Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (12 page)

At first I thought he was taken aback by my brave unwillingness to leave a friend behind, despite any danger to myself. I actually felt heroic, all Linda Hamilton for a moment. But no, he was just amazed at how dim I was apparently being.

“There
is
no fire, Doctor,” he said. “
I
set the alarm off. I had to get you away from Gio somehow. It’s all I could think of. Your friend is safe. When I left you with him I sought her out. I had her escorted from the club.”

He half grinned.

“She was not happy with me for it. She wanted very much to stay, I think.”

Allesandro had caused all this chaos, to save me from his scary boss?

“He’ll kill you for letting me go,” I said. “Come with me, you idiot.”

He looked surprised.

“Your concern is touching. Perhaps we will make a Helsing out of you yet? I am rescuing you from my master and you stand here worried about
me
?”

“I don’t even know you,” I spat, angrily pushing my sodden hair off my forehead. “You brought me here in the first damn place.
Call
me
when
you
need
me
! That’s what your bloody card said. Not call me when you need a near death experience!”

“I didn’t tell you to come here,” he said, cocking his head to one side. “I think you
are
worried for my safety. How interesting.”

I felt like I was losing my mind. I stood dripping wet in the dark cellar.

“And a fucking Helsing? Are you
mentally
unstable
?” I practically yelled at him.

“Admit it, I’m the nicest vampire you’ve ever met.”

“I’ve met two!” I spluttered, holding up two shaky fingers. “The other one raped my brain and told me he was going to dance on my corpse! This has not been a fun evening!”

“Go,” he grinned.

How he was finding any of this entertaining was a mystery to me. Allesandro glanced behind, then back at me, less of a grin now.

“He will know you are missing by now. If you stay, he
will
kill you. You’d be no use to me then.”

I didn’t bother staying to argue. Allesandro was clearly not all there. I made my way through the darkness of the cellar, groping blindly ahead like a blind woman to a set of old wooden stairs I could just make out in the gloom. My soaked clothing was weighing me down as though I had just completed the ‘swimming in your pyjamas’ badge at school.

“Doctor,” Allesandro called when I reached the bottom step.

I glanced back to see him peering through the hole, his arms on either side as he leaned through. His t-shirt was drenched and stuck to his body in a most interesting way, which was rather an inappropriate thing for me to notice given the urgency of the situation. I would later blame this on a surge of adrenaline on my part.

His hair dripped onto his face. I noticed that his knuckles were raw and bleeding where he had punched my escape hole into the wall. And yet I noticed the impossible.

The vampire was, unbelievably, smiling at me.

“What?”

“You look really good tonight.”

Before I could swear at him, I saw movement and he turned away. Others had entered the storeroom, and I heard raised voices.

Without thinking, I dragged myself up the stairs, two at a time, abandoning Allesandro as he had told me to. Brave and noble, that’s me.

At the top, there was a trapdoor. I prayed to every god I could think of that it wouldn’t be locked. It wasn’t.

I spilled out into another basement. I hadn’t realised how deep underground Sanctum had been. This one was far more modern looking, well maintained and filled with general produce. Cartons of cigarettes, bottles, crates of snack bars.

I half ran along an aisle between the packages. There were stairs ahead of me, lit by a naked florescent strip. Running up them I shouldered the door at the top, and erupted into a brightly lit convenience store.

The cashier almost jumped out of his skin as I burst from the back room, scattering a display of cereal bars across the floor. He was a skinny young man, who had been sitting reading the newspaper, probably whiling away the wee hours of the morning and not expecting a drenched, wide-eyed woman to erupt from his storage room.

He opened his mouth to question me, his face filled with surprise. He pointed at me then the door, but I could hear footsteps in the cellar now behind me, hurrying. I didn’t think it was likely to be Allesandro, so I didn’t stop to explain or apologise.

I ran the length of the store, my wet shoes squeaking and slipping on the laminated floor tiles, and practically threw myself out of the glass front doors onto the blessed street. I had never been more grateful to be above ground and outside in the cold air.

Disoriented, I looked around wildly.

Further down the road to my left, there were large crowds milling around. Police were there and a fire engine, bathing everything in the dark night with strobing red and blue light. People were still emerging onto the street as the club ejected them into the night, sopping wet.

Looking back, I saw I had emerged from a 24-hour Spar, half the street up from the Eagle and Child. I was back on St Giles, the main strip of the vampire district. I stood shivering in the snow, not knowing what to do next.

Looking down the street, more and more clubbers were pouring out of the tiny pub which stood over Sanctum – their emergence almost an optical illusion, like a rave ending at the TARDIS. My eye suddenly caught sight of a figure, pale against the darkness of the mainly leather-clad crowd. It was Gio.

Like a spectre of death I saw his head turning this way and that, searching the crowds – obviously for me. He clearly had discovered I has escaped from Oscar and had assumed I was coming up and out through the pub. He was lying in wait.

Thank God for Allesandro’s way out. But any second now Gio would glance my way, spot me standing here, and it would all be over. His mind would roll along the length of the street and root me to the spot. Game over.

I considered darting back into the Spar, getting back under cover, but there were raised voices from within now. Whoever had followed me through the hole was still in pursuit, and if Allesandro hadn’t been able to stop them, I was fairly sure I wouldn’t stand a chance. Vampire minions.

Well … shit.

I was having a hard time thinking how things could get worse, when I heard a screech of tyres and a car came tearing down St Giles from the north, the opposite direction of Sanctum’s entrance. The bright yellow Ferrari squealed to a halt in front of me, executing a perfect 180 handbrake turn in a cloud of hissing rubber. I stared down stupidly as the passenger door flung itself open.

Inside, looking biblically furious, sat Veronica Cloves, my unwilling Cabal babysitter. She took in my appearance quickly. Drenched, shivering, my hair matted to my skull, blood from Oscar’s face tinting the back of my head pink, plaster dust covering my hands and knees.

I don’t think it would be possible for someone to look more pissed at me.

“Get … in … the … fucking … car …” she hissed through gritted teeth.

I glanced back towards Sanctum. Gio was standing like a ghost in the crowd, staring at me, his arms loose at his sides. His eyes were like headlamps.

I threw myself into the Ferrari and Cloves immediately floored the accelerator, peeling us away into the night before my door could even close.

16

The city tore by in a blur of streetlamps and lighted shop-fronts. I sat in the hand-stitched leather bucket seats of the extremely expensive car, dripping like a sodden rag and making a small puddle.

Every few seconds, I glanced behind us through the seats. Nobody appeared to be following us. Of course, with the reckless speed at which Servant Cloves was tearing through every traffic light I don’t think anything could have kept up with us if it had tried.

The woman drove like a maniac. I didn’t know if this was her usual manner, or if she reserved this style especially for when she was whisking inconvenient doctors away from angry vampires, but for the time being I was actually grateful. The more distance she could put between myself and Gio, the better.

I could feel Cloves seething quietly next to me. She hunched over the wheel, her knuckles white, her long nails a deep and garish purple.

“Were you
following
me?” I managed, when I had regained my breath and my heart had stopped slamming against my chest.

I wasn’t particularly out of shape. I even jogged on occasion, but I had not had much practice fleeing vampires before, and the adrenalin in my system was starting to make me shake.

“Of course I was following you,” she snapped, wrenching the car around a mini roundabout and heading out of the city centre towards the residential Northern Sector. “Good job as well. What the
hell
did you do?”

She shot me a murderous look.

“I didn’t do anything!” I snapped back.

“You
set
fire
to a vampire club?” she said accusingly. “That’s what it looks like! You were supposed to be covertly gathering information! Is this your idea of
subtle
?”

“I never asked to be your spy!” I retorted. “If you wanted some secret agent who could blend into any culture, you should have bloody well used one! I’m a lab drone, remember? The only culture I’m comfortable with comes in a petri dish.”

We swung a right so hard I was slammed sideways into the window. With shaky fingers I finally buckled my seatbelt. Safety first, right?

“And there was no fire,” I argued. “
And
it wasn’t me who set the sodding alarms off, it was the vampire from the lecture. He was trying to help me escape.”

Cloves slowed the car a little as we headed uptown, turning onto Aristotle Lane. Other vehicles were still swerving to get out of her way. We cruised along at a comparatively steady eighty.

“Why were you trying to escape? You went there to see this GO in the first place?”

“I did. But that turned out to be a bad idea. He’d expected me to call him at night and arrange a rendezvous. He practically wet himself when I showed up at the club. Couldn’t wait to get me out of there.”

“Why?”

“His boss, the scary-looking fashion icon in the white suit. I don’t know why, but he wanted me to come to the club. He found out Allesandro had contacted me, and when I called the club he made sure I got in, then strong-armed me into a corner and questioned me.”

“De Medica?” Cloves eyes narrowed. “We have a pretty big file on this particular GO. What was he after?”

“Me!” I practically yelped. “Not that you seem very interested, but he actually told me he was going to kill me. Right there in the club. If I hadn’t got out…”

We turned a right and the buildings around us, all post-wars, became far more affluent than I was used to. We were entering some kind of gated community, it seemed. Wherever we were headed, it wasn’t home. This whole area used to be Port Meadow, one of Oxford’s more picturesque districts: fields, hills, cute copses of trees. It was high rises now. Very expensive ones.

“He threatened you? Were there any witnesses?” Cloves demanded to know urgently. “We can bring him in on that if so.”

I hesitated, aware I was about to sound foolish.

“No, not exactly.” I muttered. “He … didn’t say it out loud…”

“What are you talking about? He threatened to kill you but he
didn’t
threaten to kill you?”

Cloves stared at me again. I really wished she would keep her gimlet eyes on the road. It would be ironic to escape being bled to death by a master vampire, only to die due to reckless driving by my getaway driver and have my body prised out of the grille of an oncoming taxi.

“I don’t know how much you know about the GOs’ … abilities,” I explained. “Although judging from your pretty sketchy intel files, I’m guessing not much. But I discovered a fun fact tonight. Vampires, old shit-scary and bloody powerful ones anyway, can push down your mind with their own. It’s not mind control, not exactly. Not hypnotism either, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t lie to him. It was like his bloody eyes were shooting truth serum at me.”

Cloves hesitated, glancing from me to the road and back. She looked uneasy.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Look, he made me answer all his questions, and he spoke inside my head,” I insisted. “Whatever it is that got Trevelyan kidnapped, this guy knows about it – or knows
something
anyway, and he thinks
I
know.”

I shivered, only partly from the cold.

“And another thing – he’s pretty damn pissed about it too. The plan for the evening was to pump me for as much information as I had, and then to … dispose of me.”

We pulled onto a private drive of a very tall, extremely well-appointed high rise apartment block. Cloves guided the car into an underground car park, the engine purring as she brought the car under cover, like a fish into dark water.

“Well, we can’t touch him on something we have no proof of,” she sounded irritated that I hadn’t managed to elicit an audible death threat. “The red tape would be hideous. It would be a diplomatic incident. Shame you didn’t get him to act violently with witnesses around.”

Silly me, what had I been thinking?

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Cloves turned to face me.

“What did he think you knew about?”

“The files,” I answered. “Whatever the hell it was Trevelyan dumped in my workstation. Remind me to thank her for that by the way, if we ever find her alive. I’m thinking a gift basket maybe, or a hand grenade. My life was far too dull before she dragged me into her mess.”

I rubbed my eyes. It was hard to see much in the darkness of the underground garage. The Ferrari’s headlights cut a path ahead of us as we purred onward between other vehicles.

“I hope you’ve had a more successful evening than I have, because I’m now pretty bloody interested to know what’s in those files that’s apparently important enough to murder me over!”

“Still working on that,” she said, still seeming less concerned that I had almost been vampire chowder, and more worried that I had caused a public scene.

I could see her Cabal mind working already, figuring out how to spin the incident on the DataStream, to smooth over any GO issues and not damage the tenuous inter-societal balance. My evening of peril was clearly overshadowed in her mind by the ballache of bad PR she was going to have to deal with.

“So what you’re telling me is that this was a trap?”

She had finally pulled up in the silent strip-lit car park. We sat there with the engine idling as she worked my story through.

“The vampire who came to the lecture was clearly looking for Trevelyan, this Allesandro of yours. He found you instead, and practically led you by the hand to the club, where his boss could interrogate you. Find out what you know about whatever it is they are so interested in?”

“What? No, it wasn’t like that,” I spluttered. “He didn’t want me at the club at all.”

Cloves gave me a look of weary disdain.

“So you say. But perhaps he did. Maybe he got you there, but once his boss found out you neither had the precious files on you nor knew what they contained, your escape was conveniently engineered, in the hope you would then run straight to the files themselves, and they could re-apprehend you later at their leisure.”

I didn’t know much about my mysterious new vampire friend, other than that he was a remarkably flexible dancer, but I was pretty certain Cloves had this all wrong. I shook my head.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “There was something between Allesandro and Gio, bad blood maybe. I don’t know what Allesandro wanted with me, but Gio was determined to get me away from him and pump me for information.”

And
later
,
pump
me
for
blood
, I added mentally. This, I reminded myself, is why I don’t go out much.

“Harkness, you don’t know how they work,” Cloves sneered. “I’ve been doing this an awful lot longer than you have. They play you, Harkness. It’s a game to their kind. De Medica is absolute clan
master
; if your precious Allesandro was being insubordinate in any way, he would be dead by now.”

She considered this for a moment.

“Really dead, I mean,” she clarified. “Decommissioned.”

I had to admit, it
would
be out of character for any clan master to allow anyone beneath them to step out of line. Decommissioning, which never officially happened by the way, was the execution of a vampire. The unlucky undead was usually staked, immobilised, and left to face the sunrise.

Decommissioning never officially happened, by which I mean Cabal kept it out of the DataStream when it did. GO business was not our concern officially. No one noticed a pile of dust rolling down the street just after dawn anyway.

If Allesandro wasn’t really working with Gio’s best interests at heart, surely he would have been offed by his boss by now. Unless, my fevered mind insisted, Gio hadn’t
realised
what he was up to until tonight, when my ill-timed phone call had dropped him right in it…

In which case, my enigmatic, mood-swinging undead buddy could be being hideously tortured by his own clan right now.

The thought of him being tortured made me feel queasy. I hoped it wasn’t the case. But then if not, then surely Cloves was right and Allesandro was playing me like a flute for Gio.

Which do you prefer, Phoebe? The rebellious-against-his-evil-master yet now very dead or at least dying Allesandro, or the two-faced double-bluffing, treacherous but very alive Allesandro?

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Jesus, did I even care either way? The man was a stranger to me.

But I did care. He was my only viable link to the vampire world. The only way we were going to find out what happened to my charming supervisor, and why.

“Where are we?” I asked, looking around at the garage.

“My place,” Cloves said.

I must have looked shocked, because she became defensive.

“I could hardly take you back to your little flea-pit, could I? They’ll be crawling all over it.” I could imagine how little someone like Veronica Cloves wanted someone like me in her celebrity home.

“Now get the hell out of my car, Harkness. Your wet arse is warping the leather.”