by James Fahy
Oscar the cherubic bloodbank just grinned stupidly at me. There was a sheen of sweat on his pale skin, he was feverish. He leaned into Gio like a comfortable lover snuggling affectionately.
“I think you broke your toy, Gio,” the vampire called Jessica said, with a cruel smile which turned down one corner of her mouth.
“Hush, Jessica. Now, this here is a friend of Allesandro’s,” Gio said to her lightly. “The lovely, and very intriguing Phoebe.”
He glanced at me with that hot, hard-to-meet stare once more.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at Sanctum before, my dear. Tell me, where did the two of you meet?”
“I work at the university,” I answered, aware that both the vampires were peering at me intently. “Allesandro and I met at a lecture, he left me his number…” I shrugged, not really wanting to say more. “… and well, here I am.”
“Couldn’t resist his charms, eh?” Jessica drawled, sipping her martini.
So vampires do drink, other than blood I mean. I noted this and filed it away. The more you know.
“I can’t say I blame you,” Jessica continued. “He certainly has a way with the ladies, that’s for sure. Your kind … and mine.” She looked distracted, glancing over at the dance floor, obviously searching the crowd for her colleague. I didn’t look. She seemed annoyed about something, or wistful, or maybe just a little drunk. The vampire leaned in to me.
“And of course he has a very … deep … bite. Or do you know that already?” she murmured.
“Jessica,” Gio said. “Go and work.”
He was smiling politely, but there was a clear undertone. His words were close and clipped. I was guessing, for all his affectations of friendly geniality, Gio had a very short fuse.
Jessica finished her drink in a gulp and with a flourish saluted her boss with the empty glass.
“To unexpected windfalls,” she said. “A bird in the hand, right, Gio?”
I stood to let her slide past me out of the booth. She glanced from Gio to me.
“Nice knowing you,” she said as she departed, not sounding particularly sincere about it.
“Now then,” Gio said to me once she had left, leaning over the table and steepling his hands. “You must tell me more about yourself, Miss Harkness. What is it you do at this university of yours? To my knowledge, Allesandro has never been particularly academic.”
I’ve never been a good liar. My only real option when the occasion demands is to try and lie by omission, but even this usually results in a red, sweaty face and a stammering stream of completely unbelievable bullcrap spilling out of my mouth. However, any attempt was rendered academic by Gio and his sun-bright burning eyes.
Back in the lecture hall, Allesandro had demonstrated an unusual vampire talent I hadn’t been aware of before, carrying on one conversation out loud with another person while at the same time whispering in my ear only, a kind of localised telepathy.
Gio now demonstrated another fun new trick. His presence shot out of him and engulfed me. He rolled my mind under his as though I were a tiny seahorse caught in a large tumbling wave.
There were myths and rumours, of course, that vampires could ‘charm’ people, control their actions or thoughts, but it was always hard to tell what was real and what was nonsense we had made up ourselves in horror films.
This wasn’t mind control, though; this was more like domination.
Gio simply stared at me with his eyes like twin furnaces, his face still set in an amiable white smile, and his mind crushed onto mine from above, hard and cruel, squeezing the truth out of me. My limbs felt suddenly like lead. Neither my arms nor legs were responding to my instinctual urge to duck out of the booth.
“I’m a paratoxicologist at Blue Lab One,” I blurted out, as though my tongue were not my own, surprised to hear myself talking. “I study the Genetic Others, mainly the Pale, but your kind as well. It’s part of my brief to find a cure, to eradicate the mutants we made.”
Gio raised an eyebrow.
“How interesting, Phoebe. Yes, the Pale as you call them, those mindless bundles of anger, hunger and violence, which you and your kind created, certainly are a … pest, are they not?”
He gestured around at the club but didn’t once break his gaze from me.
“And yet, of course, if you humans had not almost destroyed yourselves and the planet we all share with your tinkering, my kind would never have had reason to … come out … as it were. All this would not be possible. We would still be skulking in the shadows, living off the dregs of humanity’s table.”
He leaned across the booth. Still holding that paralysing gaze. His control of my free will unbroken.
“Is it not better, in the long run, that our two peoples now co-exist, that there is…” His smile widened, his teeth were even whiter than his skin, and I could just see the tips of his fangs, “… peace between us?”
Oscar, the euphoric vampire-addict pulled listlessly at the vampire’s lapels.
“I want to go and dance,” he murmured, sounding sulky.
Gio ignored him completely. His stare was fixed on me. I was rooted to my chair, the full force of the master vampire’s will pushing down on my mind like a splayed hand, holding my thoughts still. I was aware of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades.
“Do you know how the Pale came about? How this plague on the world was unleashed by you careless humans?” the vampire asked me.
“We engineered them,” I answered. Everyone knew this.
“Yes,” Gio sounded irritable, “but do you know how they were engineered? Do you know what was done? Do you know what the price was?”
I stared at him perplexed. He shook his head minutely.
“One day, someone should tell your people the fairy tale which no one knows.”
“I like fairy tales,” Oscar murmured, reaching up a languorous hand to toy with the vampire’s hair.
The gesture seemed outlandish to me, it was like watching someone petting a tiger. Any second now the creature could lash out and tear your arm off. The boy’s attempts at affection were curtly ignored by the Master of Sanctum, who shook him off like a bothersome child. Did Oscar even realise that Gio had my mind pinned down like a buzzing fly under a glass?
“Why are you here, Phoebe?” Gio asked me. “Why are you really here, in my domain, tonight?”
“Allesandro invited me,” I heard myself answer.
I had tried to bite my tongue to stop myself speaking, but it hadn’t obeyed.
“Why did he invite you?” He was pushing harder now. The fire in his eyes was tinged with ice.
Whatever Allesandro had been up to, getting in touch with me, this guy clearly didn’t know what it was, and he obviously didn’t like his clan subordinates sneaking around behind his back.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what he wanted me for.”
At least he knew I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t able to. The building pressure in my head edged into migraine territory as I felt him push harder.
“Really, I don’t!” I insisted, my hands gripping the leather of the seating either side of me so hard I was surprised my nails didn’t leave puncture wounds.
Jesus, this vampire was powerful. Any second now I would have an aneurism. Where the hell was Lucy? Maybe if she spotted me, she would come over, Gio would surely have to take his fingers out of my mind for a second or two while he played the charming host.
But no one was looking our way. We were hidden in the shadows here, away from the dancers. I had a feeling that if Gio didn’t want his staff and guests to notice him, they wouldn’t. He could probably have skinned me alive on the table-top and no one would have glanced over.
“Then why did you come at all?” Gio demanded to know of me. “Surely not just to bask in the glory of my staff? Allesandro is indeed pleasant company, but he has never had to resort to handing out business cards to strangers before. Why did you come here at his invitation? I can tell you do not like our kind.”<
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His grin was a little lopsided now, as he made a show of leaning in closer.
“I can smell it on you. You’re afraid of us. You think we’re just another virus gone wrong, like your Pale creatures, those abominations you created. You’d like to cure us all. Make us like you. Weak and short lived,” he sniggered. “So why on earth would you accept an invitation from a vampire you barely know to come to a place you hate?”
I tried not to say anything in return, I really did, but resisting caused so much pain in my head I felt like I was going to black out.
“I came because my boss at work has been kidnapped, possibly killed by a vampire,” I said through gritted teeth.
I hated Gio, I had decided. I hated anyone who could so effortlessly make me feel utterly powerless. I’m not the helpless type. If I had had a stake in my hand, I would have lunged at him in that moment.
“And the vampire who took my boss knows my name, and I’m scared.”
Gio tilted his head to the side curiously. His eyes had crinkled. He could see that he was causing me pain and was clearly enjoying it. The sadistic bastard.
“You are scared because you know something?”
Suddenly his voice was inside my head as well as outside. I heard him whisper in my mind.
“You may as well tell me everything, little girl, because believe me, you are in over your head and you are not getting out of here alive tonight, I am going to suck you dry and dance on your corpse.”
His threats whispered around my head, echoing off my skull.
“Tell me what I want to know and this will happen quickly. Refuse, and I will make it last for days.”
The words rolled straight into my head without bothering to leave his lips or enter my ears. My blood ran cold. I was going to die down here tonight.
“Scared, because I don’t know anything!” I cried. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think my boss tried to save her own life by selling me out to whoever was torturing her. She had some sensitive information, I don’t know what, and she knew someone was after her so she hid it in my workstation. I think they tortured this information out of her, and whoever wants this information now thinks I have it, and is coming for me!”
The words poured out of me uninvited. Gio’s hand shot across the table and grabbed my arm. His grip was ice. I felt the bones of my forearm grind together.
“And do you?” he asked. “Do you have this information?”
I shook my head. It felt as though it were going to fall off my shoulders. I couldn’t hear the club music anymore – nothing more than a distant thrum, as though it were a great distance away through deep water. All I could hear was the roar of my own blood in my ears, and cutting through the beat, Gio’s voice like a cruel scalpel.
“I did…” I said. “I did have it. I don’t anymore. Cabal has it now.”
His eyes bored into mine painfully. I tried to look away but his influence in my mind snapped my head back to face him as surely as if he had grabbed me by the chin and wrenched my head around.
“Where…” he growled, through gritted teeth, “… is … it?”
My mouth opened to answer, but before I could speak, a roaring din tore through the club. It was a noise which certainly saved my life, but for a moment I couldn’t even interpret what it was.
The noise clearly startled Gio as well, and his eyes flicked away from me, peering around the club in confusion. I felt his hold on my mind falter as he was distracted. It was like a heavy fog was lifted from my head. The music had stopped in the club, I noticed. The clanging siren which filled the air … was a fire alarm?
The second I realised this, that the deafening shrill bell which filled the air was a danger sign, we were suddenly all soaked. Sprinklers had come on all over the club, powerful fire-prevention rain, hidden high in the cathedral-like roof. The throngs of clubbers around us seemed to all realise at once what the noise and the water meant. There was a fire. Perhaps predictably, mass panic erupted.
It’s never a good idea to get two or three hundred people into a large underground space, fill them with alcohol and God knows what else, and then suggest to them that they may be imminently burned to death.
No one formed an orderly sensible line for the stairs. Herd mentality took over and within seconds, the club was filled with panicked screams. In the pandemonium, everyone rushed for the stairs at once.
Clearly, this didn’t have any useful result other than crushing a mass of bodies into a bottleneck. In the jostling crowds, as people quickly became soaked to the skin from the constant and powerful sprinkler rain, some fell and were trampled. Others, in their panic, fought to get to the fake windows. We were underground, for God’s sake. The only way out was back up through the pub above us.
Opposite me in the booth, my captor Gio was on his feet so fast I hadn’t seen him stand. He was glaring around the dance floor in fury, his blonde hair already plastered to his wet forehead. His pale suit was darkening in the constant downspray of the sprinklers.
The main lights had come on, filling the club with stark bright light and eradicating every moody shadow and artfully created cove. The pretence of gothic finery was destroyed in the unforgiving strip lighting. The club was revealed for what it was: a sham. The walls didn’t even look like real stone; the pillars, just stage dressing.
I blinked in the brightness, shaking my head as my hair, drenched, stuck to my back. I could move.
Across from me, the Helsing-whore Oscar was almost lying back against the booth, his head upturned to the down-pouring mist, a stupid empty grin across his face. He was clearly enjoying the turn of events, too far gone to even sense any possible danger.
“What is happening?” Gio roared into the screaming crowds.
Tables were overturned nearby, as revellers fell, ran and stumbled past, soaked to the skin and fuelled by panic.
“There is no fire here!” he bellowed.
He shot a look at me, furious. I was still sitting in the booth stupidly, as I fought to regain control of my limbs.
“You did this! Somehow, this is you!”
“I didn’t do anything!” I answered, though if he even heard me over the deafening clang of the constant alarm, I have no idea.
Gio leaned down until his face was inches from mine.
“You…” he hissed. “… are going nowhere.”
He reached over and grabbed Oscar by the dog collar, dragging him to the edge of the booth.
“Stay with her!” he barked, all composure lost. “See that she doesn’t go missing. We’re not done here. The only way she’s leaving here is in chunks.”
The master vampire disappeared into the maelstrom of pushing, shoving panic. I watched as he stalked away, roughly batting people aside out of his path like an intrepid explorer hacking at overgrowth.
Seeing my one chance to make a move and get the hell away, I forced my body to stand. My legs still felt like jelly, as though I had been heavily drugged. You have to move, Phoebe, I told myself sternly. You have to get the fuck out of here while you can, or that nasty son of a bitch is going to eat your face – and you will sit like a moron and let him do it.
I felt like I was going to throw up. I staggered as I stood, gripping the edge of the booth with both hands. I had to find Lucy, somewhere in this mess.
Someone grabbed my wrist. I looked up from my shaking feet. It was Oscar. Standing before me like a half-drowned, angelic junkie, he was pouting his cupid bow lips at me, his eyes still unfocused.
“We can’t go,” he said. “Gio said to wait.”
I could have punched him in that stupid mouth. I tried to wriggle free of his grip, but he was surprisingly determined.
“Get the hell off me, Oscar, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Gio said to wait!” Oscar insisted, his voice almost pleading. “He promised he’d come back. He won’t abandon us. He’ll be mad if I let you go.”
I had almost managed to shake him off, and he must have
sensed me slipping out of his grip, as he pulled me over to him and wrapped me in a bear hug, pinning me to him, my arms pinioned at my sides.
“Don’t, please,” he begged. “He told me to keep you. You have to stay.”
“He’s going to kill me, you stupid brat!” I hissed, trying to throw him off.
People rushed around us, jostling, shouting. In the chaos of the desperate crowd, we were just another struggling couple. No one even noticed us.
“He’s nearly killed you too!”
“He wouldn’t hurt me,” Oscar insisted, his breath hot in my ear, his voice slurred. “He’s going to make me one of them. He promised.”
“The only thing he’s making you is anaemic, you bloody arse!” I growled.
I pushed backwards, throwing us both against the table of the booth. Oscar slipped, clearly winded as I threw my weight against him, but he didn’t let go.
“No one will hurt me. My daddy’s an important man in this town, no one would dare!”
One of his arms had come up and was around my neck; he had me in a chokehold. I was pinned against Gio’s little treat and despite the chaos and the confusion all around us, I suddenly realised to my disgust that he was extremely pleased about the fact. He was practically grinding against my back. The junkie was twisted worse than I’d imagined.
“Oscar…” I gasped, my voice quiet, “listen … it’s important…”
I felt him lean in close, his head right behind mine. Sprinkler rain washed down over both of us, dripping off my chin.
“What?” he shouted over the din of the constant alarm.
I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his stupid grin. In answer, I flung my head back as hard as I could. There was a crack as the back of my head connected with the boy’s face. It hurt me like hell, but I was pretty sure I’d broken the kid’s nose.
Throwing him off as he released me with a howl, his hands going up to his busted face, I took a step into the crowd and instantly slipped on the drenched floor. People stepped around and over me, a confusion of legs and feet. I knew I had to get up, and quickly, before someone stomped me to death by accident, or before Gio returned.
Grabbing the nearest body, without bothering to look at them, I hauled myself up. Before I could stand fully, Oscar was behind me again, his hands grabbing my shoulders. He looked furious, his eyes wild, his mouth and chin running with blood as it washed with down-pouring water.
