Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (10 page)

She was nowhere near as old or powerful as Gio, or even Allesandro. I was beginning to get an instant feel for their levels of presence, their vampire auras. I didn’t kid myself though, she still could have snapped my neck with one of her dainty hands if she chose to.

The other person lolling in the booth was male, young. He must have been barely eighteen, but had the kind of peaches-and-cream skin and floppy blonde pageboy hair which made him appear even younger. He was human, and looked utterly dazed, blinking his large Bambi eyes at Gio with a kind of hungry hero-worship as we slid into the booth – myself beside the girl vampire, Gio opposite me beside the boy.

“Phoebe, these are friends of mine,” Gio said politely. “Jessica here, one of mine, she works here, of course, and this…” he turned to the boy affectionately. “This is one of my absolute
favourite
clients, Oscar.”

The vampire leaned in and ran his thumb lightly against the young man’s pouty bottom lip playfully. The kid looked delirious, his eyes rolling up in his head at the touch. I wondered if he was either extremely drunk or drugged out of his mind. “Isn’t he just adorable?” Gio said indulgently, cupping the boy’s face with one hand in a proprietary manner, as though he were showing off a favourite knick knack. The vampire smiled over at me.

“And absolutely
delicious
, I assure you,” he added.

I noticed that the boy called Oscar was wearing a leather dog collar. This in itself wasn’t really out of keeping for the dress code of the club, but at Gio’s words I looked closer. The delicate-looking throat beneath the collar was bruised and puckered, speckled with love bites. There were evident puncture wounds, some fresh, others which looked older.

That explained his barely conscious fugue. He had been fed on, a lot. Almost bled out entirely.

I suddenly had the strong urge to get the hell out of the club, and go home and scrub myself clean in the shower, possibly forever. I kept my smile fixed with an effort, however. I had the impression that Gio was trying to shock me, to get a reaction, and I wasn’t going to give him an inch. He was dangerous; I could feel that flowing off him as surely as I could sense his power. His smile was a lie.

“Having a good night?” I managed to ask.

Oscar the cherubic bloodbank just grinned stupidly at me. There was a sheen of sweat on his pale skin, he was feverish. He leaned into Gio like a comfortable lover snuggling affectionately.

“I think you broke your toy, Gio,” the vampire called Jessica said, with a cruel smile which turned down one corner of her mouth.

“Hush, Jessica. Now, this here is a friend of Allesandro’s,” Gio said to her lightly. “The lovely, and very intriguing Phoebe.”

He glanced at me with that hot, hard-to-meet stare once more.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you at Sanctum before, my dear. Tell me, where did the two of you meet?”

“I work at the university,” I answered, aware that both the vampires were peering at me intently. “Allesandro and I met at a lecture, he left me his number…” I shrugged, not really wanting to say more. “… and well, here I am.”

“Couldn’t resist his charms, eh?” Jessica drawled, sipping her martini.

So vampires do drink, other than blood I mean. I noted this and filed it away. The more you know.

“I can’t say I blame you,” Jessica continued. “He certainly has a way with the ladies, that’s for sure. Your kind … and mine.” She looked distracted, glancing over at the dance floor, obviously searching the crowd for her colleague. I didn’t look. She seemed annoyed about something, or wistful, or maybe just a little drunk. The vampire leaned in to me.

“And of course he has a very … deep … bite. Or do you know that already?” she murmured.

“Jessica,” Gio said. “Go and work.”

He was smiling politely, but there was a clear undertone. His words were close and clipped. I was guessing, for all his affectations of friendly geniality, Gio had a very short fuse.

Jessica finished her drink in a gulp and with a flourish saluted her boss with the empty glass.

“To unexpected windfalls,” she said. “A bird in the hand, right, Gio?”

I stood to let her slide past me out of the booth. She glanced from Gio to me.

“Nice knowing you,” she said as she departed, not sounding particularly sincere about it.

“Now then,” Gio said to me once she had left, leaning over the table and steepling his hands. “You
must
tell me more about yourself, Miss Harkness. What is it you do at this university of yours? To my knowledge, Allesandro has never been particularly academic.”

I’ve never been a good liar. My only real option when the occasion demands is to try and lie by omission, but even this usually results in a red, sweaty face and a stammering stream of completely unbelievable bullcrap spilling out of my mouth. However, any attempt was rendered academic by Gio and his sun-bright burning eyes.

Back in the lecture hall, Allesandro had demonstrated an unusual vampire talent I hadn’t been aware of before, carrying on one conversation out loud with another person while at the same time whispering in my ear only, a kind of localised telepathy.

Gio now demonstrated another fun new trick. His presence shot out of him and engulfed me. He rolled my mind under his as though I were a tiny seahorse caught in a large tumbling wave.

There were myths and rumours, of course, that vampires could ‘charm’ people, control their actions or thoughts, but it was always hard to tell what was real and what was nonsense we had made up ourselves in horror films.

This wasn’t mind control, though; this was more like domination.

Gio simply stared at me with his eyes like twin furnaces, his face still set in an amiable white smile, and his mind crushed onto mine from above, hard and cruel, squeezing the truth out of me. My limbs felt suddenly like lead. Neither my arms nor legs were responding to my instinctual urge to duck out of the booth.

“I’m a paratoxicologist at Blue Lab One,” I blurted out, as though my tongue were not my own, surprised to hear myself talking. “I study the Genetic Others, mainly the Pale, but your kind as well. It’s part of my brief to find a cure, to eradicate the mutants we made.”

Gio raised an eyebrow.

“How interesting, Phoebe. Yes, the Pale as you call them, those mindless bundles of anger, hunger and violence, which you and your kind created, certainly are a … pest, are they not?”

He gestured around at the club but didn’t once break his gaze from me.

“And yet, of course, if you humans had
not
almost destroyed yourselves and the planet we all share with your tinkering, my kind would never have had reason to … come out … as it were. All this would not be possible. We would still be skulking in the shadows, living off the dregs of humanity’s table.”

He leaned across the booth. Still holding that paralysing gaze. His control of my free will unbroken.

“Is it not better, in the long run, that our two peoples now co-exist, that there is…” His smile widened, his teeth were even whiter than his skin, and I could just see the tips of his fangs, “…
peace
between us?”

Oscar, the euphoric vampire-addict pulled listlessly at the vampire’s lapels.

“I want to go and dance,” he murmured, sounding sulky.

Gio ignored him completely. His stare was fixed on me. I was rooted to my chair, the full force of the master vampire’s will pushing down on my mind like a splayed hand, holding my thoughts still. I was aware of sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades.

“Do you know how the Pale came about? How this plague on the world was unleashed by you careless humans?” the vampire asked me.

“We engineered them,” I answered. Everyone knew this.

“Yes,” Gio sounded irritable, “but do you know
how
they were engineered? Do you know what was done? Do you know what the
price
was?”

I stared at him perplexed. He shook his head minutely.

“One day, someone should tell your people the fairy tale which no one knows.”

“I like fairy tales,” Oscar murmured, reaching up a languorous hand to toy with the vampire’s hair.

The gesture seemed outlandish to me, it was like watching someone petting a tiger. Any second now the creature could lash out and tear your arm off. The boy’s attempts at affection were curtly ignored by the Master of Sanctum, who shook him off like a bothersome child. Did Oscar even realise that Gio had my mind pinned down like a buzzing fly under a glass?

“Why are you here, Phoebe?” Gio asked me. “Why are you really here, in my domain, tonight?”

“Allesandro invited me,” I heard myself answer.

I had tried to bite my tongue to stop myself speaking, but it hadn’t obeyed.

“Why did he invite you?” He was pushing harder now. The fire in his eyes was tinged with ice.

Whatever Allesandro had been up to, getting in touch with me, this guy clearly didn’t know what it was, and he obviously didn’t like his clan subordinates sneaking around behind his back.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what he wanted me for.”

At least he knew I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t able to. The building pressure in my head edged into migraine territory as I felt him push harder.

“Really, I don’t!” I insisted, my hands gripping the leather of the seating either side of me so hard I was surprised my nails didn’t leave puncture wounds.

Jesus, this vampire was powerful. Any second now I would have an aneurism. Where the hell was Lucy? Maybe if she spotted me, she would come over, Gio would surely have to take his fingers out of my mind for a second or two while he played the charming host.

But no one was looking our way. We were hidden in the shadows here, away from the dancers. I had a feeling that if Gio didn’t want his staff and guests to notice him, they wouldn’t. He could probably have skinned me alive on the table-top and no one would have glanced over.

“Then why did you come at all?” Gio demanded to know of me. “Surely not just to bask in the glory of my staff? Allesandro is indeed pleasant company, but he has never had to resort to handing out business cards to strangers before.
Why
did you come here at his invitation? I can tell you do not like our kind.”

His grin was a little lopsided now, as he made a show of leaning in closer.

“I can smell it on you. You’re afraid of us. You think we’re just another virus gone wrong, like your Pale creatures, those abominations you created. You’d like to cure us all. Make us like
you
. Weak and short lived,” he sniggered. “So why on earth would you accept an invitation from a vampire you barely know to come to a place you hate?”

I tried not to say anything in return, I really did, but resisting caused so much pain in my head I felt like I was going to black out.

“I came because my boss at work has been kidnapped, possibly killed by a vampire,” I said through gritted teeth.

I hated Gio, I had decided. I hated anyone who could so effortlessly make me feel utterly powerless. I’m not the helpless type. If I had had a stake in my hand, I would have lunged at him in that moment.

“And the vampire who took my boss knows my name, and I’m scared.”

Gio tilted his head to the side curiously. His eyes had crinkled. He could see that he was causing me pain and was clearly enjoying it. The sadistic bastard.

“You are scared because you know something?”

Suddenly his voice was inside my head as well as outside. I heard him whisper in my mind.

“You may as well tell me everything, little girl, because believe me, you are in over your head and you are not getting out of here alive tonight, I am going to suck you dry and dance on your corpse.”

His threats whispered around my head, echoing off my skull.

“Tell me what I want to know and this will happen quickly. Refuse, and I will make it last for days.”

The words rolled straight into my head without bothering to leave his lips or enter my ears. My blood ran cold. I was going to die down here tonight.

“Scared, because I don’t know anything!” I cried. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I think my boss tried to save her own life by selling me out to whoever was torturing her. She had some sensitive information, I don’t know what, and she knew someone was after her so she hid it in my workstation. I think they tortured this information out of her, and whoever wants this information now thinks
I
have it, and is coming for me!”

The words poured out of me uninvited. Gio’s hand shot across the table and grabbed my arm. His grip was ice. I felt the bones of my forearm grind together.

“And
do
you?” he asked. “Do you have this information?”

I shook my head. It felt as though it were going to fall off my shoulders. I couldn’t hear the club music anymore – nothing more than a distant thrum, as though it were a great distance away through deep water. All I could hear was the roar of my own blood in my ears, and cutting through the beat, Gio’s voice like a cruel scalpel.