Phoebe Harkness Omnibus Read online

  Cloves hesitated, glancing from me to the road and back. She looked uneasy.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Look, he made me answer all his questions, and he spoke inside my head,” I insisted. “Whatever it is that got Trevelyan kidnapped, this guy knows about it – or knows something anyway, and he thinks I know.”

  I shivered, only partly from the cold.

  “And another thing – he’s pretty damn pissed about it too. The plan for the evening was to pump me for as much information as I had, and then to … dispose of me.”

  We pulled onto a private drive of a very tall, extremely well-appointed high rise apartment block. Cloves guided the car into an underground car park, the engine purring as she brought the car under cover, like a fish into dark water.

  “Well, we can’t touch him on something we have no proof of,” she sounded irritated that I hadn’t managed to elicit an audible death threat. “The red tape would be hideous. It would be a diplomatic incident. Shame you didn’t get him to act violently with witnesses around.”

  Silly me, what had I been thinking?

  I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Cloves turned to face me.

  “What did he think you knew about?”

  “The files,” I answered. “Whatever the hell it was Trevelyan dumped in my workstation. Remind me to thank her for that by the way, if we ever find her alive. I’m thinking a gift basket maybe, or a hand grenade. My life was far too dull before she dragged me into her mess.”

  I rubbed my eyes. It was hard to see much in the darkness of the underground garage. The Ferrari’s headlights cut a path ahead of us as we purred onward between other vehicles.

  “I hope you’ve had a more successful evening than I have, because I’m now pretty bloody interested to know what’s in those files that’s apparently important enough to murder me over!”

  “Still working on that,” she said, still seeming less concerned that I had almost been vampire chowder, and more worried that I had caused a public scene.

  I could see her Cabal mind working already, figuring out how to spin the incident on the DataStream, to smooth over any GO issues and not damage the tenuous inter-societal balance. My evening of peril was clearly overshadowed in her mind by the ballache of bad PR she was going to have to deal with.

  “So what you’re telling me is that this was a trap?”

  She had finally pulled up in the silent strip-lit car park. We sat there with the engine idling as she worked my story through.

  “The vampire who came to the lecture was clearly looking for Trevelyan, this Allesandro of yours. He found you instead, and practically led you by the hand to the club, where his boss could interrogate you. Find out what you know about whatever it is they are so interested in?”

  “What? No, it wasn’t like that,” I spluttered. “He didn’t want me at the club at all.”

  Cloves gave me a look of weary disdain.

  “So you say. But perhaps he did. Maybe he got you there, but once his boss found out you neither had the precious files on you nor knew what they contained, your escape was conveniently engineered, in the hope you would then run straight to the files themselves, and they could re-apprehend you later at their leisure.”

  I didn’t know much about my mysterious new vampire friend, other than that he was a remarkably flexible dancer, but I was pretty certain Cloves had this all wrong. I shook my head.

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “There was something between Allesandro and Gio, bad blood maybe. I don’t know what Allesandro wanted with me, but Gio was determined to get me away from him and pump me for information.”

  And later, pump me for blood, I added mentally. This, I reminded myself, is why I don’t go out much.

  “Harkness, you don’t know how they work,” Cloves sneered. “I’ve been doing this an awful lot longer than you have. They play you, Harkness. It’s a game to their kind. De Medica is absolute clan master; if your precious Allesandro was being insubordinate in any way, he would be dead by now.”

  She considered this for a moment.

  “Really dead, I mean,” she clarified. “Decommissioned.”

  I had to admit, it would be out of character for any clan master to allow anyone beneath them to step out of line. Decommissioning, which never officially happened by the way, was the execution of a vampire. The unlucky undead was usually staked, immobilised, and left to face the sunrise.

  Decommissioning never officially happened, by which I mean Cabal kept it out of the DataStream when it did. GO business was not our concern officially. No one noticed a pile of dust rolling down the street just after dawn anyway.

  If Allesandro wasn’t really working with Gio’s best interests at heart, surely he would have been offed by his boss by now. Unless, my fevered mind insisted, Gio hadn’t realised what he was up to until tonight, when my ill-timed phone call had dropped him right in it…

  In which case, my enigmatic, mood-swinging undead buddy could be being hideously tortured by his own clan right now.

  The thought of him being tortured made me feel queasy. I hoped it wasn’t the case. But then if not, then surely Cloves was right and Allesandro was playing me like a flute for Gio.

  Which do you prefer, Phoebe? The rebellious-against-his-evil-master yet now very dead or at least dying Allesandro, or the two-faced double-bluffing, treacherous but very alive Allesandro?

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Jesus, did I even care either way? The man was a stranger to me.

  But I did care. He was my only viable link to the vampire world. The only way we were going to find out what happened to my charming supervisor, and why.

  “Where are we?” I asked, looking around at the garage.

  “My place,” Cloves said.

  I must have looked shocked, because she became defensive.

  “I could hardly take you back to your little flea-pit, could I? They’ll be crawling all over it.” I could imagine how little someone like Veronica Cloves wanted someone like me in her celebrity home.

  “Now get the hell out of my car, Harkness. Your wet arse is warping the leather.”

  17

  I didn’t know much about Servant Veronica Cloves of Cabal, other than that she dressed in executive technicolor dominatrix chic, had a loud and garish car, and by all accounts, expensive but crass tastes. As a woman, she was professionally powerful enough to destroy me, and seemed to loathe me for the inconvenience I had lately been to her, thanks mostly to her rather sadistic boss.

  If I had any preconceived notions of what her apartment would be like, I was wrong. My own tiny apartment was basically a messy pit, somewhere simply to sleep and eat in between my shifts at the lab. I wasn’t much into interior design. But Cloves was in the public eye. I wouldn’t have been surprised if her home had zebra-striped chaise-lounges, large ostentatious gilt mirrors and possibly a hideous modern flocked chandelier. All those graceless things which cost money, but proved over and over that money could not truly buy class.

  I was surprised then, as the private, key-operated elevator finally opened on the top floor of the expensive high rise and I was practically pushed into her penthouse suite.

  It was immense, a vast loft space. The far wall was entirely composed of sloping glass, but the room was rather understatedly decorated in creams and soft whites. Minimalist leather sofas looked rather lost in little islands of tasteful Art Deco furniture. The lighting was soft and carefully placed. To my right stood a tall open fireplace, fake of course, but tastefully rendered in angular white marble.

  This room alone was five times the size of my whole flat. My feet sank into the light cream carpet, which was thicker and softer than my duvet. I was aware I was still dripping wetly onto it.

  “Nice digs,” I said as Cloves slammed the door behind me and busied herself with a complicated looking alarm panel, effectively sealing us in. “So … this is what a Cabal salary gets you, huh? I am clearly in the wrong line of work.”


  Cloves ignored me. I crossed the huge room, past the sofas and end tables, skirting a large glass-topped workstation, which held a screen much like my own at the lab – only far more advanced and expensive. It looked nothing more than a smooth sheet of glass opened on the desktop like a music stand. It probably cost more than most of my lab equipment.

  Approaching the floor-to-ceiling window, I placed my hands on the glass wall and peered out into the night. New Oxford lay below us, a glittering nightscape in the darkness. We were above most other buildings here. This entire part of the city was built after the Pale Wars.

  It had been countryside before, the sweeping green skirt of Port Meadow and Burgess Field, hugging old Oxford, defined by the stately flow of the Thames to the west. But that was then. Our city had expanded itself a lot post-war, before we had finally built the wall and sealed ourselves off from the horror which lay outside. Other high rises surrounded us, sleek towers of glass and chrome, the homes of the powerful, rich and lucky. I was nestled in the elitist real estate of New Oxford.

  Beyond this district, I could make out the distant familiar roof-scape of the city I knew. The stubby fat finger of Carfax tower, floodlit at this time of night, looking more like a squat Norman castle than a church. The multi-pointed rocket ship of St Mary the Virgin was just visible from here, reaching against the sky like a crusted stalactite from the bosom of the university. The circular dome of the Radcliffe Camera downtown, and the wide dark unlit sweep of the Botanic Gardens, a patch of inky blackness in the glittering night city.

  All of this lay below and before me, along with other, more recent additions to our fair city. In the far distance, near to the great dark high curtain of the wall itself, I could make out the militaristic sentinel which used to be called the Angel of the North, a guardian sculpture which now held court over the upper districts. Far south of here, I could see the Liver Building, rescued from a different city on the brink of collapse to the Pale years ago. It was just visible beyond the river. Smack in the middle of what once had been South Park. Relocated to New Oxford, It now served now as a lesser division of Cabal’s serving interests.

  I had to admit, it was impressive what the Bonewalkers could achieve when they put their minds to it. Moving little pockets of time and space here and there, as though they were rearranging a jigsaw. It had been the only way to save some of the things which had once meant something to humanity.

  We had salvaged what we could before the Pale destroyed them. The Pepys building for instance, swept up from Cambridge just before the city-wide fires which had razed that beautiful place to the ground three years ago, and re-deposited in the Oxford University grounds along with most of Magdalene College. It would have been a shame to lose it all to flames. We had gathered what we could. Each walled city of Britannia was now home to refugee pockets of the old world.

  Some people feared the Bonewalkers. People will always fear power, and the Bonewalkers were certainly powerful. But without them, we could never have built the wall. And without the wall … well, that way lay rabid screaming death, didn’t it?

  “It must be nice for you, to be able to stand here and look down on the rest of us,” I said to Cloves, without turning around.

  “Hands off the glass, Harkness,” she responded curtly. “And I don’t appreciate that comment. I don’t know what issue you have with Cabal, or why you have it. We are Servants of the people of New Oxford.”

  “All of them?” I asked, half to myself, still staring out at the stunning view. “Or just a select few?”

  “You have a real problem with authority, don’t you?” she said, crossing to a chair.

  She didn’t sit in it, but stood with her hand on its tall back. I turned to face her.

  “I’m surprised that your attitude has not got you into trouble before now,” she sneered.

  My eyes widened. I actually found this amusing.

  “Trouble? Like this, you mean? You don’t consider this trouble enough?”

  Her face was a mask of scorn.

  “You don’t trust your own superiors,” she said accusingly. “That much is abundantly clear.”

  I was too tired and strung out to be careful with my tongue.

  “Right now, if I’m totally honest, I don’t know what to think,” I admitted. “My superiors have so far worked very hard to cover up the fact my boss has been kidnapped, tortured and, let’s face it, probably killed. They have bullied me into putting my own safety on the line because I’m the only person they know who actually knows a vampire. And they have me being babysat by you of all people.” I blew out my cheeks. “I don’t know if I trust you less than the bloody vampires. At least I know they are trying to kill me. They seem fairly straightforward.”

  I wiped my nose.

  “Some of them I mean.”

  “Sit down,” Cloves commanded coldly.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time, and remaining standing just to be obstinate would have served no purpose other than to make me appear like a stroppy child, so I dropped onto a sofa. My legs were still jellified anyway.

  “You think we are the bad guys here?” she said. “That maybe we’re as bad as every twisted GO out there? That perhaps you can trust your charming Italian more than you can trust me?”

  She came around the chair and stood in front of me.

  “Well, allow me to illuminate you, Phoebe. If you are having trouble telling who are the good people and who are the bad people, start with this simple equation.”

  Her eyes were flashing with carefully controlled anger.

  “We are people. They are not. It’s really that simple. We are human, and we fight and we strive to keep humanity what it is. What’s left of it…”

  She pointed out of the window, presumably at vampirekind in general.

  “They are not human. They are not people. They can look like people, they can move like people. But people do not do this to other people.”

  She reached up and unfastened the elaborately decorative black choker she wore. It wasn’t until I saw her take it off that I realised I had never yet seen her not wearing it, even in DataStream shows.

  She lowered her hands, holding the glittering beads, and I swallowed hard. Her neck, collarbone and throat was a riot of scar tissue. The woman looked as though she had been savaged by a wild dog. There had clearly been a lot of reconstructive work done, what looked like multiple surgeries, but the flesh was still a mess, with pale, wrinkled scars, one atop the next, making a strata of her skin.

  Veronica Cloves stood watching me stare at her wounds. She looked oddly naked and defenceless without the choker on. Her imperfections utterly exposed. She hadn’t just been bitten. She had been gnawed on, like an old bone. She stared at me angrily, her eyes practically daring me to look away.

  “A vampire did this to me,” she said, in a quieter voice. “A long time ago, before I was Cabal. Back when I thought they could integrate, that we were all basically the same underneath. He was charming, much like your sultry Italian friend. He was pretty too … And I was careless.”

  She refastened the choker, hiding the hideous scars from view. I didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t want my sympathy of course; she had been proving her point.

  “They are not people,” she said. “Not when the lights go out.”

  She turned away from me. I leaned forward in my chair a little.

  “What happened?” I asked. “To the one who did … this … to you?”

  “I killed him,” she said simply, looking back. “The Cabal are the Servants of humanity. You may not like our methods, but we will protect the people of this city. Whatever it takes to do so, and that includes putting individuals in danger. For the good of many. We are perfectly willing to risk your safety, yes. Because what you have fallen into here is important. More important than you.”

  She sneered. “If you can conceive of that.”

  She stalked away, towards one of the doors which led off this main lounge
.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “It’s three in the morning,” she called back. “I strongly suggest you get some sleep. My techs should have finished decrypting Trevelyan’s files by morning. We’ll take things from there. And for God’s sake, take a shower – you look a mess. You can take the guest bedroom.”

  “We’re staying here?” I asked incredulously.

  If you had told me a day ago that I would be having a slumber party with a high ranking Cabal member, I would have laughed in your face.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re hardly my ideal house guest, but for practicality’s sake, it’s safest,” she said, pausing at the door. “The whole building complex is warded. It’s easier to break into Blue Lab than it is to get in here.”

  She shut the door firmly behind her, leaving me alone in her magnificent penthouse, which I was trying to not think of as her evil mastermind lair. She hadn’t even offered me a nightcap. How rude. Warded, eh? So the Cabal had Bonewalkers on payroll? That was unexpected. They were the only ones with enough power to ward a building, which in basic terms involved enclosing it in a bubble of space and time which was impassable for GOs.

  Either Cloves was more paranoid than I thought about the perceived GO threat, or she knew more than I did about things.

  Face it, Phoebe, I told myself, everyone knows more about things than you do right now. I was pretty sure Veronica the Vampire Slayer wasn’t telling me everything she knew about our current situation.

  I glanced over at her workstation. The idea of firing it up and snooping around in her private files occurred to me, but only fleetingly. No doubt she would have firewalls and encryption in place that made my own look like the old world’s Hotmail, with ‘password’ as my password. Plus, I was too tired to try.