“Minhi!”

Minhi’s eyes flickered open and she felt her stomach heave; the room was moving. She was resting on a floor, an iron floor, and there were bars against her shoulders. She realized she was in a cage. She rose, putting her hands on the bars, looked out, and screamed. The room wasn’t moving; she was swinging.

Her scream echoed through the vast, torchlit hall where hundreds of vampires were gathered. Only a few bothered to look up. “Minhi!” came the voice again. It was Paul, in the next cage over. They were suspended some twenty feet off the ground.

Below them, the tall head vampire was pacing on a raised stage between the cages and the gathered audience.

“What’s going on?” she said to Paul.

“I have no idea,” Paul said, rubbing the back of his head. “I think they knocked us out. Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” she said, “but this can’t be happening.” Looking out across the hall, she saw banners that flowed from ceiling to floor, bearing a crest and the word Scholomance. Between a couple of the banners was a huge clock, the face of which seemed to be made of bone. It was a few minutes to midnight.

“No, now listen,” Paul said. “It is happening. It is. But we’re alive. All right? That’s a good sign.”

“What makes you think it’s a good sign?”

“Because,” Paul said, “if they wanted to kill us they would have done it already. So probably this is about money.”

“Money?” Minhi demanded. “They’re monsters.”

“Even monsters need money,” Paul observed.

They sat quietly for a few moments, cross-legged in their own cages. After a while Paul folded his arms and sighed. “I must tell you: This was not my plan for a first date.”

“There was a plan?”

The Icemaker began to speak.

“Vampires!” The ice-hoofed vampire strode onto the stage, his lip curled in a sneer. “Since time immemorial, we have been the uncrowned masters of the earth. Is it not so?” He looked around. Near the stage, the leading vampires from the school nodded, rapt in attention.

Minhi listened in silence, taking in every word. This was insane. This was a dream. A floating vampire with long hair and glowing eyes, around whom the air froze as he moved, was speaking to a roomful of more vampires who worshipped him. The world had gone mad.

Minhi saw the vampire’s white eyes fall on her and Paul. There was cold even in his gaze. “Look there. Cattle. As insignificant as the humans we bring in from the forgotten corners of the cities on which to feed. But these cattle are special. They will be our sacrifice.”

Icemaker returned his eyes to the crowd. “I cannot lead the Scholomance into greatness alone. There is one whose deviancy and deviousness dwarfed my own, and who I must have as my queen. But we will need to make a great sacrifice to raise her—for she was a human, unjustly punished in life, now lost to death.

“There is a demon that can help us raise my new queen,” Icemaker said, “but for hundreds of years I have sought the secret of this demon without success. Until this.”

Minhi watched as Icemaker produced a leather scroll wrapped around an iron scepter. The tip of the scepter was a foxlike head, with human eyes and long, pointed ears.

“Without this scroll we did not know the words or the sacrifice that would move the demon,” Icemaker continued. “For years it was hidden from us by a small man, a pitiful mortal. But now we are ready. To spill the blood we must spill, to say the words we must say, and afterward, to receive the new power that will change this world forever.” He put the scroll down.

“The demon’s name is Nemesis,” said the vampire, “and the queen she will raise is…Claire.”