate you. The Scholomance will have no choice but to finally give me the recognition and authority I deserve."

Ultravox patted Alex on the shoulder. "Bury all that now. Rest," he said. "Your limbs are heavy and none of it matters anyway."

The mellifluous voice dripped through Alex's body, moving him, of course. He stepped forward, grabbed the inside of the bunk, and hauled himself up, lying down. He wanted to sleep. Otherwise he would just keep thinking about how it wasn't going to get any better.

"I had heard that you might be the exception," Ultravox was saying. "The only one of your family in generations who had that extra something that your ancestor and his mad son had. But no, you're just another adventurer, like your father. Not unimpressive-but hardly my problem." He sighed. "If you think about your life, you will see a fog crossing, enveloping you. It's better in the fog, where you can rest, and all of this goes away. It should be just a moment."

Alex barely heard Ultravox say, as he was walking away, "Good night, Van Helsing."

Chapter 31.

In the ballroom Paul returned from the punch bowl to find a blank s.p.a.ce where Minhi had been standing.

He kept his chin up-not one to go about slouching was Paul-but he had to admit this date was going poorly.

"Is that champagne?" Vienna spoke, and Paul looked up to see her standing with her father, who was the ministro de something or other.

Paul held out one of the gla.s.ses. "It's, ah, sparkling . . . fruity something or other."

She took the gla.s.s. "And to think the crystal is Lalique," she said. "This just seems wrong."

Vienna's father was round at the middle and mustachioed, and he could have pa.s.sed either for an aged matinee idol or a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Paul turned to him and offered the other gla.s.s. "Care for one?"

"Sparkly fruity something or other?" said the man, with the same accent as Vienna's. "No, that's for recovering alcoholics and teenagers."

"Wouldn't care to live like a teen?" Paul smiled.

"Wouldn't care to recover," the Spaniard said. He didn't wink but his mustache sort of danced. "I'm off to find the real thing. Let me know if anything interesting happens."

Minhi's mother approached. "Have you seen Minhi?"

Paul shrugged.

"It's a small s.h.i.+p," Mr. Cazorla said to Minhi's mother. "She can't have gotten far. Join me, I'm looking for something stronger than sparkly fruity something or other."

Minhi's mother rolled her eyes exactly, precisely the way that Minhi often did, and the two of them headed off for the good stuff.

"Where did your girlfriend go?" Vienna said, watching the parents wander away.

"Is that what she is?" Paul asked. "I sort of wonder."

"That's a terrible answer," Vienna said. "That's an American answer; I'd expect that from Alex, not from you." She laughed, and Paul found her teasing very soft edged and infectious.

Vienna went on, "You're supposed to say 'But of course! She is my girlfriend!' Or, 'No, you fool! I would not have her!' Leave the half answers and melancholia to the Americans. And the French. They hate one another but they are alike in those ways."

Paul took a sip of the sparkling whatever and blanched. Syrupy stuff. "I don't know. She wandered off."

"My date wandered off before we got in the car," answered Vienna.

"That's . . ." Paul shook his head, suddenly defensive of Alex. "He can't help that. The bloke's on a short leash." And that was the truth. Alex was always going to be half there. "He's another b.l.o.o.d.y tennis player."

"A what?"

"Tennis players. Gymnasts, speed skaters, prodigies. The professionals. They look like high school students, they talk like them, but they catch whatever bug, get nabbed by some agent, and you've lost them as a friend, or lost a lot of them. That's what Alex is. Think of him as a speed skater."

"Eh, I look around this room and I will bet the speed skaters were able to make it," Vienna said. "I think it's absurd. You're only supposed to be married to your work when you have an actual marriage to ruin; when you're fourteen it's simply ridiculous."

"Boy," said Paul, "get a few sparkling ciders in you and you're a Spanish Audrey Hepburn all of a sudden. Where's Javi?"

"Around here somewhere," Vienna said.

"I love Audrey Hepburn," said Ilsa as she appeared with Sid in tow. Paul had noticed Sid gamely attempting to keep up with his taller, more graceful date. Not so bad when the band was playing calypso, but when they took a break and the PA started pumping French techno, Sid was lost. "Did you know she grew up in the Netherlands?"

"Who's that?" Sid asked.

"Audrey . . . someone who was never in a vampire movie," Paul said.

Sid looked around. "Where's Minhi?"

Paul and Vienna shrugged, and then the music cut out.

It happened suddenly-one minute the PA system playing an appalling French cover of Rammstein's "Du Hast," and the next the heavy ba.s.s and French singing stopped, interrupted by a sudden high-pitched whistle.

"May I have your attention," came a mellifluous voice speaking in English with an untraceable accent. Paul watched as the entire crowd stopped, listening, some in curiosity and some in anger.

"Some of you are prepared for this night. If so, there is something that you will want to do."

Paul looked at Vienna and Sid. "Oh, no."

Most of the crowd was listening to this new voice with complete incredulity, but Paul noticed a subtle s.h.i.+ft among a few of them-among the debutantes. The debs had frozen, and appeared to be in full receiver mode next to their parents.

Paul saw a tall chestnut-haired deb step forward, her head lifted toward the sound. Another girl near her, a senior by the look of her, had also tilted her head up, eyes gla.s.sy and wide.

They were the same girls who had gone gaga over Sid's stories. They were still poisoned.

"You have in your hands a symbol of your own slavery," said the voice. "It is time to make yourself free."

Suddenly the daughters lashed out with the pens, leaping behind their parents, each bringing one arm around the parent's waist, the other bringing her newly received, sharp-as-a-knife Montblanc pen up to the mother's or father's throat.

"Come with us," said the voice on the intercom.

"Come with us," said the daughters.

Paul saw Vienna running. She grabbed her own father, but she was dragging him away from the others. "I'm sorry," he heard her say. "Hurry, we have to get out of here."

Chapter 32.

Alex lay in the bunk, thinking about the night he had spent with his father in the Munich train station as he began to drift to sleep. He s.h.i.+fted his head. He didn't really need anything more than a light pillow, but the one on the bunk was less than ideal. It seemed hardly there.

The words of Ultravox were still looping in his head, repeating in multiple threads of sound, urging him to rest, to sleep, to give up, to let it go.

The words seemed quiet and yet they were so constant that they blocked out everything, even blotting out the thought of the train station in Munich, the thoughts of his family. Every thought that was not still echoing the voice of Ultravox seemed dulled and distant, and it made him tired to think.

Far in the back of Alex's brain, a lion was moaning, quiet and far-off, m.u.f.fled and blanketed.

Alex felt himself drifting to sleep but his head wasn't perfectly comfortable, the pillow was too thin. Ultravox had picked up some extra bedding and moved it away. Had there been another pillow?

The moaning was rumbling, far-off, like a jackhammer a mile away, a jackhammer he couldn't hear because the millions of whispers of Ultravox drowned out those troublesome sounds.

Jackhammers and lions . . . all the noise . . . Alex's life was made up of noise and conflict and constant movement. But Ultravox had explained to him that there was a better path: sleep. Don't listen to the jackhammer, to the lion.

His head was miserably uncomfortable. He couldn't even accomplish sleeping right. Alex opened his eyes slightly, looking for the stack of bedding Ultravox had set aside.

It sat there on a small table, the stack of blankets and pillows Ultravox had pulled out.

No one can overcome it, Alex. His voice threads the brain with his will, until you can't hear anything else.

In the distance, he heard trees falling and roots being pulled aside. Giant paws slapping earth. Faraway trees in the back of the woods, where the lion growled, barely audible.

The stack of bedding seemed strange and dull. Alex looked at it.

There's something special about you, and it has them worried.

The whispering of Ultravox, the echoes in his head, increased, and for a moment he lost the sound of the falling trees. But suddenly the distant noise was there again, growling and pounding.

The bedding stacked on the table looked strange and s.h.i.+mmering. For a second it changed and Alex saw a block of aluminum cans, pressed by thousands of pounds of force into a perfect and portable block.

Now the sound of the pounding was growing, and Alex saw the bedding and then he blinked on purpose and saw the block, and tried to think.

There was a clicking sound, a machine, and Alex started to feel the bunk vibrating.

The lion-his own brain, his own Alex Van Helsing static-was running desperately toward him, wake up, the trees falling with wrenching and tearing sounds, and now Alex did something he had never done before.

He saw the static. He was aware of it, he reached out to it and beckoned to it, and like a lion of legend it burst through and uprooted trees and roared.

The lion roared and Ultravox whispered in his brain until the lion opened its jaws and sucked the whispering wind away.

The bedding was compacted aluminum cans. The bunk was a recycling compactor. He was about to be crushed.

Alex rolled, kicking and falling to the floor as the sides of the compactor began to vibrate louder. In a moment a heavy gla.s.s door, like an oven door, dropped over the compactor, and he watched as the two sides slammed together with incredible force, reducing absolutely nothing to jelly.

He nodded to himself, shaken but satisfied. So that was it. Ultravox was a one-man superweapon but Alex had the capacity to resist. That power in his brain that he called the static-it was more powerful than a magic voice. Alex heard footsteps and spun around to see Minhi, running into the hold.

"Alex!"

She leapt into his arms and hugged him for a long moment before pulling away.

"Minhi, what's going on up above?" He was looking around. He could barely remember the walk down here.

"Nothing," she said. "I found your pin; I thought you were in trouble."

Alex looked at the compactor. "It's all right now. I think I figured some things out."

"Are you all right?" She came closer, looking at him. He realized he was still shaking his head, trying to sift away the last vestiges of the voice of Ultravox.

"I'm fine, sincerely, I'm fine." Then Alex smacked his forehead. "We gotta go. He's gonna kill someone. Come on." He started to run for the stairs.

"Sometimes I can't believe you," Minhi said, running after him.

"I told you I'd catch up," Alex answered as they bounded up the stairs together.

Chapter 33.