Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  Allesandro. He was leaning heavily against the wall with one hand. The vampire’s shirt was in shreds, and his chest and stomach covered with blood, hopefully most of it not his own. He looked a wreck, but he walked out of the darkness of the Labyrinth as steadily as he could anyway, his eyes staring at me and the corpse. Taking in the scene.

  “Do you know...,” he panted. “…how hard it is to find you down here, Doctor? Even with our bond?” He took in the battered man’s corpse I knelt beside.

  “You killed it,” he said simply, peering dispassionately down at the fallen Tribal. I nodded, still not standing. I was too shaky and tired to trust my legs. And god help me, I was happy to see that the vampire wasn’t chopped up into kitty treats.

  “You killed…the other?” I asked, forcing my voice not to tremble. Of course he had. He wouldn’t be standing here otherwise.

  He brushed a dark, blood-stained lock of hair out of his eyes, a show of nonchalance. Only a vampire could still manage to look elegant when painted with blood in a filthy underground grotto.

  “Yes. Eventually.” He noticed me staring at the deep gashes and bloody wounds on his upper arms and abdomen, and changed the subject. “I leave you alone for five minutes and find you on your knees with a naked stranger.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for humour. To be honest, it was taking rather a heroic effort not to cry.

  “They were being controlled,” I said. “Someone was using them. I don’t know how, but they were rabid, like attack dogs. The smell of sickness. I think…” I hesitated. “I think they’re the two Tribals which Kane sent to investigate the Portmeadow deaths. The missing ones.”

  Allesandro sighed, and stooped, holding out his hand to help me to my feet. Unlike the dead Tribals, his was cool and dry. “Then, like the two vampires I sent, it seems they found more than they bargained for.”

  I wiped at my bloodied nose absently, looking down at the Tribal still.

  “Well, I for one, will not lose any sleep over two dead animals.” the vampire said. “But if your guess is correct, then that means, unfortunately for us, that these two beasts are not the Portmeadow murderers,” He heaved me easily to my feet. “Where is the manuscript?”

  “He has it,” I said.

  The vampire looked down at the corpse, perplexed. “The dead Tribal?”

  “No, Chase Pargate. He helped me.” I turned to look at Chase behind me. “He helped me to…”

  I trailed off.

  There was no one there. We were alone in the Labyrinth. Chase Pargate had gone.

  With the manuscript.

  “It looks as though this imaginary friend of yours,” Allesandro said dryly, “...has helped no one but himself.”

  24.

  I had hoped Allesandro would be able to find our way out of the Labyrinth. The glow-stick was almost as dead as the Tribal, and I sure as hell had no idea how to get back to the surface on my own. I could spend forever in this underground maze. Luckily for me, vampires can see in the dark, and he led me by the hand through the maze until eventually we came to a ladder, which led up to the sewers above us, and from there we made our way up further to a manhole cover.

  I don’t think I’ve even been more delighted to breathe fresh air as I was when I crawled out of the manhole like a zombie clawing its way up from the grave. The air was cold and breezy. I looked around to find we had emerged in a blessedly nondescript alleyway between the back of a row of boutique shops. The alley was deserted. It must have been late by now, and this was a quiet part of town. It could have been worse, we could have emerged in the middle of the High amongst busy traffic and hovering camera-mounted traffic control drones. We didn’t want that attention. I lay on the floor, my back against the cool cobbles, staring up at the stars floating behind clouds while the vampire carefully and quietly replaced the drain cover. I just breathed.

  “So, what now?” he asked, walking over to me as I finally stood up, exhausted. We were a mess, both of us. I stared at his clumped, bloody hair and tattered, blood-soaked shirt. I doubted I looked any better.

  “I think your clothes are beyond saving,” I said.

  He inclined his head. “Do you want me to take them off? It’s cold out here. Don’t you think I’ve been through enough discomfort for one night?”

  I pushed him away, not very seriously. “God, do you ever stop?” I asked. “You smell like dead cat and sewer.” I fished hopefully in the sad, heartbreakingly ruined remains of my beloved parka and found my phone. At least it hadn’t been lost in the chase. I’m not sure my insurance would cover it in the circumstances. I hadn’t had the foresight to take out drug-addled-were-panther-cover. Silly me.

  “What we need are showers, fresh clothes, and transport,” I said, dialling Lucy’s number.

  He looked intrigued. “Back to yours then, Doctor? Or back to mine?”

  I gave him a pointed look. “Neither, buster. If someone is trying to kill me, I’m hardly going to show up at my own flat, and I can think of a million other things I’d rather do than go back to your boudoir and watch your little Helsing clean your wounds.”

  “Poor Elise,” Allesandro clucked, rolling his hands against one another in a fruitless attempt to clean the dry, dark blood off them. “Well, you could do it?”

  “Do it yourself,” I countered, listening to the phone ring and hoping she was home and awake. “I have somewhere to go. Professor Knight had a notebook. His findings from his studies of the manuscript. That poor woman said so. If it’s not at the library, it might be in his old office.” I tried not to picture Hope Nelson’s severed head rolling out of the darkness toward my feet like a macabre bowling ball. I had the feeling I was going to be seeing that on loop for the foreseeable future.

  “We’re going to the museum?” he asked, as the phone rang endlessly in my ear.

  I glanced at him, surprised. “We?”

  He folded his arms. “Well, you clearly can’t be left to your own devices without being attacked or killed,” he reasoned. “And although I don’t mind watching your back in the least, my investment in this is not entirely about you. I still have two missing clan members to avenge. Someone killed my kind and destroyed the bodies in your car bomb, if what you say is true. If vampires are being picked off and I am seen to do nothing about it, it weakens my position as leader, which without a mate is already tenuous enough as it is.”

  There was the Allesandro I knew. Best interests at heart. His own, of course.

  “We can go to the museum tonight, or you can wait until it opens tomorrow and go on your own. I’ll be asleep then. Sun up, vampire thing, I don’t have a choice in the matter. If you want to do this, we’re on a clock.”

  “Chase fucking Pargate, double-oh-senile, has dogged my steps since the beginning of this mess,” I said. “Trust me, if I’ve got an idea that there might be useful information at the museum, then so does he, and he sure as hell isn’t going to be waiting for morning. I can’t afford to wait.”

  Lucy finally answered the phone, groggy and half asleep. I didn’t give her details, but thank God she agreed to pick us up and let us use her place to regroup. Not many people would be so accommodating if their boss called them in the middle of the night and asked to be collected from an anonymous alleyway. I found myself very grateful that Lucy was, well, Lucy. We certainly couldn’t walk through the city looking this way. We looked like zombies. People in my city don’t like zombies.

  As it happened, once I mentioned that I would be bringing the master vampire with me, Lucy just couldn’t agree fast enough. I think I actually heard a dull thud as she fell out of bed.

  25.

  My lab assistant’s flat was even smaller than mine, and in a poor part of town, only a stone’s throw from the Slade itself. I had to remember to give her a raise. I took first shower rights, leaving her and the vampire sitting awkwardly in the cluttered studio lounge. Allesandro squeezed himself into a tiny armchair, looking rather uncomfortable and drumming his fingers on his knees
. Lucy, star-struck Helsing that she was, sat opposite him on the sofa in wide eyed hero-worshipping speechlessness.

  They were still both sitting that way when I emerged twenty minutes later, my hair in a towel, gloriously blood and filth free, and wearing a black top and jeans I had pilfered from Lucy’s wardrobe. Lucy didn’t even look up at me. Allesandro on the other hand, gave me something of a desperate pleading look, which made me smirk. He looked very surreal sitting there, blood-stained and filthy.

  “Shower’s all yours,” I told him, nodding my head back at the still-steamy bathroom, and he escaped as quickly as possible from the rapt attentions of my dreamy lab assistant.

  As I scrunched my hair dry with the towel, I heard him lock the door, which made me snicker.

  “Could you try to be a little less…well, a little less Lucy?” I asked her. “You’re putting the poor man off his game.”

  Lucy looked astonished. “Oh…my…God…” she stage-whispered. “There’s a vampire in my shower.” She bit her lip wickedly. “Do you think he’s naked yet?” Her eyes glittered. “Do you think it matters to them if the water is hot or cold? You know, with their body temperature so low?” She grinned. “I bet he likes it steamy. God, can you imagine what he looks like with wet hair?”

  “Lucy…”

  “All those suds. Rolling down…”

  “Stop!” I commanded, holding a hand up.

  She looked suddenly horrified. “Christ, I hope I didn’t leave my retainer on the windowsill. God, if I knew you guys were going to be coming…”

  “Will you calm down? It’s fine, trust me,” I assured her. “He isn’t likely to care about anything more than getting the blood and gore out of his glossy lothario locks. Now stop being such a letch. Did you manage to find anything for him to wear?”

  She nodded. “There’s a t-shirt and jeans on the bed through there.” She flicked her eyes at her bedroom door, her cheeks still flushed with the giddy taboo excitement of having a nude vampire only one wall away. I would never understand Helsings. “Old boyfriend, about his size. He was an asshole. God knows why I kept his stuff. I did remember to move my stuffed unicorn off the bed though. Don’t want the Clan Master thinking I’m a total lunatic.” She tittered, a little hysterically.

  “I think we’re way past that, my adorkable little fruitcake,” I said, smiling and combing out my hair.

  I had filled Lucy in a little on events during the drive over to her place. About the Camera, the manuscript, the Tribals and the insane thief. I knew I had to make a call to Cloves at some point, but I was putting it off. With everything going on, I didn’t relish the thought of telling her there was a decapitated corpse in the library basement, or that I had basically stolen, and then lost, and very ancient and valuable book. My head was going to roll just like Hope Nelson’s.

  “Everything’s just so crazy tonight,” Lucy said, pulling her knees up and hugging them. “I didn’t know you’d been attacked, I didn’t even know where you were. You left Blue Lab with that redhead yesterday. Griff said you missed work today as you had to catch up on sleep, so I thought you were cosy at home, watching that Dallas show you were telling me about. And instead you’re here with a vampire, both beat to shit and covered in werewolf blood.”

  “Were-panther,” I corrected her studiously.

  “Insane.” She shook her head. “And with those horrible murders, and everyone blaming the Tribals. It’s just been unreal.”

  I stopped, the comb halfway through my hair. “What…murders?” I asked slowly. I could feel dread rising like a solid lump in my throat.

  Lucy blinked at me. “God, of course, well it’s been all over the news all night, but you wouldn’t know, would you? You’ve been underground wrestling Tribals. It’s terrible, Phoebe. People are panicking all over the city.”

  I stared at her in the quiet apartment. “Turn on the news,” I said grimly.

  My worst fears were realised as Lucy, almost apologetically, crossed the room and fired up her datascreen with a wave of her hand.

  Poppy Merriweather, DataStream news anchor, was looking grim. She sat behind the studio desk, the scrolling headline rolling along the bottom of the screen reading ‘savage butchery in Portmeadow-animal attack?’

  “Further news on this horrific breaking story from Portmeadow,” Merriweather said, looking earnestly into the camera. “Earlier today an anonymous source released information to the press concerning the recent spate of missing persons occurring in New Oxford.”

  Faces flashed up on the green-screen behind her. I knew them well.

  “Simon King, Amanda Bishop and Edward Knight, initially thought to be disappearances, but this evening confirmed as brutal murders, exclusively to channel five.” The backdrop changed from mugshots of our victims to a landscape shot of Portmeadow. It was a low angle, deliberately taken to make the area appear more sinister I supposed. That’s journalism for you.

  “The killings are reported to have been carried out with a brutal savagery which can only be called animalistic,” Merriweather said. “Already, concerns are rising as to whether this is the work of a deranged individual, still at large in our city. Or, as some claim, evidence of a violent vendetta against the human people of New Oxford by an organised party with an agenda in terrorism. Anti-GO sentiment is rising and many have already spoken out in condemnation of these deaths, the precise details of which are too graphic and upsetting to air.”

  “I can’t believe those poor people are actually dead,” Lucy whispered. “I’ve been watching it all night, it’s all over every channel.”

  I shushed her, my eyes glued to the news report.

  “Earlier this evening, Phillipa Heston, chief spokeswoman for the Mankind Movement had this to say,” Poppy said, swivelling slightly in her chair to a cutaway screen behind her.

  The footage cut to a well-appointed office, and a heavyset woman in her sixties, sitting behind a presidential desk. She wore a deep green blouse and a thick chain of pearls. Her white hair expensively coiffed.

  “The worry that this distressing information brings to light,” she said to camera, in a slow rolling accent, as flashbulbs popped around her. “It is clear to many of us that our worst fears are realised. It is what we at the MM have always said. But now our warnings have come too late. New Oxford is a proud bastion of humanity, but it has a dark underbelly which we ignore at our peril, infested with, and controlled by, those things we call GOs.” Her lips turned downwards in distaste, as though the very word were unpalatable. “These…things…they look like people, they can walk and talk like people, and they fool a whole lot of innocent people. Human people. But the mask has slipped tonight, and with these unforgivable deaths, these shocking murders in the heart of the human community, we finally see the monsters for what they are. It’s what our organisation has been trying to open people’s eyes to for years.”

  Her mouth tightened. “It is very clear to me that certain ‘factions’ of these so called sub-cultures have no wish to integrate with normal people, as they claim. And when threatened, this is how they retaliate against us. Against the people who offer them shelter and safe harbour from the Pale, here in our fair city. We have allowed these creatures to co-exist with us, and how do they repay our beneficence? With savagery and cruel intent. They bite the hand that feeds.”

  Off screen, a reporter spoke. “Are you implying, Mrs Heston, that you personally believe these murders to be the definitive work of GOs?”

  “Well, let me only say,” she replied, clasping her hands on the tabletop. “Everyone knows that a frightened and wounded animal will fight to the death. It’s in their savage nature to do so. These Tribal squatters who fill what were once our lush green spaces with their ‘tribes’, it’s common knowledge that their so-called leader is reported to have a darker past than I would care to speculate.” She looked into the camera, out of screens to the people of New Oxford. “But they need to understand this. We are not a city who will be cowed into obedience by M
afioso terror.” She looked to the off-screen reporter in her office. “Look at the recent evidence. Even when Cabal themselves see fit to try and form some kind of bridge between our kind and these animals, our first real attempt as a human society to reach out with a liaison to these things, what is the result?” She raised her eyebrows. “A carbomb. That’s what. Our human ambassador is nearly killed on her first day of peace talks, in what is clear to me a blatant act of defiance, a violent statement by an underground society of savages who want nothing to do with our way of life. Indeed, who scorn it. Who would wish to destroy it. Coincidence? Or are they sending us a warning?” She wagged a finger at the camera, her flinty eyes glinting. “Because if it’s the latter, they had better be prepared for war. Mankind will not go down without a fight.”

  The interview cut back to the news studio and Merriweather.

  “On other fronts, GO rights campaigners have called for tolerance and patience, and for a full and objective investigation by Cabal in the wake of these murders. Fears of vigilantism need to be controlled, say many Pro-GO petitioners.” Merriweather glanced at her notes. “Questions are now being asked. Why Cabal were not aware of these deaths, and can our leaders truly protect us? In retaliation to the statements by the MM earlier today, several Mankind Movement establishments have been vandalised or looted, an act of retaliation from the more militant wings of the pro-GO protesters. Several Scott Enterprise’s offices were damaged this evening in suspected arson attacks. Arrests have been made, with police confirming amongst their number known GO rights protesters with prior criminal history, and GO sympathetic Helsings.

  “In a statement released just an hour ago from Scott Towers, industrial magnate Marlin Scott, a vocal supporter of the Mankind Movement, had this to say…”

  The screen cut to Scott Towers, a static exterior shot, over which Marlin Scott’s voice rolled. A still-image of the old man was inserted in the top right hand corner of the screen.