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and trying to get you off balance.
    â€œWhatever,” Judith said. “I’ll tell them you called. Ronnie, I know eating is important to you, so if you plan to join us I’ll keep a place set for five minutes after the rest of us sit down.”
    â€œDon’t you have a run to finish?” Ronnie asked. “Good-bye, Judith.” After a moment they could hear Judith snort derisively and hang up.
    Ronnie asked Alex, “Does all this have to do with the thing you haven’t told Dad?” Alex winced at her straightforwardness. Ronnie never minced words.
    What she meant was this: When Alex had arrived at Glenarvon Academy on Lake Geneva, he had learned a number of things he had not known before.
    First, whereas Alex believed he had been going insane at Frayling Prep in the United States where he had gotten involved in a fight that left the other boy seriously injured, at Lake Geneva he had learned that he wasn’t going crazy at all. Instead, he was beginning to be visited by a sense for evil, a static that grew and warned him of supernatural danger. The boy he’d fought had turned out to be particularly, supernaturally, dangerous.
    Second, following the trail of this static had led Alex to discover that his father, a rather boring but renowned philanthropist and university lecturer on history and mythology, had fudged the truth during Alex’s entire childhood. He had always insisted that the supernatural—vampires, zombies, the whole B-movie greatest-hits scene—were not real, were “not how things happened.” Fudged as in lied. There were such things, and in Geneva, they had sought Alex out.
    Third, his father should have definitely known better, because Dr. Van Helsing had actually been an agent for the organization that now called Alex one of its off-the-books fellows: the Polidorium. Apparently Dad had not known his old colleagues—and old enemies—were at Lake Geneva. But the memory of the vampires ran deep, and they had a special hatred—and a strange modicum of respect—for Alex’s family.
    Alex hadn’t told his father about any of this. In the month since he’d made these discoveries, he had found a certain sense of belonging and peace in his new role. The Polidorium blanched at his youth but were training him because they seemed to believe his latent skill for finding and fighting the vampires could be a benefit to them, and therefore to their clients, which apparently extended to every government on the planet.
    But he had told Ronnie.
    â€œI think it’s connected,” Alex said now, and he looked around to make sure no one was listening. No one was—an evacuation after a fire had a way of putting everyone in an overexcited but unfocused state. As Alex ran his eyes up and down the bus—and out the window at the bus next to them—he saw dullness and confusion. He could have walked up and down the aisle stealing everyone’s wallets and he doubted anyone would notice.
    â€œPeople are going to know it started by my room,” he said. Whispering, Alex gave Ronnie a brief run-down of the whole business of the evening. “I don’t know what the school is going to do, but I’m gonna try to ride it out. I really need to stay.”
    â€œRide it out?” Ronnie asked. “Okay. So you’re going to tell Dad that you burned down your school, but assuming you don’t get kicked out, ‘don’t worry about it because I like Switzerland so much’?”
    He chuckled. “How did you so perfectly predict my line of argument?”
    â€œWe all live sprawled across one another,” Ronnie grumbled. “Even in a house this big, even across the Atlantic.” She seemed to consider the chessboard that lay before Alex. “It will work for now, but you have to cut them in soon.”
    â€œWhy would you say that?”
    â€œThe best time to tell the truth is always soon,”