Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (31 page)

34

By the time we pulled into the white dusted quad before the entrance to Blue Lab One, it was nearing eleven. Most of the staff would be gone by now. Only the die-hards worked through the night.

There were only two other vehicles in the car park. A black van and a fine looking Bentley, which I was guessing was either Harrison’s or the Minister’s. I was dimly aware that whatever trouble I was in with them for bringing a GO into the lab, a more pressing issue was that it had almost been half a day since Griff had given me my dose of Epsilon. I was going to need a shot soon.

The doors to the atrium opened with their customary whoosh and we were escorted inside by the ghost. Mattie was at his post behind the large, brightly-lit reception desk and standing with him, waiting for us, were Servant Leon Harrison, five Cabal ghost agents, and the large and ominous figure of the Minister.

I hadn’t seen him stood up before. The fat, grey-complexioned man was taller than I’d expected. He stared at Cloves and I as we walked towards them, his eyes looking as bored and utterly disinterested as they had last time we met. I figured he was most likely pissed off at having to come down here so late and getting his hands dirty for once.

“Servant Cloves,” Harrison said, disapproval plain on his face, “you should know that there will be a full investigation on your handling of this case. Your brief was to quietly and unobtrusively gather intelligence. Instead, we find ourselves with a diplomatic incident in the vampire district due to your mole here setting fire to the GO’s place of work, a rather inexpert handling of the attack at the Bodleian Library and the kidnap of a very high profile member of a very important and influential family.”

He was glaring at her. She looked contrite but didn’t give him an inch. I was impressed.

“In addition to this, a gangland shootout occurred at one of our city’s finest historic churches where, I might add, several media sources saw Cabal agents whom you had sent on an anonymous tipoff. Thankfully, our presence and involvement there cannot be proved and remains speculation only – and then there was an incident reported by the superintendent of your building, a break-in at the home of a Cabal Servant.”

He shook his head, looking thoroughly disgusted.

“I am officially relieving you of further duties temporarily pending full investigation and debriefing.”

Cloves nodded respectfully.

“Understood, Servant Harrison,” she said. “Despite the somewhat unorthodox methods, I have, with the assistance of the Doctor here and her exploitation of her GO source, uncovered intelligence of the highest importance; a breakaway cult within the GO community, calling themselves the Black Sacrament. Requesting permission to file my report immediately, sir.”

Harrison looked over at me, his expression still unpleasantly disapproving.

“The Doctor’s GO source?” he said, looking at me most distastefully. “Yes, both myself and the Minister are very interested to hear about that, especially given the GO’s recent admittance to a high security, closed access lab right here in this building.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but from behind Harrison the Minister cut in, his voice the usual gravelly rumble.

“Do they have the files Trevelyan discovered or not?”

Harrison held out his hand and Trevelyan dropped the datapad into it. The Minister came over and took it from him, barely looking at any of us.

He waddled around and disappeared behind the desk, practically shoving Mattie out of the way with his large bulk, and hooked the datapad to the reception workstation. The files appeared, and the minister began reading through them quickly, his odd unfocussed eyes sliding listlessly over the pages.

We all watched him curiously. This was not normal behaviour for a Minister. Why he was so interested in the files was a mystery to me. I figured that must surely be Harrison’s domain.

After a moment, the Minister paused and looked almost pleased, his rotund face twisting into a humourless smile.

“Excellent,” he said, his voice slurring lazily. “We have what we need.”

“What we need, Minister?” Harrison asked, polite but clearly confused.

“You can come in now,” the Minister said, muttering to himself, barely intelligible.

Behind us, the outer doors to the quad opened and I turned to see figures entering from the dark night outside.

It was Gio, Helena and Jessica. The Black Sacrament had just strolled straight into Blue Lab.

They were flanked by six others, the same combat-ready humans who had stormed the fundraiser and later chased Cloves all over town. Gio was smiling, as though delighted to see us all again. He raised his arms in greeting, as though to hug us all.

The men were all armed with machine guns.

“What the fuck?” I heard Cloves say quietly.

“Excellent, excellent,” Gio said, looking very pleased with himself. “We only need the girl.”

He spoke in a breezy offhand way as they stalked toward us down the entrance corridor, one bony finger pointed directly at me. Before any of us could react, the men had raised their weapons and gunfire rattled through the atrium, deafening and startling. To my immediate left, Servant Leon Harrison’s head exploded, obliterating his incredulous expression.

I’d never seen someone get shot in the head before, not outside of the movies anyway. I would have expected him to go down gracefully, maybe with a neat pound-coin sized hole in his forehead. Instead, his head flew apart like a watermelon. I watched with numb shock as his body was lifted off the ground with the force of the impact, thrown back against the desk with a thud. To me, it seemed to happen in slow motion. His headless body hit the ground sprawling, a red mist of blood coating his expensive white shirt.

More shots were being fired around me and the six ghost agents fell. The highly trained Cabal security staff were mown down in a hail of bullets. I saw them fall back, as if landed with invisible punches. It was so swift only one of them had managed to get his hand on the butt of his gun before they were killed.

Echoing around the large atrium, the noise of the gunfire was deafening, a brief staccato burst which slammed against my ears. Directly behind me, dear old Mattie, a look of disbelief on his face, took three slugs to the chest and disappeared behind the reception desk as if he had fallen through a secret trapdoor.

Amidst the deafening rain of bullets, I heard Cloves yell and spun to see her flying backwards, hitting her head hard as she fell against the desk. She landed in a crumpled heap face down on the white floor then lay, completely still.

The whole massacre had lasted no more than five seconds.

Suddenly, I was standing alone, hunched with my hands raised like a shield in front of my face – an instinctual defence which would have done little good against their bullets if they had wanted me dead. Bodies surrounded me everywhere, harsh smears of crimson in the otherwise clean white lines of the atrium.

Gio’s goons fanned out, professional and silent, guns still raised and trained on me.

“Well,” Gio said lightly after a moment, as the musical tinkle of spent shells clattering on the tiles had fallen into silence. “
That
was satisfying, wasn’t it?”

Jessica and Helena flanked him on either side. Jessica looked rather irritated. I noticed there were a few ragged holes in her sweater. The Sacrament vampires hadn’t managed to escape the fight at Carfax completely undamaged then; they looked like bullet holes.

I had no idea if you could put a vampire down with regular bullets. After watching Allesandro regenerate from body wide third degree burns in a mere matter of hours, I doubted it.

Gio was surveying the scene like a chirpy master of ceremonies, as though he were here to give the light hearted company speech at the Blue lab Christmas party. He seemed to be enjoying the carnage.

“You are a slippery little pup, Doctor Harkness.” He shook his head good naturedly, as though I were a cheeky child. “Twice now you’ve given me the slip. Twice I’ve had to chase you around after you made me look a fool. You escape my club, you escape my little pet Pale … and yet everywhere I turn, there you are, like a bad penny.”

His smile was warm, but I had learned that his bright shining eyes were very cold indeed.

“It must be fate,” he purred. “Don’t you think?”

“Maybe you’re just not very competent, Gio,” I said, forcing my voice to sound steady.

Helena’s eyes widened in surprise behind Gio as his face twisted, the smile falling away. He glared at me with utter loathing.

“You can
act
as brave as you wish, you pathetic human creature, but I can
smell
the fear on you. Sweat and shit. And you are
right
to be afraid.”

The exterior doors of Blue Lab opened and two vampires entered, both male and dressed in the same combat ready getup as the human mercenaries. The final two members of the Black Sacrament.

They were almost identical, possibly twins. Between them they were dragging the unconscious body of Oscar. His arms were draped over their shoulders as they held him up, his shoes scraping behind him on the floor. He would have looked like a drunken student being carried home by his friends, had the front of his now filthy tuxedo not been spattered with blood. He looked as though he had thrown up on himself at some point.

I couldn’t see his face; his head was lolling between his own shoulder blades too much. In a way, I was glad I couldn’t. I knew they had already taken the boy’s teeth.

Behind the vampires and their captive, the Bonewalker itself glided like an angel of death, looming over them, tall and black-robed. Its white mask caught the bright strip lighting, so that it seemed to glow.

“Is he alive?” I demanded desperately of Gio.

“For now,” the vampire replied, still glaring at me angrily. “After your goddamned phone led your Cabal friends right to us at Carfax, we had to get out fast. We haven’t quite had time to finish things off.”

He forced his face back into the bright, friendly expression he seemed to favour. I had come to the conclusion that in his extremist mindset, this vampire was what we would medically term batshit-crazy.

“Besides, I thought it would be more touching for the three last offerings to go together. Right here, at the end of all things. We didn’t keep Trevelyan alive, or that Coleman girl. They were so loud,” he complained fussily. “Such a handful, you understand, but our Bonewalker friend here is the worker of miracles and he tells me the fresher the better.”

Jessica had walked over with interest to where the Cabal agents lay sprawled, quite dead in a messy heap. She squatted and delicately rolled a finger over the blood on the floor, tasting it experimentally, as though she were dabbing up sherbet.

“I’m starving,” she said. “When can we finish these ones off?”

“Right now of course,” Gio said to her happily.

“The last three?” I questioned.

I had been trying to subtly move backwards but the reception desk was at my back. My heel caught on something and when I glanced down, I saw that I had nudged Veronica Cloves’ leg. Her body was very still on the floor. The sight of it made me want to heave. I had seen more than enough death in the last forty eight hours.

I looked over at the Minister, who was still standing at the workstation, looking uninterested and solemn. He hadn’t spoken once since he had summoned Gio and the Black Sacrament into Blue Lab. He hadn’t even looked up or moved during the shooting. He just stood there like a dumb statue, while bullets flew around him, utterly unconcerned.

“Minister,” I implored. “I don’t understand what’s happening here. Why are you working with the vampires? You’re Cabal, for God’s sake! You just got two of your own Servants killed, not to mention your agents.”

“Good lord,” Helena called to Gio, looking mildly astonished. “The girl really is quite dense, isn’t she?”

Gio laughed and bizarrely, so did the Minister. They snickered in perfect harmony.

“Of course you don’t understand,” the Minister grumbled. “You have never held a single conversation with the Cabal Minister.”

The fat man looked up at me, his face grey and empty of feeling, chilling as I had always found it like the dead, glassy face of a fish. I glanced at Gio. With every word the Minister had said, the vampire’s lips had moved silently, mimicking the words.

Gio grinned, showing long, sharp fangs behind his lips, and on the other side of the desk, the Minister copied him.

“You’ve been speaking to
me
,” the Minister rumbled in his gravelly voice. “Our dear Minister has, for some time now, been my very own ghoul.”

Gio’s words were coming from the Minister’s body. I stared, disbelieving. The fat man’s lustreless appearance, his glazed, sleepy eyes, his death rattle of a voice … He was a ghoul. Gio had been controlling him. It’s how he had got us here tonight, with the decrypted files and me, the last offering.

“It’s good to have eyes and ears in a place of power,” Gio said, this time from his own mouth. “We apprehended the good Minister several weeks ago. He had noticed, you see, that Trevelyan had been digging around in the archives here at Blue Lab and that she had discovered something she shouldn’t have; something that
he
wished dearly would remain buried.”