Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  I don’t like using it if I can avoid it though. It was installed by Cabal, who decided, in their infinite benevolence, that I needed decent access to the digital world in order to further my research. I suspect their real motivation in this generous gift is less altruistic. Much more likely that it’s just another way for my superiors to keep tabs on my every move, online as well as in the real world. Keeping tabs is an obsession with them. There are more tabs on me than there are in a full orchestra. I don’t like the idea of Cabal knowing what I’m streaming or searching twenty-four seven. Especially as they might take issue to my watching old vintage Doctor Who episodes when I should be working.

  So instead of using my super-sleek home system, which I have dutifully nicknamed HAL like all treacherous robots, I spend a lot of time downstairs in the café. Sure it’s small and a little shabby. The owner, a lovely man named Haqua who has a beard like a toilet brush and large sleepy-looking eyes, insists on adding the word ‘chic’ whenever I mention this. It does have a certain grungy doc-with-the-dragon-tattoo charm to it though. It serves coffee alongside the various pungent vegan soups and homemade bread rolls though, that’s good enough for me.

  I was sitting in a window booth, next to the steamed glass obscuring what had developed into a rainy cold day of grey mist outside, scrolling furiously through search results. I wasn’t looking for Doctor Who today. I was looking for… what was I looking for?

  In frustration I glanced down at my notepad. My list of keywords, most already with a line angrily scratched through them. My own uncertain handwriting peered back up at me unhelpfully.

  “Murder – rooftops – cat-burglar? Vampire-killer? Gang-war? In-fighting? Serial killer?”

  I’d flitted around online for hours now, dancing around these subjects, dipping in and out of some of the more ‘fringe’ chatrooms and conspiracy theory message boards of our city. Sniffing around to see what the whispers were. There was nothing. Nothing useful anyway. All the usual paranoid online chatter about us being controlled by lizard people in human skin-suits, or how we were all being poisoned by mind-control chemicals in our morning cereal. You can find all kinds of theories on everything in the DataStream. There are a hell of a lot of sites about crop circles for instance, which, considering no one alive is outside the city to make them, is a genuine mystery. There are also plenty of sites dedicated to religious ranting about judgement day, which in my opinion has already come and gone. Nothing brings out the crazies like thirty years of post-apocalypse I guess.

  Still, occasionally, like a clear signal in a lot of white noise, there is something you can pick out, if you know what you’re looking for. I had been hoping my keywords would throw back something to me… anything. But seemingly it was all quiet in the etherspace. I was frustrated. Sandra Bullock always made online research look easy. Nineties movies lie to us.

  In a city under such constant draconian surveillance, it was infuriating that no one seemed to see… anything.

  I shrugged, sipping my coffee. Well, that wasn’t necessarily true. Maybe people were talking online about the recent vampire deaths after all. Maybe the message boards were full of chatter and maybe Cabal was just cleaning up the DataStream servers after them. I wouldn’t put it past them. Cabal couldn’t completely control the flow of information to the public, but they gave it their best shot, bless ‘em. The last keyword on my list seemed unlikely to return any useful results. ‘Spontaneous combustion?’

  It was no good. Cloves was leaning on me to pull out of my arse some kind of workable theory as to why GOs were being killed, and without actually speaking to any vamps, I had to admit I had very little to go on. What I needed was an inspirational montage, preferably with a stirring soundtrack. No such luck. The soundtrack in the café was currently a wan and lacklustre ‘Carpenter’s greatest hits, rearranged for pan pipe’. Griff, my loyal assistant, was busy back at the lab trying (and failing) to ID our Vlad Doe from the sample I’d brought him. It wasn’t going to be enough. I had to face it. I was going to have to go and ‘liaise’.

  I curled my lip a little. It’s hard to check in with your otherworldly contacts when they did a moonlight flit and haven’t been seen in months. I was still annoyed with Allesandro about that. To be fair, I was usually annoyed with Allesandro anyway. Lucy, a loyal Helsing who ‘totally ships us’ – her words, not mine – tells me this is a sign of love. According to her and her dewy-eyed worldview, ‘you know it’s ‘the one’ when you simultaneously want to kiss them and punch them in the throat all the time’.

  My level of annoyance with my absent vampire associate was more specific and based on the fact that, shortly after a rather intimate moment between us, he suddenly decided to go on a navel-gazing walkabout in the great post-apocalyptic outback, leaving me in a warehouse full of the Pale, killer drones and faceless genetic mutant girls to die. That had not endeared him to me. The only GO who had actually stuck with me through that particular nightmare had been Kane, the leader of the Tribals, and he’d lost his life for his efforts. I didn’t know where Allesandro had gone or why, and frankly I didn’t care to know. It did however leave me in something of a bind when it came to getting a foot in the door in GO society.

  I set my coffee cup down hard with a crack, perhaps a little harder than I’d intended. It drew looks from other patrons in the café. Perfectly normal. Just the behaviour of someone who frankly doesn’t care to know, that’s all. I sniffed to myself, staring out of the wet and misty window at the shapes of the street beyond. Oxford’s old stone, ghostlike in the haze. It was freezing out and warm in here, resulting in rivulets of condensation racing one another down the glass. I watched them for a while, at a loss.

  Something occurred to me. The small scrap I’d found at the scene this morning after our victim had gone poof. It was at the lab right now for analysis, but… it might be worth a shot.

  Fingers clacking on the keyboard and perhaps without thinking things through properly, I hastily typed in ‘vampire – latex’.

  A procession of images flashed across my screen.

  “Oh my!” a voice at my shoulder said, making me jump. “Wow Doc, that’s some… niche interest… you got going on there.”

  Lucy, my intern at Blue Lab and the closest thing I have to a friend, nineteen, willowy, elegant geek-chic and wide-eyed lover of all things vampire, had appeared. Evidently looking for me. She was currently peering down with evident glee over my shoulder at the screen, which contained several morally questionable things.

  “I mean, yum, it’s like he’s vacuum-sealed for freshness right. Tasty vampire?” she giggled, sliding a satchel casually off her shoulder.

  With furious embarrassment I tried to close the datasite which had appeared on the screen. My helpless fumbling only resulted in even more pop-up windows and referral sites. I was trapped in a vampire pornado. There was a lot of rubber and a lot of very white flesh. My face burned.

  “Not that I’m complaining, but those pants? Wow. He must have been sewn into them. I mean there’s tight, and then there’s just unhealthy, right? The bird’s gotta be dead in that canary cage?” Lucy continued, grinning as she teased me.

  “I’m doing… research!” I spluttered, finally making the various scrolling images vanish. Apparently there are quite a lot of vampire and latex sites. With an online community full of rabid vamp-loving Helsings, I don’t know why this surprised me.

  “So I see.” She shrugged out of her heavy winter coat, dropping down into a seat at my table as the screen mercifully faded to black, obliterating the fang-porn from my station, if not from the back of my eyes where it was now forever burned. “No wonder you don’t use your Cabal set up for this.” Lucy sniggered to herself. “So… did you turn up any…” She waggled her eyebrows, “big leads?”

  I wasn’t sure which was worse, my personal mortification or Lucy attempting to be suggestive. It was like watching a kitten in a bonnet trying to be sassy.

  “Oh shut up,” I muttered. “Shouldn’t
you be at the lab? Not that I’m not happy to see you, Lucy, but my day started at dawn with a vampire turned inside out. It’s only three p.m. now, and I’m apparently reduced to searching titillating images out of desperation. I’m grasping at straws.”

  “You’re grasping at something, that’s for sure,” Lucy nodded with a lopsided smile. “Look Doc, I know this is all hush hush investigations and Griff, Dee and I are even less ‘officially’ involved than you are, but I have a lot of friends in the GO scene, and these random kills have got me worried. I want to help.”

  “We don’t know they’re random,” I corrected, keeping as quiet as possible. “And keep your voice down. We don’t want the lovely general public hearing the trigger words you just blurted, so ex nay on the urdermay, okay?”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. She looked like a sweet little choirgirl, dressed in a rather lumpy green wool vest over a baggy checked shirt. You could happily invite the vicar around and trust her to serve tea and biscuits. Nice biscuits too. But like many New Oxford residents, she was a vampire groupie. A Helsing. Infinitely more comfortable around them than I was. Lucy spent almost all of her free time on St Giles, the vampire strip, the Crimson Mile, whatever you wanted to call it. She was on the list for nearly every VIP nightclub. I worried for her safety quite a lot but at the end of the day I was just her boss, I wasn’t her mother.

  “I know you’ve been…” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “…down… on the vampires, ever since the Duke of Sanctum jilted you, but-”

  “Allesandro didn’t ‘jilt’ me,” I snapped. “Honestly, Luce, you’re like a gossip columnist. He just went…wherever he went. It’s none of my business anyway. He doesn’t need my permission to do a moonlight flit. He can do what he wants, when he wants.”

  Lucy held her hands up in a show of peace. I immediately regretted speaking. I hate sounding like I’m justifying myself. “My point is,” she continued calmly, “maybe you felt a little abandoned in your time of need, and-”

  “If I felt abandoned,” I replied, unable to help myself. “It’s because I was abandoned. Oh, and left up to my neck in infected Pale and strangled by a faceless creature, let’s not forget that.” I bristled at the sound of my own voice, practically biting my tongue. “And anyway… I don’t feel abandoned. I don’t need rescuing. I can handle myself.”

  “Okay, okay… sorry to bring it up, geez,” she said. “I’m just saying that you seem to be trying everything to solve this string of vampire urdermays other than… you know… actually talking… to… vampires.”

  “Vampires don’t like talking to me,” I said flatly. This much at least was objectively true and scientifically possible to prove. Other than my absent friend Allesandro, who was very much the exception to the rule, most vampires I’ve met in my brief but exciting career have tried to kill me. “I clearly just rub them the wrong way.”

  “Dove might talk to you,” Lucy said. “Dove might be eminently rub-able. Why don’t you come with me tonight, to Sanctum? I can ease you back into the scene.”

  “I was never ‘in the scene’, Lucy,” I insisted. I frowned in curiosity. “And what the hell is a ‘dove’?”

  Lucy reached into her pocket and brought out a crumpled flyer, thick black ink print on red. I took it with a wary frown, smoothing it out on the table top in front of the datascreen.

  “He’s steward at Sanctum,” she said, smiling. “Someone’s gotta stand in for the king while Elvis has left the building. Allesandro left him in charge, kind of. Looking after the fangy family business.” She tapped the flyer. “He’s the one in charge of organising this, you must have heard about it.”

  The flyer showed a stylised bat, black balloons grouped either side of its outstretched wings. There were popping cartoon champagne bottles bookending the centre image, although it looked, thanks to the red paper, as though they were merrily exploding blood not alcohol. The whole thing was encased in a playful twirling border, and across the top was carnivalesque lettering. I read it out loud.

  “Fangfest! A Halloween celebration!” I glanced up. “What is this?”

  “It says right there,” Lucy said excitedly, tapping it. “It’s a street carnival, scheduled for Halloween, in a few days’ time. Kind of like mardi-gras but specifically run by the vampires of the St Giles district.” She grinned. “It’s going to be all kinds of super awesome. Like a huge Halloween party in the streets. The actual street fair itself, the parade, is Halloween night. I think the procession starts at the top of St Giles and is going to end up outside the Sheldonian Theatre, over near the library.” She looked like a child excited for Christmas. “There are vampire clowns, vampire jugglers, vampire fire-eaters, vampire acrobats, it all sounds so amazing!”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “But… the Halloween open-air party, that’s just the big finale,” Lucy went on. “Fangfest itself is a week-long thing. Kind of like Pride? Only, you know, undead. It’s already started. There are all kinds of special events going on. Performances, special shows, themed nights, costume competitions. Blood donation booths. Most of the vamp nightclubs are involved. Yellowmoon, Sanctum, Angel and Greyhound. They’re showing a load of old movies at the open air cinema too.” She grinned. “GO versions of some old classic rom-coms, reimagined as horror movies, because… you know…” She waggled her fingers in front of me in a spooky way, “…Halloween!”

  “GO… movies?” I asked dubiously.

  Lucy counted them off on her fingers. “There’s Skinless in Seattle showing tonight, then When Harry Ate Sally, tomorrow I think is a double bill of Ghoul with the Wind and Death-fest at Tiffany’s-”

  “Stop. Stop it immediately. I get the idea,” I cut her off. “While a great big week-long festival of bloody and spooky Halloween vampire fun sounds interesting, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think our lords and masters would take kindly to me kicking back and dancing in the streets when I’m supposed to be working on this.”

  “You’re missing my point,” Lucy said patiently, helping herself to my coffee. “Dove is desperate to make a good impression holding the fort at Sanctum while the Duke is AWOL. He’s the one who has put this whole thing together. He’s filling daddy’s shoes while your boy is off on his gap year or whatever, and he’s trying to improve the GO image. Social integration and all that. All the world’s a rainbow, even the ultraviolet parts and all that bee-bop. Showing us poor humans how friendly and fun vampires can be.” My assistant nodded earnestly. “Fangfest is good PR for them, good PR for Cabal. Everybody is happy. I’m absolutely sure we can shoehorn you into a private meeting with him as GO Liaison needing to discuss some of these inter-species finer details.”

  “Do I want to be shoehorned into an unfamiliar vampire?” I winced.

  “And while you’re there, you could sniff about these urdermays.” She winked in a very unsubtle way. “Just like a proper sleuth, you know, those cartoon ones from before the war you’re always telling me about. Scoopy dog?”

  “Scooby Doo,” I corrected absently, rescuing my coffee possessively from her cold fingers. I considered her plan for a moment. Sanctum, Allesandro’s old kingdom, the vampire nightclub located beneath the streets at the Eagle and Child pub. It was the last place I wanted to visit. Last time I’d been there, his old boss, the mentally unhinged vampire Gio had tried very hard to kill me. And had gone on trying to kill me for some time after that. Until I’d killed him instead. Let’s just say it wasn’t my ‘happy place’. But Lucy might have a point. Maybe this new pretender to the throne with his ridiculous bird-name would have some insight into our current situation. Damned if I had any better ideas to go on.

  “Not that I’m not grateful,” I said, tilting my head suspiciously at Lucy. “But I have to ask. What’s in it for you, my scheming associate?”

  She grinned. “Dove is supposed to be hot. Like…” She cast around for inspiration, “movie idol in a kiln hot. Like salt plains in a heatwave hot. I wanna meet him.” She tapped the side of her
neck with a finger. “Maybe I can get an autograph?”

  I looked heavenwards. “Save me from Helsing fangirls,” I muttered with a smirk.

  “Could help take your mind off you-know-who,” she added, sweetening the pitch. She picked up the red flyer and fluttered it at me playfully. “It’s been months, Doc. You need some rebound fangs.”

  “My mind is not ON you know… oh I give up.” Lucy has a way of wearing you down. “Whatever, yes. Let’s go see the vampires and find out who’s pulling them apart. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Lucy gave herself a high five. It was the single geekiest thing I’ve ever seen a human do. “Yay! I’ll pick you up at sundown? Dress trampy. And don’t be so glum about it.” She stood, sweeping up her coat and looking very happy with herself. “You never know, the vamps might all be in those latex getups you like.”

  There was no coffee left in my cup to throw at her.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Dress trampy’ is a command that does not sit well with the wardrobe of a social recluse who usually does everything possible to avoid drawing attention to herself. I wear a lab coat like it’s armour against the world. It’s great. Like most uniforms, people don’t see the person, only the costume. I comforted myself with the reasoning that this was the same thing. Tonight, against both my better judgement and my will, I was going to be a Helsing.

  Sadly, my casual wardrobe screams ‘chunky knit!’ rather than ‘femme fatale’. The only way I could be considered fatal in any way would be if you happened to have an allergy to angora wool. However, I had managed to find mothballed in the back of my messy closet something semi-suitable. Black leather pants I could still fit into if I didn’t intend to sit down or bend at the waist all night, a retro T-shirt emblazoned with the bride of Frankenstein in communist propaganda poster style, and a bruised red waist-length leather jacket with an unnecessary number of buckles.