Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  The man had walked through fire to keep me alive though. Burning to a crisp in Blue Lab’s ultraviolet corridor. Had that been something more than ruthless ambition?

  “I have to trust someone I suppose,” I said. “Look, I know you clearly have some kind of a personal beef with Allesandro, but that’s none of my business. Looking at the facts, he helped me find out about this manuscript filled with coded genetics, helped me break into the museum, and – I hate to bring it up – but helped me avoid becoming a chew toy for two of your tribe.”

  Kane nodded solemnly. “Hm yes, all this and more, I do not doubt. And what did he want from you?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing.” I was getting irritated with the demon bear. I shouldn’t have to explain myself. “His people are missing too, not just yours. He has a duty as clan leader to find out what’s happening, just as you do.”

  He looked down at me, his eyes heavy-lidded, the irises bright yellow. “No,” he said, patiently, as though I was missing his point. “I know what he needs as a Clan Master. What I’m asking is, what did he want…from you?”

  I hesitated.

  He smiled ruefully, crooked on his face as he say me falter. “Always they want something.”

  “He needs a clan mate,” I said, hopefully quiet enough so that Cloves could not hear. “If you must know. Some stupid vampire mumbo jumbo. You make a stronger suit for clan leader if you don’t rule alone.”

  “And he wants you?” Kane raised his eyebrows. I was a little insulted.

  “Is that so hard to believe? What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing,” he chuckled a little. “You are a fine woman, Doctor. There is nothing wrong with you. You are brave, and strong. You act like beta but deep down you are alpha.”

  “I said no, not that it’s any of your business,” I said, avoiding his eyes. I wasn’t entirely comfortable being looked at as though I was a nice meal. “I have no interest becoming the bride of Dracula. So I refused his kind offer. And he still helped me.”

  The Tribal rubbed his stubbled chin wearily. “He has made a bond with you, Doctor. It is about control, connection. And he would make it stronger if he could. A bond forged in blood. Did he ask for you to drink from him?”

  I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times. “Yes. Actually. On the bridge, when he turned up announcing he was going to help me.” I recovered a little. “For other reasons that might benefit me which I’m not going to go into with you, okay? I know you want to paint him as entirely self-serving but…”

  He nodded, as if all was suddenly clear. “You refused to drink his blood, to strengthen the bond he so desires, which in turn will strengthen his hold on you, and his claim to power amongst his own. And he still helped you. How noble. Perhaps I am wrong about this vampire, who knows.”

  My jaw clenched a little.

  “You reek of vampire, little doctor,” he said quietly, bending his head to mine. “Perhaps later he offered again, and this time you did not refuse I think?”

  I paused.

  “I had no choice,” I whispered. “You don’t understand the details. We both would have died if I hadn’t.”

  “Perhaps,” he said lightly. “So he saved your life? Again? Noble. You must be grateful.” He held up a finger. “But you see, he got what he wanted, one way or another. They always do. It is all they are interested in. He wanted his blood in you.” He looked me over. “More besides, no doubt. And you are filled with his blood. You are dizzy with it, just as he desired you to be. The path does not matter, not when the end destination is the same. Win for him.”

  “You really think that’s his only interest in helping?” I asked, feeling my face flush.

  “If he had any other, why would he not be here with us now?” Kane reasoned. He indicated our underground carriage, rolling through the stygian gloom. “And yet he is not. He got what he wanted from you, again, and now he has left. He does not seem to be seeking his lost vampires any longer, does he? Perhaps they are not as important to him as he would have you believe.”

  I stared at Kane. If he was amused at my expense, he hid it well. I couldn’t decipher his expression well in the darkness. It didn’t look like mockery or scorn. If anything, it looked like pity.

  “You feel he did you a kindness?” he said. “It is how he is. You do not know him. What he has done, what he is capable of.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t know anything about Allesandro’s past. Kane clearly did. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any more.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I said firmly. “And I’ve read your Cabal file, Kane. You’re hardly a saint either.”

  He nodded in agreement. “Very true,” he admitted. “I am certainly no saint. But I do not pretend to be. I have no reason to.”

  I looked away, down the long corridor. There was something up ahead, far off in the distance of the tunnel.

  “Are we nearly there yet?” I asked, eager to end this particular discussion. Kane had irritated me all out of proportion. I could still feel his calm yellow eyes on me, and had the urge to poke them very hard.

  “Do I look like the jolly conductor?” Cloves snapped without turning around.

  34.

  The Tribal’s words had rattled me. I felt a little sick, as though Allesandro’s blood had curdled in my stomach. His lips had been hot under mine. I remembered his heart beating, actually beating under my fingers. That hadn’t been my imagination.

  But Kane was right about one thing. The vampire wasn’t here with us. He was back in his sumptuous parlour with his doting Helsing girl. My companions on this dangerous quest were not vampires, but instead my boss, whom I had no illusions was only here because she wasn’t allowed to actually taze me, and a man of dubious criminal background searching for his kidnapped daughter.

  I didn’t know the vampire’s motives. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I knew all of Kane’s either. If there was darkness in Allesandro, he hid it well behind easy charm. The darkness in Kane was a different kind. Clear in every shadow on his face, just beneath the surface and entirely unapologetic. Did I really trust Cloves, the face of Cabal? She’d used Coldwater’s initial interest in me to haul me before the board, manoeuvred me into a position where she knew I would be chosen as Cabal-GO liaison, all so she could get her hands on the full files about the Portmeadow murders. Cloves had moved me around the board like a chess piece for her own needs, and I knew she’d do it again in a heartbeat. People using people was par for the course in our city. Was there anyone in this city who hadn’t actually lied to me at some point?

  I felt guilty. As if I was any better. I’d used Oscar twice. Worming my way into his inner chambers at the party to spy on his files, and summoning him like some throwaway lapdog when I needed access to the museum. I was as bad as the rest of them. I didn’t even know where Oscar was. After the Bonewalker took us, no one had seen him. Was anyone even looking for him?

  What did I expect to find at the end of this tunnel? Coldwater with a smoking gun in her hand, summoning the ghost of Roger Bacon? Building an army of possessed Tribals? To what end?

  35.

  The ‘something’ which I had spotted up ahead, turned out to be a great deal further off than I initially thought. As the tunnel was so long and straight, and so very uniform in design, it was almost an optical illusion. It was a good ten minutes before it finally resolved itself into the end of the line, and a great pair of study looking and quite imposing industrial doors.

  Cloves brought our trolley to a grinding, clattering halt and we all dismounted. The large doors were ajar. No high security codes at this end. This was just a functional entrance to the old power-plant. Cloves shone her torch warily into the darkness between the doors. I stood a little behind her, braced for one of the Pale to come flying out of the darkness and attack us. I didn’t like this feeling of being out of the city. I’d never felt so exposed.

  “Steps,” she said flatly. “They go up. To the surface, eventua
lly, I imagine. It should bring us out inside the Harcourt compound.”

  “It will,” Kane sniffed. “I can smell the night air up there. It reeks with the Pale, stronger even than I’d smelled from on top of the wall.”

  Cloves led us through the doors into the darkness beyond and we began to climb the twisting metal stairs. Our boots rang on the metal treads. Dust hung suspended in the air, caught by our flashlights. “The Pale are up there all right,” she agreed, almost in a whisper. Her natural bossiness saw her taking point. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it. I couldn’t imagine her ever being afraid of anything, except being fired, or maybe having her media-styling allowance cut. “But the plant itself, the entire Harcourt site, is fortified. The compound should be secure. No doubt the ugly fucks are all clanging on the chain link fence like something out of night of the living dead, but there’s no way they will be inside.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I asked, following her up, my hand trailing on the rusty metal handrail. It was icy cold against my skin. “After all, it’s a drone-operated plant. No one living has actually been out here for years.” I considered for a moment. “Well, nobody except Coldwater, I mean. The Pale could have broken in ages ago, it could be overrun with the zombie-face-munchers up there.”

  She shook her head, shining her wavering beam above us into the darkness as we climbed.

  “No, if they had breached the fences around the site, they’d be down here too. They’d be all over the tunnel. In fact when you typed in your little open-sesame code and those doors opened back there at the city, they would have been waiting right on the other side to pour in and bite your little face off.”

  That had occurred to me at the time too.

  “It is not the Pale I fear we have to worry about up here,” Kane said, bringing up the rear. “That smell again. There is something…unnatural…ahead.”

  “Said the shape-changing Russian man-bear,” Cloves muttered, deadpan.

  “I am Czech,” Kane replied from behind me in a growl.

  I had read about the Harcourt Arboretum once. It had been a woodland paradise. A pride of the county. One hundred and thirty acres of conservational woodland containing some of the oldest redwoods in Britannia. Collected and protected back in 1835 under the instruction of Archbishop Harcourt.

  The Arboretum had developed botany as a science, the ongoing study of medicinal herbs and plants within its beautiful glades and meadows, an idyllic sylvan paradise and an essential reference and storehouse for the University. The various areas into which the Arboretum had been divided sounded whimsical to me. Windmill Hill, Serpentine Ride. Like something out of Austen. It really had been a different world back then.

  But from its glades and meadows had come some of the most important scientific research into plant biology, developments of medicines, vaccines. Poisons too. I thought of the manuscript which Chase Pargate had stolen from me in the Labyrinth, with its detailed herbal section, the many plants depicted and the indecipherable coded words which flowed around them. Roger Bacon would have loved the Harcourt.

  As we came finally to the top of the stairs, and out into the open night air however, I saw that not much remained of the former glory.

  The entire site of the former Arboretum was industrial now. Trees and meadows were gone. This was a world of steel and brick. Ugly and functional. Our exit let us out into a wide concrete yard, open to the dark and cloudy sky, and around which goliath buildings towered. Stern-faced factories with dark abandoned windows, chimney stacks, still and silent, and looming over all else, a great cooling tower of sorts. Everywhere pipes and tubing. The beautiful ancient stones of New Oxford were absent here. This entire power plant had been erected after the war, and as such there was little beauty in the buildings. Sheer gunmetal industry. Functional, with a side of utilitarian. On every corner of the wide courtyard I saw wall-mounted cameras. Drone controllers clung here and there in the still darkness like robotic spiders. Integrated datascreens dotted surfaces everywhere, all currently dark and dusty.

  I wondered if anyone was watching the three of us through these cameras right now, as we stepped out into the yard, a space larger than a football pitch. Black tarmac crunched under our feet in the hushed air.

  “Well, we made it to the power-plant,” Cloves said. “And look, here comes the welcoming committee.” She gestured with her flashlight. A low robotic contraption, roughly the size of a dog, but squat and bulky, had rolled from some hidden compartment in the building opposite us. It made its slow and laborious way on caterpillar tracks towards us. The moonlight glinted dully on its metal hide.

  “Security drone,” Cloves said as it approached. “We have them back at HQ. This is an old model though. God, it’s like a tin can, ancient tech. Nothing’s been updated out here in years. It’s like the land that time forgot.”

  The robo-dog ground to a halt before us. With a series of clicks, a small antenna emerged from its back, or its shell, whatever the hell it was, and flicked toward us. A red light blinked rapidly for a few seconds as it scanned the three of us.

  “Unauth. State designation,” a pre-recorded human voice crackled from some hidden speaker within the rusty thing.

  “Voice command override?” Cloves said unfazed in a businesslike tone.

  “Unauth. State designation,” the voice repeated insistently. “Security breach will result in detainment,” it added.

  Cloves sighed.

  “Jesus, it really is the fucking stone age,” she muttered. “Manual override,” she told it.

  A panel hissed open on the robotic carapace. Beneath was a yellowed glass disc. Cloves leaned down and put her thumb on it.

  “State manual,” the drone’s robotic voice instructed.

  “Cloves. Servant. Override level amber. Code three seven seven. Disengage all,” she told it.

  The glass hummed as it read her fingerprint and voice record. There was a further series of clicks, presumably while it matched data in whatever mainframe it was wired to.

  “Override accepted,” it said at length. “All secondary drones deactivated for site. Primary perimeter security drones remain active.”

  “Well yes,” she said conversationally as she stood up. “Bloody good job, you rusty piece of shit. We don’t want the nice security drones up on the fences to stop keeping an eye on all the gibbering zombie hell fiends now, do we?”

  “What did you just do?” I asked, as the panel on the small drone closed again.

  “Basically swiped in to site,” she told me. “I signed us in, passed security. This drone checks my file back at Cabal HQ, ensures I have clearance and high enough servant ranking to override it, which, thankfully for you two deadbeats, I do.”

  She looked around, peering up at the ghostly dark windows all around us. “It’s only a basic bot. The ones which water the plants at the Liver have more advanced software than this things these days. I guess no one thought to waste money upgrading the drones out here in limbo though. Why would they? This world is dead. I’m surprised it hasn’t rusted to hell and fallen apart by now.”

  “And what would have happened if you hadn’t passed security?” Kane asked, eyeing the robotic sentry with distrust. Cloves smiled coldly.

  “Well, on a site this size, outside the perimeter wall, there are probably around forty or so of these rustbucket drones. God knows if there are any more recent models, there could be hoverers too.” She pointed to the sky. “In the air. We don’t pass, I don’t get to deactivate them, basic security then deems us as unauthorised entities, and every drone not currently busy manning the outer fences of the power plant descends on us here to neutralise us.”

  “Neutralise us?” I repeated. “You mean they would assume we were the Pale?”

  Cloves nodded. “An unauthorised threat, yes. Most of these tincans probably only have integrated tazers, but I’ll bet the fence sentry drones are armed to the teeth. Live ammunition.”

  “Well,” I looked down at the deactivated
drone squatting before us. “For once in my life I’m glad you’re here.”

  “My fucking heart bleeds,” Cloves said. “The problem is, there’s now a record of me being here, where I probably shouldn’t be, and it’s being uploaded onto the Liver databases back at HQ.” She glared at us both. “So whatever we came here to find, we better find it fast. If someone doesn’t want us here, and it flags up that I literally just signed the guest book, it doesn’t take much for them to reactivate drones remotely. If that person has higher clearance than me that is.”

  “You mean like Coldwater does?” I said unhappily. “I see your point.” I didn’t relish the idea of someone remotely programming the site drones to view us as a threat. It would be a neat way to get rid of us. The sky above us seemed dark and filled with unseen menace. “But this place is huge. I don’t know what I expected, but there must be ten buildings in this complex. It’s not like we have a map. Where do we start looking?”

  Kane put his hand on my shoulder, and pointed to the tall concrete block across the dark asphalt. It looked to me like an old boxy hospital wing, all function and no form. A haunted, ghostly shape squatting in the silence. “In there,” he said.

  The fourth floor of the building had glowing lights in the windows. It was the only sign of human presence we had seen.

  Cloves nodded, as the metallic and presently non-fatal security creature rumbled slowly away, presumably back to its charge point until the next time the wall camera sensors picked up a visitor. “Destination locked,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “Let’s go fuck shit up.”

  36.

  We pushed through the doors into a silent atrium, complete with abandoned, dusty reception desk, and wide stairs behind leading up to higher floors. Dark corridors stretched off either side. We shone our flashlights down them, but they did little to dispel the gloom. The building had that hushed, haunted feel of a place long since abandoned of any human interaction. A thick layer of dust covered everything. I felt like I was on one of those old ghost-hunting shows.