Paper Children

by James Fahy

  I tried to stand, but saving Celeste had taken everything I’d had left. I could feel sweat breaking out all over my skin, icy in the wind.

  Allesandro landed a vicious blow on the pale vampire’s jaw, causing him to spit blood into the night beneath the glitter of fireworks filling the heavens.

  Dove wavered unsteadily, staggering. “You… can’t stop me.” He grinned through bloodied teeth. “None of them are worth saving. None of them are worth the life of any one of us.” With a shaking, exhausted finger, in the flickering light of a blood red firework above, he tapped his mask, between the eyes. “Your clan… great and noble Duke of Sanctum… they all think like I do now. They only listen to me now… to reason!”

  Allesandro’s hand shot out and grabbed Dove by the throat. The two of them flew back against the wall of the cupola, my vampire lifting his grinning, maniacal adversary off his feet and sliding him pinned up against the brickwork.

  “I will never release them…” Dove choked and gurgled, blood from his mouth dripping down over Allesandro’s white hand and arm.

  Celeste was sitting up beside me. I tried to make myself stand again, but the pain in my arm and shoulder was too much… my head felt light and my vison was tunnelling, fading around me. Whatever damage I’d done to myself hauling her up, after the trauma I’d put my both my mind and body through deep in the underground facility, controlling the Pale, it had taken its toll. I could taste copper in my mouth and my ears were ringing.

  Dove was still grinning. “I will never forgive,” he spat viciously.

  Allesandro, still holding the struggling vampire by the throat, fixing him to the wall like a pinned butterfly, drew his free hand back in a fist, and brought it crashing down onto Dove’s face, shattering the decorative mask, which fell in dusty plaster shards around them.

  A final crackle of fireworks illuminated Dove’s hate-filled face, glaring at his former master.

  “Neither will I,” Allesandro said.

  He reached and closed his hand over the studded decoration embedded in Dove’s brow. Dove struggled in panic and tried to break free, but it was no use. My vampire held his head tightly. I watched, blearily and dizzy, as he tore the long metal spike from Dove’s skull, extracting it as surely as the sword from the stone. The long, blood-slicked needle of metal sliding out of Dove’s brain in Allesandro’s tight fist. Dove screamed, his body jerking and flailing uselessly, as the tech was wrenched from his head. His feet clattered against the stones, his body convulsing as though a violent current passed through it. By my side, Celeste covered her ears and buried her head.

  The scream, inhuman agony, rolled out across the square and the streets beyond, echoed in every speaker, bouncing off distant walls.

  Allesandro held the long silver spike, obscene and glittering, as he dropped Dove, who fell to his knees in spasms, his jittering, shaking hands coming up to cup his bleeding forehead.

  My vampire drew back the spike, and with a cold, frozen expression, he drove it deep into Dove’s chest, swiftly skewering the kneeling vampire in the heart.

  The ringing in my ears was louder and I was fairly sure I was going to throw up. I blinked, trying to make the scene focus before me.

  I was aware of Celeste’s hands on my shoulders as she knelt beside me, trying to steady me as I swayed.

  Was it real? Had we really stopped him?

  I saw, as though down a long and swiftly darkening corridor, Dove’s lifeless body crumple over to the side, slumping bonelessly and with grim finality against the wall. I saw Allesandro turn to look for me, across the rooftop, bloodied and staggering, his dark hair slick with gore, his arms bloodied to the elbow, and a wild light in his grey eyes.

  Perhaps I called his name. Or maybe it was he who called mine. It was the last thing I remembered before the world span and darkness descended fully. Celeste’s hands caught me as I fell, and after that, there was nothing more.

  Chapter 39

  I didn’t wake up on the rooftop of the theatre. I woke up in the back seat of a car, lay slumped against the window as it rumbled through the dark city. I was bleary and disoriented. I noticed that it must have started raining while I was out of it, because it was rolling down the glass. The buildings sliding past in the darkness beyond were blurry, neon signs in shop windows, pumpkin lights strung between streetlamps. Everything glowed like jewels in the darkness and was reflected, sparkling in every raindrop on the window.

  The glass felt wonderfully cool against my forehead. I felt feverish and drunk. I tried to speak, but my tongue felt swollen and dry. I managed to turn my head, which felt like a heavy cannonball on a neck made of wet spaghetti. I saw the shoulders and the back of the head of the driver in front of me, a man with buzz-cut hair in a dark suit. There was another man in the front passenger seat beside him. Same hair, same suit. They were separated from me by a lattice iron grill. I tried to frown, but I’m not sure I managed it. What I had done down in the old Seraph facility, stopping the Pale in their attack with my own force of will… it had drained me immeasurably. I hadn’t realised, but I’d been running on pure adrenalin since then. All through the crowds at the theatre, the rooftop with Dove and Celeste. And now… my body felt as though it were shutting down completely.

  I felt very drunk indeed. It occurred to me I should ask who they were. But I already knew, even in my feverish, hungover state. They were Cabal Ghosts.

  I should also ask where we were going. But I was fairly sure I knew that too. I could feel the handcuffs around my wrists in my lap. And the doors here in the back of the car had no handles.

  Blacklisted.

  I let my eyes slide closed again. My eyelids feeling wonderfully cool against dry eyes which burned like hot stones. In the darkness of my jumbled mind I saw Dove and Allesandro again. The Duke of Sanctum thrusting the metal spike into his steward’s chest, like a short, needle-sharp rapier.

  Even though my face was numb, smeared up against the window of the car, as it rattled along over bumps, I managed to smile.

  Chapter 40

  When I came fully back to my senses, two days had passed, and I was firmly planted in my new home.

  A bare room with a grey cot and a wobbling desk and chair. Small enough that if I lay on the floor and stretched my hands above my head, I could touch opposite walls with toes and fingertips. The walls were bare and white. There was no window. The door was locked. There was a small porthole in its centre, and a flap at its base. Looking like an elongated letterbox.

  This was how my meals were delivered.

  I didn’t have my phone or a datascreen. The only thing I had was a grey and shapeless jumpsuit.

  I spent the first day in silence, running over and over what I would say when someone came and opened the door. How I would explain what had happened.

  No one came.

  Food was pushed through the slot twice a day. I never even saw anyone pass the tiny porthole window in the door. And when I put my face to the glass, hands cupped either side, I could see nothing my outside cell but a dark and grey corridor. The opposite wall was blank.

  They could at least have hung a poster, I thought. ‘Hang in there, Kitty’, ‘You don’t have to be a sadistic Orwellian prison guard to work here, but it helps’…something.

  But it was as featureless out there as it was in here.

  I spent the second day pacing. You can get a lot of good cardio pacing, even if you don’t have much room to pace in. No one came that day either. There was a tiny pinhole bubble affixed to one corner of the ceiling. I assumed it was CCTV. Keeping an eye on the guests here. I talked to it a lot in those first few days. Some of my talking was quite loud. Much of it was swearing.

  I never got a response. Only the flat black eye, peering blindly down at me.

  Welcome to the joys of being Cabal blacklisted, Phoebe Harkness.

  It didn’t matter that Coldwater had been a deranged and dangerous woman. That she had broken every law she had claimed to stand for. It didn�
�t even matter that she was dead.

  A blacklist order from a member of the highest of the high, one of Cabal’s senior directorial board, was the word of God. A lifetime of solitary confinement. No trial, no investigation, no chance of parole… ever.

  As there was no window in my cheery little cell, the only way I marked the passing of the hours was when the lights went out. Abruptly and without warning, plunging the room into complete blackness. I assumed this meant it was night. They stayed off for around seven hours, as far as I could judge, before flicking back on again.

  I had no idea if this actually meant it was night or day outside. I didn’t even know if I was above or below ground here. It barely mattered.

  The shower cubicle set in a small recess in one corner of my new, constrained world at least gave hot water. It helped break up the day between mealtimes.

  I wondered to myself, as time passed… and the third silent, empty day became the fourth, and then the fifth, and onwards… whether the people who had brought me here, the good servants of Cabal, had any idea why?

  A blacklist order wasn’t questioned, by anyone. It couldn’t be. I had been taken in the aftermath of Halloween, presumably apprehended on sight, though I couldn’t remember anything after the rooftop. After Dove’s death.

  Coldwater really had doomed me, snuffed me out with a flick of her thumb, just as Cloves had warned she would so many times.

  And now she’s dead, I said to myself. The only woman who could overturn her decision was lying deep underground, broken and half-eaten in the dark. Not likely she was going to repeal it then. It was equally unlikely that any of the other of the senior board would overturn it either. Why would they? I didn’t know any of them, and they didn’t know me.

  Bleakly, I realised that they probably didn’t even know I was here… wherever here was, this dire detention centre. Matters like this were beneath their notice.

  I no longer existed out in the world.

  A few times, I tried talking to whoever it was who pushed my rather grim meals through the slot, but never got the slightest response, no matter what I said.

  I wasn’t begging to be released. I wasn’t pleading for my freedom. I was here to stay, I knew that. But I wanted to know what was going on out there.

  Two weeks passed, if my ability to count days by the cycles of light and dark which regimented my cell was to be trusted, and I had no idea what was happening in my city. Halloween had gone. November was rolling along. Had Allesandro gotten Celeste down off the roof? Was she safe? Had Lucy and Oscar been hurt in the crowds? What did Cloves and Chase do with the children we rescued?

  I didn’t know what the fallout in the city from Halloween night had been. There must be something. Vampires going feral at a festival and attacking the humans around them? Even Cabal wouldn’t be able to sweep that under the carpet and pretend it hadn’t happened.

  And what about Coldwater? Did anyone even know she was dead, or what she had done? Or was she a missing person now? Surely Cloves would have outed the truth of Seraph?

  No one gave me any answers. In the eyes of the ruling body, I wasn’t a person entitled to them anymore. Hell, I wasn’t a person. Doctor Phoebe Harkness was a past life. Now I was simply ‘detainee 448’. It said so on my stylish jumpsuit.

  More time passed. I refused to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me broken. I only cried at night, after the automatic lights off.

  I missed Lucy. I knew I would never be allowed visitors. I might well go the rest of my life and never see another living person. I missed Griff and Dee. Just thinking about them both made my chest ache. I wondered if their funerals had come and gone yet. I wondered if anyone had taken the decision to turn off Griff’s life support. Surely Lucy would make Cloves do it, in my absence.

  And I missed Allesandro. I had only just found him again, and it’s not as though we’d had time to go for a walk and catch up. I had a lot I wanted to discuss with him. But if I was honest, I also just missed his face.

  I felt painfully alone.

  I’d freed him from his prison deep underground. That was the important thing, I told myself. I saved him when no one else was looking for him, even if doing so had ended up with me here now, in the same fate. I had taken his place in hell, when he had been needed out in the world to stop any more children dying. I considered this a fair trade. A grim one, but I didn’t regret it. Whenever I did, I thought of the twelve girls on the hospital beds deep underground, and of Celeste. We had freed them. It was worth it.

  To pass the time, when there was literally nothing else to do, I imagined roughly seven hundred different scenarios in which Allesandro, in his usual dramatic, attention-seeking way, staged a daring breakout. Some of these daydreams were fairly straightforward, some were ridiculously elaborate and would put the old Mission Impossible movies to shame. He and Lucy disguised as prison guards, sneaking me out through the laundry chute to where Oscar had a car waiting, the motor running.

  No one came to break me out of course. I doubt anyone, even Cloves, knew where I was.

  “You could at least appear in my head,” I muttered to myself one morning, sitting on the bed and swinging my legs. “When you want to, you’re always invading my dreams, you bloody phantom. And now radio silence?” I sighed into the stillness and silence of my cell.

  “It would be nice just to have someone to talk to. Even if it’s only a projection.”

  Allesandro didn’t appear in my dreams. I didn’t have any waking visions. Nothing. Maybe it only worked if they knew where you were? There was another possibility of course, but I was avoiding thinking of it, though it crept treacherously into my thoughts anyway.

  Maybe he just wasn’t trying. Cabal could even have officially declared me dead. And no one would know any different.

  So I had no dream visits from a friendly vampire. I had plenty of nightmares though. Burning demons grinning in the dark. Small pale children with bald heads and glowing, pale eyes crawling like spiders over the walls and ceiling of my cell in the night.

  *

  Sometimes I dreamed I was on the tower of Oxford Castle once more. Those were the best ones. Simply because it reminded me of being outside, with wind in my face and the sky above me, my city laid out all around me. Space and freedom, such simple treasures that I had never given a thought to. So I looked forward to these dreams. Even if I was always fighting either the ghoul or Dove in his sun-protection white cowl and cloak. They always ended the same way. With my being thrown over the tower’s edge. Forcing me to wake up in panic before I hit the floor.

  And I always woke up to this tiny grey room and remembered where I was.

  *

  It was perhaps two weeks before I saw someone, though it felt much longer. It wasn’t someone I expected. I was sitting with my back to the wall, facing the door. Wedged between my thin bed and the pointless empty desk, facing the door and lost in my own thoughts, when it happened. It must have been what I had come to think of as the ‘day-cycle’, because the harsh lights were on. I had gotten into a routine of doing exercises, basic floor stretches and body weight stuff. It wasn’t like they let you out and allowed you to walk manacled around some grim courtyard, shackled at the feet. Blacklisted detainees clearly received not even the most basic shred of humanity. I had been cast into a very modern looking oubliette to be forgotten. I was clearly expected to go mad, or to waste away and die.

  I had made up my mind to do neither. I would stay alive out of sheer spite. If the only revenge I could take against Coldwater’s death sentence was taking up space and costing the government two vile unpalatable meals a day, I would do just that. I would last for years, because fuck them, that’s why.

  And I was still fully, resolutely sane.

  I’ve always liked my own company anyway. A lifetime of being a hermit had trained me for this. I was already playing entire movies in my head to pass the time. From start to finish.

  I had an entire season of Doctor Who pretty much memorised
, and I had been looking forward to ‘watching’ it later, after lights out and the Night Cycle.

  I wasn’t going to go mad. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

  I was lost in such thoughts, rambling around in my head, when there was a flicker and a hiss from the corner of the room opposite me.

  My eyes flicked up to the CCTV bubble that squatted up there like a spider’s web. There was a tiny wisp of smoke drifting from it, as though it had just shorted out. Dull as it seems, this was the most interesting thing that had happened in the last two weeks. Indeed it was the only thing that had happened in the last two weeks. I stared at it in fascination, watching the tiny curl of smoke twist in the air as it dissipated.

  Something moved out of the corner of my eye as I stared up at it, and when I looked back down from the ceiling, someone was standing in the middle of my cell.

  I almost jumped out of my skin.

  The girl was standing right in front of the door, though she hadn’t opened it to enter. She was dressed in jeans which looked dirty and too big for her, and a battered old jacket. Both looked as if they’d been stolen from a dumpster. Her pale hair was unwashed and loose around her shoulders. It was the attire of a street person. Scavenged and pilfered.

  It was such a shock to see her… to see anyone, that for a moment I didn’t recognise her at all. But as I scrabbled my way up the wall to stand, staring, I saw how very pale she was, her skin looked almost translucent, like alabaster, the harsh lights of my cell seeming to penetrate its surface. And her eyes were very… wrong.

  Melodie Cunningham Bowls, the thirteen-year-old product of both her father’s genetic enhancements and Coldwater’s abominable splicing, had just popped silently into existence in my room.

  “You… you’re…” I stuttered. My voice sounded odd and raspy. I wasn’t sure the last time I’d spoken out loud. It might have been a day or two. Maybe longer. My heart was pounding with the shock of seeing another person after such a long stretch of time with only myself for company.