Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (7 page)

13

Cloves had dumped me unceremoniously outside my tiny flat, giving the street and the coffee shop-cum-cyber café a disdainful once over as she did so.

“You actually live here?” she asked, unable to keep scorn entirely out of her voice, if she was even trying to. “Above a café?”

“Such is the glamorous life of a Blue Lab toxicologist,” I replied unapologetically as I finally got out of the car. “Maybe you can suggest a pay rise in my next review.”

Cloves’ face did not crack. “Listen to me, Harkness,” she growled. “I want you to check in with me tonight, as soon as you’ve done whatever it is you plan on doing. You’re on my payroll now. Don’t do anything stupid.”

For a moment I thought she was concerned for my safety, but then realised her own ass was on the line as my babysitter. Cloves seemed to be a woman used to getting results, and definitely used to being obeyed by her Cabal underlings.

“And there I thought it was
you
who were at
my
disposal,” I said lightly. “I’ll call you from the club if I need a ride.” I slammed the door before she could reply, and she peeled away with a squeal of furious tyres.

*

Later, I sat nestled in the battered old armchair in my lounge, a cup of much needed hot chocolate in my lap. I have few pleasures in life, but imported cocoa, hard to come by in our day and age, is one of my guilty luxuries. I took a deep breath and flipped open the manila file.

There was a photograph attached to the inside cover with a paperclip. A covert-looking shot of Allesandro, evidently taken at the R&D presentation the night before. I studied the photo. He was certainly a striking figure. I studied it some more, for the sake of thoroughness. People tend to avoid outright detailed inspection of others when actually face-to-face. It’s a bit rude and tends to make one look like a nutter. Thankfully though, technology has saved the voyeuristic day, and now you can stalk whomever you like with relative impunity. With this in mind, I flicked through to see if there were any other photos. Nada. It didn’t give me enormous faith in the spying potential of Cabal if the only photograph they had of this GO was from the same function where I had met him. I had been expecting years’ worth of impressive surveillance. A full dossier on his every movement. No such luck. It was evident with every passing moment that I would be flying blind.

Subject
142531

Designation
GO
anima
-
mortis
.

Colloq
:
Vampire

Age
:
undetermined

Origin
:
undetermined
. (
Suggested
Italian
/
Caecilian
/
Hispanic
origin
?–
tbc
)

Known
associates
:

Subject
476421

Subject
343465

Subject
763541

Subject
244356

Subject
432126

Subject
145552

Current
loc
:
New
Oxford
,
Saint
Giles
,
Neo
-
Vampire
-
District

Other
known
/
suspected
Pre
-
wars
loc
:
Geneva
/
London
/
Florence

The
genetic
other
known
as
Allesandro
(
no
known
surname
)
currently
resident
and
working
under
the
GO
Registration
Act
2017
in
New
Oxford,
west
of
the
reclaimed
Cambridge
Campus
site
.
Believed
to
be
employed
under
subject
145552
in
the
GO
entertainment
industry
.
Currently
resident
at
sanctum
/
e
&
c
.
No
known
undesirable
activity
.
No
criminal
record
post
wars
.
Identifying
marks
,
none
.

There was nothing else.

I flipped the page, just to check the back sheet was indeed blank. It was.

Seriously? This was intel? About as useful as a thumbnail sketch. For a start, I had no idea who the other ‘subjects’ were. I assumed this meant there were other manila folders somewhere in Cabal’s archives, but without access to them these numbers it was all meaningless to me. Other GOs perhaps?

They knew where he worked, of course. Every GO residing in New Oxford and every one of the other free towns was required to register and be on record, but this was hardly rocket science. The man had given me his business card, for God’s sake; he clearly wasn’t in hiding.

No rap sheet. He seemed to have stayed off the law’s radar. Undesirable activity, as far as vampires were concerned, was human attack. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, the GOs generally dealt with it internally, swiftly and sternly. It was bad PR for both sides, considering they were picketing for equal rights. A rogue human attack could set things back years, and the great and good of the GO cause had little patience for any of their own kind who were unable to keep their fangs behind their lips.

No tattoos either. This didn’t shed any light on anything either, although I admit part of me was oddly disappointed with the news.

Don’t judge me. I never said I was Snow White.

I flipped the useless file closed irritably and finished my hot chocolate in as angry a manner as is possible when slurping hot molten goodness. I burned the roof of my mouth, which only made my mood worse.

Truth be told, I was shook up. Scared and well out of my depth. It wasn’t just the fact of what had happened to my supervisor, which was horrific in itself, or the fact that my bosses were trying to hush the whole thing up. It wasn’t even that I had been press-ganged into this unwanted new ‘promotion’ of unofficial Blue Lab Snoop. It was that I was having to lie by omission to my team. It was that I was well and truly out of my – admittedly narrow – comfort zone. Perhaps most of all, it was that despite Cabal’s seeming faith in me to be a team player, the very private conversation I had held with the vampire Allesandro at the lecture put me in a very difficult position.

He had told me bad things were coming. That
they
would need someone on
our
side of things. I had apparently been hand-picked by the other side as well.

Gosh, I was popular all of a sudden. Go me!

I hadn’t revealed the details of this exchange to Harrison, Cloves or their senior, of course. I did retain some small sense of self-preservation, after all, but what did this make me? An unwitting vampire conspirator? Some kind of double agent, a go-between for two very suspicious and unfriendly teams. I wasn’t sure quite what I had done to get myself dragged into this odd mess, but I was feeling very sulky about it.

I had been twirling the business card Allesandro had slipped into my pocket, flipping it over and over in my fingers while I stared out of the window from my perch on the old armchair, furious with the world at large. Now I stared at it.

The telephone number, and the handwritten message, in frankly very un-gothic biro: ‘
When
you
need
me
–
A
’

Sighing, I dialled the number.

It was still daylight hours, so the young female voice which answered was undoubtedly human. I had assumed, and she confirmed, that the number on the card was the number for the vampire club.

The nocturnal GOs often had human staff to do their day work for them. Sanctum was a vampire club, run by them for the burgeoning human tourist trade, but it had human staff for such mundane day-to-day tasks as table bookings, taking deliveries, all those pesky things which had to be done under the sunshine (such as it ever was in Britannia).

The woman on the phone sounded breathless and sultry. Professionally so. In my opinion, she was trying a little too hard, but I reasoned it had taken her a while to answer the phone when I’d called, so for all I knew she was out of shape and had to run up a flight of stairs to answer. Probably corsets were involved. I decided not to judge.

I enquired after Allesandro and was told he was ‘resting’, which was euphemism for the strange paralysis which affects all vampires from sunup to sundown. It’s more than just a heavy slumber. They are literally dead to the world and no good to anyone, unless you needed a door propped open.

I asked the breathy staff member to pass on a message that I would be calling in the club this evening. When she asked to take a name for the message, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure if Allesandro had approached me representing the wider GO community, or if his … interest, if that was the word, was of an individual nature. In the end I told her to just tell him the doctor called to make an appointment and hung up before she could question me further.

The thought of my actually attending a vampire club filled me with quiet, toe-curling discomfort. I didn’t even like
human
clubs. The vampire district which had sprung up around St Giles was notorious. The human clientele who went there were generally either very gothic, in it for the glamour-by-association, or hopeless vamp-worshippers, rather sad and desperate people half-hoping to be chosen to be bitten and feverishly seeking eternal life and beauty.

This never happened by the way. Period. Vampires are not flighty when it comes to turning humans. If they were, there would be a hell of a lot more of them. The very fact that they were so notoriously picky proved that there was at least some form of common sense at work in the GO community. If you face spending the rest of eternity in someone’s company, it’s unlikely you are going to choose a drunken nightclub patron with an Anne Rice obsession and a penchant for morose internet poetry. That would get old fast, even if the individual didn’t.

Even if the vampire lovers went home without their dreams of eternal life coming true, they still had a good time. The vampires had no problem entertaining said people, as long as they were happy to buy drinks and part with their money. Business was business.

Still, I didn’t fit into the usual clientele by
any
stretch of the definition. I didn’t even think I had anything suitably dark and moody to wear. A quick inspection of my rather capsule wardrobe confirmed this. I had work clothes, sweats for jogging, pjs, and some rather older work clothes which had been relegated to ‘weekend wear’. As I may have intimated already, I don’t have time for much of a social life. Astonishingly, I found I was clear out of blood red corsets, leather pants and PVC stiletto boots.

I had a moment’s shining hope when I thought I had found a suitable off the shoulder black top, but my euphoria was quickly crushed when I pulled it off the hanger and discovered it was a long relegated-to-the-closet number which actually had a line of stylised Hello Kitty silhouettes along the waist.

What the hell I had been thinking when I bought that, I will never know. I wasn’t cute enough to pull off the Hello Kitty look. Neither were most people I saw wearing Hello Kitty to be honest.

There was nothing else for it. Going completely against every natural fibre of my being, I admitted I needed help. After pacing my flat a few times, listening to the hubbub of the cafe below drift up through my floorboards, I dialled the only person I could think of who might be able to solve my pending crisis.

Lucy answered on the second ring. It was past six by now, and she couldn’t have been long back home from the lab.

“Doc!” She sounded surprised to hear from me. I had never called her before, so I wasn’t offended by this. “Everything okay? We missed you today. Weird day all round, huh?”

“Yeah, sorry about that, I had to go over some files for the big bosses in Trevelyan’s absence,” I said apologetically, which was only half a lie so I didn’t feel too bad. “Listen, Lucy, this is kind of a random question, I know, but are you doing anything tonight?”