Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (13 page)

17

I didn’t know much about Servant Veronica Cloves of Cabal, other than that she dressed in executive technicolor dominatrix chic, had a loud and garish car, and by all accounts, expensive but crass tastes. As a woman, she was professionally powerful enough to destroy me, and seemed to loathe me for the inconvenience I had lately been to her, thanks mostly to her rather sadistic boss.

If I had any preconceived notions of what her apartment would be like, I was wrong. My own tiny apartment was basically a messy pit, somewhere simply to sleep and eat in between my shifts at the lab. I wasn’t much into interior design. But Cloves was in the public eye. I wouldn’t have been surprised if her home had zebra-striped chaise-lounges, large ostentatious gilt mirrors and possibly a hideous modern flocked chandelier. All those graceless things which cost money, but proved over and over that money could not truly buy class.

I was surprised then, as the private, key-operated elevator finally opened on the top floor of the expensive high rise and I was practically pushed into her penthouse suite.

It was immense, a vast loft space. The far wall was entirely composed of sloping glass, but the room was rather understatedly decorated in creams and soft whites. Minimalist leather sofas looked rather lost in little islands of tasteful Art Deco furniture. The lighting was soft and carefully placed. To my right stood a tall open fireplace, fake of course, but tastefully rendered in angular white marble.

This room alone was five times the size of my whole flat. My feet sank into the light cream carpet, which was thicker and softer than my duvet. I was aware I was still dripping wetly onto it.

“Nice digs,” I said as Cloves slammed the door behind me and busied herself with a complicated looking alarm panel, effectively sealing us in. “So … this is what a Cabal salary gets you, huh? I am clearly in the wrong line of work.”

Cloves ignored me. I crossed the huge room, past the sofas and end tables, skirting a large glass-topped workstation, which held a screen much like my own at the lab – only far more advanced and expensive. It looked nothing more than a smooth sheet of glass opened on the desktop like a music stand. It probably cost more than most of my lab equipment.

Approaching the floor-to-ceiling window, I placed my hands on the glass wall and peered out into the night. New Oxford lay below us, a glittering nightscape in the darkness. We were above most other buildings here. This entire part of the city was built after the Pale Wars.

It had been countryside before, the sweeping green skirt of Port Meadow and Burgess Field, hugging old Oxford, defined by the stately flow of the Thames to the west. But that was then. Our city had expanded itself a lot post-war, before we had finally built the wall and sealed ourselves off from the horror which lay outside. Other high rises surrounded us, sleek towers of glass and chrome, the homes of the powerful, rich and lucky. I was nestled in the elitist real estate of New Oxford.

Beyond this district, I could make out the distant familiar roof-scape of the city I knew. The stubby fat finger of Carfax tower, floodlit at this time of night, looking more like a squat Norman castle than a church. The multi-pointed rocket ship of St Mary the Virgin was just visible from here, reaching against the sky like a crusted stalactite from the bosom of the university. The circular dome of the Radcliffe Camera downtown, and the wide dark unlit sweep of the Botanic Gardens, a patch of inky blackness in the glittering night city.

All of this lay below and before me, along with other, more recent additions to our fair city. In the far distance, near to the great dark high curtain of the wall itself, I could make out the militaristic sentinel which used to be called the Angel of the North, a guardian sculpture which now held court over the upper districts. Far south of here, I could see the Liver Building, rescued from a different city on the brink of collapse to the Pale years ago. It was just visible beyond the river. Smack in the middle of what once had been South Park. Relocated to New Oxford, It now served now as a lesser division of Cabal’s serving interests.

I had to admit, it was impressive what the Bonewalkers could achieve when they put their minds to it. Moving little pockets of time and space here and there, as though they were rearranging a jigsaw. It had been the only way to save some of the things which had once meant something to humanity.

We had salvaged what we could before the Pale destroyed them. The Pepys building for instance, swept up from Cambridge just before the city-wide fires which had razed that beautiful place to the ground three years ago, and re-deposited in the Oxford University grounds along with most of Magdalene College. It would have been a shame to lose it all to flames. We had gathered what we could. Each walled city of Britannia was now home to refugee pockets of the old world.

Some people feared the Bonewalkers. People will always fear power, and the Bonewalkers were certainly powerful. But without them, we could never have built the wall. And without the wall … well, that way lay rabid screaming death, didn’t it?

“It must be nice for you, to be able to stand here and look down on the rest of us,” I said to Cloves, without turning around.

“Hands off the glass, Harkness,” she responded curtly. “And I don’t appreciate that comment. I don’t know what issue you have with Cabal, or why you have it. We are Servants of the people of New Oxford.”

“All of them?” I asked, half to myself, still staring out at the stunning view. “Or just a select few?”

“You have a real problem with authority, don’t you?” she said, crossing to a chair.

She didn’t sit in it, but stood with her hand on its tall back. I turned to face her.

“I’m surprised that your attitude has not got you into trouble before now,” she sneered.

My eyes widened. I actually found this amusing.

“Trouble? Like this, you mean? You don’t consider this trouble enough?”

Her face was a mask of scorn.

“You don’t trust your own superiors,” she said accusingly. “That much is abundantly clear.”

I was too tired and strung out to be careful with my tongue.

“Right now, if I’m totally honest, I don’t know
what
to think,” I admitted. “My
superiors
have so far worked very hard to cover up the fact my boss has been kidnapped, tortured and, let’s face it, probably killed. They have bullied me into putting my own safety on the line because I’m the only person they know who actually
knows
a vampire. And they have me being babysat by you of all people.” I blew out my cheeks. “I don’t know if I trust you less than the bloody vampires. At least I
know
they are trying to kill me. They seem fairly straightforward.”

I wiped my nose.

“Some of them I mean.”

“Sit down,” Cloves commanded coldly.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time, and remaining standing just to be obstinate would have served no purpose other than to make me appear like a stroppy child, so I dropped onto a sofa. My legs were still jellified anyway.

“You think
we
are the bad guys here?” she said. “That maybe we’re as bad as every twisted GO out there? That perhaps you can trust your charming Italian more than you can trust me?”

She came around the chair and stood in front of me.

“Well, allow me to illuminate you, Phoebe. If you are having trouble telling who are the good people and who are the bad people, start with this simple equation.”

Her eyes were flashing with carefully controlled anger.

“
We
are people. They are
not
. It’s really that simple. We are human, and we fight and we strive to keep humanity what it is. What’s left of it…”

She pointed out of the window, presumably at vampirekind in general.

“They are
not
human. They are not
people
. They can
look
like people, they can
move
like people. But people do not do
this
to other people.”

She reached up and unfastened the elaborately decorative black choker she wore. It wasn’t until I saw her take it off that I realised I had never yet seen her not wearing it, even in DataStream shows.

She lowered her hands, holding the glittering beads, and I swallowed hard. Her neck, collarbone and throat was a riot of scar tissue. The woman looked as though she had been savaged by a wild dog. There had clearly been a lot of reconstructive work done, what looked like multiple surgeries, but the flesh was still a mess, with pale, wrinkled scars, one atop the next, making a strata of her skin.

Veronica Cloves stood watching me stare at her wounds. She looked oddly naked and defenceless without the choker on. Her imperfections utterly exposed. She hadn’t just been bitten. She had been gnawed on, like an old bone. She stared at me angrily, her eyes practically daring me to look away.

“A vampire did this to me,” she said, in a quieter voice. “A long time ago, before I was Cabal. Back when I thought they could integrate, that we were all basically the same underneath. He was charming, much like your sultry Italian friend. He was pretty too … And I was careless.”

She refastened the choker, hiding the hideous scars from view. I didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t want my sympathy of course; she had been proving her point.

“They are
not
people,” she said. “Not when the lights go out.”

She turned away from me. I leaned forward in my chair a little.

“What happened?” I asked. “To the one who did …
this
… to you?”

“I killed him,” she said simply, looking back. “The Cabal
are
the Servants of humanity. You may not like our methods, but we
will
protect the people of this city.
Whatever
it
takes
to do so, and that includes putting individuals in danger. For the good of many. We are perfectly willing to risk your safety, yes. Because what you have fallen into here is important. More important than you.”

She sneered. “If you can conceive of that.”

She stalked away, towards one of the doors which led off this main lounge.

“So what now?” I asked.

“It’s three in the morning,” she called back. “I strongly suggest you get some sleep. My techs should have finished decrypting Trevelyan’s files by morning. We’ll take things from there. And for God’s sake, take a shower – you look a mess. You can take the guest bedroom.”

“We’re staying
here
?” I asked incredulously.

If you had told me a day ago that I would be having a slumber party with a high ranking Cabal member, I would have laughed in your face.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re hardly my ideal house guest, but for practicality’s sake, it’s safest,” she said, pausing at the door. “The whole building complex is warded. It’s easier to break into Blue Lab than it is to get in here.”

She shut the door firmly behind her, leaving me alone in her magnificent penthouse, which I was trying to not think of as her evil mastermind lair. She hadn’t even offered me a nightcap. How rude. Warded, eh? So the Cabal had Bonewalkers on payroll? That was unexpected. They were the only ones with enough power to ward a building, which in basic terms involved enclosing it in a bubble of space and time which was impassable for GOs.

Either Cloves was more paranoid than I thought about the perceived GO threat, or she knew more than I did about things.

Face
it
,
Phoebe
, I told myself,
everyone
knows
more
about
things
than
you
do
right
now
. I was pretty sure Veronica the Vampire Slayer wasn’t telling me everything she knew about our current situation.

I glanced over at her workstation. The idea of firing it up and snooping around in her private files occurred to me, but only fleetingly. No doubt she would have firewalls and encryption in place that made my own look like the old world’s Hotmail, with ‘password’ as my password. Plus, I was too tired to try.

I sat up for a while in the silent room, staring out at the cityscape, curled on a sofa with my knees drawn up. I was wondering if Lucy got home okay.

Allesandro had told me he had got her out, before the alarm had been pulled. But then he could have been lying about that. Why would he have concerned himself with my friend? It would be a surprisingly thoughtful thing to do, and as Cloves and her raggedly chewed neck demonstrated, the GOs were not people. Not really. How had he even known I was there with a friend anyway? I hadn’t mentioned it to him when we met on the dance floor.

I checked my phone, which had spent the evening tucked into the extremely tight leather pants I had borrowed from Lucy. There was no signal here. That would be the building wards. Landlines only I guessed. No missed call either. I hadn’t really expected there to be.