Phoebe Harkness Omnibus Page 11

  “Oscar…” I gasped, my voice quiet, “listen … it’s important…”

  I felt him lean in close, his head right behind mine. Sprinkler rain washed down over both of us, dripping off my chin.

  “What?” he shouted over the din of the constant alarm.

  I couldn’t see him, but I could feel his stupid grin. In answer, I flung my head back as hard as I could. There was a crack as the back of my head connected with the boy’s face. It hurt me like hell, but I was pretty sure I’d broken the kid’s nose.

  Throwing him off as he released me with a howl, his hands going up to his busted face, I took a step into the crowd and instantly slipped on the drenched floor. People stepped around and over me, a confusion of legs and feet. I knew I had to get up, and quickly, before someone stomped me to death by accident, or before Gio returned.

  Grabbing the nearest body, without bothering to look at them, I hauled myself up. Before I could stand fully, Oscar was behind me again, his hands grabbing my shoulders. He looked furious, his eyes wild, his mouth and chin running with blood as it washed with down-pouring water.

  “You stupid bitch…” he began.

  He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence, however, as someone came up behind him, lifted him off his feet with a hand around the neck, and threw him to one side as lightly as though he was a rag doll. My captor disappeared into the crowd, taking several other bystanders down with him in a heap, like human skittles.

  It was Allesandro. He reached down and offered me a hand.

  “Come on,” he said.

  His hair was plastered to his face, the sprinklers bouncing droplets off his leather biker jacket noisily. His eyes were casting around wildly.

  “We have to be quick!” he yelled.

  I took his hand and he hauled me to my feet. I went to make for the stairs, following the crowds, but he tugged me away.

  “No, not that way, you’ll never get out. Follow me,” he shouted over the sirens.

  I followed, half stumbling, half dragged, going against the flow of bodies, towards the back of the room where Allesandro led me behind the long bar. There was a narrow doorway here. The vampire pulled me through, and along a dark corridor which led to a stock room, piled high on all sides with crates of beers and spirits.

  The sprinklers were on in this large room as well, though the fire alarm was less deafening. I noted we were wading through a good three inches of water here. Part of my mind wondered exactly how good the drainage at an underground club was likely to be. Those clubbers who didn’t burn to death or get trampled by their fellow revellers may well end up drowning.

  “Your boss wants to kill me,” I said.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. Allesandro had let go of my hand and was hauling aside crates at the back of the room.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted over the alarm, glancing back the way we had come.

  I was convinced that at any second, Gio was going to appear and claim me again. He wasn’t going to let me get out of here.

  “There’s another way out,” Allesandro shouted. “This city is so old. All the cellars. You could walk from one side of New Oxford to the other, breaking through walls, without having to come up above ground.”

  The wall behind the crates was bare plaster. Apparently the decadent gothic finery was all upfront at the club, not in the rather more grubby backstage areas.

  “Well yeah … if you happen to have a sledgehammer,” I said, still feeling woozy from Gio’s stare.

  Allesandro punched the wall. Hard.

  His movements were fast. It was still unfamiliar to me to see how the GOs moved. They looked human most of the time but when they moved like this, it certainly reminded you that you were in the room with another species entirely.

  He hit the wall again, and again, and again, in quick succession. Plaster rained down. On the fourth or fifth punch, the wall gave way with a crunch, and his arm went right through. A hole roughly the size of a car window fell away around him in a rumble of brick and plaster.

  “… Or a vampire,” I corrected myself.

  He had reached into the hole and was busying himself tearing away bricks, widening the gap. He pulled at the plasterwork and masonry, as though it were nothing more than wet sand. When the hole was large enough he turned back to me, a hand outstretched.

  “Quickly,” he said.

  I hesitated. Why the hell was he helping me escape his own clan? His expression was earnest, serious. His wavy hair plastered to his face. His clothing soaked and covered in already wet and grubby plasterwork. Why would I trust a vampire who could well be just about to bury me alive? He could just be buying his way back into his boss’ good books by making sure I was kept in a safe hidey hole until things calmed down.

  “Your boss was planning to kill me tonight. Why are you helping me?” I asked.

  He stared at me as though I were stupid.

  “This really isn’t the time.”

  “I don’t even know you,” I said. “I’m only here in the first place because of you, and now look how things are going. That scary son of a bitch is your master. Why would you help me escape?”

  He shrugged, his earnest expression subsumed by what I was already coming to think of as his gigolo mask.

  “Let us just say that I’m ambitious. Consider yourself an investment,” he said. “Now will you please come the hell on?”

  “He’ll know,” I said, wading towards him. “Your freakshow boss, he’ll know you helped me out of here.”

  Allesandro shook his head, helping me up and practically manhandling me through the hole he had created.

  “Leave him to me,” he said simply. “I’ll think of something. Just get out of here, will you?”

  I dropped down on the other side of the wall. I found myself in what looked like a very dark and unused cellar. Packing crates surrounded me on all sides. Confused, I looked back through the hole into the storeroom.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  He shook his head.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, I should have come to you. You can’t go home, it won’t be safe.”

  “Where the hell should I go then?” I asked. Then a horrible realisation hit me. “My friend Lucy, she’s still in there, in the fire! I can’t leave without her.”

  He stared at me, his beautiful face utterly astonished.

  At first I thought he was taken aback by my brave unwillingness to leave a friend behind, despite any danger to myself. I actually felt heroic, all Linda Hamilton for a moment. But no, he was just amazed at how dim I was apparently being.

  “There is no fire, Doctor,” he said. “I set the alarm off. I had to get you away from Gio somehow. It’s all I could think of. Your friend is safe. When I left you with him I sought her out. I had her escorted from the club.”

  He half grinned.

  “She was not happy with me for it. She wanted very much to stay, I think.”

  Allesandro had caused all this chaos, to save me from his scary boss?

  “He’ll kill you for letting me go,” I said. “Come with me, you idiot.”

  He looked surprised.

  “Your concern is touching. Perhaps we will make a Helsing out of you yet? I am rescuing you from my master and you stand here worried about me?”

  “I don’t even know you,” I spat, angrily pushing my sodden hair off my forehead. “You brought me here in the first damn place. Call me when you need me! That’s what your bloody card said. Not call me when you need a near death experience!”

  “I didn’t tell you to come here,” he said, cocking his head to one side. “I think you are worried for my safety. How interesting.”

  I felt like I was losing my mind. I stood dripping wet in the dark cellar.

  “And a fucking Helsing? Are you mentally unstable?” I practically yelled at him.

  “Admit it, I’m the nicest vampire you’ve ever met.”

  “I’ve met two!” I spluttered, holding up two shaky
fingers. “The other one raped my brain and told me he was going to dance on my corpse! This has not been a fun evening!”

  “Go,” he grinned.

  How he was finding any of this entertaining was a mystery to me. Allesandro glanced behind, then back at me, less of a grin now.

  “He will know you are missing by now. If you stay, he will kill you. You’d be no use to me then.”

  I didn’t bother staying to argue. Allesandro was clearly not all there. I made my way through the darkness of the cellar, groping blindly ahead like a blind woman to a set of old wooden stairs I could just make out in the gloom. My soaked clothing was weighing me down as though I had just completed the ‘swimming in your pyjamas’ badge at school.

  “Doctor,” Allesandro called when I reached the bottom step.

  I glanced back to see him peering through the hole, his arms on either side as he leaned through. His t-shirt was drenched and stuck to his body in a most interesting way, which was rather an inappropriate thing for me to notice given the urgency of the situation. I would later blame this on a surge of adrenaline on my part.

  His hair dripped onto his face. I noticed that his knuckles were raw and bleeding where he had punched my escape hole into the wall. And yet I noticed the impossible.

  The vampire was, unbelievably, smiling at me.

  “What?”

  “You look really good tonight.”

  Before I could swear at him, I saw movement and he turned away. Others had entered the storeroom, and I heard raised voices.

  Without thinking, I dragged myself up the stairs, two at a time, abandoning Allesandro as he had told me to. Brave and noble, that’s me.

  At the top, there was a trapdoor. I prayed to every god I could think of that it wouldn’t be locked. It wasn’t.

  I spilled out into another basement. I hadn’t realised how deep underground Sanctum had been. This one was far more modern looking, well maintained and filled with general produce. Cartons of cigarettes, bottles, crates of snack bars.

  I half ran along an aisle between the packages. There were stairs ahead of me, lit by a naked florescent strip. Running up them I shouldered the door at the top, and erupted into a brightly lit convenience store.

  The cashier almost jumped out of his skin as I burst from the back room, scattering a display of cereal bars across the floor. He was a skinny young man, who had been sitting reading the newspaper, probably whiling away the wee hours of the morning and not expecting a drenched, wide-eyed woman to erupt from his storage room.

  He opened his mouth to question me, his face filled with surprise. He pointed at me then the door, but I could hear footsteps in the cellar now behind me, hurrying. I didn’t think it was likely to be Allesandro, so I didn’t stop to explain or apologise.

  I ran the length of the store, my wet shoes squeaking and slipping on the laminated floor tiles, and practically threw myself out of the glass front doors onto the blessed street. I had never been more grateful to be above ground and outside in the cold air.

  Disoriented, I looked around wildly.

  Further down the road to my left, there were large crowds milling around. Police were there and a fire engine, bathing everything in the dark night with strobing red and blue light. People were still emerging onto the street as the club ejected them into the night, sopping wet.

  Looking back, I saw I had emerged from a 24-hour Spar, half the street up from the Eagle and Child. I was back on St Giles, the main strip of the vampire district. I stood shivering in the snow, not knowing what to do next.

  Looking down the street, more and more clubbers were pouring out of the tiny pub which stood over Sanctum – their emergence almost an optical illusion, like a rave ending at the TARDIS. My eye suddenly caught sight of a figure, pale against the darkness of the mainly leather-clad crowd. It was Gio.

  Like a spectre of death I saw his head turning this way and that, searching the crowds – obviously for me. He clearly had discovered I has escaped from Oscar and had assumed I was coming up and out through the pub. He was lying in wait.

  Thank God for Allesandro’s way out. But any second now Gio would glance my way, spot me standing here, and it would all be over. His mind would roll along the length of the street and root me to the spot. Game over.

  I considered darting back into the Spar, getting back under cover, but there were raised voices from within now. Whoever had followed me through the hole was still in pursuit, and if Allesandro hadn’t been able to stop them, I was fairly sure I wouldn’t stand a chance. Vampire minions.

  Well … shit.

  I was having a hard time thinking how things could get worse, when I heard a screech of tyres and a car came tearing down St Giles from the north, the opposite direction of Sanctum’s entrance. The bright yellow Ferrari squealed to a halt in front of me, executing a perfect 180 handbrake turn in a cloud of hissing rubber. I stared down stupidly as the passenger door flung itself open.

  Inside, looking biblically furious, sat Veronica Cloves, my unwilling Cabal babysitter. She took in my appearance quickly. Drenched, shivering, my hair matted to my skull, blood from Oscar’s face tinting the back of my head pink, plaster dust covering my hands and knees.

  I don’t think it would be possible for someone to look more pissed at me.

  “Get … in … the … fucking … car …” she hissed through gritted teeth.

  I glanced back towards Sanctum. Gio was standing like a ghost in the crowd, staring at me, his arms loose at his sides. His eyes were like headlamps.

  I threw myself into the Ferrari and Cloves immediately floored the accelerator, peeling us away into the night before my door could even close.

  16

  The city tore by in a blur of streetlamps and lighted shop-fronts. I sat in the hand-stitched leather bucket seats of the extremely expensive car, dripping like a sodden rag and making a small puddle.

  Every few seconds, I glanced behind us through the seats. Nobody appeared to be following us. Of course, with the reckless speed at which Servant Cloves was tearing through every traffic light I don’t think anything could have kept up with us if it had tried.

  The woman drove like a maniac. I didn’t know if this was her usual manner, or if she reserved this style especially for when she was whisking inconvenient doctors away from angry vampires, but for the time being I was actually grateful. The more distance she could put between myself and Gio, the better.

  I could feel Cloves seething quietly next to me. She hunched over the wheel, her knuckles white, her long nails a deep and garish purple.

  “Were you following me?” I managed, when I had regained my breath and my heart had stopped slamming against my chest.

  I wasn’t particularly out of shape. I even jogged on occasion, but I had not had much practice fleeing vampires before, and the adrenalin in my system was starting to make me shake.

  “Of course I was following you,” she snapped, wrenching the car around a mini roundabout and heading out of the city centre towards the residential Northern Sector. “Good job as well. What the hell did you do?”

  She shot me a murderous look.

  “I didn’t do anything!” I snapped back.

  “You set fire to a vampire club?” she said accusingly. “That’s what it looks like! You were supposed to be covertly gathering information! Is this your idea of subtle?”

  “I never asked to be your spy!” I retorted. “If you wanted some secret agent who could blend into any culture, you should have bloody well used one! I’m a lab drone, remember? The only culture I’m comfortable with comes in a petri dish.”

  We swung a right so hard I was slammed sideways into the window. With shaky fingers I finally buckled my seatbelt. Safety first, right?

  “And there was no fire,” I argued. “And it wasn’t me who set the sodding alarms off, it was the vampire from the lecture. He was trying to help me escape.”

  Cloves slowed the car a little as we headed uptown, turning onto Aristotle Lane. Ot
her vehicles were still swerving to get out of her way. We cruised along at a comparatively steady eighty.

  “Why were you trying to escape? You went there to see this GO in the first place?”

  “I did. But that turned out to be a bad idea. He’d expected me to call him at night and arrange a rendezvous. He practically wet himself when I showed up at the club. Couldn’t wait to get me out of there.”

  “Why?”

  “His boss, the scary-looking fashion icon in the white suit. I don’t know why, but he wanted me to come to the club. He found out Allesandro had contacted me, and when I called the club he made sure I got in, then strong-armed me into a corner and questioned me.”

  “De Medica?” Cloves eyes narrowed. “We have a pretty big file on this particular GO. What was he after?”

  “Me!” I practically yelped. “Not that you seem very interested, but he actually told me he was going to kill me. Right there in the club. If I hadn’t got out…”

  We turned a right and the buildings around us, all post-wars, became far more affluent than I was used to. We were entering some kind of gated community, it seemed. Wherever we were headed, it wasn’t home. This whole area used to be Port Meadow, one of Oxford’s more picturesque districts: fields, hills, cute copses of trees. It was high rises now. Very expensive ones.

  “He threatened you? Were there any witnesses?” Cloves demanded to know urgently. “We can bring him in on that if so.”

  I hesitated, aware I was about to sound foolish.

  “No, not exactly.” I muttered. “He … didn’t say it out loud…”

  “What are you talking about? He threatened to kill you but he didn’t threaten to kill you?”

  Cloves stared at me again. I really wished she would keep her gimlet eyes on the road. It would be ironic to escape being bled to death by a master vampire, only to die due to reckless driving by my getaway driver and have my body prised out of the grille of an oncoming taxi.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the GOs’ … abilities,” I explained. “Although judging from your pretty sketchy intel files, I’m guessing not much. But I discovered a fun fact tonight. Vampires, old shit-scary and bloody powerful ones anyway, can push down your mind with their own. It’s not mind control, not exactly. Not hypnotism either, but I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t lie to him. It was like his bloody eyes were shooting truth serum at me.”