Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (30 page)

It reminded me of an old anatomy lesson from when I was studying medicine in my youth, and corpses were opened for our observation. The figure’s legs were gone, removed mid-thigh, one of its arms the same. Its chest was held open, peeled back in the manner of a post mortem, the skirts of flesh pinned back like butterfly wings. Wires and tubes fed into the cavity. It had no jaw, and one eye had been removed clinically.

It dawned on me slowly, and must have to Coleman too, that this was Subject One. The thing which had so generously supplied our missing link, the genetic data which added to our own, and had made the Sentinels possible.

Was it even human? I could not say. But I almost dropped on the spot when I saw, even from this distance, its remaining bloodshot eye move slowly in its socket, roaming the room until it settled finally on us.

The thing was alive. Even in this lamentable condition, they were keeping this wasted abomination alive. Is this how they had supplied us with our samples? How it was still living, I had no idea. It was nightmarish to behold and in the piercing stare with which it fixed me and Coleman, I swear I detected such agony, such fierce and un-relenting pain, that it took my breath away.

Beneath that pain, though, I saw anger; a fury which seemed to somehow roll across the holding pens and break over us like a wave. How long had this thing been down here, this mystery medical breakthrough which had made our world-saving work possible? Surely not the entire five years while we worked blithely above? Perhaps longer, much longer, before our Development Team was selected and put to work here. In that stare was something terrible, and neither of us could remain a moment longer.

We did not speak of what we had seen to Trevelyan, Scott or Harkness. We told them the lab had been empty. There had been nothing down there.

Perhaps it is better to think that. I do not wish to tarnish our good work. Surely whatever individual sacrifices are made, the greater good outweighs them in the long stretch of history.

This was last night and we leave tomorrow, after we are debriefed. I do not know if the man, if it was a man, remains down there or if it will be moved as well.

On a final, perhaps unscientific note, I must add the unsettling dream I had, here on our final night. I dreamed I was once again in the lab on the thirteenth subfloor but there was a man there this time, standing in the holding pen. Not a monster, only somehow not a man either. Something else.

In my dream he spoke to me and told me that we had changed the world together, he and I, and that his children would tear down his enemies.

Dreams are such odd things. I know, of course, that this was nothing more than an anxiety dream brought on by the stress of our macabre discovery. It was in other ways ludicrous. Only in the madness of a dream would my addled mind replace a burned out mutilated corpse with a stern man’s bright, fierce countenance, and then give him of all things an Italian accent.

I will sign off now. In a way I will miss these logs. Trevelyan made all of us pose for a photograph today, our final day together. He says he is going to frame it for his daughter even though she will never know of our work here. None of our families will, even when the Sentinels go public, but he is still proud. We all are. Harkness had obtained champagne. We had a jolly time.

I will still be glad to see the back of the Norfolk base, however. It will be good to get back out into the shining future we have made possible and to live again.

On behalf of the Sentinel Development Team, this is Doctor Alistair Rutheridge signing off.

32

My hands were numb, holding the datapad there in the darkness of the alley. The words on the page dictated long ago, before the wars had started, before Tassoni had turned the Pale on mankind, blurred before my eyes.

I looked up to find Cloves and Allesandro both watching me silently. They were almost lost in the darkness. Cloves’ expression was hard to read. I knew she had already read these files herself. She had made the links. She understood.

“This is why they want us,” I said, forcing my voice to sound as normal as I could. “Whatever the Bonewalker is planning to do, whatever ‘magic’ the Black Sacrament are hoping will bring Tassoni back, they need the original DNA.”

I looked up at them both.

“They need the Development Team, the ones who made the Pale. My father, Trevelyan’s, Coleman’s, the others; they all gave their own genes to the project and mixed it with Tassoni’s.”

“The original message which came with Trevelyan’s teeth makes a little more sense, that’s for sure,” Cloves said darkly. “There will be payment, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Five sinners, five will pay.”

“They need us, somehow, to bring him back,” I said mostly to myself, still clutching the datapad. “They couldn’t get Coleman. He killed himself years ago. Trevelyan, he’s also dead from cancer. My own father died in the wars. So they took their children instead: Vyvienne Trevelyan, Jennifer Coleman, and me. The only member of the Development Team we know is still living is Marlin Scott. They tried for him, of course, but found him toothless. Now they have his son, Oscar.”

“And the sins of the fathers…” Allesandro said softly.

Cloves had obviously filled him in while I was reading the files.

I was still in shock. How could my father have never mentioned this to me? I was born after the collapse of the old world, the wars already raging. My mother dead, he was the only family I’d ever had. In the new world order he had found a new role in our society as a field medic. I had never known that the armies of the Pale against which he fought were partly his own creation, that they all on some level shared his DNA.

Shared
my
DNA…

A hideous memory resurfaced. Gio hadn’t been kidding when he had thrown me into the pit with the feral Pale under Carfax and instructed me to enjoy some family time. He knew so much. Who was involved, who to harvest. He didn’t have access to these files. What information was on them that they didn’t already know?

I wondered if this was this the reason the Epsilon serum had bonded with me successfully, because the genetic virus the Pale carried was partly me anyway. The same genetic footprint?

“What about Rutherford?” I asked suddenly. “What the hell happened to him?”

Cloves and the vampire looked blank.

“He was the other guy in the photograph I took from Vyvienne Trevelyan’s house, the Development Team line up,” I said. “It must have been the photo they talk about in these logs. We identified everyone else but the large guy with the beard must be Rutherford – the one who dictated these logs. Do the Black Sacrament already
have
his teeth? Did he die years ago? Did he even survive the war? We don’t even know if he had children. He and Coleman were the only ones who saw Tassoni at this production base of theirs and Coleman ended up offing himself, probably out of guilt at unleashing the Pale on the world. Did Rutherford do the same?”

“I’ve already run a remote trace on him in the archives from the workstation in my car,” Cloves said, shaking her head irritably. “There’s no intelligence on him after the wars. You have to remember, Harkness, when the world went to shit we had something of a mini Dark Ages. There wasn’t a whole lot of careful census taking going on. We lost a large portion of the population before we regained the upper hand and started to repel the Pale. A lot of people were never found; a lot of people died unburied.”

“We only gained the upper hand because
someone
realised Tassoni was still controlling the Pale,” I insisted. “
Someone
found him, what was left of him anyway. Wherever the military were holding him, they found him and finished him off. If it was Rutherford, he might still be alive.”

They were both looking at me questioningly.

“Well, it’s obvious to me that the Black Sacrament have already found him, or some direct descendant anyway. On the DataStream clip, it said five would pay – the five members of the Development Team, obviously – and when Gio had me under Carfax after they had taken Oscar’s teeth, he referred to me as the
last
offering.”

Cloves phone suddenly rang, startling us all. She stared at the incoming number, looking worried, which was an unusual expression to see on her face.

“It’s Harrison,” she said, seeing Allesandro’s questioning look. “My boss.”

We watched as she took the call, turning her back to us for a modicum of privacy. From what we could make out, she was being quite forcibly questioned about a fracas reported at her home address. Then there was some heated discussion about alleged Cabal involvement at the Carfax shootout the night before.

Cloves sounded contrite. It was unsettling to hear her sounding apologetic. I realised even hard-assed government power mongers have their own bosses; harder-assed have even more powerful ones.

She hung up, staring at me and Allesandro.

“Well, fuck us all,” she said after a moment.

“What now?” I asked.

Cloves looked furiously at me.

“That was my boss, Servant Harrison. You’ve met him, of course. He’s at Blue Lab right now. With the minister!”

“Who’s the minister?” I asked confused.

“Oh, you’ve met him too,” she said, “in our friendly little meeting, when we’d received the teeth of Trevelyan? Ministers are higher in the Cabal than even the highest Servants. They are only called in to oversee things when enough shit has hit the fan that it stops spinning altogether. Such as when a senior member of Blue Lab is kidnapped and her teeth gift wrapped to us, for instance.”

“The big fat guy?” I realised.

I had guessed he was the most senior of the three in the uncomfortable meeting we’d had. He had been the creepiest too; that overweight, sickly looking man, who slurred his words lazily like a bullfrog perched behind his desk..

“Yes, the big fat guy,” Cloves said through gritted teeth. “He’s at Blue Lab with Harrison because Blue Lab security footage flagged up a level one incident last night, and it landed on Harrison’s desk an hour ago.”

Her eyes flicked from Allesandro to me.

“Apparently, a GO strolled into the atrium, carrying an unconscious woman, disabled a security guard and broke into one of the labs.”

My face froze.

“Does any of this sound
familiar
to you?” Cloves said.

Allesandro made to speak but she held up a quivering finger in front of him.

“Just … don’t,” she said, using every vestige of self-control. “I don’t even want to know. It’s
not
my problem anymore. This is way above me if the Minister is aware of it. Harrison wants me at the lab, ten minutes ago, with the goddamn files we’ve been run all over for. He wants you two as well. I think you can figure out why.”

My stomach sank. Of course we wouldn’t have gotten away with it. How ridiculous I had been to think that we had somehow managed to sneak Allesandro in and out of Blue Lab without anyone seeing.

We had cleaned the lab, we had Mattie the security guard covered. But this was Blue Lab. Everything was monitored. It was what the Cabal did best. And now there was security footage, no doubt being added to my own manila file somewhere in the Liver Building.

“We have to go in,” she said, sounding defeated. “I’ve probably lost my job over this. The incident at Carfax, the fundraiser, being compromised at my home address…”

She shook her head in disbelief. I was expecting her to follow this up with something customary, like ‘I wish I’d never met you Harkness’, but to my surprise, she looked at me with something almost close to pity.

“But you … is there a rule you
haven’t
broken? A GO inside the lab for God’s sake? This is bigger than me now. You understand that, don’t you? I can’t
protect
you, not from this.”

I did understand. I still held the file in my hands. At least we could give the Cabal all the information we had. I had never asked for any of this private eye crap anyway. Maybe they could finish what we’d started and stop the Black Sacrament without me.

I was probably going to spend the rest of my life in quarantine, or worse. I could run, but where? We live in a walled city run by these people. It’s not like I could flee to the countryside.

My number had been well and truly called. I looked at Allesandro. I had no idea what they would do to him. I found myself caring about that more than I liked to admit.

I nodded to Cloves, her mouth set in a thin line, and handed the datapad back to her. Then we did the only thing we could.

We went to face the music.

33

Harrison sent a car to pick us driven by one of Cabal’s ghosts. As we climbed into the car, Allesandro told us he would follow on his bike. Cloves snorted with derision, clearly still utterly distrustful of the vampire.

“Of course you will, and that’s the last anyone ever saw of the mysterious vampire with the perma-tan,” she said waspishly.

He ignored her. As I climbed in next to her I looked back at him.

“You don’t have to come,” I said. “You could disappear.”

He shook his head and gave me his lopsided smile again.

“I’m not about to let you out of my sight again, Doctor,” he said, leaning down to the window. “You’re my investment, remember?”

He closed the car door for me, still smiling through the open window.

“You’ve said that before,” I said, frowning up at him out of the window. “What
are
you talking about?”

“He wants to be
clan
master
, you idiot,” Cloves piped up. “Isn’t it obvious? If the Black Sacrament are stopped and the charming vampire extremists are removed from his clan, there’s a spot open for the top job.”

I stared at the vampire, my eyes wide. I hadn’t considered his angle on all this.

“Seriously? This is why you saved me? All that deeply touching concern for my wellbeing, just so you can become lord of Sanctum?”

He shrugged.

“I was originally aiming for Trevelyan,” he admitted. “The Sacrament knew she was getting antsy. As we now know, she’d been digging around in archives and found out the truth. When I attended the lecture, I was hoping to meet her.”

He must have noticed the look on my face. He tilted his head to one side.

“If it’s any consolation, finding you there instead was a very pleasant turn of events.”

“It’s not,” I replied coldly. “And what if they’d got to me after Trevelyan? If they’d gotten my teeth next?”

He considered this.

“Well, there was always Oscar,” he reasoned. “Any one of you would do. He would have been harder to keep out of their hands, though, considering Gio already had his claws in the boy, using him to get to his father.”

Cloves smirked.

“Looks like
you
were the
easy
option, Harkness,” she said.

My face felt hot. I stared up at the vampire who was looking down at me, frowning slightly, as though he didn’t understand why I was angry or upset.

“I’m nobody’s gambling chip, Allesandro, least of all yours,” I said coldly. “Don’t follow us.”

I rolled up the window with a push of a button before he could reply, and the Cabal ghost drove us away down the slum street.

“How naïve can you possibly be?” Cloves said, with genuine wonder. “What on earth did you
think
he was so interested in? I told you, you can’t
trust
their kind. They have their own interests before ours.”

“Cloves,” I muttered, staring angrily out of the window. “Shut the fuck up, will you?”