Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1)

by James Fahy

  “What about Rutherford?” I asked suddenly. “What the hell happened to him?”

  Cloves and the vampire looked blank.

  “He was the other guy in the photograph I took from Vyvienne Trevelyan’s house, the Development Team line up,” I said. “It must have been the photo they talk about in these logs. We identified everyone else but the large guy with the beard must be Rutherford – the one who dictated these logs. Do the Black Sacrament already have his teeth? Did he die years ago? Did he even survive the war? We don’t even know if he had children. He and Coleman were the only ones who saw Tassoni at this production base of theirs and Coleman ended up offing himself, probably out of guilt at unleashing the Pale on the world. Did Rutherford do the same?”

  “I’ve already run a remote trace on him in the archives from the workstation in my car,” Cloves said, shaking her head irritably. “There’s no intelligence on him after the wars. You have to remember, Harkness, when the world went to shit we had something of a mini Dark Ages. There wasn’t a whole lot of careful census taking going on. We lost a large portion of the population before we regained the upper hand and started to repel the Pale. A lot of people were never found; a lot of people died unburied.”

  “We only gained the upper hand because someone realised Tassoni was still controlling the Pale,” I insisted. “Someone found him, what was left of him anyway. Wherever the military were holding him, they found him and finished him off. If it was Rutherford, he might still be alive.”

  They were both looking at me questioningly.

  “Well, it’s obvious to me that the Black Sacrament have already found him, or some direct descendant anyway. On the DataStream clip, it said five would pay – the five members of the Development Team, obviously – and when Gio had me under Carfax after they had taken Oscar’s teeth, he referred to me as the last offering.”

  Cloves phone suddenly rang, startling us all. She stared at the incoming number, looking worried, which was an unusual expression to see on her face.

  “It’s Harrison,” she said, seeing Allesandro’s questioning look. “My boss.”

  We watched as she took the call, turning her back to us for a modicum of privacy. From what we could make out, she was being quite forcibly questioned about a fracas reported at her home address. Then there was some heated discussion about alleged Cabal involvement at the Carfax shootout the night before.

  Cloves sounded contrite. It was unsettling to hear her sounding apologetic. I realised even hard-assed government power mongers have their own bosses; harder-assed have even more powerful ones.

  She hung up, staring at me and Allesandro.

  “Well, fuck us all,” she said after a moment.

  “What now?” I asked.

  Cloves looked furiously at me.

  “That was my boss, Servant Harrison. You’ve met him, of course. He’s at Blue Lab right now. With the minister!”

  “Who’s the minister?” I asked confused.

  “Oh, you’ve met him too,” she said, “in our friendly little meeting, when we’d received the teeth of Trevelyan? Ministers are higher in the Cabal than even the highest Servants. They are only called in to oversee things when enough shit has hit the fan that it stops spinning altogether. Such as when a senior member of Blue Lab is kidnapped and her teeth gift wrapped to us, for instance.”

  “The big fat guy?” I realised.

  I had guessed he was the most senior of the three in the uncomfortable meeting we’d had. He had been the creepiest too; that overweight, sickly looking man, who slurred his words lazily like a bullfrog perched behind his desk..

  “Yes, the big fat guy,” Cloves said through gritted teeth. “He’s at Blue Lab with Harrison because Blue Lab security footage flagged up a level one incident last night, and it landed on Harrison’s desk an hour ago.”

  Her eyes flicked from Allesandro to me.

  “Apparently, a GO strolled into the atrium, carrying an unconscious woman, disabled a security guard and broke into one of the labs.”

  My face froze.

  “Does any of this sound familiar to you?” Cloves said.

  Allesandro made to speak but she held up a quivering finger in front of him.

  “Just … don’t,” she said, using every vestige of self-control. “I don’t even want to know. It’s not my problem anymore. This is way above me if the Minister is aware of it. Harrison wants me at the lab, ten minutes ago, with the goddamn files we’ve been run all over for. He wants you two as well. I think you can figure out why.”

  My stomach sank. Of course we wouldn’t have gotten away with it. How ridiculous I had been to think that we had somehow managed to sneak Allesandro in and out of Blue Lab without anyone seeing.

  We had cleaned the lab, we had Mattie the security guard covered. But this was Blue Lab. Everything was monitored. It was what the Cabal did best. And now there was security footage, no doubt being added to my own manila file somewhere in the Liver Building.

  “We have to go in,” she said, sounding defeated. “I’ve probably lost my job over this. The incident at Carfax, the fundraiser, being compromised at my home address…”

  She shook her head in disbelief. I was expecting her to follow this up with something customary, like ‘I wish I’d never met you Harkness’, but to my surprise, she looked at me with something almost close to pity.

  “But you … is there a rule you haven’t broken? A GO inside the lab for God’s sake? This is bigger than me now. You understand that, don’t you? I can’t protect you, not from this.”

  I did understand. I still held the file in my hands. At least we could give the Cabal all the information we had. I had never asked for any of this private eye crap anyway. Maybe they could finish what we’d started and stop the Black Sacrament without me.

  I was probably going to spend the rest of my life in quarantine, or worse. I could run, but where? We live in a walled city run by these people. It’s not like I could flee to the countryside.

  My number had been well and truly called. I looked at Allesandro. I had no idea what they would do to him. I found myself caring about that more than I liked to admit.

  I nodded to Cloves, her mouth set in a thin line, and handed the datapad back to her. Then we did the only thing we could.

  We went to face the music.

  33

  Harrison sent a car to pick us driven by one of Cabal’s ghosts. As we climbed into the car, Allesandro told us he would follow on his bike. Cloves snorted with derision, clearly still utterly distrustful of the vampire.

  “Of course you will, and that’s the last anyone ever saw of the mysterious vampire with the perma-tan,” she said waspishly.

  He ignored her. As I climbed in next to her I looked back at him.

  “You don’t have to come,” I said. “You could disappear.”

  He shook his head and gave me his lopsided smile again.

  “I’m not about to let you out of my sight again, Doctor,” he said, leaning down to the window. “You’re my investment, remember?”

  He closed the car door for me, still smiling through the open window.

  “You’ve said that before,” I said, frowning up at him out of the window. “What are you talking about?”

  “He wants to be clan master, you idiot,” Cloves piped up. “Isn’t it obvious? If the Black Sacrament are stopped and the charming vampire extremists are removed from his clan, there’s a spot open for the top job.”

  I stared at the vampire, my eyes wide. I hadn’t considered his angle on all this.

  “Seriously? This is why you saved me? All that deeply touching concern for my wellbeing, just so you can become lord of Sanctum?”

  He shrugged.

  “I was originally aiming for Trevelyan,” he admitted. “The Sacrament knew she was getting antsy. As we now know, she’d been digging around in archives and found out the truth. When I attended the lecture, I was hoping to meet her.”

  He must have noticed the look on m
y face. He tilted his head to one side.

  “If it’s any consolation, finding you there instead was a very pleasant turn of events.”

  “It’s not,” I replied coldly. “And what if they’d got to me after Trevelyan? If they’d gotten my teeth next?”

  He considered this.

  “Well, there was always Oscar,” he reasoned. “Any one of you would do. He would have been harder to keep out of their hands, though, considering Gio already had his claws in the boy, using him to get to his father.”

  Cloves smirked.

  “Looks like you were the easy option, Harkness,” she said.

  My face felt hot. I stared up at the vampire who was looking down at me, frowning slightly, as though he didn’t understand why I was angry or upset.

  “I’m nobody’s gambling chip, Allesandro, least of all yours,” I said coldly. “Don’t follow us.”

  I rolled up the window with a push of a button before he could reply, and the Cabal ghost drove us away down the slum street.

  “How naïve can you possibly be?” Cloves said, with genuine wonder. “What on earth did you think he was so interested in? I told you, you can’t trust their kind. They have their own interests before ours.”

  “Cloves,” I muttered, staring angrily out of the window. “Shut the fuck up, will you?”

  34

  By the time we pulled into the white dusted quad before the entrance to Blue Lab One, it was nearing eleven. Most of the staff would be gone by now. Only the die-hards worked through the night.

  There were only two other vehicles in the car park. A black van and a fine looking Bentley, which I was guessing was either Harrison’s or the Minister’s. I was dimly aware that whatever trouble I was in with them for bringing a GO into the lab, a more pressing issue was that it had almost been half a day since Griff had given me my dose of Epsilon. I was going to need a shot soon.

  The doors to the atrium opened with their customary whoosh and we were escorted inside by the ghost. Mattie was at his post behind the large, brightly-lit reception desk and standing with him, waiting for us, were Servant Leon Harrison, five Cabal ghost agents, and the large and ominous figure of the Minister.

  I hadn’t seen him stood up before. The fat, grey-complexioned man was taller than I’d expected. He stared at Cloves and I as we walked towards them, his eyes looking as bored and utterly disinterested as they had last time we met. I figured he was most likely pissed off at having to come down here so late and getting his hands dirty for once.

  “Servant Cloves,” Harrison said, disapproval plain on his face, “you should know that there will be a full investigation on your handling of this case. Your brief was to quietly and unobtrusively gather intelligence. Instead, we find ourselves with a diplomatic incident in the vampire district due to your mole here setting fire to the GO’s place of work, a rather inexpert handling of the attack at the Bodleian Library and the kidnap of a very high profile member of a very important and influential family.”

  He was glaring at her. She looked contrite but didn’t give him an inch. I was impressed.

  “In addition to this, a gangland shootout occurred at one of our city’s finest historic churches where, I might add, several media sources saw Cabal agents whom you had sent on an anonymous tipoff. Thankfully, our presence and involvement there cannot be proved and remains speculation only – and then there was an incident reported by the superintendent of your building, a break-in at the home of a Cabal Servant.”

  He shook his head, looking thoroughly disgusted.

  “I am officially relieving you of further duties temporarily pending full investigation and debriefing.”

  Cloves nodded respectfully.

  “Understood, Servant Harrison,” she said. “Despite the somewhat unorthodox methods, I have, with the assistance of the Doctor here and her exploitation of her GO source, uncovered intelligence of the highest importance; a breakaway cult within the GO community, calling themselves the Black Sacrament. Requesting permission to file my report immediately, sir.”

  Harrison looked over at me, his expression still unpleasantly disapproving.

  “The Doctor’s GO source?” he said, looking at me most distastefully. “Yes, both myself and the Minister are very interested to hear about that, especially given the GO’s recent admittance to a high security, closed access lab right here in this building.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but from behind Harrison the Minister cut in, his voice the usual gravelly rumble.

  “Do they have the files Trevelyan discovered or not?”

  Harrison held out his hand and Trevelyan dropped the datapad into it. The Minister came over and took it from him, barely looking at any of us.

  He waddled around and disappeared behind the desk, practically shoving Mattie out of the way with his large bulk, and hooked the datapad to the reception workstation. The files appeared, and the minister began reading through them quickly, his odd unfocussed eyes sliding listlessly over the pages.

  We all watched him curiously. This was not normal behaviour for a Minister. Why he was so interested in the files was a mystery to me. I figured that must surely be Harrison’s domain.

  After a moment, the Minister paused and looked almost pleased, his rotund face twisting into a humourless smile.

  “Excellent,” he said, his voice slurring lazily. “We have what we need.”

  “What we need, Minister?” Harrison asked, polite but clearly confused.

  “You can come in now,” the Minister said, muttering to himself, barely intelligible.

  Behind us, the outer doors to the quad opened and I turned to see figures entering from the dark night outside.

  It was Gio, Helena and Jessica. The Black Sacrament had just strolled straight into Blue Lab.

  They were flanked by six others, the same combat-ready humans who had stormed the fundraiser and later chased Cloves all over town. Gio was smiling, as though delighted to see us all again. He raised his arms in greeting, as though to hug us all.

  The men were all armed with machine guns.

  “What the fuck?” I heard Cloves say quietly.

  “Excellent, excellent,” Gio said, looking very pleased with himself. “We only need the girl.”

  He spoke in a breezy offhand way as they stalked toward us down the entrance corridor, one bony finger pointed directly at me. Before any of us could react, the men had raised their weapons and gunfire rattled through the atrium, deafening and startling. To my immediate left, Servant Leon Harrison’s head exploded, obliterating his incredulous expression.

  I’d never seen someone get shot in the head before, not outside of the movies anyway. I would have expected him to go down gracefully, maybe with a neat pound-coin sized hole in his forehead. Instead, his head flew apart like a watermelon. I watched with numb shock as his body was lifted off the ground with the force of the impact, thrown back against the desk with a thud. To me, it seemed to happen in slow motion. His headless body hit the ground sprawling, a red mist of blood coating his expensive white shirt.

  More shots were being fired around me and the six ghost agents fell. The highly trained Cabal security staff were mown down in a hail of bullets. I saw them fall back, as if landed with invisible punches. It was so swift only one of them had managed to get his hand on the butt of his gun before they were killed.

  Echoing around the large atrium, the noise of the gunfire was deafening, a brief staccato burst which slammed against my ears. Directly behind me, dear old Mattie, a look of disbelief on his face, took three slugs to the chest and disappeared behind the reception desk as if he had fallen through a secret trapdoor.

  Amidst the deafening rain of bullets, I heard Cloves yell and spun to see her flying backwards, hitting her head hard as she fell against the desk. She landed in a crumpled heap face down on the white floor then lay, completely still.

  The whole massacre had lasted no more than five seconds.

  Suddenly, I was standing alone, hunched w
ith my hands raised like a shield in front of my face – an instinctual defence which would have done little good against their bullets if they had wanted me dead. Bodies surrounded me everywhere, harsh smears of crimson in the otherwise clean white lines of the atrium.

  Gio’s goons fanned out, professional and silent, guns still raised and trained on me.

  “Well,” Gio said lightly after a moment, as the musical tinkle of spent shells clattering on the tiles had fallen into silence. “That was satisfying, wasn’t it?”

  Jessica and Helena flanked him on either side. Jessica looked rather irritated. I noticed there were a few ragged holes in her sweater. The Sacrament vampires hadn’t managed to escape the fight at Carfax completely undamaged then; they looked like bullet holes.

  I had no idea if you could put a vampire down with regular bullets. After watching Allesandro regenerate from body wide third degree burns in a mere matter of hours, I doubted it.

  Gio was surveying the scene like a chirpy master of ceremonies, as though he were here to give the light hearted company speech at the Blue lab Christmas party. He seemed to be enjoying the carnage.

  “You are a slippery little pup, Doctor Harkness.” He shook his head good naturedly, as though I were a cheeky child. “Twice now you’ve given me the slip. Twice I’ve had to chase you around after you made me look a fool. You escape my club, you escape my little pet Pale … and yet everywhere I turn, there you are, like a bad penny.”

  His smile was warm, but I had learned that his bright shining eyes were very cold indeed.

  “It must be fate,” he purred. “Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe you’re just not very competent, Gio,” I said, forcing my voice to sound steady.

  Helena’s eyes widened in surprise behind Gio as his face twisted, the smile falling away. He glared at me with utter loathing.

  “You can act as brave as you wish, you pathetic human creature, but I can smell the fear on you. Sweat and shit. And you are right to be afraid.”