Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  If you’ve never had a gun go off right next to your ear, it’s an experience. There’s a reason people wear ear-defenders at shooting ranges. In the close quarters of our tight space, it seemed to shake the walls.

  Where the hell did Cloves get a gun from?

  She was a good shot, aiming high at the thing’s back, ensuring that if the bullet had gone straight through, it wouldn’t have hit the unconscious teenager being carried lower in its arms. I saw the small puff of blood and dust as her bullet punched into its grimy shoulder, tearing a flap in its rotten, stained shirt, just below its ragged ruff.

  Cloves had both hands on her gun, elbow’s locked and arms straight. The gun was ridiculously big for a handgun. This wasn’t some mother-of-pearl discreet self-defence weapon. Cloves was packing a Desert Eagle. Of course she was.

  She fired again in quick succession, each report lighting the stairs like lightening, rocking the stones with their crisp reports which slapped my eardrums. The creature staggered, leaning against the wall, knocked off balance with her assault. The final bullet buried itself in the back of its neck, tearing a hole right through it and making it drop the girl in an unceremonious heap on the stairs.

  It didn’t turn, but I saw its dark hands fly up to grip its own throat. I waited for it to collapse.

  Instead, it let out a loud, gurgling growl of sheer anger, and before Cloves could load another clip, it stepped over the girl and ran off around the curling stairs, disappearing swiftly into the shadows and making good its escape.

  Cloves shoved me roughly out of the way.

  “Check the kid!” she snapped, barrelling after the nightmare into the darkness without a moment’s hesitation.

  I scuttled forward, watching her disappear out of sight and hearing the thing’s retreating roar, rolling back toward us across the dark stones of the stairwell. Lucy was sobbing on the steps behind me as I reached the girl and gently turned her over. She was unconscious but breathing, her dark hair strewn across her face. I pushed it clear, checking her for injuries. She had an angry red scrape across her forehead which was just beginning to bleed. It was likely she had caught the wall when she had been dropped, but otherwise she seemed okay.

  “Celeste?” My voice was shaky. I concentrated to calm it and sound reassuring. “Hey, honey. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  She murmured sleepily. I couldn’t hear Cloves or the creature at all. We were alone in the tower now.

  “We… we were just sitting on the steps,” Lucy whispered, her eyes wide. “Just talking and it… it just reached out of the darkness and took her.”

  I glanced up at Lucy, who had sat up and was hugging her knees. She looked in shock, her eyes wide in the darkness.

  “It just fucking took her, Doc. We didn’t even hear it coming. It was silent. I grabbed on to her but it just pulled her right out of my hands. It just came out of the shadows.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, not feeling that even one little thing about this was okay. “It didn’t take her. She’s here. We stopped it. It didn’t get away with her.”

  Celeste was starting to come around in my arms a little. We would have to find her grandfather. He was still out in the quad with the other guests, I’d last seen him chatting to Dove and Elise. He was clearly oblivious that some demonic monster had just tried to abduct his granddaughter like some wicked goblin from a fairy tale.

  “What the hell is it?” Lucy asked in a whisper. I realised this was the first time she’d seen the thing. “I thought it was going to kill me but it… it just threw me aside like nothing.”

  I became aware that a phone was ringing. It was coming from Cloves’ treasured purse, lying discarded and utterly forgotten on the step by Lucy. We both ignored it. Someone was coming back up the stairwell.

  Cloves reappeared, looking furious and slightly dishevelled.

  “It’s gone.” She was out of breath.

  “What do you mean it’s gone?” I stared at her, she was still holding the comically large handgun. It made a strange accessory in her yachting club get-up.

  “It’s just disappeared!” Cloves shook her head. “I went right down the tower, they’re all still out there, watching the damn movie. How could it get through all those people and not one of them see it? None of them have a fucking clue it was even here.”

  Even for a demon, it would be possible to slip away into a large dark crowd, I realised. One filled with people dressed for Halloween. Masks and outfits. In the dark of the cinema crowds, it would seem just another costume.

  Cloves glanced down at the girl I was holding.

  “The brat okay?”

  I nodded.

  “That thing…” She waved her gun behind her down the steps. “It should be dead.” Cloves walked the last few stairs up to us. “These are hollow point bullets for fuck’s sake. I must have punched six holes in that son of a bitch. One through the throat. It didn’t even fall down. How is it not dead?”

  I didn’t know. The phone was still ringing but none of us cared. I was still feeling slightly deafened by the gunfire.

  “Where the hell were you hiding that?” I nodded at her gun.

  “I’m always armed, Harkness. You should be too.”

  “You were not hiding that thing in your bra strap.”

  “My purse.” Cloves flapped a hand bossily at Lucy behind me, beckoning for her to fetch it. I had seen Cloves’ purse. I’d snatched it from her earlier on the landing above. It had been empty except for the sunglasses. You couldn’t hide a large gun in a transparent plastic clutch bag.

  As Lucy scooped it up, I saw the surface flicker, a little static crawling across the surface where her fingers pressed. It was black inside, lined with dark material.

  “It’s a hologram design, you moron,” Cloves sneered, as Lucy reached by myself and the girl to pass it to her. “Don’t believe everything you see.” The phone was still chirping urgently. “Jesus Christ.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe that thing had the gall to show up here. To try and take another kid, right under our noses, with all these people? We have to call this in, right now. Get Coldwater and the rest of the directors down here if we bloody well have to. Set up a perimeter. That thing could still be nearby.”

  “We should get the girl to a hospital,” I said. “Get her checked out.”

  “We should call a fucking priest,” Lucy said quietly to herself. “That’s what we should do.”

  Cloves pulled her phone from her purse and held it up to her ear, frowning at us. “Speak of the devil.” She motioned for us to be silent, with a casual wave of her firearm, which was more than a little alarming. “Coldwater is calling. Probably wondering where the hell you are and why you’re not at the damn lab where you’re supposed to be.”

  She answered the call, turning away from us and walking away a couple of steps for a degree of privacy.

  Lucy scooted over to me, as I began to help the still-bleary teenager to sit up.

  “I’m sorry, Doc.” She sounded teary, but seemed to be regaining herself after the shock. “I should have done something. I didn’t-”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “What could you have done? It’s okay, look everybody’s safe.”

  Her lip was still trembling as she looked down at the young girl. I felt terrible. Lucy was a lab intern. She signed up to Blue Lab for bloodwork and petri dishes. She was aiming for a doctorate and now, instead, here she was pulled into the grimy and bloody dangerous world I seemed always to find myself in. She shouldn’t have to deal with monsters. I shouldn’t have dragged her along with me tonight.

  “Lucy,” I made her look up at me, distantly hearing Cloves talking on the phone. “Calm yourself down, alright? You did fine. You’re not hurt. The girl is okay. Nobody got swiped tonight. We stopped it. The bad guy is gone.”

  She nodded at me, giving me the most pitiful brave-little-trooper face and making me feel even worse. See, this is why historically I don’t have friends.

 
Cloves lowered her phone and turned to face us. We both looked up at her. Her face was white, her jaw set. I frowned.

  “What?” I asked, staring at her. A feeling of dread was bubbling up inside me from nowhere. There was something in her expression I’d never seen before. She looked genuinely shell-shocked. “Cloves? What is it?”

  Cloves swallowed hard, blinking at us both. “There…” She cleared her throat. “There’s been an attack,” she said. “At Blue Lab. It’s trashed. Coldwater has been injured, badly-”

  Lucy leaned in and took the weight of the girl as I stood up unsteadily in the shadows. My legs feeling weak and watery. Cloves was frowning at me with another unfamiliar expression. It almost looked close to pity.

  “Your team, Harkness,” she said thickly. “Dr Denison and Dr Lovelace…”

  I felt like I was going to be sick. I shook my head. I could feel Lucy staring at me from the corner of my eye but I couldn’t tear my face away from Cloves.

  Cloves looked down at her phone in her hand, as though it was a strange an alien thing.

  “They’re dead.”

  Chapter 18

  I don’t really remember the trip to the hospital. I remember the car Cloves ordered taking us away from Christchurch. A big black Cabal Humvee, shining in the night like a beetle. I remember garbled conversations and barked orders from Cloves. That Celeste and her Grandfather were to be brought along with us. She didn’t want them out of her sight if they were targets. Lucy was white-faced and strangely silent at a time I would have expected her to be in floods of tears or hysteria. I vaguely recall the drive through the city to the John Radcliffe. The nearest, largest hospital in New Oxford to Blue Lab. I knew the building well. It was a teaching hospital, I’d spent a lot of time here before I got my own lab at BL1 and ended up in bed with Cabal. I say in bed, but it was more Gerald’s Game than Dangerous Liaisons, as far as I was concerned.

  We didn’t talk much. I, like Lucy, didn’t want to breathe, or think. Not until we’d seen for ourselves.

  It was almost midnight now, and Lucy and I sat in a hospital corridor, in that bland and unforgiving light these places have, as though designed to chase away every possible shadow, leaving everything flat and harsh, and strangely unreal. I felt numb. Cloves was arranging something in the next room with Coldwater. We were about to be debriefed. And I just wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to see them.

  “Dr Harkness?”

  I looked up. A doctor stood before me. I hadn’t noticed her approach. A middle-aged woman with a small face, her build and appearance putting me randomly in mind of some kind of cartoon forest animal. Some odd creation of Beatrix Potter.

  “Servant Cloves is waiting for you inside.”

  She gestured to the door. Swallowing, I stood, squeezing Lucy’s hand in mine as she let go. Lucy didn’t follow me in. I’m not sure she wanted to see. Perhaps she couldn’t process things yet.

  The door led to a private hallway, in which three Cabal Ghosts stood, a human barrier to anyone not classified enough to be in here. We passed them quietly, I didn’t even register their faces, and moved through a second door, which brought us into a nondescript hospital room. There were two beds. There was a chair by the window, the tan blinds of which were closed fast against the night outside. The lighting in here was dimmed somewhat, less harsh that the waiting area, and the air was filled with the beeps, pops and clicks of hospital apparatus. The pinging song of the dead and the dying.

  Cloves sat in the chair by the window, her legs crossed, arms resting on the chair and fingers steepled in front of her mouth as she looked up to see me enter. She looked a little paler than usual. Across from her, standing in the centre of the room, Director Coldwater turned to face me.

  I’d never seen Coldwater less than pristine. The sight was surreal, only adding to the sense of dreamlike unreality. She had her arm in a sling, and her face was badly bruised on one side, her jaw and cheek washed with an angry purplish-black. I could see butterfly stitches, freshly administered, high on her cheekbone, and her bottom lip was split.

  But all of this I barely noticed, registering her injuries almost reflexively. My eyes were drawn instead to the two beds.

  “Dr Denison is dead,” Cloves said flatly. “Dr Lovelace…” She shook her head. “Technically, his heart is still beating, but don’t have any false hopes, Harkness. He’s just as dead.”

  One of the beds contained Dee. My sniffer-ghoul. My forensic wizard. The guy I’d trained with years ago right here in this very hospital. The expert who had first found the faceless girl beneath Folly Bridge, happy in his gruesome pathology. And I had drawn him into my world. Made him a member of the team. And now he was dead.

  He looked peaceful. I had been expecting carnage. My mind had been spooling over and over the vampire deaths, the sheer gleeful violence and destruction that the killer there had enjoyed. Other than the unmistakable pallor, I could see no signs of trauma on the man lying on the bed.

  When people die this way, often you hear others say that they looked like they were just sleeping. I call bullshit on this. It’s just a lie people say to comfort one another.

  I don’t know whether I believe humans have spirits, or souls, or whatever you want to call them, but I do know this. When a person dies… when whatever it is that’s inside them which makes them who they are… is gone, what’s left behind, the corpse, never looks like them.

  It can seem like a very good facsimile, an expert waxwork model, almost enough to fool you, but never quite completely. The person is gone. And only meat and bones are left behind. No more a part of them any more than a shrugged off coat. Denison’s body, lying so very still in the bed, didn’t look like Denison to me. It looked appalling.

  I closed my eyes, standing stock-still in the middle of the hospital room amongst the beeps and whirrs. I didn’t want to see him. I had no wish to remember him looking like this.

  “How…” I asked quietly, my voice cracking slightly.

  “Broken neck,” Cloves said. “It was quick, clean.” If I didn’t know Cloves better, I’d almost think she was trying to comfort me. No mess, no fuss, right?

  “I doubt he even knew,” she continued. “He wouldn’t have-”

  “And Griff?” I cut her off. I forced myself to open my eyes and turn to look at the second bed, moving my head before I could bottle out and hesitate, the way it’s sometimes better to plunge into icy water rather than creep in inch by inch. Get it over with. A short sharp shock… then it won’t be so bad.

  Unlike Dee, whose body was respectfully untouched in the bed, simply covered with a sheet up to the neck, Griff was wired up. There were countless suction pads on his chest and arms. Wires trailing everywhere. An oxygen mask clung to his mouth, into which air was being pumped at regular intervals. He had been cleaned up, but I could still see spatters of blood on his neck and shoulders. One side of his face was deep black and red with bruising.

  His head was the worst. Griff’s scruffy brown curls were matted to the side of his skull, stained with blood. His head itself, above the eye socket and along the temple, was disfigured, horribly caved, like someone had punched a dent into the side of car.

  My hand flew to cover my mouth and I had to turn away.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” I whispered shakily behind my hand. Cloves stood up quickly. I don’t know if she expected me to pass out and was ready to catch me.

  “Blunt force trauma,” she told me, in her clinical way. Cloves didn’t do bedside manner. I knew her long enough to know that her preferred way was to rip off a plaster all at once. “He was hit hard… repeatedly. I’m sorry, Harkness.”

  “Your assistant was left for dead,” Coldwater said behind me, her voice sounding slightly thick and a little slurry, I assume from painkillers. “As was I. But I’m afraid every test we’ve done show massive cerebral haemorrhage, irreparable tissue damage to large portions of the brain itself, huge trauma to the central cortex. His heart was still beating when the emer
gency services got to us, but now…”

  I glanced over Cloves’ shoulder at a bare portion of the hospital wall. I couldn’t bear to look at anyone in the room, living or dead.

  “…the only thing keeping this body alive are these machines, Dr Harkness. It’s brain death. Irreparable and irrecoverable,” Coldwater continued. She paused for a respectful beat. The pings and beeps of the machinery quietly ticked through the room. “We need to know… if Dr Lovelace-”

  “I don’t know if he has any family,” I replied thickly. I knew what she was asking. Next of kin was needed, to make the decision to unplug Griff. He was never coming back. There was nothing left to come back from. The body in the bed was just a shell. He had literally had his brains bashed in.

  “What… what happened?” I finally turned to look at the director. Out of the corner of my eye I could still see the bodies of Griff and Dee. I refused to look directly at them, keeping my eyes trained on Coldwater instead. She was badly beat up, but she always struck me as a tough cookie.

  “There was a break in at the lab, Dr Harkness,” Coldwater told me. “I imagine the intruder expected you to be there too, and your other assistant. Perhaps he meant to take out your whole team, yourself included.” She winced a little. I could tell it was painful for her to move her jaw to talk. “I was there, as you know, unfortunately for me. Your team here were filling me in on the drone footage. We don’t know how he got in, past security. We’re looking into it.”

  “It happened fast, and he was violent… and brutal.” She nodded towards Dee, wincing slightly as she no doubt pulled some painful tendon or other. “This one was the first. He just walked up behind your Dr Denison and twisted his neck. He didn’t even get a chance to stand up. Your other boy put up a fight.” Her lips were thin. “But not enough of one. They crashed around the lab. Dr Lovelace was beaten to death with his datascreen.” Coldwater’s eyes looked haunted. I’d never seen her actually look so human. “Then he turned on me.”

  “But you’re not dead.” I said thickly.