Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (24 page)

“Oh, come
on
!” I complained aloud to the universe. “
Seriously
?”

This was the second Pale I had seen in as many days. The first had been behind toughened glass and sedated with nerve gas, and it had still scared the hell out of me. You can imagine how I felt at the bottom of a dark well full of corpses, with one of them circling me in the gloom, eyeing me hungrily.

Fuck. I was going to die. There were no two ways about it. The Pale killed. It was what they did – what they were made to do.

If I’d been holding a machine gun, I might have stood a slim chance against one of them in a confined space. As it was, armed with nothing but harsh language and the freshest meat this man-made ghoul had seen all day, I was well and truly shafted. No down-the-well pun intended.

I wondered briefly if it would be disrespectful of me to try and wrench off the rest of Jennifer Coleman’s leg and at least use that like a club. It wouldn’t stop the nightmarish bastard from tearing me to pieces, but I could at least go down fighting. I might even land a few good blows before it took me down. I could die kicking my murderer in the head with someone else’s foot.

The Pale growled deeply at me. It hadn’t attacked me yet. Was it sated, only just fed? Or just taking it’s time? I had nowhere to run after all.

I had time to wonder whether Trevelyan and Coleman had been dead already when their bodies were discarded down here, or if Gio’s crew had let their Bonewalker friend harvest their teeth and then just thrown the women down here, still alive. A little entertainment for the monster.

I hoped they were dead beforehand. Gio hadn’t bothered taking my teeth, whatever the hell they were needed for. He had Oscar’s to play with for now. He had wanted me down here beforehand, with this thing, for fun.

If I ever got out of here, I swore I would kill that vampire myself.

The Pale opened its mouth slightly, a long rattling hiss escaping its throat. I could see its breath clouding. It was cold down here. I braced and gritted my teeth as I saw the beast lower into a deeper crouch. It was getting ready to pounce, to throw itself at me. I had seconds to act.

Above me, the noise was getting worse. The vampires of the Black Sacrament had clearly not cooperated with the authorities. I heard something slam repeatedly, twice, three times. Someone was throwing themselves against the door up there, trying to shoulder it open.

I glanced upwards. The Bonewalker had turned away, no longer looking down but away from the well, at the door to the basement.

“Help me!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, hoping to hell that it was the Cabal guys at the door.

There was definitely a skirmish of some kind going on up there. Had they forced their way in?

“Hey, I’m down here!”

The sound of my voice seemed to startle the Pale. Did it regard my bellowing as a show of aggression? A warning? Whatever it thought, it didn’t like it. It roared at me – an inhuman, low shriek.

Above me came the sound of splintering wood, and then a familiar voice.

“Doctor!”

Was that Allesandro?

I couldn’t see the Bonewalker above me anymore. My whole attention was on the Pale, mainly because it had just made its move, throwing itself toward me through the darkness, jaws open, claws outstretched. Jesus, it was fast.

I threw myself to the floor, splashing into the water so that the abomination sailed above me. I slammed against Jennifer Coleman’s body and instinctively grabbed at it, pulling it into a macabre bear hug and rolling it over so that I was beneath it, the water almost closing over me. I felt the Pale land atop the corpse, heavy and urgent. It began to rip and tear into what it thought was its prey, as I rolled out from under the poor woman above me.

I would feel bad later. The way I saw it, she was already dead. She wouldn’t mind. I, on the other hand, wanted to stay alive as long as possible, even if that was only the next few seconds.

I crawled away through the muck on my stomach.

“Phoebe!”

The voice called out to me from above. It was definitely Allesandro. I heard struggling, was he fighting the Bonewalker?
Could
you even fight them?

I didn’t have much time to ponder this because the Pale, hunched over what was left of Coleman’s body that now resembled shredded pork, flicked its head my way, realising that I had escaped its attack.

There was nowhere left to run, no hiding. I wouldn’t get a second reprieve. It stood, its furious gimlet black eyes, like sparkling lumps of coal, were trained on me as gore dripped from its jaws.

There was a thump from above. The Pale and I both looked up at the same time to see the surreal sight of the Bonewalker and Allesandro tumbling down the well shaft towards us. Allesandro had his arms wrapped firmly around the Bonewalker.

He must have thrown himself at it, diving for it in a rugby tackle and driving both of them stumbling over the lip of the pit. He looked, as he descended, as though he were wrestling an outlandish oversized bat, as the Bonewalker’s black robes whipped about them.

They landed directly on top of the Pale, crushing it into the water in a confusion of limbs and struggling movement in the darkness. Water erupted, blinding me.

I had half pulled myself to my feet when out of the flailing pile of bodies, the evidently unharmed Pale disentangled itself and threw itself at me.

It hit me hard, slamming me into the floor, its solid, bristling weight above me. Its jaws snapped inches from my face, once, twice, as I thrashed to keep out of its range. And then it sank them into my collarbone.

The agony was immediate and unbearable. I felt it tear through meat, sinew and muscle until its sharp teeth scraped against my bone. I heard a scream, distant and horrifying. I didn’t immediately realise that it was coming from me. I felt its long claws puncture the skin of my upper arms where it was holding me fast. Each nail was like a slim knife, sliding into my flesh.

Then something landed on top of the Pale, yanking it away. Allesandro had just dragged me from the jaws of living death. I felt each blade-like claw tear out of me.

The vampire looked wild. His face was grazed and bloody, his hair drenched and plastered to his head. He had the Pale in a headlock, the creature roaring furiously and snapping at his arm. His teeth were grinding, fangs fully extended. He didn’t look much like a human there in the darkness. Pulling backwards, the two of them rolled away from me in a confused tangle.

My hands went to my throat, choking and coughing, and came away shiny with blood I was losing a lot. The pain was almost too much to bear and I knew I was going to black out soon. I couldn’t afford to do that.

I rolled onto my knees and crawled away from the vampire and the Pale, who were rolling around in the water, each trying to get the upper hand. Allesandro was strong but he had only taken the creature by surprise. It was adjusting now.

That was what they did. They adapted, they reacted. It was what made them such efficient killers. It was already gaining the upper hand. The Pale would kill him, there was no doubt about that.

Next to me, rising into a standing position, was the Bonewalker. Its robes were drenched but its expressionless mask was still in place. It seemed to survey the chaos around it with interest. It noticed me and though its dead black eye-holes seemed to pin me to the spot, it made no move toward me.

“Allesandro!” I shouted. The effort tore through my body. The Pale had cut me badly. Part of my rational science brain was telling me it was all over – there was no point struggling now. Even if the Pale didn’t kill me, I was as good as gone now.

It had bitten me, tore me up good. In a matter of hours or maybe less, the virus, the genetically engineered code of the Pale, would spread through my system, infecting me. I would become one of them, or else my body would reject the virus and collapse on a cellular level. Either way, to put it in proper clinical scientific terminology, I was well and truly fucked.

But I was damned if I was going to sit here and die quietly. I wasn’t going to let the one person who had come to try and help me get ripped apart.

As I watched, the Pale slashed at Allesandro, tearing through his sodden shirt and opening deep red parallel wounds across his stomach. The move would have disembowelled a human. Vampires were physically denser than us, but it still looked like it hurt.

The vampire went down, his head slamming against the flagstones under the water. The abomination stood, reached down and grabbed Allesandro’s head in its claws – it slammed the vampire’s skull against the floor three times. Allesandro went limp in its arms. Throwing its head back with a triumphant howl, the creature gathered my now unconscious saviour up in its arms and threw him like a light rag doll towards us.

The vampire landed at my feet in a twisted heap, raising a slurry of water over my knees. I stared down. His lips were bloody but I heard him moan faintly, his eyelids fluttering. He wasn’t dead.

I leaned down and put my hands under his armpits, heaving him upwards to his knees. He was larger than me and soaking wet so he felt as heavy as lead – a dead weight in my arms. Or an undead weight, I suppose. The blood loss was making me feel lightheaded and a little giddy.

I hoisted him up, wrapping one arm around his waist and holding him to me protectively, though the effort of doing so made my vision blur and threaten to fade altogether. I shook my head, trying to clear it, trying to ignore the searing pain now coursing through my body and spreading outward from my wounds like a fever.

The infection of the Pale was taking hold.

With my free arm, I reached up and gripped a handful of the Bonewalker’s robes, twisting the fabric around my hand tightly.

I looked up to see the GO looking down at me. Its mask regarded me solemnly, as though it had only just noticed the blood-soaked human woman kneeling next to it, cradling the half-conscious vampire lying sprawling at its feet. It seemed to regard us both with faint interest, as though observing lesser creatures in a detached manner.

“Get us out of here!” I shouted up at it.

It stared back at me blankly, its black eyes beyond the mask like dark mirrors.

“I know you can! If we stay here, we all die,” I spat. “You will too, you know. You might not be human but you’re physical. You have a body and that fucking thing is going to tear it apart as surely as it will mine and his.”

The Bonewalker looked over to the Pale, as though noticing it properly for the first time. The grey skinned monster was flexing its claws, looking at the three of us, sizing us up. Its weight shifted from foot to foot. It was preparing to jump for us. We had seconds before it was on top of us again.

“You will die down here too,” I insisted. “Move us! You know how. That what you do! You move things around. Take us out of here, or die down here with us. Do it!”

There was nothing I could feel under my fistful of robe that seemed like a normal body. But I held on tight, making it drag me and my vampire with it.

“Now!” I screamed.

The Pale leapt. I saw it leave the ground in a spray of water and sailing through the air towards us, a blind knot of aggression, fury and intent to kill. The Bonewalker’s hands were suddenly in view, long and white in the darkness. It made a small gesture in mid-air, like elegant tai-chi.

As the Pale descended onto us, I closed my eyes instinctively and braced for the attack, but then the world shifted. My stomach lurched, like when a rollercoaster drops you, and my ears popped.

There was suddenly silence around me. Cold kisses on my face and shoulders, soft and chill.

My eyes shot open. It was snowing. The flakes fell onto my face, onto the vampire before me, and onto the wet black robes of the Bonewalker.

We were outside. The pit, the Pale, the dead bodies and the slurry were all gone. The Bonewalker was standing in an inch of snow on a deserted side street, myself and Allesandro in a tangle by its feet, exactly as we had been a second ago.

I let go of the robe in shock and the GO moved slowly away from me, still staring down inscrutably through its mask. I couldn’t guess what it was thinking. It was utterly alien. It didn’t feel particularly hostile. I wondered why on earth it was working for Gio. Why did any of the Bonewalkers work for others, when they were so powerful?

I looked around frantically. The street we were on was no more than a large alleyway emptying out from the backs of shops with cold cobbles underfoot. I stared down at the cobbles incredulously, watching the snow turn red slowly, drop by drop. I didn’t immediately realise that it was my blood tinting the scene. I was bleeding from the throat, where the Pale had bitten me.

Infected
me.

“W—where?” I tried to ask.

At the end of the alleyway, I could see out into the street beyond. There was a lot of action out there. Several police cars were pulled up, and a few dark tinted unmarked vehicles that I guessed were Cabal. They were arranged haphazardly in the street, parked in a rough semicircle around what I saw was a church. I recognised the stubby square tower. It was Carfax, which meant we were on the corner of St Aldate’s on Cornmarket Street.

Suddenly, there came the muzzle flash of gunfire within the church. Was that where we had been? Beneath Carfax? Gio’s private torture room, right here in the heart of the city? Good transport links, excellent Wi-Fi and an en-suite monster pit in the basement.