Even with the aid of the in-helmet GPS, it took another quarter hour for Alex and Sangster to reach the Villa Diodati, which stood on the south-southwest shore of the lake. It was a vast, stucco-covered manor, perfectly square, threatened on all sides by trees that seemed to Alex to be attempting to pull the place into the ground. Alex followed Sangster to the sloping bank on the eastern side, where the balustrades of the balcony, like large teeth, made the house look thirsty.

They stopped their bikes in the vineyards before the house and stood in silence for a moment, surrounded by the sounds of the lapping waves of the lake and the chirps of frogs and night birds.

“Why are we here?” Alex asked. A dull, muted static was beginning to throb in his head, though, and he thought he knew the answer.

Sangster took off his helmet, laid it on his handlebars, and brought a smaller headset out of his shirt pocket and up to his ear. Then he pulled a leather pack out of the saddlebags and threw it over his shoulder. “In truth,” he said, “there is no reason the Scholomance should be at Lake Geneva at all. Bram Stoker said it was in Eastern Europe and we killed decades looking there.”

Alex shook his head slowly in wonder. “How can you treat a novel as though it were a history book?”

Sangster said, “We weren’t making plans based on The Shining, Alex. Remember: We know that the events of Stoker’s Dracula actually happened, with a few embellishments. Our organization has a memory that goes back to Van Helsing before Bram Stoker even wrote his book. Besides, Stoker admitted all this while he was still alive.”

“Really? When?”

“In his introduction to the 1901 Icelandic edition,” Sangster said. “Will there be anything else?”

“Just that I’d love to see you go toe to toe with Sid.” Alex looked around. “It’s strange. I’m feeling something like that thing, that static I feel when they’re near,” he said. “But it’s distant.”

Sangster nodded. “This confirms my suspicions. There is evil in this place.”

“So why? Why Lake Geneva?”

Sangster rolled his neck, considering. “The lake has always attracted people interested in vampires and the supernatural. Besides the Diodati party, Yeats was here; Milton was here; Coleridge was here. The villa itself is very impressive; you’ll find art of all kinds, paintings of great literature, lots of myths. But so far, there is no entrance to the Scholomance to be found. And we have ways of finding secret entrances. You see this vineyard?” Sangster was walking toward the shore, then looked back at the trees. “A year ago we tried looking in and all around it, hoping something would open up.”

“Open up? You mean like, ‘Open Sesame,’ and the ground rolls away?”

“The clan lords and others on their level are able to hide behind powerful energy fields. With the right tools we can drop these fields, but you have to find them. And all around here—the house itself, the vineyards, all around the statue—we tried. Nothing.”

“But the entrance is here after all?”

“Well, we didn’t look in the water,” Sangster said. Now he spoke into his headset. “Armstrong, you on?”

“Copy.”

“What are you seeing?”

“Wind twenty knots, southeast.”

“Pockets?”

“Wind is bouncing off the house, bouncing off the trees—I have your position, there is nothing in front of you. Wait—”

“What?”

“There’s a bounce of wind, a dip, about fifteen meters north of your position.”

“All right, stand by.” Sangster took a few long steps. He reached into his pack and produced a long mesh strap of glass balls about the size of his fist. They clinked as he strung them over his shoulder.

Sangster slipped one of the glass balls out of the strap and tossed it to Alex. Alex caught it, feeling its weight—the ball was about half again as heavy as a baseball. “What’s this?”

“Holy water.”

Sangster crouched, removing a leather roll from his pack, which he lay open to reveal more tools. He drew out what appeared to be a stake with an ornate handle and handed it to Alex. “Keep this with you. Remember—with a vampire you need to hit the heart to kill. Best shot is right between the ribs—here,” and he tapped Alex to the left of his sternum. “Okay?”

Alex noticed a two-foot-long contraption of wood and metal. The device was fully enclosed in dark material, with a silver trigger and a large housing in the front that appeared to contain the works of the weapon. “That looks like a—crossbow.”

“It’s a Polibow,” Sangster said, nodding. “It doesn’t get damaged as easily as a crossbow, but it’s as quiet. You have a cartridge that fits in the top, loaded with silver shaft s threaded with wood. Twelve of them.”

“Silver,” Alex repeated. In old movies, silver was for werewolves and the Lone Ranger, who when you got down to it could probably hunt werewolves really well. “And are your bullets silver, too?”

“Silver and wood. Our bullets are pressed hawthorn wood with a silver jacket.”

“Isn’t all that a lot more expensive than lead?”

“Much, but lead doesn’t kill vampires,” Sangster said, stopping in his crouch. “Only wood and silver do. Silver is actually more an allergen; wood alone will kill. When it comes to wood, hawthorn is best.”

“Why’s that?”

Sangster tapped his own forehead. “The crown of thorns was made from it. Your stake is made of hawthorn. Holy stuff burns the bejesus out of them. But to kill, you gotta get ’em in the heart.”

“Anything else?” Alex wanted to know. It would be useful to have information before he needed it for once.

Sangster thought through a list he seemed to keep in his head as he continued rummaging in his pack. “Direct sunlight will burn up the younger ones.”

“But not the older ones?” Alex asked.

“On a cloudy day you might find them in the market,” said Sangster. “Shopping for shoppers.”

Sangster seemed to find what he was looking for—a folding device that looked like a pocketknife. He closed up and stuffed the roll in his pack, then drew from his own shoulder holster a pistol with a silencer on the end. He unfolded the pocketknife-like device and it came apart into two large pieces. One unfolded further into the shape of a rifle stock, which Sangster now snapped into the back of the pistol. The other device slotted into the top of the gun, and by the glint of glass on the end Alex could see it was a gun sight. Now Sangster brought the gun up to his shoulder.

“We’re gonna do some skeet shooting. Gimme a good throw—put ’er right over there,” he said, indicating the general direction of the water.

“Over the water?” Alex hefted the ball, gauging how he would throw it.

“Yep. Not too far, about twenty meters.”

Alex drew back and threw, letting the ball arc high, then down about twenty meters out. Sangster moved smoothly, and there was a shoomp sound, followed by a tinkling as the ball exploded.

Sangster frowned. “No.”

“Wind can do all kinds of crazy things,” Armstrong said from the radio. “Try twenty yards farther up—that would be a beeline from the front entrance to the house.”

“Good,” Sangster agreed, nodding to Alex. They moved farther up. “Pull.”

Alex grinned at the idea that he was lunging a clay pigeon and threw, watching the glass ball arc high and glimmering. Another explosion. Nothing.

Sangster stopped. For a moment he slouched, and Alex feared that they had reached the end of it. The lead would not pan out.

Feeling sour and defeated, Alex stuck his hands in his pockets and scanned back south along the beach.

The static was still there, like a distant hiss, a TV left on in a room far away. He looked down the beach, watching the slowly churning surf, the sand and grass. About thirty meters away stood a statue of an angel, its arms spread wide.

“Whoa,” said Alex. When his eyes scanned across the angel, the hiss seemed to spike, as if someone in that faraway room had turned up the volume.

Alex ran down the beach, listening. For a couple moments there was almost nothing there again. The whole static thing was such a strange phenomenon that he barely knew how to feel it. But he kept running toward the statue.

He looked back to see Sangster following and heard the teacher say, “What about fifty meters south?”

Alex stopped before the angel guarding the lake. An inscription on the base of the statue read, BEHOLD IT, HEAVEN! HAVE I NOT HAD TO WRESTLE WITH MY LOT? The static was whispering louder now, as Alex looked at the angel. Then he turned toward the water, and the static sang.

Sangster caught up, reading the inscription aloud. “Behold it, Heaven,” he said. “These are Byron’s verses. Pull.”

Alex drew back once more and threw, high and out, and as the ball tumbled toward the moon-specked waves, it seemed to freeze in place. Sangster drew a bead as it fell, and time stretched out. Alex swore he could feel the bullet find its place. The ball exploded, glass tinkling in all directions over the lake, and the holy water inside sprayed out.

There was a pop, a sizzle on the waves, or rather over them, a momentary shimmer that spread out in a web about four meters wide. Then all was normal.

“Again,” Sangster said.

Another ball. Contact. The cloud of holy water burst over the waves, and now the air shrieked and spat with electric protest, and then it sizzled and churned away. Alex gasped at what remained.

There in the lake was a slope, dark walls shimmering in the gloom. Water lapped lightly over the lip of the entrance, held in place by some power Alex could only imagine.

Alex said urgently, “Can we—should we go in, can we go?”

Sangster nodded toward the entrance, and now the air began to shimmer again, closing up as before. After a moment the reflection of the moon lay across the water as if nothing had disturbed it.

“You won’t get through now,” Sangster said.

Alex turned back to look at the angel, and behind it, the Villa Diodati. Nearby he could hear Sangster speaking into his headset. “Polidorium, we have located the Scholomance.”