by James Fahy
“Yes Doctor, that’s correct.” The doors closed and I felt a lurch as we began to ascend.
“You’re… setting me… free?” I still didn’t believe it. I’m a suspicious type. Part of me kept expecting to wake up and find myself back in the cell. Being anywhere else but that small room, which had been my entire world for several weeks, certainly felt surreal and dreamlike.
“Your blacklist status was overturned this morning, Doctor,” the man told me in his I’m-just-doing-my-job voice. “Your belongings will be waiting for you following your exit interview.”
“Only a senior board member can overturn a Cabal blacklisting,” I babbled. “Why in the hell would they do that?”
I pictured the senior members. When last I’d seen them, they had been attending a private meeting at the Bodleian library, casually discussing the politics involved in dipping into one another’s ‘private projects’. The Jowly guy with his many chins, the one who looked like Vincent sodding Price, the fidgeting one who seemed older than god. What interest any of those crusty old fucks could have in me was beyond my understanding. The only board member I’d ever had any real interaction with was Coldwater, and unless she’d clawed her way out of several stomachs, I doubted she was involved in reversing her ruling.
“The Senior Board do not explain their decisions to me, Doctor,” the man droned, talking to me as though I was an idiot. “Nor should they. I’m merely a servant, as are you. If your curiosity is unquenchable, you will have an opportunity to voice your questions to the directors themselves. A representative of the Board will be conducting your exit interview.”
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. There was a short corridor and a closed door ahead. He indicated for me to proceed.
Seriously? A member of the board themselves was performing my exit interview?
I stepped out of the lift, before he could change his mind and drag me back down there. I didn’t care what happened now, I only knew that I was never, ever going back into that lift.
I pushed through the doors which led to a small room, like a police interrogation suite, with a table and a chair either side of it. My suited prison guard, the thin Cabal Ghost, hadn’t followed me. There was no one in the plain, Cabal-grim interview room other than myself and the director of the board who had apparently taken me off the blacklist.
She looked up at me as the doors swung shut behind me. Dressed in a sombre black suit which was exquisitely tailored, with wide lapels that, against all sense of taste or decency, were mirror-silver. There was a matching silver dyed streak in her jet black bob of hair.
Veronica Cloves, drumming dark-painted nails of one hand on the table impatiently, looked up at me with her usual sneer.
“Harkness,” she said gruffly in greeting.
“Cloves?” I couldn’t believe I was seeing her. I was more surprised because never in my entire life had I ever expected to be happy to see Veronica Cloves.
She looked me up and down, her eyes narrowed in their usual disapproving way. For a moment though, she seemed to falter, taking in the sight of me in prison garb. I knew I probably looked grey-skinned and hollow-cheeked, though perhaps she was merely appalled by the shapeless sackcloth.
She seemed to regain herself, leaning back and folding her arms. She blew air out of her nose.
“You look like shit,” she said.
I sat opposite her, still staring, as the sheer relief of seeing a familiar face…any familiar face, rolled over me. My fingertips pressed hard against the table top, as though I were checking it was real.
“You’ve lost weight though,” she added. “Jesus, who knew you had cheekbones under that puppy fat?”
I swallowed a couple of times before answering. “Benefits of a jailed-for-life-in-hell-diet,” I said. “Cloves, how… are you here? How did you wrangle me off the blacklist? I mean… is it real?”
Cloves looked pleased with herself. This is a scary look on her. Imagine a smug python.
“Yes it’s real, you impertinent little shit,” she said. “And there was no wrangling involved. I would have taken you off the blacklist earlier, but I only officially assumed the position today.”
I stared for a moment, processing what she was telling me.
“The position? You… you’re…”
“Senior Director of the Board, Veronica Cloves, yes,” Cloves nodded. “Dear Felicity is, after all… taking indefinite time off, to focus on her family.” She smiled, ever so slightly, with one corner of her mouth. “Nature abhors a vacuum, Harkness. There was an open spot on the board, someone had to fill it. Why not me? You’d be amazed how open to promotion the board can be, especially given my knowledge of several extremely unpalatable occurrences which would not reflect well on any of Cabal.” She glanced at her fingernails lightly. “If for instance they were to be brought to light, in a garish and sensational fashion by someone ruthless enough to exploit their many, many media connections.”
I swallowed. Unable to speak for a moment. I wasn’t sure if this momentary loss of words was with silent horror at Cloves’ shameless and terrifying ambition, or the dawning realisation that she was now at the top of the Cabal food chain.
“You… haven’t revealed what Coldwater did,” I said. “You’ve covered it up?”
“The children are rehoused,” Cloves said, offhand. “Every one of them, the girls you took out of Felicity’s cookie jar of horrors. They’re safe, Harkness,” she reassured me. “The city is… unstable at the moment. After Halloween, there have been protests, a lot of anger, and worse.”
“I know what happened out there,” I said. She looked at me questioningly, but I didn’t feel like telling her who I’d met in my cell.
“If it came out now, the experiments, the children, Coldwater’s little menagerie… it would destabilise Cabal entirely. We’d be looking at anarchy.”
“Maybe anarchy is what this city needs,” I replied. “I’m sure you can understand, Veronica, that having been a guest of Cabal for the last few weeks, I’m not exactly sympathetic-”
“But you’ve never had me on the inside before,” Cloves said sharply, meeting the dark fury in my eyes with steel in her own. “And I need you on the outside. Blue Lab open again, and other… projects, under my discretion.”
“You’re making it sound like I have a choice,” I replied. “What if I don’t want to come back and work for the system? You send me back downstairs?”
Cloves looked genuinely appalled, as though I’d slapped her across the face.
“You think I would?” she hissed. “Jesus, Harkness. I became a director of the fucking board to get you out of there!”
I blinked at her, taken aback a little. I hadn’t expected to ever be able to hurt Veronica Cloves feelings. I didn’t realise she actually had any.
“There was no other way you were getting out, was there?” She smoothed her lapel, looking uncomfortable. “I was sworn in this morning. This… fucking… morning. What’s the first thing I do?”
My face burned a little, I stared at the table. “I’ll take the job,” I said. “And, thank you. For getting me out.”
Cloves looked at me for a long time. Eventually she raised a finger.
“Don’t be coming at me with any sister-from-another-mister bullshit,” she commanded. “Okay? You’re more useful to me out here than down there. Don’t read too much into it.”
I actually smiled a little, for the first time in weeks.
“I think I prefer seeing you chopping ghoul’s heads off with axes than sitting on a Cabal throne… but you came through. Nothing stops Cloves, right?”
Cloves stood up, her chair squeaking across the floor. “Fuck yes,” she muttered, beckoning me to follow her. “Nobody fucks with my staff, Harkness. Nobody except me. Let’s get out of this shitty hellhole. I need a cigarette and you need a shower.”
I followed her out, her heels clacking on the floor like gunshots. New Oxford’s most ruthless and ambitious woman, and she had just
been given the keys to the kingdom. God help us all.
Chapter 42
Cloves led me out of the building, through several hallways, all empty, and out into the night.
I had never felt happier to be outside. There was wind on my cheeks and it was bitterly cold and dark. It felt so wonderful that for a moment I stood on the steps of the building, barely registering where we were, and simply stared up at the sky. It was high above, threaded with dark, thick clouds, reflecting the glow of the lights of the city below like a quiet, glowing storm.
“Enough, Shawshank.” She clicked her fingers to get my attention. “I know you’re going to be out of the loop, but there’s a new law being passed, and things have gotten more fifty shades of fucked up than you can imagine. We have a lot to do.”
I opened my mouth to exclaim that she had just made a retro-old world reference, two in fact. Was I… God-forbid… rubbing off on her? Looking around, I finally saw where we were. It was just an anonymous side-street, just off the High, down near the river. I’d walked past this building every day of my life. I bought groceries near here. From the outside, it just looked like any other building, nestled between shops. Cabal hide things so well.
“I know,” I told her, following her down the steps. There was a car waiting for us, a sleek black limo. No sign of her yellow Ferrari. Was this the director of the board life? “About the vampires. They’ve gone, right? Roanoke-style?” Cloves paused and looked back at me suspiciously. “How did you…” she began, but shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Cabal detention centres have DataStreams now? What next? Air hockey and a spa? Jesus.” She looked relieved at least not to have to drag me up to date. I had more to tell her than she had to tell me, I figured. About Seraph, about the girl-thing’s strange and ominous warnings. About the endgame.
“Just get in the car,” she opened the rear door. “There’s someone you need to meet.”
Curious, I clambered into the back of the limo and she shut the door behind me.
Sitting across from me, lounged in a relaxed pose on the soft Italian leather in the dark, was Allesandro.
For several seconds I just stared at him. He smiled back at me. He looked well, dressed head to toe in a smart pre-war evening suit. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been covered in blood on a rooftop, dressed in dusty, rumpled clothing from deep underground.
And I’d thought that would indeed be the last time I’d see him.
I was fairly sure the suit was Gucci. Maybe Cloves was rubbing off on me too. Either way he looked well. He looked like the Duke of Sanctum.
“Doctor,” he said quietly. “It’s very good to see you.”
I heard Cloves get in the driver’s seat of the front of the limo and slam the door. Of course. She may be a member of the board now, but even if the official car was only for keeping up appearances, nobody was going to be allowed to drive her.
As the car pulled smoothly away, I finally found my voice.
“I thought…” I said haltingly, unable to stop looking at him. Finding it difficult to believe he was here, that I was here myself, free in the world. “I thought you’d gone.”
He reached out and slid his hand into mine, interlacing his long cool fingers with my own in the darkness.
“If I had, you’d find me,” he smirked. “I haven’t left the city, Phoebe.” His grey eyes glittered in the opulent shadows of the limousine. “None of us have.”
“But… but the vampire district…”
“What happens when you make something pleasurable into something illegal?” he smiled. “Prohibition?”
I shook my head.
“It goes underground,” he whispered, smiling.
I was torn between wanting to kiss him and wanting to shake him until his teeth rattled. Lucy had a theory about that particular set of emotions.
“Where are we driving to?” I wanted to know.
Allesandro looked out of the window, his face in profile like a dark angel.
“To the Labyrinth, Phoebe. To the Labyrinth,” he told me. His voice sounded full of playful secrets.
The vampires of New Oxford were in the Labyrinth. The great city beneath the city. The endless warren of tunnels and intersections. To avoid their fate, they had returned, after so many years, to the shadows.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, and his hand squeezed mine a little. “You won’t believe what we found down there.”
I peered at him in the quiet purring darkness of the car. “What did you find?” I asked.
He turned away from the window to face me, and although I could barely see his face in the darkness while the Oxford streets slid by outside, I could tell that he was still smiling secretively at me. He leaned in, and so did I, until his lips brushed my ear.
“Hope,” he whispered.
My thumb stroked the smooth skin between his finger and thumb, across the back of his hand.
Human and vampire, through a city built on fear and control, a city fuelled by hate and division, with Satan herself as our chauffer, we drove onwards into shadows and hope.
Epilogue
The hospital room was dark. The only lights were the flickering monitors hooked to the bed. The slatted blinds were closed against the window pane, keeping the dark night outside at bay. There was no reason for any illumination when the only occupant of the room was, for all intents and purposes, dead.
There had been two people in this room at one point, but now one of the beds lay empty. Fresh, clean sheets drawn tight across the frame with no-nonsense, hospital precision. Every trace of that body’s occupancy had been erased. What remained of them had gone into the fire, dispersed into New Oxford’s dark skies in a plume of smoke and ash.
The one remaining figure, lying still beneath the sheets, was barely visible. Hidden from view by a nest of wires and tubes, his chest rising and falling only because the watchful machines in the shadows on either side made it so. Breath, unnaturally forced like pumped bellows, fogged an oxygen mask over a ruined face.
Sofia stood in the darkness by the door to this private room, her arms folded as she contemplated the man, kept on the knife edge of life and death by technology alone.
The corridor beyond this room was quiet at this time of night. The ER was on the other side of the hospital. It would be filled with all the regular chaos which reigned throughout the night at hospitals. Drunks, drug overdoses, car crashes. Some parts of every hospital never sleep. Filled always with bright light and noise and suffering.
But here, there was only the soft hiss of manufactured breath. This room, disguised as a place of life, was one step away from being a morgue, and the Tribal woman, senses keen, could smell the death in the air.
She walked towards the bed quietly in the darkness. She didn’t need much light to see by. Her eyes reflected gold where they caught a sliver of light from the machines. She looked down at the man in the bed, the shell of broken human, and sniffed.
“Those women,” she whispered, her head cocked to one side like an inquisitive dog. “They give good advice. They may be mad old witches living in the trees, but they know how power…” Her hand trailed lightly over the sheets, across the chest of the man, following the lines of the many wires. “…they know how power is gained.”
She gently brushed tousled brown hair from the man’s forehead, nodding to herself. “They give good advice.”
She leaned down and whispered in the patient’s ear.
“I have a fight,” she said. “I have an alpha to restore, little man. And I need assistance. A choice lies before you.” She glanced up at the steady monitors. “You can die, here, oblivious, and know peace… or you can fight with me.” She studied his face. “I mean to rule. But she and I?” She shook her head. “We are too closely matched. I will not sway my people from her, not without… support. Fresh blood, for the pack. What do you say?”
Almost imperceptibly in the dark, near-silent room, Sofia saw his eyelids flutter. Just once.
<
br /> A slow smile spread across her face. “A brave choice, broken one. You will make a worthy mate.”
In the gloom of the night and the hush of the quiet room, the Tribal shifted, partway between woman and beast. Her face twisted out of true. She loomed over the prone body, her jaws wide. When her words came next, they were guttural and twisted through an animal throat.
“One week until the full moon,” she growled, and buried her teeth in his exposed shoulder.
The body on the bed bucked as though electrocuted. There was a crunch of gristle and bone. Blood ran down his chest, and across his neck, pooling like dark ink in the shadows of his throat.
Sofia released him, her face shifting like a blurring mirror back to human appearance as she sat up. She gently stroked the wound, her fingertips coming away bloody. As she stood, she casually licked them clean, one by one.
Without a backwards glance, she quietly left the room, pausing only at the door.
“I’ll see you then, when you wake up.”
Once she had gone, in the darkness and stillness of Griff’s hospital room, his body shuddered, as though dreaming, and the monitors by the bed began to ping and chime.
Phoebe Harkness will return in Beyond the Pale
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Acknowledgment
No book is born in a vacuum. Special thanks from my dark little heart go out to Beth Denny, Beverley Lee, Danielle Vinson, Dusty Drosche, and Mike Wrigley, who all held the hands of the Paper Children and helped lead them out into the light. Well-loved Helsings with tireless enthusiasm and invaluable feedback. You’re all always welcome backstage at Sanctum. Free shots for life.
