Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  Oh wonderful, I thought to myself. After months of non-contact, erotic and surreal dreams and waking hallucinations of the man notwithstanding, I was apparently off to meet with Allesandro again, Clan Master of St Giles, at the behest of a Tribal leader. This was bound to end well.

  I fervently wished I was back in the lab with the diseased corpse.

  18.

  The last time I had been to the vampire district, it had been to Sanctum. I had been with Lucy, a veteran Helsing, and dressed the part. It had not ended well. I had in fact almost been killed by Gio, the previous Clan Master. My introduction to the vampire world had been a rocky one.

  This time around I had no Lucy; my companion was instead an abrasive Tribal with nothing but scorn for vampires (and humans it seems) and I was dressed excitingly in my work clothes. This was far from perfect. As ill-conceived plans went, I didn’t hold out much hope. There was no way we were getting in past the bouncers in my opinion.

  Yellowmoon, like most vampire clubs, is nine tenths below ground level. They’re like gothic icebergs. The entrance to this particular one was an old church. The church of St Giles itself in fact. The former chapel sits at the very northern tip of the district, at the point where the wide promenade of St Giles splits like a wishbone. Sitting on a small island in the roads at the junction of Woodstock Road and Banbury Road to the north.

  It was the oldest church in Northern Oxford once. Built in 1120, although not actually consecrated until 1200 by the rather tardy Bishop of Lincoln.

  I was fairly certain it classed as being un-consecrated again now. The spirits residing within and below the ancient edifice were not holy – rather vodka and vermouth.

  Over the main doorway, beyond which faint thumping music could be heard rising like a dark and urgent heartbeat, there was a sickly yellow moon, crescent, picked out in glowing neon. Above it, the club name in sweeping glowing cursive. Light blazed through the stained glass windows into the night.

  I was coming across crescent moons an awful lot recently, I noted, as Sofia and I made our way across the former lawns, weaving through the usual straggling crowd of Helsings. We drew a few odd looks from the clubbers.

  In a land of super-pale foundation and gothic black lipstick, the two of us could not have looked more out of place. I looked like a chemistry lecturer, and Sofia, in my opinion, a militant lesbian truck driver. There was nary a swatch of effete and morbid fishnet between us.

  The bouncer on the door cocked his head to one side questioningly, looking us over. I gave him my warmest smile. This was going to be difficult.

  “Umm, hi,” I began. “Look, we’re not on the guest list, but…”

  “Phoebe Harkness, right?” The bouncer blinked at me in a disinterested way. He was clearly more used to children of the night teenagers in basques. I didn’t look appealing enough to flirt and flex.

  My mouth hung open a second. Sofia stood beside me, arms folded defensively, radiating disdain.

  “The Master is expecting you,” he said.

  “He is?” I was confused. I wondered if Sofia had called ahead, but I sincerely doubted it. Vampire and Tribals don’t swap numbers historically, unless you’re talking body count.

  He nodded. “He said you’d be here tonight, and to show you right down to his rooms.” The bouncer was human, most of them were, vampires don’t do their own door-work, but he still eyed my companion suspiciously. “He didn’t say anything about a plus one though. Especially not a shapeshifter.”

  I didn’t know how Allesandro knew we were coming. I looked to Sofia, but she shrugged.

  “Well, the shapeshifter is the only reason I’m here at all, so she comes too,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. Go me.

  The bouncer blew air down his nose, making it clear he couldn’t personally care less if I’d turned up with a werewolf, two goblins and a pocket full of pixies. His expression was the universal look of ‘not paid enough to bother’.

  “Wait here,” he said without grace or preamble, and disappeared within the church.

  He returned shortly with a girl in tow. She was young, maybe twenty, a willowy thing wearing a very figure-hugging black dress. Her face was artfully pale, with very red lips against a mass of curling dark hair. She gave us both the once over, not looking particularly impressed with what she saw. She pouted at us expertly.

  “So this is the famous Doctor Harkness,” she sniffed, her head so far to one side it almost rested on her own shoulder. “I saw you on the news, at the university, when those kids killed themselves. I always thought they said the camera adds ten pounds, but looks like it’s pretty accurate sometimes.” She tilted her head to the other shoulder dreamily, like a drugged baby owl. “You’re older than I thought you would be.” There was almost pity in her voice. “I’ll take you to the Master.” She turned and melted into the darkness within, beckoning lazily over her shoulder with an arrogant flip of her hand.

  Sofia and I followed inside, through the church proper, which had been converted into a plush bar – all soft lighting and dark recessed booths in red velvet. Just once, I’d like to see a vampire bar decorated like a 1950s American diner, with roller skating vamps in little candy striped uniforms. Supply and demand, I thought wistfully. Shame. You’d be able to kick them away easier on wheels.

  We walked the length of the building, through the crowds, thin enough up here at ground level, to where the altar would once have stood. Now, before the rather pretty stained glass window, there was a wide metalwork industrial spiral staircase.

  “And you are?” I asked, as we followed, noticing the girl was swishing her hips rather more than was necessary. Purebred Helsing no doubt. I was expecting ‘Morticia’ or ‘Indigo’ or something similarly emo.

  “Elise,” she replied simply, in a breathy whisper, without turning to look at us. We followed her down the stairs, her dark-fingernailed hand trailing lovingly on the bannister. “I am a ward of the Master.”

  “A…ward?” I asked, as the thumping music rose to meet us, vibrating in my ribcage with every descending step.

  Elise, the bride of Dracula, paused at the foot of the stairs, in a short corridor before two padded red velvet doors, and gave me a narrow-eyed look through her darkened eyes.

  “Clan Master Allesandro has not yet chosen a mate,” she said softly. “It weakens his position to rule alone. There is some dissent in the Clan. He has been reluctant to make a decision as to who will rule by his side.” Soft waves of hostility ebbed from her in my direction.

  Sofia chuckled. “And you have your sights set on the throne do you, little human? Such ambition.”

  Elise barely glanced at her. Her attention seemed entirely for me. Had I wronged this girl in a past life or something? “Well, someone has to help the Master,” she said. “When others won’t.”

  She pushed through the doors, and the music and lights of Under Yellowmoon flooded over us.

  I’d only ever been to Sanctum before so I imagined this would be more of the same. It was, only rather grander, and a lot darker.

  The subterranean club was styled to look like a vast arched crypt beneath the church above, gothic arches and fluted pillars everywhere dividing the dark space into sections. Yellow neon bands twined around each pillar like luminous ivy, making them glow in the darkness. Through the din of the music and the throng of tightly-pressed dancing bodies, I could make out a long bar at the far end of the crypt, past the dance floor. The entire wall behind it was composed of video screens. Flashing vampiric imagery, snippets of old B movies and other goodies of the night as a backdrop to the thumping rhythmic chaos. Above all, suspended from one of the vaulting archways in the centre of the club, there hung from a web of cables a phosphorescent yellow moon, throbbing electronically with light in time to the music. The club’s namesake, I supposed.

  Elise led us along the edge of the dance floor, where Helsings mingled with each other and the vampires. You could always tell the two apart. Vampires move more qu
ickly but with that tai chi kind of elegance. The humans mostly just staggered around, pissed.

  Of course, you could also pick out the vampires because every single one of them stopped dancing to stare at us as we passed. They could sense Sofia. A Tribal in their house. They marked our passage, unblinking eyes reflecting in the dark crowds, tracing our steps. Sofia swathed across the room, not giving two hoots about the scrutiny, while the only thing keeping me from freaking out was the soporific cocktail that Griff had flooded me with.

  “There is a lot of leather here,” Sofia remarked to me with interest, taking in the club. “Humans dressed in dead animals. They find it pleasing, yes? Erotic I suppose, to dance with the dead and wear the dead also.”

  “Vampires aren’t dead,” I corrected her absently, keeping a beady eye on the crowd. “They just technically aren’t alive either, in any way we really understand yet.”

  “Meat wrapped in meat and offered to fangbearers,” the Tribal sneered. “Like dancing pigs in blankets.”

  I didn’t point out that Sofia was wearing leather trousers too.

  Elise led us through the club and off through another set of wide double doors, clearly employee only, judging by the bouncers flanking them. Both vampires this time, I noted.

  The music faded a little behind us as we made our way through a small labyrinth of backstage passageways and tunnels. It was all very decadent here, crimson plush carpets, gilded golden mirrors and flickering sculpted ceiling lights punctuating the gloom like guiding stars above.

  We descended again, another flight of stairs. Good God, we had to be below sewer level by now. Bloody vampires and their bloody immortal thighs. Given their fondness for tight cramped spaces, could they not have installed a lift?

  Elise, the wannabe bride of Dracula I amended, stopped in her tracks before a final set of doors. She turned to face us. “You will have to wait here while I see if he is free to receive you.”

  Behind her, the doors opened of their own accord with a soft whoosh, and I heard Allesandro’s voice from within, “I am always free for the good doctor.”

  Elise started, looking abashed.

  “Show them in, Elise,” Allesandro said softly. “We do not keep guests waiting at the door.”

  She led us into the room deferentially. I looked around at the vampire clan leader’s inner sanctum. Ironic really, that his sanctum wasn’t at Sanctum itself. Unless he had one there too. What was the plural anyway? Sanctums? Sancti?

  Whatever the room was called, it was large and lushly appointed, pale gold and soft white, rococo furniture, swathes of pale fabric artfully concealing the walls and ceiling, an awful lot of very large and elaborately gold-framed mirrors, with thick carpeting underfoot. My feet left footprints in it. I knew I’d have a bugger of a time trying to hoover it without leaving patterns in the weave. How did they manage to get it so uniformly fluffy? Maybe the vampires did have magical powers after all.

  Allesandro coughed politely, dragging my attention from the criminally plush carpet. I half-expected him to be on a throne or something. He was Clan Master after all. What I hadn’t anticipated was an enormous four poster bed with gold and white swags twining each spindle in voluminous drapes, upon which Allesandro himself was lazily sprawled, hands behind his head amongst an obscene amount of throw pillows.

  I stared blankly at him as the door swished closed behind us softly. His eyes flicked lazily from me to my companion, looking over Sofia carefully. There was an awkward moment of silence. Awkward for me anyway.

  “You have smut on your face,” he said, breaking the lengthening silence. I gaped at him. Oh my God, were vampires psychic now? Could they read our thoughts?

  Sofia huffed impatiently, looking at me scornfully. “Your makeup, from your fancy party…it is smudged.” She pointed to her own left eye, indicating the death of my mascara.

  I stared at her, my mind a blank white noise of mortification. After a monumental battle of wills, I looked at Allesandro. He winked at me, the bastard.

  “Well,” he said eventually, sounding amused. “I knew you were coming, but I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting you to bring a playdate.”

  “The doctor has brought a shapeshifter into our walls,” Elise said, crossing to the bed and dipping to Allesandro’s side. She stroked his proffered arm from wrist to elbow in what I considered an altogether over-familiar way.

  He smiled up at her affectionately. “So I see. Thank you, Elise, that will be all for now.”

  I saw the corners of her lips tighten a little. Evidently she hadn’t expected to be dismissed.

  “Are you certain it’s safe, Allesandro?” she asked him quietly, though not so quietly that we couldn’t still hear her. “To be alone with their kind?”

  Allesandro sat up, taking her hand as he swept his legs off the bed. He kissed the back of it lightly, an easy and unashamed gesture. “Always thinking of me, little one. If I need anything, I will call for you.” He reassured her. “We have things to discuss it would seem.”

  She shot me a look of dark and unconcealed hatred, and nodded to him, stalking past us to the doors.

  Allesandro stood up as she left. “I see you have been making new friends, Doctor.” He waved us both over to him, glancing at Sofia with guarded interest. “Tribal ones, no less.”

  “You too, evidently,” I replied politely, wondering why the Helsing girl bothered me quite as much as she did. Allesandro, like many of his kind, was a glorified gigolo. It was none of my business where he laid his fangs. Perhaps my unbidden dreams were clouding my judgement.

  “Elise?” He smiled and shook his head indulgently. “She’s a sweet girl. Practically runs the place for me. Especially during daylight hours when I’m indisposed. There’s a lot for me to take care of these days. Clan Masters do not rule alone, traditionally. She is…” He searched the air before him for the word, amused, “…ambitious. I have to admit though, I thought you were coming alone.”

  “And what, you were getting the bed warm?” I raised an eyebrow. Offence, they say, is the best form of defence. Although, personally I would sometimes prefer a flame thrower. “I always wondered if you slept in coffins or not. What exactly did you think I was here for, Allesandro? And more importantly, how did you know I was going to be here at all? I didn’t know myself until half an hour ago.”

  “I could feel you…coming,” he said softly, with a wicked tilt to his lips. “A not altogether unpleasant sensation, although one which has been woefully lacking of late. It has been quite some time since we met, Doctor. I have missed you. Can I offer you a drink?”

  That was Allesandro all over. Puns and innuendo I could deal with, but occasionally he would drop what seems like real sentiment in the middle of it. I’m sure he did it on purpose to put me off balance. He may look like a guileless choirboy but I’d never met anyone so effortlessly scheming.

  He walked over to a table and without waiting for a reply, clinked several glasses and began to pour what I hoped very dearly was red wine from a crystal decanter.

  Dreams and waking dreams aside, it was odd seeing the vampire in the flesh again. He was stunning as always, unruly dark hair and white skin. Dressed in trousers of some soft dark suede which clung almost obscenely to his thighs, and a white billowing shirt with lace at the wrists and a deep open chest.

  “As long as it’s grapes in the bottle, yes. And I’m sorry I have to ask. Who on earth dressed you, Allesandro? Anne Rice?” I frowned. He turned and smiled, holding out a glass.

  “Awful, isn’t it,” he agreed, sweeping an embarrassed gesturing hand over his gothic outfit. “All that is missing is buckled shoes.” He shrugged. “But it’s what the Helsings expect, and I’m on duty tonight. I’ve had to work the club, meet with the public. Wouldn’t do to be seen in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.” He rolled his eyes. Vampires were all about the image. They played on humanity’s expectations, and humanity paid them very well for it.

  He smiled at Sofia. Or at least his mouth di
d, but his eyes were wicked, and they held no warmth for the Tribal. Although he stood several steps away from me, I suddenly heard him whisper softly into my ear, as though his lips were brushing my earlobe,

  “Do you think your friend would like a dish of water putting out?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. His lips hadn’t moved. This was one of the vampire’s skills, to have a private conversation with you while holding a public one at the same time. I had no idea how they did it. Low grade telepathy of some kind. He was trying to unsettle me and, damnit, it was working.

  “How could you feel me…arriving?” I wanted to know, choosing my words carefully. I took the glass, and handed it to Sofia, who sniffed it with open suspicion behind me.

  Allesandro indicated a slim-legged sofa and bade us to sit. He himself melting into a low chair beside it.

  “We have a connection, Doctor, you and I. Don’t tell me you didn’t know?” He looked a little surprised, although I could never tell if this was an act with him. “Surely you’ve been feeling it too? The…bond…between us. It’s a rare thing.”

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t about to start discussing random dreams and waking hallucinations with him in front of Sofia.

  “A bond,” I said flatly. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “You drank my blood,” he reminded me with a tip of his glass. “In Blue Lab, when you were on the verge of death and only my blood could save you. I have been inside you, Doctor. The body does not forget such things.”

  I bristled, noticing Sofia’s eyebrows raising next to me out of the corner of my eyes.

  “You have a bruise,” he said, abruptly changing the subject and frowning in concern. He touched his own temple lightly. “I felt it earlier, like a migraine.”

  My hand went to my sore head.

  “I got hit in the head earlier tonight,” I said. “You knew that?”

  “And your leg too.” He nodded toward my thigh. He couldn’t possibly see the bruising through my work trousers.