Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  “We’re so limited by the night, Duke,” the monster growled in its low, slow voice.

  I was wondering if we both rushed it at once, could we topple the monster. A tinny voice echoing through the corridors informed us dispassionately that it was now eight minutes until decontamination. Eight minutes until all of us, anyone left down in this old station would be thrashing around on the floor, choking on our own vomit.

  “You wanted the streets full for your carnival,” I said. “Not just Helsings. As many people out in the open as you could. Why? What are you planning to do?”

  The ghoul slowly turned its head from its old master to face me. It regarded me silently for a moment. “Simple,” it said. “I’m going to massacre them.”

  There was a noise far below us. Something moving at the foot of the stairwell. It sounded like more than one. The Pale were coming, more of them finding their way up here from the lower levels.

  “They won’t all fall to one vampire,” Allesandro said. “You’re more insane that even I thought. You’ll be overwhelmed by the crowds. My people, my vampires, will stop you too. We want to co-exist with the humans. You honestly think they will stand by and watch you destroy all the trust we’ve built between our people? They will stop you.”

  “No, no they won’t,” the thing cackled. “Not your people anymore. They’re mine. Every last one of them is mine.”

  “You’re controlling them…aren’t you,” I said in a whisper. The demon’s grin split wider. “You’ve rolled all of them under your mind, all the vampires of the district.”

  It seemed impossible, but with PAPER’s technology giving him the boost, I knew it was true.

  “Allesandro,” I said to my vampire. “He’s in their minds. Every vampire in that parade up there. Nearly a hundred of them. He’s controlling every one of them.”

  “My signal,” the ghoul gurgled with glee. “We will fall upon the crowd, man, woman and child.” It squeezed Coldwater’s neck, making her gag. “We will paint the streets red, and the humans will know their place. We will take back the night. What goes around… comes around.” It put its head down close to Coldwater, its charred, monstrous cheek nuzzling hers as she sobbed.

  “Tell me,” Dove whispered to her through the larynx of the vampire ghoul. “All thanks to you. Is this the outcome you wanted? The greater good. But not of your kind.”

  “He couldn’t control them all,” Allesandro shook his head in disbelief. “Not every one of the clan. Some would have fought back. Some would have been too strong of mind to submit to you.”

  “Dealt with,” Dove’s ghoul grinned.

  The vampire murders. The body Cloves and I had found on the rooftop. Vampires killed and executed, torn apart with bloody violence, all over the city, all of them. Those, I realised, had been the ones Dove had been unable to subdue. The one’s whose minds he hadn’t been able to worm his fingers into. So he’d killed them. He’d torn to pieces any resistance he’d met. Thinning his own herd until all that were left were those compliant.

  The ghoul must have released Coldwater’s throat enough for her to draw a breath.

  “I didn’t want this,” she gasped, her voice cracked and choking. “All I ever wanted… was to be with my son.”

  The ghoul laughed, loud and rumbling, as though gargling on lumps of meat. In one deft swoop, he grabbed Coldwater around the waist and lifted her, kicking and screaming above his head, as though she weighed no more than a rag doll.

  “Go,” it growled. “Be with your children.”

  Before Allesandro or I could move, it had hurled her right over our heads, across the railing of the stairwell. In the darkness, the pulse of the demonic red light, she seemed almost to float in mid-air, suspended over the dark, yawning chasm of the stairwell stretching away beneath her like a hungry throat. She hung for a moment that seemed to stretch in time, eyes bulging in shock, and then she fell, topping over and over, down into the darkness as surely as tumbling into hell.

  I gripped the rail and watched her fall. Her head cracked the stair railing twice on different levels as she plummeted, ringing out sickening chimes, and her body hit the floor far below with a loud crunch.

  Down there in the darkness, I could just make her out, staring back up in horror and shock. Her arms and legs were twisted in unnatural positions, and her neck looked broken, but she wasn’t dead. Even as a pool of blood began to spread out around her head inching its way in thick tendrils across the concrete floor down there, her tongue worked uselessly in her mouth, the fingers of one hand twitching in uncontrollable spasms.

  From the shadows all around her, approaching with curiosity on all fours, I saw the Pale emerge. They convened on her body like spiders coming to a fly caught in a web, grabbing at her arms and legs, digging their little fingers into her hair, and nuzzling at her stomach. Young and old, the Pale covered her like a swarm of ants, until she was lost in a pile of while limbs and arched, skeletal backs. As they began to feed in frenzy, I was glad of the darkness, of how little I could see.

  I turned away from the railing, sickened and shaking. I was never going to mourn the death of Felicity Coldwater, but I was still sick to my stomach.

  The ghoul loomed over the two of us, still blocking the doorway between us and the corridor. Distant screams and howls of the Pale echoed down the blood red passageway behind it, coming closer.

  Again the dispassionate recorded voice over the tannoy informed us that we now had six minutes to exit before decontamination. The ghoul didn’t need to fight us. It only needed to keep us here.

  “New order rises tonight, Duke,” the ghoul grinned at both of us. “Humans should fear us. We should reclaim our place. If only you’d had the vision to see it… but now, you never will. It’s time to wrap up bu-”

  It jerked forward suddenly, biting off its own words with a gurgle. Its eyes shot wide, bulging in its head. There had been a wet thud, and something in the shadows behind it. Sudden movement again, as light caught metal slicing out of the red shadows, and as the ghoul stumbled towards us, tottering unsteady, as though drunk. I watched in disbelief and confusion as its head dipped, and kept on dipping, rolling forward in a snapping of sinew and a crunch of gristle. The creature fell heavily to its knees, clanging on the metal of the stairwell, making it vibrate beneath our feet, and then its head, disconnected and decapitated, rolled slowly down its chest, across its kneeling lap, and away like a grim football past Allesandro’s feet.

  We watched it clatter down the stairway, hitting every step with a noise like a dull gong as it rolled away into darkness.

  The headless body fell forward, vomiting thick black ichor from the ragged wound of its neck. Allesandro instinctively gave it a hefty kick, and sent it tumbling down the steps as well, cartwheeling over and crumpled, as loose and boneless as a scarecrow.

  I stared at the doorway. There, standing with legs planted firmly apart, gripping a bloodied fire-axe firmly in both hands and looking like a vengeful goddess of death, was Veronica Cloves.

  Chapter 36

  “That,” she panted, slowly lowering the axe, “was pretty fucking satisfying.”

  “Cloves?”

  She looked briefly over myself and Allesandro. “I can’t stand mansplaining monsters,” she sneered. “Are you coming? Or did I just crawl into hell for no sodding reason whatsoever?”

  She turned and set off down the corridor. I took one last look down the dark, long shaft of the stairwell. I could still hear the ghoul she had just decapitated rolling downward in a clatter through the darkness like the world’s most morbid slinky. The Pale, it seemed, were on their way up. We followed her out into the red light.

  “How the hell are you down here?” I asked, as the three of us ran along the passageway, Cloves a good ten paces ahead. “How did you know to find us? And where the fuck did you get a bloody axe from? The overlook?”

  “Gift shop,” she replied curtly. “Keep up for Christ’s sake. Those pasty bastards are everywhere. I’v
e taken two of them down already.”

  “They sell axes in the Castle gift shop?” I was beyond confused.

  She actually took time to give me a withering look over her shoulder. “No, you idiot. One of those ‘in case of emergency, break glass’ things. I figured this constituted an emergency.”

  “We have to get up to the city,” Allesandro said urgently. “You’ve destroyed his puppet, but the real Dove is up there, and he’s going to spark a bloodbath.” We hung a left into another corridor, barging through swinging doors that slammed behind us as we ran.

  “No shit,” Cloves growled. “We have to get out ourselves first. Oscar and Lucy told me where you and Chase had gone. Where is he now?”

  “He took the children,” I said, out of breath. “We found them. He was getting them out. You haven’t passed him?”

  “Down here? I think I would have noticed my old dead partner and a brace of brats.”

  It was difficult to differentiate between the corridors, even on this upper level. They were all bare and undecorated, an identical grid. I wondered how extensive this facility had been, long ago, before its decommission and appropriation by Coldwater for her very own Doctor Moreau experiments. It had been difficult enough getting our bearings on the way in. Even more disorienting now with the only light source the dim, flashing red bulbs, and the constant screams and grunts of unseen Pale making it difficult to think.

  Every corner we turned, every set of doors we pushed through, I expected the three of us to come face to face with them. We could hear them, running around, shrieking and skittering here and there. The sound of corridor doors banging as they crashed through them, the clatter and smash of machinery toppling as they flailed against them. I even saw a couple, glancing back over my shoulder as we hurried onwards, dark shadows in the gloom behind us, swiftly crossing intersections we had just passed. I was silently grateful for the darkness and the noise, masking our presence from them, drowning out our footfalls.

  When we turned a final corner and saw ahead of us the large, rectangular reception area where the elevator had first delivered us into this stygian nightmare, my relief was almost euphoric.

  Ahead of us, a crossroads, but beyond that was the lift, and gathered around it, to my immense joy, was Chase Pargate and his brood of survivor girls. They all looked up as we ran towards them.

  Cloves was a few paces ahead of us. She crossed the intersection first, just as Chase was ushering the children into the darkness of the elevator. I heard her yelling at him in the pulsing crimson light, and he looked as surprised to see her as we had been. I could only imagine what the girls made of her. Seeing a woman running out of the darkness toward you cradling a fire-axe was not a reassuring sight for anyone. Reunions and explanations would need to wait however. The automated voice over the tannoy informed us calmly that decontamination would commence in four minutes.

  “Exits,” the metallic voice dispassionately intoned as we ran. “Are now closing.”

  There was a whirring bang, and as Chase and Cloves bundled the children inside the elevator and the vampire and I approached the intersection, suddenly from the ceiling above, a vast thick sheet of clear glass descended swiftly like a guillotine. It was as wide as the corridor, from wall to wall, and it slammed with great finality into a deep slot which had opened at the same time on the floor.

  Unable to stop, I hit it running, almost concussing myself, and bounced right off, falling onto my back as surely as if I’d run headlong into a wall of concrete. As I scrambled to pick myself up, I saw Allesandro throw himself against it, shoulder first, to no effect. He beat at it with his hands. It didn’t even wobble. It must have been half a metre thick.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped, winded, my head ringing from where I had cracked it against the barrier. I banged my hands on it furiously. “Hey! Open up! We’re not clear yet!”

  On the opposite side of the barrier, Chase was staring, wide-eyed, from the elevator door, the girls huddled behind him in the darkness. We had seen this on our way in. The failsafe, to ensure nothing bad got out in case of a catastrophe.

  Cloves had spun on her heel in surprise at the noise of the suddenly-descending barrier. Through the thick glass she stared at me, wide-eyed, her face a mask of shock.

  “We have to break it!” Allesandro grunted. He was pounding the walls with his fists, putting all of his vampiric strength behind it. I’d seen him punch a hole in a wall in Sanctum before now, to help me escape from Gio. But as I stared, dumbfounded, he wasn’t making a dent in the glass. He hit it again and again, in rapid succession, beginning to leave bloody smears from his knuckles.

  We’d been sealed in. Horror overtook me. The system has sealed up entirely, both to stop any chance of contamination, or the imminent nerve gas that was about to be released escaping the compound and out to the world above. Frantically, I scanned the walls on both sides, looking for anywhere I could pry my fingers between the glass and walls. Looking for any kind of lever or keycode, or release button.

  “There has to be an override!” I shouted, staring over at the vampire, still throwing himself against the barrier. “Some kind of mechanism.”

  “Harkness, move back,” Cloves voice shouted, dulled and muffled through the thick glass. I stopped scrabbling at the walls and stared through it at her. Allesandro grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me backwards a few paces as Cloves raised the fire axe above her head and brought it crashing down on her side with all her might.

  It hit the glass with a reverberating thud but glanced right off. It hadn’t cracked. She swung again and again, bringing the blade down at full force three times, looking for all the world like a demented axe murder. After the third strike, she dropped the weapon, staggering. I heard it fall to the tiles with a muffled clatter as I ran back up to the barrier, slamming my palms against it.

  There was the tiniest chip, on her side. A notch the size of a fingernail.

  There was no other damage.

  Cloves stared at it, and then, through the glass that may as well have been a mile thick, she stared at me, lips tight.

  “You won’t break through,” I heard myself say, shaking my head. In the secret weaponised levels below Blue Lab, I had seen one of the Pale throw itself a barrier just like this one, repeatedly until it had shattered its own collarbone, without making so much of a scratch on the containment wall. I myself had locked a previous vampire clan leader behind such glass to be eaten alive, and even he, with all his strength, hadn’t been able to break it. They were meant to be impenetrable.

  “There has to be another way out,” Allesandro said urgently beside me. “Or something we could get to break it.”

  I already knew there wasn’t. Reinforced glass, with thick polycarbonate layering, only had to be three and a half inches thick to be bulletproof. This thing was half a metre. It was so thick, that Cloves and Chase, and our only means of escape, looked misty. It was like peering into the deep end of a swimming pool.

  We must have looked the same to them from their side. Two shadowy and indistinct figures. as though we were ghosts already.

  The doors of the elevator, I could blearily see, were trying to close automatically. Chase was braced between them, using all his strength to hold them open, the girls huddled together behind him.

  Cloves ran back to him. For a moment, I felt sure she was abandoning us, but she swiped his gun from his belt and ran back to the barrier, waving us aside with her arm. We flattened ourselves against the wall, and heard the gunshot, muffled, like a deep thump. The flash of the muzzle lighting the glass in one flare like a camera bulb.

  It didn’t break.

  Cloves emptied the clip into the barrier, flash after flash until she was clicking on an empty gun.

  I moved away from the wall. My legs felt unsteady. None of this felt real. Her side of the glass was marred with black scorch marks, but it still stood firm. She held the gun out before her still, her hands shaking slightly.

  Behind us, in the
darkness, I could hear the Pale screaming in animal anger. They were close by. The noise was drawing them.

  “Vee!” Chase’s voice was so distant and distorted. I felt like I was already in my grave, listening to the muffled voices of mourners above through six feet of distant earth. “I can’t hold the doors!”

  They were beginning to close on him, his face contorted in pain as they forced his arms in towards his shoulders.

  Cloves was still staring at me. Still holding the gun out before her uselessly. I swallowed.

  “You have to go,” I said, my voice shaking as I shook my head. I forced it to be firm. “Three minutes and this whole place will be dead. You guys too, and those girls. You have to go right now, Cloves.”

  “Like fuck I do!” Her voice came through the glass. She looked and sounded furious. I’d never seen her eyes so wide. “You don’t give me orders, Harkness!”

  “Those girls are going to die if they don’t leave now,” Allesandro quietly to me.

  “Just go,” I said to Cloves, meeting her square in the eye. “Get the kids out while you have time.” My hands were on the glass, and a very small voice, just this side of hysteria was repeating in my mind over and over like a shocking mantra, ‘I’m going to die here. I’m actually going to die here’.

  I gestured to the elevator behind her. “The doors are closing! We can’t…” I swallowed. My throat felt so dry. “…We can’t get out. You have to.” I swallowed. “There’s no-one else to stop Dove.”

  I didn’t believe Cloves and Chase would be able to stop him. He would roll their minds if they even got close. The only reason he hadn’t been able to roll mine was because of my skewed blood. But I was going to die down here. Allesandro was going to die down here. I would be damned to hell and back if anyone else was, especially those fucking kids. If they didn’t get out, everything… all of it… would have been for nothing.