Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (23 page)

Helena’s eyes were like diamond, drilling into my head.

“Now then,” she said softly. “Are the files decrypted yet?”

“Yes,” I answered, against my will.

“Wonderful,” she said encouragingly. “See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Now … who has the files right now?”

“Veronica Cloves,” I heard myself say. The side of my face stung as though I’d just been lashed by a whip. Helena wanted more. “She’s a Cabal Servant. She’s just finished decrypting them.”

“And where is she now, honey?” Helena asked me lightly, probing gently like a high-school counsellor.

I tried to fight back but my mind was like a dandelion in a hurricane. She blew it apart and pulled the truth out through my lips.

“I don’t know. She was at the fundraiser, but she didn’t have the files with her, at least I don’t think so. They’re probably at the Liver, Cabal HQ.”

“Why don’t we just use the old man?” Jessica said. “Make him bring Cloves in, hand over the files that way.”

Gio shook his head. He was stalking the room, his arms folded.

“He’s too far gone,” he said. “It’s becoming less and less convincing. I don’t want to risk it and have Cabal come down on us, not when we’re so close. Better to get them ourselves.”

“We cannot storm Cabal HQ,” Jessica pointed out.

“She’d back them up at home.” Helena reasoned, glancing at Jessica and Gio for a split second before staring back at me. “Where does she live, Doctor?”

I gave her the address, selling Cloves up the river against my will.

“But you won’t get in. The building’s warded.”

“
We
can’t, you stupid girl,” Gio said behind her, “but my hired chaps can. They’re as human as you are.”

“Thank you,” Helena said to me, sounding truly grateful, as though I had been playing nice and not just had my brain picked through entirely against my will.

“Go to Hell,” I managed to say.

Her sweet smile didn’t falter. She walked away and I blinked rapidly as she released my mind. Sweat was beading on my forehead, cool against my hot skin.

Damn it. Now they don’t need me anymore. If I was no further use for information, then…

As if on cue, the door behind the trio of vampires opened again and another figure entered, flanked by two male vampires I hadn’t seen before. The other members of the Black Sacrament, I assumed. But I wasn’t interested in them. It was the apparition standing between them that held my eyes.

My blood ran cold. I wouldn’t have believed that I could find anyone other than Gio the scariest thing in a room, but the person who entered was terrifying.

Almost seven feet tall and cloaked from head to toe in a long black hooded robe, it looked like the mad monk Rasputin. Looming into the room larger than life, its face, like with all of its kind, was hidden entirely behind a white porcelain mask with blank, expressionless features.

Whenever I had seen these GOs on the DataStream or in history vids, they had always reminded me of the old Japanese stage demons, like actors clad in Noh masks, their expressions frozen. Through the eyeholes of the terribly blank face, I could see its eyes. They were inky black from lid to lid, like pools of tar. Shark’s eyes.

It glided into the chamber, its feet – if it even had feet – invisible beneath the long robes. Its hands were tucked into its voluminous sleeves like a Gregorian friar. Moving slowly, like a ghost or a deep-sea creature drifting along the current, it was utterly silent.

It was a Bonewalker.

I had never seen one in real life before. We didn’t know a whole lot about them, unlike the other GOs.

A vampire was a vampire at the end of the day, and those who called themselves Tribals fit pretty closely with our werewolf mythology. But the jury was out on what the hell Bonewalkers actually were. Some suggested they were a kind of ghost, a spirit made flesh. Others, including some very vocal Mankind Movement supports, insisted they were demons walking the earth. I was wondering, in the light of recent events, if they were the truth behind the myth of the Tooth Fairy.

They rarely spoke. They came and went as they pleased, and seemingly on their own whims, deciding their own allegiances.

Cabal had dealings with Bonewalkers. They had used their powers to move a lot of Britannia’s furniture around. No one knew what the price had been or what the Bonewalkers had wanted in return. A lot of people, myself included, agreed that Cabal had balls just for engaging with the otherworldly entities. But our government were not the only ones who had made contracts with them.

Marlin Scott himself had managed to commission the services of a Bonewalker somehow, in the course of making his fortune. Their unique talents, bending and reordering space amongst them, had enabled him to develop the technology for the wall in the first place.

Again, no one could say for sure what they had asked in return for their contribution to his work, if anything. Some of the more hysterical tabloids had suggested Marlin has sold his soul for wealth and fortune. It was ironic really that he was now such a staunch opposer of all GOs in his old age, when the bell was quite literally tolling. Maybe the Bonewalker would be paying him a visit again someday soon.

The Bonewalker drifted further into the room, its black eyes silently taking in the three vampires and then me as it towered over us all. I felt very vulnerable in my chair.

It tilted its head slowly and questioningly at Gio, who looked uncharacteristically demure in its presence.

“We have what we need from this one,” the vampire said, gesturing to me. “She is the last offering. What of the boy? Has our dentist upstairs done his work?”

The Bonewalker parted its hands. It had been carrying a small black package in its sleeves. It held this out toward Gio silently. Its hands were long and thin, with elongated fingers.

The vampire smiled down at the package as though it were a Christmas present.

“Good. Excellent. We will deliver those, like the others. And then,” he smiled coldly at me, “we will take the last of our ingredients.”

I stared at the ghoulish apparition of the Bonewalker, dominating the room like a silent grim reaper, and at the small box it carried. I knew instantly what was in the box.

Teeth. Oscar’s teeth.

Did this mean he was dead? I had no idea. But I knew I was next.

Gio crossed the room toward me, dwarfed by the Bonewalker which had turned its empty, masked face toward me and was regarding me with cool, inscrutable indifference.

“Sadly,
you
will never know how the story ends, my dear Phoebe,” he said, baring his teeth at me.

He dragged me to my feet roughly and turned me around. For the first time, I saw what lay behind me in the centre of this subterranean room, a deep stone well flush with the floor. My chair had been right on the brink of it. A dark abyss. The animal smell I had noticed was wafting up from it.

Just when I was wondering what could make this happy gathering even more fun – vampires, a Bonewalker, a creepy dungeon, a less than gentle dentist waiting to meet me. Ah yes, of course, a big black well of despair. That’s the ticket.

“I need your teeth,” Gio growled, “but we have a little time to play yet. It doesn’t matter to me what state the rest of you is in.”

His breath was hot on my neck. I stared down into the pit, my eyes wide.

“I don’t like being made a fool of twice. I think it’s time for you to find out what happened to your friends.”

Before I could react, he pushed me lightly in the back. For one horrible, timeless moment, I teetered on the lip of the stone pit. From the corner of my eye, I could see the Bonewalker watching me. Its pale mask was stone, its black eyes glittering. Helena and Jessica were behind it, both leaning against the sofa looking thoroughly unconcerned, as though this were the most normal thing in the world. Jessica was still sipping her steaming coffee.

And then I fell – arms flailing, into the darkness below with an unheroic shriek.

25

The pit wasn’t as deep as I’d imagined. I fell for maybe a couple of seconds before I hit the floor painfully in the darkness, jarring my knees badly as I fell, sprawling on my front and grazing the skin off my hands.

I managed to land partially on my side, preventing my head from smacking against the floor but winding myself terribly in the process. I lay gasping for a few seconds. The ground beneath my hands was wet. It was two or three inches deep in rank water or sewage, I couldn’t tell which.

I rolled painfully onto my back and stared up at the circle of light above me. At least I hadn’t broken anything. Gio was silhouetted against the well’s mouth, and he gave a little wave.

“Enjoy your family time,” he called down to me. “We’ll be back to pick up the teeth shortly.”

I couldn’t have replied if I’d wanted to; the air had been knocked out of my lungs. I forced myself to get to my knees despite the screaming pain.

So much for feeling hale and hearty.

I was guessing my miraculous healing after the bike accident had something to do with Gio feeding from me. Had it mended me? With the first moment’s leisure I’d had since waking up, my aching hand went to my neck. I’d expected a ragged wound, but there was nothing I could feel there other than two small lumps, tender to the touch. Vampire bites, nothing more. If I hadn’t just been thrown down a pit of death, I’d be feeling fit and ready to take on the world.

The stench down here was terrible. In the darkness, strange shapes surrounded me, lumps on the wet floor. Piles of garbage?

Before I could investigate, I heard a commotion above. Raised voices. Were the vampires arguing amongst themselves?

And then I heard a phone ringing. The everyday sound seemed ridiculous in this setting. The tinny sound of Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’ floated down to me – just the opening bars, over and over. It was my ringtone.

I make no apologies. Retro pre-war classics are not to be sneered at.

The bastards had my phone up there, probably taken when I’d been grabbed, and now someone was calling me.

No one
ever
called me.

“Boss,” a male voice said, up in the room. “We have a situation upstairs.”

I was guessing another member of the Sacrament.

“What are you talking about?” Gio’s voice demanded, over the electro pop. “Will someone turn that damn thing off?!”

I heard the clatter of heels across the flagstones – Jessica I guessed – and the ringing phone stopped.

“There are people outside, upstairs in the street,” the new male vampire was saying, sounding worried. “A lot of them. I think … I think they’re Cabal.”

A flurry of expletives filled the room above me. I struggled unsteadily to my feet in the muck. They all started talking at once.

“How?” Gio demanded silencing the others. “No one could know we are here!”

“Gio, we need to deal with this, now,” Helena’s voice was calm and reasonable as always. “They’ve no reason to come down here. But if the Cabal are snooping around—”

“I’ll fucking deal with them,” Gio snapped. “Get upstairs, all of you. They can’t possibly know we have the boy and the woman here. There’s no way they could. We weren’t followed. I’ll get rid of them.”

I heard them all leave. The door slammed.

Leaving me alone in the dark pit.

I was panicking more than a little. But if what they said was true, if Cabal were here (wherever
here
was) and snooping around Gio’s secret den…

A tiny glimmer of hope ignited in my chest.

They would want to come in, look around. The Cabal had the right to do that everywhere, all as part of the common interest legislature. And if the vampires of the Black Sacrament resisted or refused, there would be trouble. You didn’t refuse Cabal.

Had the cavalry really arrived? Tracked me here somehow? I had no idea how anyone could. Then, up there in the room I had fallen from, my phone started to ring again.

Of course, my mobile, I thought. GPS.

Vampires, for all their insistence that they had moved with the times, apparently were not that up on basic tech.

It would be Cloves behind it no doubt, tracking my whereabouts like a true government snoop. For once I was grateful for her stalking me. She must have had my phone tapped. I wondered if she was here in person or if she had just sent a fleet of Cabal ghosts, hopefully armed to the teeth.

As I stared up, a black shape suddenly leaned over the lip of the pit. It was the Bonewalker. It hadn’t left with the others. Was it staying behind to guard me? Or just to creep me the hell out?

The sight of the GO staring down at me like an empty-eyed corpse startled me, its face as unsympathetic as a store mannequin. I stepped backwards, losing my footing in the pit, and fell over one of the large misshapen lumps. I lay sprawled in the muck again, spitting out rancid water and cursing the creepy shit above me with every foul word I could think of.

“I suppose you think that’s funny, do you?” I yelled up furiously. My voice was cracking with fear. “Well screw you, you big silent bed sheet-wearing fuck!”

My hand grabbed at the lumpy mass to steady myself, and I froze. I had grabbed a forearm. Shakily, I felt along the length of the cold wet limb, my eyes straining to see in the darkness.

I had just fallen over a body.

A wispy nodule atop what I guessed was the torso bobbed at my grasping fingers and, at my fumbling, the head of the corpse wobbled on its neck and fell with a crack to face me.

I screamed.

It was a good scream. I didn’t know I could scream like that. People did in old black and white horror movies, but I had always thought it was a little over the top. Apparently as I now discovered, when occasion demanded, it was pretty bloody fitting.

It was difficult to make out in the darkness, but I was staring at the ravaged, bloody-mouthed face of a young woman. Her blank, staring eyes were wide, already covered with a filmy cataract of death; her face leered at me like a monster from a haunted house, the lips and chin coated in a thick crusty beard of dried blood. I dropped the dead arm and scooted backward in the muck on my rear. Goosebumps were fluttering up my arms.

Her head had long matted dreadlocks, glued together with filth and blood. She was even still wearing her ultra-hip glasses, though they were askew on her face in a way that would have been comical if she hadn’t been so extremely dead and extremely close to me.

There was no mistaking the identity of this body. I had seen her face on the DataStream only yesterday morning at Cloves’ apartment. This rotting, disfigured corpse was Jennifer Coleman, the GO activist. Her teeth may well be sitting in a box at Blue Lab, but the rest of her was inches from me in a stinking charnel pit, merrily decomposing.

I covered my mouth to cut off my scream, my hand shaking uncontrollably. I almost bit my fingers off. Far above me, I was dimly aware of loud noises in the building above; shouts and crashes above the basement. Was a there a struggle going on up there? What the hell was happening? Were the Cabal storming the building?

I risked a look upwards. In the basement room at the top of the well, all was calm. The Bonewalker still stared down at me, utterly unmoved by my macabre discovery. I wondered if the body here was its handiwork.

I had shuffled back so far into the darkness that my back hit another soft object. I jumped away from it with a yelp. My nerves were utterly gone. I turned, wide-eyed.

This second lump was a body as well; face down in the water, its arms and legs splayed at odd angles and its ample frame bunched up. It looked as though it had been either unconscious or dead when it was thrown in the pit. From the smell, I’d say it was definitely dead now.

I couldn’t see its face, but I saw that one of its legs was missing a shoe. Oh dear God.

Swallowing the urge to cry uncontrollably and vomit at the same time, which would have been neither brave nor useful, I forced myself to inch back toward the bloated, waterlogged corpse instead.

Through some tremendous overriding of natural instinct, I kicked at the shoulder a few times with the toe of my shoe, each time uttering a small ‘ew ew ew’ noise of revulsion. Ultimately, I made the body roll over in the shallow water so it lay face up.

I slowly lowered my still trembling hand from my mouth.

“Oh Vyvienne,” I breathed, staring at the ruined face in the darkness.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that the wide, empty stare or the sunken, toothless mouth, bloody as though it had been painted with too much glossy lipstick.

I had found Trevelyan at last. What was left of her.

“I’m so sorry.”

Most people have wished their manager dead at least once during a particularly frustrating day at the office. I was no different, but this was not an end I would have wished on my worst enemy. She had never been much of a looker in my opinion, but having the inside of your face removed and then floating face down in sewage for a couple of days was never going to make much of an improvement.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that face. Thank God for the darkness.

I was shaking all over. Gio and his Black Sacrament buddies had taken these women, torn out their teeth and thrown them away like garbage down this godforsaken pit.

We were nothing to them. We weren’t people. We were offerings, just lumps of meat to be harvested. And now they had Oscar and me too. I didn’t want to end up like this.

I wouldn’t even be in this mess if Trevelyan hadn’t gotten me involved. Obviously she had known something about our fathers’ past which I did not. I only knew my father had been a biologist. It’s partly the reason I went into science myself; to honour his memory. But by the time I was born, our world had changed. He was drafted into the wars as an Army Medic. He was an old man when he died, leaving me clueless. I wish I’d spent more time hacking her system, although all that had been left was the Military Application details. I was guessing whatever was going on was to do with a different department she had been involved in. What had they been? Archives and Development?

I had lost the photo I had stolen from her house somewhere in the chaos at the library, but I remembered what it had said underneath.

Me
and
the
Development
Team

What the hell did you know that I didn’t, Trevelyan?

I fought between the twin urges to cry over her body with horror at her death, and kicking it repeatedly in frustration.

Above us, the Bonewalker still stared down impassively, and beyond the door I heard more shouting and what sounded like muffled gunfire. My eyes roamed around the pit. They were becoming adjusted to the darkness down here.

It was a small space no more than twenty feet across, an oubliette at the bottom of the well shaft. There was no way in or out that I could see. The crumbly walls were too slick with slime and water to consider climbing. And besides, I doubted the Bonewalker would just let me haul myself out at the top. Although it might. Who knew what their kind were actually thinking?

Against my instincys, I forced myself to look at the corpses of the two women. For God’s sake Phoebe, they’re just dead bodies. You’re a Doctor, it’s not like you haven’t seen dead people before. Get a grip.

And that’s when my roaming eye saw that one of the late Jennifer Coleman’s legs had been gnawed on. It was a ragged, bloody stump. Interesting fact about vampires: they don’t eat human flesh. They will drink you dry if you let them and sometimes, I had most recently discovered, even if you didn’t. However, they weren’t, as far as I knew, much into the habit of ripping off chunks of flesh to eat.

Beyond Coleman’s body, I noticed another dark shape, a lump hunched against the wall. As I noticed it, I saw that it wasn’t another body, not a dead one anyway.

It was something crouched, very still in the darkness-now that I had seen it, I realised that its chest was moving quickly. It lurked in the shadows, watching me with interest. Quickly I realised, it was the source of the animal smell.

I moved backwards, very,
very
slowly, barely making a ripple in the fetid sludge. Its head twitched and I froze, watching as it cocked its head to one side as though it were sniffing blindly for me.

I gave it a moment and then moved slowly away again, my heart thudding in my chest. I tried to manoeuvre so that the remains of Jennifer Coleman were between me and the thing, but it also moved forward, slowly, stealthily. It was stalking me in the darkness. It came toward me enough that the dim light which fell from the well shaft above threw some faint illumination on its shape.

It had bald, skull-like features, as though the bones were protruding against its tightly drawn, mottled grey skin. It was naked as a babe with scrawny, sinew covered arms and legs, and an emaciated sunken chest.

Slowly, it slithered on all fours in my direction. Its lower face was all long sharp teeth, grinning like a demon in the darkness. Its eyes were dark pits.

A Pale.

Gio and his buddies were keeping one of the Pale in this pit as a pet. Vampires, Bonewalkers, and now this?