Alex Van Helsing: The Triumph of Death by Henderson Jason

Author:Henderson, Jason [Henderson, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperTeen
Published: 2012-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

They called it Icemaker Station.

Very near the house on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had almost ended Alex Van Helsing’s life, the immortal vampire once known as Lord Byron and code-named Icemaker waited and slept in a chunk of ice. The curse that Byron had taken on himself near the end of his mortal life, the magic that enabled him to use and freeze the liquid in the air around him, had provided a final retreat when the Polidorium had caught up with him and doused him with liquid nitrogen, one of the coldest substances on earth. Byron opted to continue the process and encase himself in a protective chunk of ice, and there he stayed.

His captors didn’t take him very far. The seven-foot-tall, four-foot-wide chunk of ice that held Lord Byron rested in silence in a liquid-helium-cooled refrigerator the size of a small house securely reinforced in a cell built just for him, half a mile below Lausanne, Switzerland. Manned twenty-four hours a day by chemists and security guards, with extra chambers and cells both under construction and ready for future prisoners, Icemaker Station occupied three city blocks’ worth of space below the Olympic Museum, an access point chosen in part for its outward serenity and its complete lack of connection to either the world of anti-vampirism or the world of ultra-low-temperature experimentation. The fact that there were five world-class high magnetic field laboratories around Lake Geneva, providing a rich source of new hires to work on Icemaker Station, was a bonus.

Within seven hours of leaving Vienna Cazorla behind, Alex was getting out of a van at the edge of Lake Geneva at the Olympic Museum, a severe white-stone building set off by a much more inviting park. As Alex ran up the granite steps in a leather jacket that did nothing to stop the leaching cold coming off the lake, he took in a whole garden of sculpture dedicated to the constant search for human physical perfection.

“Every cell in my body is telling me this is a bad idea, so pay close attention.” Sangster was rattling off instructions as they walked. “Do everything the staff tells you. If a rule sounds stupid, do it anyway. Polidorium Incarceration are the most competent jailers on the face of the earth, so respect every word they say.”

“I got it,” Alex said, freezing.

“Astrid?” Sangster said.

She nodded. “Sure.”

Fir trees and rich green shrubbery nestled against the cold and blinding-white concrete museum. Around it, Alex saw huge gray figures that held aloft the Olympic circles and cyclists arrested forever in bronze and, of course, the Olympic torch. When he beheld a gray sculpture of a pistol with its barrel twisted into uselessness by the Olympic Spirit, Alex briefly envisioned the Olympic Spirit as some shot-putting Jolly Green Giant, thundering across the countryside, throwing train cars and spitefully knotting the barrels of perfectly good gun sculptures.

This was the kind of place where, as a young man of certain expectations sent overseas, Alex was supposed to be spending his time.

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