Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1)

by James Fahy

  The exterior doors of Blue Lab opened and two vampires entered, both male and dressed in the same combat ready getup as the human mercenaries. The final two members of the Black Sacrament.

  They were almost identical, possibly twins. Between them they were dragging the unconscious body of Oscar. His arms were draped over their shoulders as they held him up, his shoes scraping behind him on the floor. He would have looked like a drunken student being carried home by his friends, had the front of his now filthy tuxedo not been spattered with blood. He looked as though he had thrown up on himself at some point.

  I couldn’t see his face; his head was lolling between his own shoulder blades too much. In a way, I was glad I couldn’t. I knew they had already taken the boy’s teeth.

  Behind the vampires and their captive, the Bonewalker itself glided like an angel of death, looming over them, tall and black-robed. Its white mask caught the bright strip lighting, so that it seemed to glow.

  “Is he alive?” I demanded desperately of Gio.

  “For now,” the vampire replied, still glaring at me angrily. “After your goddamned phone led your Cabal friends right to us at Carfax, we had to get out fast. We haven’t quite had time to finish things off.”

  He forced his face back into the bright, friendly expression he seemed to favour. I had come to the conclusion that in his extremist mindset, this vampire was what we would medically term batshit-crazy.

  “Besides, I thought it would be more touching for the three last offerings to go together. Right here, at the end of all things. We didn’t keep Trevelyan alive, or that Coleman girl. They were so loud,” he complained fussily. “Such a handful, you understand, but our Bonewalker friend here is the worker of miracles and he tells me the fresher the better.”

  Jessica had walked over with interest to where the Cabal agents lay sprawled, quite dead in a messy heap. She squatted and delicately rolled a finger over the blood on the floor, tasting it experimentally, as though she were dabbing up sherbet.

  “I’m starving,” she said. “When can we finish these ones off?”

  “Right now of course,” Gio said to her happily.

  “The last three?” I questioned.

  I had been trying to subtly move backwards but the reception desk was at my back. My heel caught on something and when I glanced down, I saw that I had nudged Veronica Cloves’ leg. Her body was very still on the floor. The sight of it made me want to heave. I had seen more than enough death in the last forty eight hours.

  I looked over at the Minister, who was still standing at the workstation, looking uninterested and solemn. He hadn’t spoken once since he had summoned Gio and the Black Sacrament into Blue Lab. He hadn’t even looked up or moved during the shooting. He just stood there like a dumb statue, while bullets flew around him, utterly unconcerned.

  “Minister,” I implored. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. Why are you working with the vampires? You’re Cabal, for God’s sake! You just got two of your own Servants killed, not to mention your agents.”

  “Good lord,” Helena called to Gio, looking mildly astonished. “The girl really is quite dense, isn’t she?”

  Gio laughed and bizarrely, so did the Minister. They snickered in perfect harmony.

  “Of course you don’t understand,” the Minister grumbled. “You have never held a single conversation with the Cabal Minister.”

  The fat man looked up at me, his face grey and empty of feeling, chilling as I had always found it like the dead, glassy face of a fish. I glanced at Gio. With every word the Minister had said, the vampire’s lips had moved silently, mimicking the words.

  Gio grinned, showing long, sharp fangs behind his lips, and on the other side of the desk, the Minister copied him.

  “You’ve been speaking to me,” the Minister rumbled in his gravelly voice. “Our dear Minister has, for some time now, been my very own ghoul.”

  Gio’s words were coming from the Minister’s body. I stared, disbelieving. The fat man’s lustreless appearance, his glazed, sleepy eyes, his death rattle of a voice … He was a ghoul. Gio had been controlling him. It’s how he had got us here tonight, with the decrypted files and me, the last offering.

  “It’s good to have eyes and ears in a place of power,” Gio said, this time from his own mouth. “We apprehended the good Minister several weeks ago. He had noticed, you see, that Trevelyan had been digging around in the archives here at Blue Lab and that she had discovered something she shouldn’t have; something that he wished dearly would remain buried.”

  “How would a Cabal Minister notice what someone like Trevelyan was doing?” I asked.

  I didn’t understand. He was a powerful figure, she should have been completely beneath his notice.

  “Oh, our dear minister has kept an eye on her, and you, of course, since you first came to work here at Blue Lab. How could he not take an interest when he realised that your supervisor, the daughter of one of the Development Team who doomed this world, had dug up a past which threatened both herself and him? He called her to a meeting, somewhere anonymous, somewhere discreet, down in the Slade sector, over by the boundaries of the woods.”

  Gio walked towards me, slowly, his hands causally thrust into his pocket as he spoke.

  “We were watching her. We had been for some time. We had to be sure she had extracted the files we needed before we apprehended her. So imagine our delight when we followed her to her secret rendezvous to find that she had been summoned by a Minister himself.”

  I watched as Gio moved up to the reception desk, standing beside his ghoul and gently patting him on the shoulder as he continued his story.

  “He didn’t threaten Trevelyan, of course. The Minister here was a good man, or he believed himself to be. Trying to build order out of the chaos, trying to make amends for the destruction of the world. He tried to dissuade her, to warn her about the dangers of digging up the past.”

  The vampire gave the minister a look of utter disgust.

  “He thought he could convince her to let the ghosts lie, you see. Everything had changed after the wars. To rise to such heights as he had, to reinvent himself and then to risk having everything torn down by the snooping of a curious lab supervisor who had happened upon her own family name in some classified archives.”

  He looked back to me.

  “Trevelyan didn’t listen to him. As you probably know, she was a stubborn and opinionated woman. High ranking Cabal or not, when she figured out who he was, she only looked harder. They parted badly. Trevelyan left and the Minister, alone without his usual entourage in the darkest sector of our fair city, far from his golden towers in the Liver, was ours for the taking. I made him my ghoul and for all intents and purposes, I have lived and breathed through him since.”

  I looked back to the Minister, the empty puppet Gio had been using.

  “But how did he know what was in the files?” I questioned. “Why was he even watching Trevelyan and me? I’ve never even met the man.”

  “No, but your father knew him well, Doctor,” Gio explained. “Don’t you understand yet? My, you are rather slow. The Minister, saviour of mankind and leader of the city in the ongoing struggle against the Pale menace, is, or at least once was, Alistair Rutheridge, the original leader of the Development Team.”

  35

  Of course.

  I knew I had recognised the face of the large bearded man in the photograph on the wall in Trevelyan’s office, that I’d seen his face somewhere else. Shave off the beard, add a couple of hundred pounds and thirty years, and it was the Minister.

  Gio called an elevator and at the insistence of his armed thugs, we all took a ride down into the pit, my mind still reeling.

  I was alone in the small, horribly confined space, stuck with the vampire clan master, the ghoul Minister, and the smiling blonde sociopath Helena. Jessica had taken another elevator with Oscar and his handlers. The Bonewalker, presumably, was making its own way down into the depths of Blue Lab, leavin
g the armed mercenaries to guard the atrium above.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, staring at the corpulent, somnambulistic bulk of Minister Rutheridge. “There’s no record of him. Cloves told me. When she decrypted the files, she searched all of Cabal’s databases. There’s no record of Alistair Rutheridge after the wars at all.”

  “As good a time as any to disappear, don’t you think?” Gio smiled at me.

  He was leaning nonchalantly on the other side of the elevator, his arms folded casually, watching me like a hungry cat. I was pretty sure he could smell my fear.

  “In the chaos of the apocalypse, any number of people disappeared. When we vampires and the rest of the GOs came to pull your fat out of the fire, and the world was being rebuilt anew, it would have been easy enough to reinvent yourself if you chose to. To hide your shameful past and become someone new.”

  He leaned forward and picked an imaginary piece of lint from the Minister’s lapel. The shell of a man didn’t respond.

  “The poor human. He must have been wracked with guilt,” Helena said in her soft dreamy voice, “knowing what he had done, what he had unleashed on the world. He was always an ambitious man and that didn’t change after the wars.”

  Her eyes wandered over his crumpled, pinstriped suit before focusing on me.

  “When the Cabal was formed, he entered its ranks. He’s been climbing steadily ever since. He had a new name, new identity, a new mission to right the wrongs of old. You humans are so sentimental. It’s almost as though he thought it was possible to make amends, to wash the blood off a ruined planet.”

  “So now we had the Minister,” Gio said as Helena returned her gaze to the ghoul, “and we had our first ingredient for the Bonewalker. The teeth of the first sinner. Our goal was made so much easier now that I could walk and talk through the meat puppet of Rutheridge himself, giving orders, digging deep.”

  He sighed, looking me square in the eye.

  “But you people, you are so troublesome, aren’t you? Before I could access the files, Trevelyan gets cold feet and breaks cover. She deleted everything from the system, hid the files and ran.”

  “We caught her, of course,” Helena smiled, “which is where you came in, sweetie.”

  The door of the elevator pinged open. We were faced with a long, dimly lit corridor. We were deeper than I’d been before. We were on the Development Level.

  The Minister’s hands suddenly shot out and grabbed me, pinning my arms to my sides as he walked me out of the lift. I tried to wriggle free, but the ghoul was freakishly strong. Gio smirked at me.

  “Walk, Doctor,” the Minster growled at me. “And don’t try anything or I’ll have him break your arms.”

  We made our way down the long, featureless corridor. It was emergency lighting only down here, red bulbs at intervals along the corridor, turning the very air into a murky crimson wash.

  “We were furious, you see,” Gio said from behind as his ghoul shuffled me along, still captive. “Trevelyan had hidden the files with you, deeply encrypted. The Black Sacrament do not have access to the level of technology your Cabal enjoy. We needed to decrypt the files, but we could not risk raising suspicion. If a Minister was looking into the matter on a personal level, it would seem odd to all. Questions would be asked. I’m sure you’ve noticed, but he hardly looks fresh any more, our dear Doctor Rutheridge. We couldn’t have people looking too closely at him.”

  Gio was ahead of us now, leading the way through the crimson corridors, his voice sickly sweet as it carried over his shoulder to me.

  “So instead we used him to call in Servant Harrison and his lackey Cloves. Neither suspected they were being issued orders to investigate the matter by anyone other than the real Minister. Why would they? Certainly he is a little grim looking and somewhat stoic, but neither had met him in person before. They could not have guessed he was my ventriloquist’s dummy.”

  We reached a door in the corridor and passed through into a deeper subsection of the Development Level.

  “We set Cabal the task of decrypting the files,” Helena said, walking beside me. “It was only out of curiosity that we suggested you become involved. Why not kill two birds with one stone, we figured; get you chasing our little traitor in the midst.”

  She sounded so pleased, her awe of Gio so genuine, I was surprised she wasn’t skipping with happiness down the corridor.

  “Gio has eyes everywhere, sweetie. He knew Allesandro was not a true believer, that he had approached you at the lecture. We knew he was trying to bring our great work down around our ears. How perfect to use him to lure you to the club? We already had Rutheridge and Trevelyan, it would be insulting not to collect offering number three along the way?”

  We had reached a large sealed door: black, metal and windowless. I heard footsteps behind us and knew that Jessica was following, bringing Oscar with her.

  I couldn’t think of any way out of this. I was alone with every enemy I had.

  “Why have the teeth delivered here though, to Blue Lab?” I asked, as the Minister, his invisible strings pulled by Gio, began to tap in the access code to open the door.

  “Initially, just as with Trevelyan, we needed a starting point,” Gio explained. “Some horrific crime to act as a rallying point to muster the righteous fury of Cabal into action. We knew Harrison would perhaps have been less likely to start a city-wide search for someone who was probably dead, while Cloves would be too busy with the far more important business of using her techs to decode the files for us. We needed to engage you.”

  Gio shrugged absently, leaning against the wall as he watched his puppet opening the door, one arm still clamped around me.

  “After the first lot, we thought we might as well have Coleman’s sent too, and then young Oscar’s. Keep the great and good Servant Harrison busy, thinking there was a personal message in them.”

  He gave a mock sympathetic look to the Minister.

  “Perhaps I was too cruel, making him be the one to wield the pliers each time, to be the one to hurt the children of his former team.” He saw my horrified look. “Oh yes Doctor, he is still in there … somewhere. But he has no control anymore.”

  The vampire leaned into the grey Minister’s face. It had been the Minister’s voice on the DataStream video then; it was him torturing Trevelyan. Or rather Gio, speaking through his ghoul’s vocal chords.

  “I wanted him to feel what he had done. His precious project had tortured our leader, our beloved Tassoni, for five long years. And when our master took his righteous revenge and led the Pale armies against his torturers, what did this man do? He returned to the holding pen where our master’s ruined body still lay, and he killed him. He denied him his vengeance, and then buried the truth.”

  Gio’s eyes flashing furiously as he turned on me.

  “Why should he get to rebuild a new life? Why should the children of his guilty associates flourish in the new world? How is that justice? No, how delicious to make him tear into the children of his dear old companions, to force him to bloody himself to the elbow in their corpses, to pull the teeth from their mouths. He suffered as he went about the work I set him,” he grinned at the slack-faced ghoul, “and somewhere in there he suffers still.”

  The door before us whooshed open.

  “And now you will all suffer for your sins,” he finished.

  We had been led, I saw, to a large circular chamber which I assumed had once been a development lab. I had been expecting horrors down here. God knows I knew there were monsters on other levels. I had seen them myself. But whatever equipment and machinery had once filled this room had long since been cleared away.

  The metallic floor, grimy and dusty with disuse, was covered in a complicated sigil, some kind of multi-layered pentagram. It filled the floor of the round, high-ceilinged chamber, spray-painted floor in black and red. It was intricate and elaborate.

  There were five points to the vast star. At three of their peaks, there was a pile of teeth, like upe
nded popcorn boxes; miniature cairns of glistening molars, bicuspids, canines, incisors, macabre little pyramids. I knew whose they were: Vyvienne Trevelyan, Jennifer Coleman, and Oscar Scott.

  And waiting for us in the very centre of the vast pentagram was the Bonewalker.

  The Rutheridge ghoul released me and at Gio’s silent instruction, walked off to take his place at one of the two empty points.

  The other was for me.

  Behind me, Jessica and the two male vampires hauled the still unconscious Oscar into the room. They dragged him over and dumped him unceremoniously at the point of this dark compass which held his teeth. His body fell to the floor in a heap.

  Jessica walked back to Gio and Helena, brushing her hands together briskly, as though she had just been taking out the trash.

  “I don’t see why we brought the boy,” she grumbled, her glossy ponytail swishing as she walked. “His teeth are already here, we didn’t need the rest of the meat.”

  “Because Tassoni will be hungry when he gets here,” Gio said reverently.

  I couldn’t think of any way to escape.

  I was deep underground in the hands of my enemies. Everyone else here – the other offerings – was either already dead, like my boss and the activist girl, worse than dead, like poor Minister Rutheridge, or else out for the count.

  “The files,” I said to Gio.

  One of the twin male vampires, a tall dark haired and sour looking creature, had positioned himself behind me. God knows why, it’s not as though I could make a dash for it.

  “The files?” Gio repeated politely, cocking his head at me.

  “I’ve read them,” I said. “What’s on them that you need so much? You already knew what happened and where the Pale came from, who was responsible for them. You have your bloody sacrifices or whatever this billowing lich-lord calls them.”

  “Tassoni,” Gio revealed simply. “The ritual of the Black Sacrament, which our friend the Bonewalker has promised to perform for us, can hardly be performed without his body.”