“How did you know I was driving out?” Alex asked as Sangster ushered him into the bowels of the farmhouse.

The events of the dawn had been a splendid blur. Sangster’s colleagues in the Polidorium, though grim faced that Alex had gone in alone on a mission they had never fully supported, took charge of the captives, whom they treated gently. The Polidorium would help with their physical and mental recovery before handing them over to the Swiss police for reunions with their families.

Paul and Minhi had been told, You don’t know who rescued you. Nobody here was anyone you recognize. You never saw the terrorists’ faces. They were now back at their schools—there were headmistresses to be assuaged and parents to be called. Alex himself should have been exhausted, but he was still running on adrenaline. He would have to crash soon, he knew.

“We had a tracker in the go package. By the time you hit the tunnel we knew you were on the way out and moving fast, too fast to be on foot,” Sangster said.

Sangster was still limping—but not much, and he had left his cane behind. “You’re nearly healed,” Alex said, incredulous, as they went through the door and into the carpeted corridors of the Polidorium HQ.

“It was a sprain.”

Alex snorted. “Hairline fracture—so how does that work?”

Sangster stopped and Alex did, too. “A long time ago I was offered a choice by the Polidorium. It’s a choice you may make one day. But not anytime soon.”

“Holy—are you a vampire?”

Sangster rolled his eyes. “The one good vampire in a world of evil?”

“That seems plausible enough.”

“Let me tell you something.” Sangster stopped, turning to look Alex in the eye. “There are no good vampires, at least none I’ve ever encountered. Icemaker may have an obsession but he was never all that sympathetic in the first place. It just doesn’t work that way. Whatever that person was is perverted by the curse, and no empathy, no feeling, no love in the way we know it can remain. Don’t ever forget that.”

“So you’re saying you’re not a vampire.”

“Surely we have work to do…”

“What about a dhampyr, like in Vampire Hunter D?” Alex asked, remembering Sid’s comics.

“Vampire Hunter… A half vampire?” Sangster raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know where to start. But I’ll say this; the dead don’t reproduce—at least not like that,” Sangster said.

“But they do travel fast.”

“They do travel fast.” Sangster nodded.

“You’re not going to tell me why you heal faster than normal.”

“Not right now, I’m not.”

“So what is this?” Alex asked. Sangster was opening the door into the conference room, and Alex saw Carerras and Armstrong waiting.

“This is a debriefing.”

“So you got them out,” Carerras said flatly. Alex could not tell if he was impressed. “What about Icemaker’s plan?”

“He was going to make a sacrifice,” Alex said evenly. “He wanted to raise someone called Claire.”

Sangster looked down. “That would be Claire Clairmont, a woman who probably matched Icemaker in life for deviousness. But I had no idea he was so obsessed. If you had asked me what woman did he despise most in his life, I would have said Claire. But then again, if you were to ask me which one would haunt him, the answer would probably be the same.”

Armstrong shrugged. “That is how it goes.”

Sangster looked back at Alex. “How was he going to do it?”

“There was a ritual,” Alex said, finding a seat. A cup of hot chocolate was sitting waiting for him. Unbelievable. “In front of a giant keyhole, like in the Polidori story in Frankenstein. On the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Icemaker had a scroll, with an animal scepter head on it. He said it had shown him how.”

“Aha,” Armstrong said. She tapped some keys in the table and brought up an image on the screen. “Is this it?”

The scroll Alex had last seen in the hands of Icemaker was spinning slowly in a 3-D image. “Yes.”

She nodded. “Yep. The Scroll of Hermanubis. This was on the Wayfarer, the ship Icemaker hit.”

Carerras leaned forward. “So Polidori had found the scroll Icemaker wanted and hidden it away, because he somehow learned that Icemaker would want to use it to cast a spell to raise the dead.”

“I think we’ve been wrong about Frankenstein,” Sangster said thoughtfully. “I think Polidori had Mary Shelley put the reference to Icemaker’s plan, in the guise of the keyhole story, into Frankenstein when she reissued it, just in case we lost any other hints. And over the course of time, we did lose the other hints.”

“Well, Icemaker was furious that we disrupted his ritual,” Alex said. “He managed to raise his demon to do this favor, to raise the dead. Nemesis. But I stole the sacrifice.”

“Hmmm,” Carerras said, folding his arms. “Then I suppose that’s it. Rituals require their proper time. If he was supposed to do it on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, he missed his opportunity.”

“That’s it for now,” Sangster agreed.

Alex sipped the hot chocolate. He was famished. “So, is there anything else?”

“There’s a lot,” Sangster said. “You’re the first agent to make it in and out of that place alive in nearly fifty years.”

Alex’s heart sank. He was tired. He didn’t want to spend another six hours describing the whole ordeal.

And then he realized what Sangster had just called him. An agent.

“Not now, though,” Sangster said. “Go home. It’s done. We’ll get the details later.”

“Hermanubis, huh?”

Early the next evening, Sid paced the three boys’ room as he stared at a mound of books.

Alex had crashed and slept for about seven hours. Paul had been returned to the school in a limo the school sent to the hospital, where he was greeted with cheers and applause by his fellow students—even Merrill & Merrill—all relieved to have him back from his “kidnapping by terrorists.” True to his word, Paul stuck to the story. Until he, Sid, and Alex headed back to the room, where they told Sid everything, from the vampire in the woods to the tunnel out of the Scholomance.

“Yeah, it was called the Scroll of Hermanubis,” Alex said.

“That makes sense,” Sid said. “Hermanubis was an Egyptian god who could move between the world of the living and the dead.”

Rather than feeling as though all had gone smashingly—as Alex was inclined to think it had—Sid seemed more ill at ease than ever.

“What is it?” Alex insisted.

Sid heaved a sigh and stared at the desk where he’d tossed every book he could find on Icemaker, his poems, the Haunted Summer, all of it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Everything in the story in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in the introduction—it means something. The skull-headed lady. The keyhole. All of it was a clue. The skull-headed lady is Claire, whom Icemaker wanted to raise. The demon he needed to help him came through the keyhole.”

“Right,” said Alex.

“Which makes sense. But we’ve got a problem.”

Paul sat up from where he’d been lying on his bed. “What?”

“If everything in the clue means something, then everything in it means something.”

“Okay…”

Sid opened his copy of Frankenstein, thumbing back to the 1831 introduction. “So what about the Tomb of the Capulets?”

“I don’t follow.” Alex rubbed his eyes with his palms, suddenly feeling very much like he wished he followed even less.

Sid was holding up the book, reading. “The Tomb of the Capulets. Mary Shelley says that after Polidori started writing about the skull lady, he—that’s Polidori—‘did not know what to do with her and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.’”

“So?”

Sid picked up another book, this one on the Villa Diodati party of 1816. “You saw Icemaker down in the Scholomance at a keyhole window; that’s where Nemesis came. But…that was a castle, not a tomb. So there was no Tomb of the Capulets. And it…here”—he went to another book and flipped the pages for a moment—“there was a collection of art in 1816, in the house Icemaker rented. The Villa Diodati. There was a painting of the death of Romeo and Juliet.”

“The Tomb of the Capulets,” repeated Paul.

“Icemaker,” Sid said, “when he was Byron, wrote a poem about going to Nemesis. And the whole point of it was that he was a greater kind of being, that he alone was sufficient. I have no doubt that he needed the ritual to perform, and that the scroll held that ritual. But I don’t think he needed the captives—the sacrifice—at all.”

“What do you mean he didn’t need us?” Paul demanded.

“It’s—” Sid stood up, pacing. He looked at Alex. “Look, I hate to break this to you, but vampires aren’t stupid. This was a trick. He knew you were watching him. When did the Polidorium start tracking Icemaker?”

“The moment he started moving up Italy. He travels with an army, so the Polidorium can’t miss him.”

“Right—if you’re Icemaker, you know you’re being watched. He had to come to Lake Geneva because the Scholomance was the place to do his ritual, but he knew the heat would be on the moment the caravan started moving. The good guys would want to stop him, to disrupt whatever he was planning. So he made you all part of the plan: stole some captives so you could rescue them and think you disrupted his ritual. You’d go away satisfied. But you didn’t disrupt him at all. You gave him time to finish.”

“What do you mean, ‘to finish’?” Alex asked.

“A vampire rises fully formed out of the grave,” Sid said. “But raising a dead human, from dust to bones, to a new being—that takes time, like a day, and room. He triggered it all on midnight of the feast day. It’s not done. Claire will rise at The Tomb of the Capulets—the painting—you see?”

“See what?” demanded Alex.

“Claire will rise at the Villa Diodati,” Sid said. “She’s probably rising now.”