Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (25 page)

The Bonewalker, for reasons I couldn’t understand, had done exactly what I had asked. It had moved us from the pit beneath the cellars under Carfax to street level, just a little way from the action.

I watched the Bonewalker take in the scene at the end of the alleyway; the chaos of the firefight within the church, its dark windows occasionally blossoming with muzzle flashes, the straggling crowds of rubberneckers it was attracting. It seemed to reach a decision.

Turning to look down at Allesandro and myself one last time, it took another step away from us and simply vanished. It faded away almost instantly, like a shadow blown apart. The last thing to go was the mask, which floated in mid-air alone for a millisecond before disappearing altogether.

We were alone in the snow. Allesandro coughed, his head resting in my lap as I knelt sprawled in the shadows.

“We’re alive?” he asked weakly.

I couldn’t speak, so I nodded down at him. My body was racked with agony from my infected wounds and it seemed to be getting worse by the second.

“Thank you for coming for me,” I managed. “… I got bit.”

He forced himself into a sitting position, his eyes widening with alarm.

“The creature?”

I nodded again.

“’Fraid so … Hurts…”

My voice was coming in a croak. I was finding it hard to form coherent sentences in my head now. I knew what this meant. The virus was spreading, much faster than I had thought.

I could feel something building deep inside me, a latent rage, and I knew it was growing. It would get bigger and bigger until it ate me whole and nothing else was left. My mind falling apart as it took over. It wouldn’t stop until I became one of them. One of the Pale.

Allesandro rolled off me and to my amazement, he managed to stand, bracing himself against the brick wall of the alleyway. His clothes dripped with the filth from the well. His hairline was bloody, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“You can stop it,” he insisted. “The infection, you can stop it.”

I stared up at him.

“There’s no cure,” I said. “I’m sorry … if you wasted your evening.”

I felt drunk, not all there. It seemed such a shame to me that he had gone to all this trouble for nothing. My beautiful would-be rescuer.

“This makes three times you’ve tried to save me now … Is it a hobby for you? Didn’t work out so well … in the end.”

I could hear my words slurring.

The vampire reached down and lifted me roughly by my elbows, dragging me upright. I howled in agony, but he ignored my cries.

“Third time’s the charm,” he grinned, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Epsilon. I was at your lecture Doctor, I know your work. You must try.”

I shook my head, sending spasms of pain shooting down my neck.

“Not a cure, just … a … retardant,” I said. “Plus … Boom.”

I tried to convey a rat exploding, but I didn’t feel coherent enough to do so. I knew I was dead. I had gotten him out alive, or undead – whatever he was. In one piece anyway, more or less. That would have to be enough for me.

“Saved your life,” I croaked. “We don’t have to keep taking turns you know. They have a boy, Oscar, save
him
… try to, anyway.”

I gripped the sodden front of his shirt.

“Promise me.”

Allesandro, who seemed to be already healing from his wounds thanks to his nifty undead constitution, caught me under my arms as my legs went from under me completely. My head lolled on his shoulder as he took my weight.

“Save him yourself,” he insisted.

He lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. I tried not to throw up as he started to walk down the alleyway, carrying me with him.

“Your serum, it’s at your laboratory, right?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. I wasn’t sure I could have if I wanted to. I was losing all reasoning. My speech had gone and the anger was building in me, slowly but relentless as a forest fire. Not all of the wetness on my cheeks was blood. I was crying. I didn’t want to turn into one of them. I didn’t want to disappear and become the thing that went bump in the night.

“My bike is this way,” the vampire said, heaving me away from the pandemonium still raging inside Carfax tower as the police and Cabal battled Gio and his men within.

I wondered how Allesandro had found me, how he had gotten down to the basement. But I couldn’t have asked him if I’d tried. I was already beginning to think sharp red thoughts, like how good it would feel to bite into his shoulder, to tear at the skin just to feel it rip. I forced the thoughts away, but the hunger was rising.

26

I didn’t really remember the ride across the city. Only glimpses, sensations. Streetlamps blurred by, the bike roaring under me. New Oxford slid by in a drunken blur-I passed out more than once, the icy wind whipping around my hair. I felt hot, burning all over with the fever of the Pale.

I awoke to feel myself being carried in his arms across the snowy silent quad, the buildings of the university rearing up dizzily around me, hallucinatory. I felt weightless in his arms, my arms and legs like lead, my head lolling.

And then we were somehow inside, in the blinding antiseptic glare of the entrance corridor.

Mattie, our night security guard, rose from his chair as we approached, a look of shock and horror on his round face. Allesandro said something to him, I didn’t catch what. The vampire waved his hand in front of the man’s face and the guard dropped out of sight behind the counter – unconscious, I think. I have no idea how he did that.

Another blur and we were in the elevator, descending into the ground. Allesandro was crouched over me, pinning my arms to my sides. I was sat on the floor of the lift, thrashing against him furiously. I don’t remember why; I only remember the anger, the furious bloodlust. I wanted to hurt him, to eat him.

He was stronger than me though, for the time being anyway, and held me pinned like a spitting cat. He was talking to me, trying to calm me I think, but I couldn’t understand his words anymore. I could hear nothing but my own blood roaring in my ears.

He dragged me out of the elevator and I passed out again, drifting in and out of consciousness. In my brief bouts of downtime, I dreamed of teeth and claws and redness, all primitive lusts and hungers. And part of me liked it.

I came to with my a bar of light sliding across my bleary eyes. I felt my hand roughly slapped against a panel, held tightly by Allesandro and forced into place. He was getting us through the lower security – the iris scanner, the palm pad. He was using me to get in.

The small rational part of me which still existed wanted to warn him about the corridor, the long ultraviolet walk between here and the lab. It was impossible. We couldn’t make it.

But the next thing I knew, I was being carried again and on every side of me was blinding blue light, stinging my ever more sensitive eyes. We moved forward haltingly, step by step, shuffling. When I managed to focus enough to look up at the vampire as he carried me along, I saw that his skin was blistering badly. Smoke was rising from the neck of his shirt, from his sleeves, everywhere. He was roasting as though we had stepped into a nuclear reactor, his beautiful face blackening and cracking.

But he didn’t stop. He moved onwards still and didn’t drop me, gripping me to him so that I could feel the heat and pain radiating from him like a furnace.

The last thing I recall is the lab itself.

I was on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. Allesandro was on his hands and knees next to me, shaking in agony, almost unrecognisable. His clothes had burned to cinders and were glowing with dancing ash. If before he had looked like a renaissance angel, now he had clearly been cast burning from heaven and had landed, scorched and in tatters, deep in the pit. He had fallen.

Someone was shouting, incoherently, and then there were hands on me. Griff’s face was above, staring down, filled with shock. I heard him shout to someone else and from the corner of my eye, Lucy, dear sweet Lucy was there, holding a syringe while Allesandro barked orders at the two of them, even as his own body convulsed in shock.

I closed my eyes.

Lucy was alive. This was strangely important to me. A tiny part of me let go, stopped struggling. I couldn’t think anymore. I just wanted to rest, and then to wake and feed … and feed … and feed.

27

I woke up on a mortuary slab, which is never a good start. I was disoriented, and groggy. But instantly I felt, I was me.

I wasn’t a monster.

The terrible knowing void of hunger was gone. I tried to move but my head rolled weakly to the side. I was in pain, a
lot
of pain. I was dying.

“She’s stable, I think,” I heard Griff say, somewhere beyond my vision.

His voice sounded tinny and far away, as though through a bad telephone connection in a storm.

“The retardant’s holding. Her vitals have evened out but she’s lost too much blood. These wounds…”

He sounded desperate.

“I can help.”

It was Allesandro’s voice – rough and ragged-sounding, his accent thick – and suddenly there was an arm in my view. It was bare and white, still badly blistered here and there but already healing. There was a fresh, messy wound across the wrist, already dripping blood.

“Drink,” I heard him say thickly, and he lowered his arm onto my face.

He seemed weak, almost about to stumble. I thought I saw someone behind him, helping him to stand as though he was drunk. Griff?

Instinctively, I tried to turn my face away but his other hand caught me. His grasp was soft but firm, cradling my head.

“It’s okay. It won’t make you like me, I promise. It will heal you. Drink, or you will die.”

He held my face firmly against his arm until I opened my lips and closed them around his wrist. I could taste the salt of his skin on my lips as his blood flowed into my mouth. I drank. I fought the urge to retch as my throat filled with the metallic taste of pennies and blood.

I drank and drank until I passed out again.

28

I woke again.

I didn’t know how much time had passed but the lights were low in the lab, as though everyone had gone home for the night. Only the rat cages and the soft private lamps over each workstation were illuminated. That didn’t mean much in Blue Lab. It could have been one in the morning or three in the afternoon for all I knew. That was one of the pitfalls of working four levels underground. On the plus side, I seemed, however, to be alone, not a monster, and not dying.

I sat up carefully. I was still on the mortuary slab at the back of the lab. It was the closest approximation we had to anything resembling a hospital bed. The lab was very quiet around me. After my semi-fugue and the chaos of the trip here, it was odd to be surrounded by silence.

I found I was dressed in a white lab coat, and nothing else. Luckily, it was quite big and covered everything from neck to knee. My hands went tentatively to my throat where the Pale had torn into me under Carfax, afraid of what I might find there.

There was no wound, no ragged tear. I checked my arms. No puncture wounds where the claws had slashed into me, just small red crescents like old bruises. I felt … fine. Importantly, I didn’t feel like a homicidal bloodthirsty creature which was a definite plus. I was still human … I thought. I seemed to have my mind back.

I slid slowly off the gurney, testing carefully to check my legs could hold my own weight. I was a little lightheaded, but not as though I had just almost died a few times over. It was more like I’d had a sugar rush from one too many M&Ms.

Vampire blood, I thought. It’s the new hair of the dog.

Griff appeared out of nowhere, popping his head around the corner of the cubicle space. He must have heard me moving around. So I wasn’t completely alone after all.

His hair looked a little wild and he had dark circles under his eyes. I pulled my lab coat tighter around me self-consciously, acutely aware that I was naked underneath. And yes, I was also aware how ridiculous my prudishness was considering I had recently been thrashing around on the floor in my own blood, foaming at the mouth.

My assistant stared at me. I stared back. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Doctor Grace,” I said, my voice sounding small in the quiet lab.

“Welcome back Doctor Harkness,” he replied hoarsely.

We stared at each other some more, both of us deeply uncomfortable.

“Epsilon?” I asked eventually, when the silence had become deafening.

I watched his Adam’s apple work a few times before he answered. He was staring at me like he’d never seen me before. His eyes looked red.

“My revised version, yeah,” he said eventually.

He looked scared like he was about to get a scalding from the teacher.

“Brad’s still alive and well,” he added reassuringly, obviously wondering if I might be concerned about imminently exploding.

A reasonable concern, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“We’re not cleared for human testing of course but…”

He looked helpless. He ran his hands through his shaggy hair.

“There wasn’t much choice, Doc. You were … turning. I was … we were losing you.”

I nodded slowly. I knew exactly how close I had come to being lost. If the vampire hadn’t gotten me here in time, tearing through the city like the proverbial bat out of hell…

“Allesandro? Is he…”

“The vampire’s fine,” Griff replied, a little curtly I thought, but I didn’t have the energy to wonder about this right now. “Resting. He was pretty burned up. I’ve been watching him while he’s sleeping.”

He hesitated, looking embarrassed as he realised how odd that sounded.

“Observing his condition, I mean,” he stammered. “He’s healing faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I mean, you can literally see his skin reforming. Two hours ago he was covered in third degree burns-and now? Bad sunburn. His rate of regeneration is astonishing.”

Griff was a scientist at the end of the day. It didn’t matter how much weird the world threw at us, we will always want to study it. We can’t help ourselves. We’re the ones who run toward erupting volcanoes, measuring tools in hand, while everyone else runs the other way.

I was leaning against the gurney, my legs crossed at the ankle, still hugging the lab coat closed.

“Erm … where are my clothes, Griff?”

“Oh,” Griff’s face reddened. “That wasn’t me! That was Lucy. They were ruined, Doc. Blood, some kind of rank sewage, and burned up in places where the GO had carried you in. She had to pretty much cut you out of them. We put them through the incinerator.”

Of course, Lucy. I hadn’t hallucinated about her then.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She went home to get you a change of clothes. She’s swinging by mine too, for you know, the dead guy. He was in as bad a state as you almost. Not infected, of course. I don’t think the vampires are susceptible but still, he was a mess. We burned all his stuff too but then he set most of his clothes on fire talking a stroll down the security corridor.”

“He’s
called
Allesandro,” I said, walking towards Griff, slightly unsteady still. “Not the dead guy, not the GO – Allesandro. Where is he?”

Griff gestured over my shoulder.

We have three morgue cubicles in the lab; big, oversized silver lockers. We’ve never needed to cold store anything larger than a dog before. I saw that one of the drawers was now closed.

“It’s the daytime boss,” Griff told me. “He had to sleep, or whatever it is they do when the sun’s up. I think it speeds up their healing too.”

I took a moment to register the fact that there was a butt-naked vampire asleep in the dark corpse drawer behind me. It didn’t faze me as much as you would expect. The last few days had been all kinds of strange. I was kind of getting used to it.

It was odd to realise it was the daytime. It had been dark when Allesandro brought me in. I must have been out a long time while Griff administered the Epsilon serum and let it take hold, working through my system, undoing the work of the virus.

I took a moment to consider the magnitude of what we had done.

“We are in so much trouble,” I muttered. “We have a GO in the lab. The lab designed to keep GOs out. This breaks every possible level of protocol…”

I suddenly remembered something from my fugue; the security guard hitting the floor upstairs at the main entrance.

“Jesus! Mattie!” I yelped.

“It’s okay!” Griff said, his hands raised reassuringly. “It’s okay. Your crispy vampire just put him under or something, Jedi mind tricks. I’ve been up to check on him once you two were both, you know, stable. He was reading his newspaper. He doesn’t even remember anything. As far as he knows, I think he thought he fell asleep in his chair for ten minutes, that’s all.”

Griff looked concerned, glancing at the drawer behind me.

“I didn’t know the GOs could do that to people,” he said in a low voice.

“Oh, they have all
kinds
of fun skills we know nothing about. Trust me,” I said, “I’ve been sampling their less fun party tricks.”

“Anyway, he’s been off shift for a while now,” Griff told me. “It’s nearly five o’clock.”

I shuffled over to a seat at the nearest workstation and collapsed into it. My mind was still reeling. I put my head in my hands, rubbing my eye sockets with my palms.

“Doc, you know at some point you’re going to have to tell me what the hell is going on,” Griff said, turning to lean against a desk.

I looked up at him. His face was earnest, serious and worried.

“It’s one thing pretending there’s nothing wrong while you don’t show up for work and then take me casing our boss’ house. It’s quite another when an undead on-fire GO bursts into the lab carrying your body and telling us that you are turning into one of the Pale.”

He shook his head, as though he still didn’t quite believe what had happened.

“Lucy claims she knows the vampire guy, from some club or other you two went to? Since when do you go to vamp clubs? Am I the only person out of the loop here?”

I sighed, and rubbed my eyes again.

“Could you get me a coffee, Griff?” I said. “We’re not leaving the lab until the sun goes down and I can talk to the deeply sunburned vampire taking a nap in the fridge over there. I need some answers myself and I’m not letting him out of my sight until I get them, so I might as well tell you everything while we wait.”

He looked at me expectantly.

“Seriously, Griff,” I said, smiling weakly. “Coffee. It may take a while.”

I told Griff everything, from start to finish. From Allesandro turning up at the lecture to the alley outside Carfax and all the insanity between. Cabal, the Black Sacrament, the Bonewalker, the bodies, the Pale. My list of horrors seemed endless as I poured it out to him. In retrospect, I reflected, it had been a pretty rough couple of days.

The only part I left out of my story was my clandestine trip down to the MA level and what I had found down there. I’m not quite sure why but I figured he would have enough to deal with digesting our immediate problems without discovering that certain divisions of our employer, our very government, were responsible for mass civilian executions in the name of war. Something told me this was very, very dangerous information to have.

I had tried to keep Griff and Lucy out of this. To keep them safe, I supposed. I supposed that was irrelevant now.

To his merit, my assistant barely interrupted me, except with the occasional outburst of shocked expletives. He seemed genuinely surprised by my thumbnail sketch of Veronica Cloves. That figured. All anyone ever saw was her earnest, trustworthy, reassuring face on the DataStreams. As the spokeswoman of the Cabal to the media at large, she was practically lovable.

I thought of Lucy, our ditzy chipper lab assistant by day, leather-clad vampire-worshipper by night; Cloves, hardly the beatific charmer once she was off screen; Oscar, the nicely turned-out rich boy with the world at his feet, slumming it undercover as a submissive blood junkie.

And then there was Allesandro, smooth-moves gigolo by trade, seemingly selfless action hero by choice. Even the other vampires I had met, Jessica and Helena, were hardly what they seemed, their gothic image just a false front to pander to our expectations.

Somehow, I found it more disturbing that they had been holding me in a dungeon looking like they had just stepped out of Harvey Nicholls. You expect to be tortured by leather wearing, chain-clad monsters. It was more disturbing when the violence came from someone dressed like a schoolteacher and sipping a macchiato.

Finally, I thought of Gio; the self-styled lord of Sanctum lovingly welcoming his darling Helsings, the mortal children, into his domain each night while secretly hating them all.

Honestly, I wondered if
anyone
in this town was what they seemed.

Did Griff have a double life too? Right now it wouldn’t have shocked me to discover that when he wasn’t running maths through the system or tinkering with his vintage car, he was moonlighting as a high-wire, fire-eating trapeze artist.

But I doubted it. Griff was the most honest, dependable person I’d ever met. We had worked together for nearly four years. He had never questioned me once. He was loyal to a fault. Now he sat, holding his untouched coffee with both hands. It had gone cold while I had been talking. His face was pale.

“She’s really dead then?” he asked. “Trevelyan? And that other woman, the one who’s been all over the news yesterday, Coleman, right? This vampire group calling themselves the Black Sacrament, they killed them both … for their teeth?”

I confirmed this with a nod.

“They have Oscar Scott’s too,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ve killed him yet. I hope not.”

“From what you’ve said, he sounds like a prick,” Griff muttered, looking unimpressed.

“Oh, he is,” I nodded in happy agreement. “But that doesn’t mean he deserves to die, just for being stupid. If people were killed for that, there would be less of a housing crisis in the merry walled cities of good old Britannia. They wanted mine too – my teeth. This Bonewalker they have, they’re using it for some kind of magic sacrifice or offering; I don’t know, whatever the hell you want to call it. They can do things we can’t imagine, the Bonewalkers. I just don’t know what it is the Sacrament are trying to achieve.”

I had told Griff about the DataStream clip which had arrived at the lab with Trevelyan’s teeth; the angry ranting of the guy with the pliers. I was pretty sure by now this was Gio. The portentous warnings that the ‘sun would rise’. It hardly sounded like a vampire-centric threat.

I had expected anger from Griff, or at least resentment that I had hidden all of this from him until now. Naturally, I was surprised when, instead, he put down his cup and slid his hands across the desk, taking hold of mine reassuringly.

I looked up at him, confused.

“Don’t worry Doc,” he said with a small grim smile. “We’ll figure this out; you, me and Lucy. We’re a team, right? It’s what we do. It’s what friends do.”

I stared at him in blank shock for a moment. His hands squeezed mine. I felt very tired.