Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  I had a brief image of him draining me dry. I’d never fed a vampire before. I’d never fed a starving vampire. How much would he need to live? How much would he take before he was sated. He could drain me dry and leave me here on the floor of this room, a dead and empty husk. Even if he didn’t mean to, would he know to stop? Not to take too much?

  With my free hand I reached down and clumsily unbuckled one of the restraints around his wrist, freeing his arm from where it had been shackled to the bedframe. It immediately shot up and grabbed my wrist, holding it to his mouth as he drank, I slid my hand under his head, cradling it and lifting him slightly, afraid he was going to choke.

  Before my eyes… he was changing.

  The stick thin forearm, white as milk, which held my wrist to his mouth, was filling out, ropes of muscle forming and swelling as I watched in astonishment, my own breath coming in gasps as the sensation of his feeding blushed and vibrated through my body, wakening desire so primal and carnal I felt my cheeks rush with blood. On his swelling arms veins were rising to the surface. Even his fingers were filling out, reversing their twig-like appearance. I stared at his face. The sunken eye-sockets were steadily becoming shallower, the gaunt and hollow cheekbones receding. His skin, paper-grey and thin moments ago, was beginning to glow, and I felt his lips bloom and thicken around the skin of my wrist, moist and warm.

  With the deep pressure of the pull of blood still throbbing pleasure through my body in waves, I looked down at his body, arching in delicious agony on the bedframe. His ribcage, horribly visible only moments ago, was fading from view as before my eyes his chest swelled, muscle and tissue growing and reforming right before my eyes. His collarbone ceased to jut out as the tendons of his neck swelled, his shoulders blooming under the support of my free hand.

  I’d never seen a vampire come back to strength. It was like watching a dead-dry lawn bloom back to life after a rainstorm. Like watching time-lapse photography of something rotting being played in reverse. His skin smoothing out, thighs and arms engorging, swelling like melons ripening in the sun. I could hear the creak and stretch of tendons and tissue forming, and moment by moment, the vampire drinking from me became himself again. Even his hair, lank and matted mere moments before, was invigorated. Becoming once again the tousled glossy curls and waves I was familiar with.

  I was starting to feel weak, and colder. The unbearably wonderful draw of his feeding still dragging at me in waves that made me shake. How much of my blood had he taken? Was I going to pass out?

  “Allesandro…” I gasped. “Enough.”

  His eyes shot open, bright and clear. They rolled back slightly in their sockets. For a moment, I thought he might not stop. A part of me didn’t want him to. But with a deep murmuring moan of sheer animal pleasure, of ecstatic satiation, he finally released my wrist from his mouth.

  I stared down at his beautiful face as his head fell back against the mattress. There was a blush of high colour in his marble cheeks. His mouth was open and wet as he lay panting, parted lips, soft and tinged deep pink with my blood. He stared up at me with such a terrible, irresistible hunger that I was torn between running screaming from the room or else climbing up on top of him right here. Fuck the parade, screw the ghoul stalking us down here. Just give me this room, and nothing else.

  “Welcome back,” I breathed, reining it in.

  His tongue darted out and licked across my wrist. He held it to his lips and kissed. A strange numbing tingle, like anaesthetic, and I watched in wonder as the puncture wounds healed themselves in seconds. The corner of his mouth turned up in a smile that was pure wickedness.

  It was the most familiar expression I’d ever seen on his face. I’d missed it.

  “You taste…” he panted, “…like nothing I’ve ever…”

  He didn’t get to finish. I had darted down and before I’d ever realised I was going to do it, my lips were on his. The kiss was deep. I could taste my own blood on his mouth, and he was warm, responding instantly and urgently to me. I bit his lip playfully, eliciting a delighted growl from the vampire below me, and his freed hand came up to grab my hair, pulling me across him as he kissed me back, hungrily.

  “I thought you were dead,” I murmured into his mouth, pulling away from the kiss. “When I saw you… I thought…”

  He stroked my hair out of my eyes as I lifted up and away from him. Peering up at me with the tiniest frown as I stared down at him. Vibrant and alive beneath me.

  “Doctor,” he purred with a smirk. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  I stroked his face, my fingertips tracing along the curve of his eyebrow, down the line of his cheekbone and jaw. The hellish thing I had found in the room was gone, a nightmare faded. My beautiful vampire was back.

  “Neither did I,” I admitted, both to him and to myself. “But… here we are.”

  He kissed me again, arching his head up off the bed to me, and the simple sweetness of having him here, alive and whole and not in agony, was the most wonderful taste, was the one bright and shining moment in a week that had been filled with horror.

  I couldn’t help but snigger a little. I was still light-headed from the blood loss, but a floaty kind of euphoria still drifted through me. Was this what Helsings felt? Had I been missing out this whole time?

  “What?” he whispered, kissing the side of my face and neck in soft, featherlike strokes that made goosebumps rise up. “What’s funny?”

  “I’m just a big capri-sun to you, right?” I teased. “Vitamin Phoebe.”

  I felt him grin into the hollow of my neck.

  “I could get used to my five a day,” he breathed. He lay back, his hair falling around his face. He looked as euphoric as I felt myself.

  I traced a finger along his collarbone and down his chest, which glistened slightly with sweat, feeling his heart pound beneath my hand. I hadn’t known vampires even could sweat. I hadn’t known they could blush either, for that matter. He was warm. Feeding made them more human. Is that what they really took from us? I wondered. More than simply blood. Some vital essence. Borrowing our actual humanity? Like infusing Michelangelo’s David with a pulse, making stone eyelids flutter and stone lips moisten. Was that the power humans had?

  “You got buff fast, bro,” I smirked. “I mean, Christ alive…”

  I stroked the palm of my hand down across his abs, to the line of his oblique, playing my fingers across flesh like silk. His entire body felt hard as stone, hidden under a sheet of flawless skin. “Benefits of a blood-diet? You swelled up right under me.”

  He narrowed twinkling eyes at me and bit his lip a little. I glanced down.

  “Oh…” I said, my eyebrows disappearing right into my hairline. “You really… um… swelled up, huh?”

  He cleared his throat. “As much as I… quite evidently… enjoy being tied to a bed beneath you, Doctor…”

  I looked back up at his face. It seemed the wisest thing to do. “Yes,” I replied, a little too quickly, “We should… get up right?”

  I forced myself to look at his forehead rather than into his eyes. I could feel my face burning. “I mean, you’re kind of already up, but…”

  My vampire may well have just made the most impressive comeback from the dead since John Travolta’s career and I still felt a little high from the feeding, but priorities, Phoebe, I told myself.

  As much as every part of me wanted to stay and play, there was a time and a place for everything, and hidden in a subterranean hellish laboratory full of the Pale while anarchy and bloodshed were about to erupt on the streets above was neither of them.

  I forced myself to sit up, moving away from him, and tucking my hair behind my ear self-consciously. He sat up, unbuckling his other wrist with his free hand.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly, his tone solemn for the first time. He leaned down and freed his own ankles. “For coming and finding me.”

  “You’re welcome,” I mumbled. This had gotten very awkward, very quickly. I didn’t know where
to look. “Can you walk, do you think?”

  He slid his legs off the bed and stood up.

  “Nothing worse than pins and needles,” he assured me. “I’ve been tied up for longer in my time, Doctor. I’ve lived a long life. You don’t know the half of it. And your blood is… something else.” I watched him walk off across the room, bare feet slapping on the tiles as he reached the workbench I had passed on my way in.

  Stop staring at the vampire’s perfect ass, I told myself, guiltily.

  “They’re still here,” he muttered.

  “What are?”

  “My clothes.” He held up a bundle of material from the worktop as I sat back on the bed massaging my wrist, dark jeans and a dusty black T-shirt. I was still feeling light-headed from the feeding. To be honest, I felt like if this was an old movie we should both be lay smoking a cigarette right now. He shook out the jeans, sending up a small cloud of dust.

  “Allesandro,” I said. “How did you end up here?” I looked at the hanging IV drips and bags of blood, more so I would have something to look at other than the back of the naked guy across the room. “What were they doing with you in this fucked up place?”

  The door to the room burst open with a bang. I jumped so much I almost fell off the bed. Chase Pargate stood in the doorway. He looked like he’d been running. For one horrible silent moment, he took in the scene, his eyes flicking from me, sitting clearly flushed on the hospital bed, to my vampire, who stood across the room with his clothes balled in his hands, staring back at him in surprise.

  “Oh god,” Chase covered his eyes dramatically with both hands. “Vampire peen! Cannot… unsee.”

  He opened his fingers, peering at me through them. “You are soooo fired,” he breathed scandalously at me.

  “What the hell, Chase?” I stood up, my heart still pounding from his dramatic entrance.

  “Who might this be?” Allesandro asked, pulling up and fastening his jeans. He looked from me to the door, eyebrows raised.

  “You know what?” Chase said, lowering his hands and holding them palms up as if to ward us both off. “I don’t even wanna know. What happens in the evil lab, stays in the evil lab, right? Why the devil haven’t you answered your phone? I’ve been calling you for ten minutes.” He glanced down, seeing my phone on the floor where I had dropped it, the screen smashed. “I see you found your missing vampire. I mean, I’m assuming this is him. How many vampire guys are you going to run into in a secret facility, right? I’ve been looking for you to tell you we have a problem.”

  “Is this human with you?” Allesandro slid his T-shirt on over his head, still frowning at Chase with suspicion.

  “He’s not human,” I explained. “Long story, later.” I looked to Chase. “Problem?”

  Chase held up his DataPad, cupped in the palm of his hand. “It’s not just Barbecue Beelzebub down here with us.” He said. “I just saw Coldwater through the spycam I left on the lift. She must have followed him here.”

  This place was getting crowded.

  “We need to find Coldwater before he finds us,” I said, looking between them. “Allesandro, how did Coldwater manage to trap you here in the first place? And what for?”

  The vampire stalked out of the room right past Chase, beckoning for us to follow him. “Walk and talk,” he said. “And no, we have to find her before he does. I assume you know what that thing really is, and who’s behind it.”

  Confused, I slid off the bed and followed. “Find Coldwater before the ghoul does. Why? They’re working together, aren’t they?”

  I heard the vampire scoff from the darkness of the corridor. “Dove doesn’t work with humans. He hates them. Come on, I can find that woman’s scent, over the last few months I’ve become intimately familiar with the bitch.”

  Chapter 33

  We made our way through the maze of dark tunnels, Allesandro in the lead, stopping at various intersections with his head slightly inclined, as though listening for something, before choosing a route and setting off again. Chase brought up the rear, watching our back, gun in hand.

  “Dove was always a dangerous specimen,” the vampire told me as we prowled along, keeping his voice low in the darkness. “I’m assuming he told you how we met? That he was being kept as a foodbank by humans? Out in the wasteland.”

  “Yes, vampire-blood buffet for hillbillies in the apocalypse,” I confirmed. “You saved him.” I was struggling to keep up with his pace. He was clearly back to full strength. I should consider bottling my blood. I’d make a fortune on the vampire market.

  “I shouldn’t have,” Allesandro said, flatly. “I brought him back from the brink of death with my own blood. But even when we came to New Oxford, later, when Gio set up the vampire clan, he was still unstable. He never really recovered from his torment.” He tapped his head. “But he buried it pretty deep.”

  Chase piped up from behind us. “So if he’s living on your blood-force, you sired him? Does that make you his vampire-daddy? Cause your son has issues pops. He’s been killing and kidnapping through a meat puppet for fun.”

  I shushed Chase for interrupting, my flashlight roving the floor of the dark corridors.

  “More like the alpha to his beta,” the vampire replied. “Dove could never best me, not with my blood being his resurrection. I was the one who could keep him in check. Gio approved of that. Dove kind of blended away into the background at Sanctum. We didn’t let him do any front-of-house business. He would have been bad for Helsings.”

  He took a sharp right, pushing through swinging doors and onward into the darkness.

  “That night, after you and I had been buried alive, Doctor, you took a lot of blood from me.”

  “I remember,” I murmured. In my defence, I had been devolving into a feral Pale at the time. I’d kind of needed it.

  “I told you I was going home to rest, to regain my strength, and that was the intention, but Dove… He was waiting for me that night, back at Sanctum.” He shook his head in disbelief. “We all have our own strengths, and that one has always had a gift for rolling humans under his mind, but no vampire would ever dream of trying to roll another, and even if he had tried, I was far stronger than him.”

  “Alpha-beta blood,” Chase piped up from the dark. The vampire nodded in front of me. He blew air down his nose in a humourless laugh. “Under normal circumstances that is. But that night, there was something different about him. He was stronger, mentally. Far stronger than he should have been, and I was weakened from the blood loss. He managed, somehow, to roll me. I blacked out in Sanctum and woke up here.” He looked around at the dark pipes snaking through the blackness. “Dove had betrayed his own kind, he sold me off to this place, to Coldwater.”

  “So that he could take over at Sanctum?” I said.

  “As a first step, I imagine,” the vampire confirmed. “Let’s find the lady herself and get some answers. I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with her in which I wasn’t strapped to a gurney being drained for quite some time now.”

  We passed the holding pens. I tried not to look too closely at the heavy doors as room after room filled with the living cadavers of the Pale passed us by. We were not bothering to move quietly, and sensing us, I heard them throw themselves against the barriers with rage, making the metal shudder. A tangle of limbs and fury.

  “The first thing I want to ask old Felicity,” Chase muttered as we crossed the pens, “is why in heaven’s name she’s keeping a Pale army down here all cooped up in tupperware.”

  “And why Dove has been harvesting children,” I added. “Those two are all tangled up together. It’s her technology buried in his head.”

  It looked as though we would get our chance, as after only a couple more junctions and turns, my vampire stopped suddenly right in front of me.

  “Shh,” he said, holding up a hand to stop us. Ahead, the corridor split into three pathways, all identical and utilitarian. Behind us, I could hear the ceaseless, muffled thumping of the Pale, throwin
g themselves tirelessly against the doors again and again.

  After a moment’s thought, Allesandro took the left corridor, which brought us to a high-security door, windowless and bolted, with a dim light emanating from beneath it.

  “That woman,” Allesandro said, a slight growl under his voice. “She’s in here.” I glanced down and noticed he was clenching his fists tightly. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Just… be calm,” I whispered. “Don’t do anything too… massacre-y. I need answers from her.”

  The vampire looked sidelong at me, cool fire in his eyes. “She tortured me here for months. In all that time, she’s the only one I ever saw. Whatever she’s doing, I don’t think Cabal have approved her any staff. I’ve come to dream of tearing her face off.” He sighed down his nose, then nodded. His voice was dark. “Ask your questions, Doctor. But then… I will ask my own.”

  “I have a question,” Chase said, pushing us both aside. “Are we waiting to be invited in? We don’t have time for glowering and brooding, chickens.” He pushed open the door with a bang and we spilled into the room.

  It was large and long. Set out like a dimly lit hospital ward. There were long rows of beds set out in a grim grid arrangement beneath naked bulbs in the shadowy ceiling above. Medical equipment was everywhere along the walls, high-spec datascreens and every manner of monitoring device you could imagine. There were a dozen beds in this room. Every one of them contained a girl, lying motionless under thin sheets. Every single one.

  At the far end of the room, Coldwater stood, hunched over a bank of computers. The wall before her was a bank of screen and monitors. She whirled, shocked at our entrance, and stared at us in wide-eyed surprise, her DataPad clutched in her hand.

  Never has anyone looked more caught red handed. She was like a deer in headlights.

  While she took in the sight of myself, Allesandro and Chase standing in the doorway, I looked over the children. They were all young. Shockingly so, and all girls. Every one of them looked undernourished, hollow cheekbones and lank hair. Every one of them was as still as a corpse, hooked up to IV drips and wired with electrodes, breathing universally into oxygen masks and restrained at the wrist and ankle, as Allesandro had been. They were all unconscious… or worse. The sight made my blood run cold. It was like walking into a dark morgue filled with young bodies. From what I saw, the oldest was perhaps sixteen. Some of youngest looked no more than six.