Phoebe Harkness Omnibus Page 4

“To answer your questions,” his voice murmured inside my mind, sounding faintly amused, “… yes, we do have telepathic capabilities to some degree, amongst others. As you have no doubt figured out by now. You seem as smart as you are striking, Dr Harkness. Also yes, I do agree that the hideous woman you see me speaking to has had expensive work done to lift her face, and no, she did not pay enough for it. And ridiculous as she may appear, she is very, very dangerous. As for what I am doing here, I am here to warn you.”

  “Warn me?” I whispered my lips barely moving, my voice low enough to not carry to the microphone. I felt like a rabbit caught in headlights. A bead of sweat rolled between my shoulder blades and down my spine beneath my suit jacket, like a traced fingertip.

  “Do not confuse the words warn and threaten, Doctor,” the vampire whispered. “I mean you no harm … But terrible things are coming. And we vampires will need someone on your side of things if they are to be prevented.”

  “What things?” I asked, certain now that I wasn’t even whispering, but equally sure that he could hear my words, even inside my own head, if I allowed it.

  Down in the rows of seats, his eyes flicked from Veronica Cloves’ to mine briefly.

  “You will need someone on our side of things too. You will see. I came here to find someone useful, from within your organisation.” He sounded pleased with himself. “To tell the truth, I am glad it is you, not that other woman, Trevelyan. You are far more … interesting.”

  “What things are coming?” I asked again. Something brushed against me. For a moment I was certain he was standing right beside me, and that his arm had slid around my side, his fingertips brushing my hip. I jerked around instinctively, but there was no one on the stage with me of course. He was right where he had been all along, in the rows of seats, keeping the audience and the media entertained with whatever he was saying to Cloves.

  My sudden movement seemed to capture everyone’s attention, and all eyes flicked onto me. Great, I thought wincingly. I just had a little seizure on stage by myself … smooth. My ears seemed to pop, and suddenly I could hear the room again. Allesandro’s voice was no longer in my ear but back in the audience, where his body, I think, had remained.

  “… If the Cabal representative insists, however, I will of course bow to the wishes of the masses and remove myself from the hall. I came here through curiosity only,” he was saying, in a friendly and amiable way. “Much like the other, more human members of the public, I presume.”

  Veronica Cloves smiled her tight media-friendly smile. “I think given that this is indeed primarily a meeting to discuss scientific results for the outcome of human led research for a human cause, it may well be appropriate for you to leave, Mr. Alexander.”

  “Allesandro,” he corrected her gently. “No ‘x’. I understand.” He turned to the stage. “Dr Harkness, my apologies if I have in any way disturbed your presentation. My people may well, as you so rightly put, have been a help to mankind, but as we cannot yet vote or truly class ourselves at citizens, perhaps my curiosity into human affairs should be elsewhere.” He grinned, much for the sake of the media presence, and put his hand over his heart contritely. “I confess I have an unquenchable thirst for all things scientific.”

  He bowed courteously, his hair tumbling forward, and just like that, he left. Leaving his row and walking without a backward glance the length of the auditorium, banging out of the double doors. At least half of the media crew followed him.

  The room erupted into chatter and gossip. Veronica Cloves, her face a thinly disguised mask of white fury, shot me a look of death, and began calling for order.

  7

  “Holy fucking shitting crap!”

  Such were the first words uttered to me by Lucy when I eventually appeared backstage, released from the presentation. The girl was practically jumping up and down on the balls of her feet.

  “Did that really happen?” she squealed. “He was one of them, wasn’t he? I mean really? You got hit on by a GO?”

  I grabbed her by the elbow as I unpinned my thankfully deactivated microphone and practically dragged her down the corridor, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of the building before Veronica Cloves, or any one of the press or audience members, could find me.

  “Can we just go? Please?” I almost begged. “Yes, it was a vampire, I mean, a GO, and no, he wasn’t bloody hitting on me. Jesus, could that have gone worse? In any way, shape or form? Vampires aside, I was just forced to report that in our ongoing quest to find a vaccine serum to reverse the effects of the Pale infection, our greatest success of the quarter has been to make a rat explode.”

  Lucy was optimistic as always as we made our way through the college. “I don’t think Trevelyan could have done any better, Doc,” she assured me. “I mean, who knew one of them was going to turn up and cause a big scene. God, I was only listening from backstage, but the way he and that lady from Cabal were going at each other, GO rights here, legislation there, it was like the most polite and politically correct boxing match I’d ever seen. Talk about a bad atmosphere! I love her on the talk shows, she’s so sweet.”

  I hadn’t heard a word of this exchange of course, but I could hardly tell Lucy that the reason for this was that I had a vampire whispering sweet nothings in my ear at the time and groping my…

  At the memory, my hand went to my hip as I walked. To the pocket of my suit jacket. My fingers closed around something. A square of card. He must have slipped it into my pocket.

  I tried not to process how he could have done that. How he could have been in two places at once, having two different conversations. I was just realising how little we knew about the Genetic Others, really. What else were they capable of?

  I kept my hand clutched firmly around the card as we left the building and erupted into the blessedly icy night air of the car park. For some reason, I didn’t want to inspect it while Lucy was around. She didn’t notice anyway.

  “God, he was lush though.” She was smirking as we walked to my car. “That voice too, I love an accent. You can see why people think the GOs are charming.”

  “Not all of them,” I said blankly. “Don’t even get me started on the unsolved murder statistics in this city in the last ten years. The DataStream might insist on telling us everything’s happy and shiny, but talk to the police sometime.” I fumbled in my bag for my car keys while Lucy rearranged the folders she was carrying, hopping slightly from one foot to another in the cold.

  She gave me a wary look. “Do you think Cabal are going to cut our funding?” she asked tentatively, referring to my not-so-amazing report on our complete lack of viable lab results.

  Inwardly I did a kind of half hysterical laugh. Cut our funding? I’d be amazed if they didn’t shut us down completely. Frankly, I was half expecting to be summoned for questioning by the Cabal council themselves first thing in the morning to investigate any questionable relationships I might have with the Genetic Other society. I didn’t say this, of course. For the same reason I wasn’t sharing the card in my pocket with Lucy. I felt stupidly protective of her and Griff. They were my team.

  “Of course not,” I lied. “Trevelyan will spin it. It’s the one thing she’s good at. When she gets back on the radar from wherever the hell she’s got to. We’ll be fine. Look I need to get home, it’s been a hell of a day, can we pick over the bones of the battlefield in the morning?” I pleaded.

  Lucy agreed and retreated with good grace to her own car. I sat in mine, the heaters on full blast, slowly dissolving a porthole in the frost on the windscreen, and plucked the card from my pocket.

  It was a business card. Plain white stock, very expensive thick card. On one side was simply a telephone number, printed, and beside it, a handwritten scrawl: ‘when you need me – A’.

  I flipped the card over. The reverse showed a stylised raven, wings spread, looking like a Rorschach ink-blot. The script below was a single word, ‘Sanctum’, in spiky, gothic script.

  I’d heard o
f the place – a nightclub, members only. In the GO district. I’d never been there. Didn’t plan to either.

  ‘Terrible things are coming’. Allesandro’s voice in my head again, but not telepathy this time, only memory. I slipped the card back into my pocket.

  Starting the car, I reflected on my exceedingly unusual day. None of this would have been my problem if Vyvienne Trevelyan had just shown up and done her God damn job. I was going to find a way to make her suffer for this, I promised myself.

  As it turned out, someone beat me to it.

  8

  Driving home in the snow, I wondered how much of the night’s events would actually air on the DataStream. As I later discovered, very little.

  Cabal had taken power for a reason in our brave new world. Building order out of the chaotic and tremendous shit-storm of a war we had created for ourselves had not been easy. Despite what most people might individually think about freedom and liberty, people en masse want order. They want to know someone is in charge of things and making the cogs of our world turn. Most people had been glad that someone, anyone, was taking charge, forming some manner of government after the years of confusion and terror. Thirty years later, and we were all now finding out what happened when you gave all your human rights to a group of people who insisted their agenda was to ensure you remained human enough to have rights.

  People don’t like upset. Cabal make sure that doesn’t happen, for the most part. Content citizens are easier to manage I guess.

  DataStream screens on the sides of dark buildings were already showing the evening’s roundup as I drove the dark streets. All the usual stories concerning rolling brown-outs across New Oxford and the need for all citizens to do their part, pull together, blah blah blah. After the usual power crisis story there was a segment concerning the crop circles again. Seriously, who makes these things? Certainly not humans; we don’t live in the countryside anymore. That’s Pale territory. We stay behind our nice safe, high, thick, heavily-guarded perimeter walls.

  New Oxford was cruel in wintertime; there had been ice on the inside of my apartment windows all week. By the time I got home, curled up in bed hugging a fluffy hot water bottle, the DataStream had already finished, the segment on the Blue Lab R&D aired and gone.

  My phone rang almost as soon as I turned off the DataStream, slightly disappointed to have missed the segment. I flicked on the bedside lamp, which sputtered at half wattage for a moment, before deciding to come on full beam after all. It was Lucy on the line.

  “That didn’t go as bad as I thought!” She sounded monumentally relieved.

  “Lucy, how did you get my number?” I asked.

  “Oh, sorry, I’m at … I’m with Griff,” she said awkwardly. “We thought you might need checking up on, bit of a team high five that we didn’t get crucified on screen tonight, you know?”

  With Griff, eh? My eyebrows crawled up my forehead, and I was glad Lucy couldn’t see the expression. Well, this was news to me. See what happens when you absorb yourself in your work so much? You become the cranky, work-obsessed spinster while everyone around you gets coffee and long walks on the beach. Maybe I was reading too much into things, though. They could be just hanging out. People did that right? Other people I mean. Not me obviously. My closest acquaintances were lab rats.

  “I didn’t catch it,” I admitted. “Did the camera add ten pounds? I hear that happens.”

  “Oh, there was a fault with the equipment at the lecture theatre apparently,” Lucy revealed. “Something to do with all the brown-outs. They didn’t show any footage from the lecture, just the anchorwoman, that Poppy Merriweather with the red hair, interviewing Veronica Cloves.”

  Of course, I thought.

  “She was very complementary about Blue Lab,” Lucy said. “Talked us up big style. She’s so lovely!”

  Orwell had been almost, but not quite right. Total world domination hadn’t been achieved through a fascist boot stamping on the face of mankind forever. It had been achieved through glossy, impenetrable and perfect PR.

  “I take it there was no mention of a vampire being there?” I asked.

  “No, I dunno … maybe they didn’t have time on the segment.” She seemed to sense my mood. “I would have thought you’d be happy you weren’t on screen?” Lucy asked. “I know you didn’t want to take Trevelyan’s spot anyway.”

  “I don’t really care how much screen time ‘Doctor Fiona’ got,” I muttered. “I just wonder at the famous transparency of Cabal.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Lucy insisted. “They can’t help the power crisis. If anything it shows it affects them too, not just us lowly citizens. I know the only light that’s been bothering to work at my place all night has been the one in the fridge for some reason.” Good old Lucy. She did insist on seeing the bright side of everything. “I’m just super-happy they made us sound good!”

  “They made themselves sound good, Lucy,” I sighed with a wan smile. “We’re still going to get it in the neck from Trevelyan tomorrow.”

  “If she even shows up,” Lucy pointed out.

  As it happens, our absent supervisor did show up in the lab. Just not quite the way we’d expected.

  9

  I should have guessed there was something wrong as soon as I stepped into the atrium at Blue Lab the next day.

  It was a crisp sunny morning. Bitterly cold, the kind of cold which gets inside your hat and gloves and lies there like dry ice under your clothing. The sun was bright, dazzling off the snow and making the quad at the college look like something from an old sentimental biscuit tin, the ancient buildings dark spikes against a shocking, cloud-free sky the colour of spearmint toothpaste. I had actually quite enjoyed the walk to work, crunching through the park and across the campus in my boots, but as soon as I was through the heavy vacuum-sealed doors and inside the unrelentingly modern interior, the atmosphere was somehow even chillier.

  Miranda, our day receptionist, was sitting at the check in desk, Mattie having clocked off for the night. She was a handsome, heavyset woman with a tumbling mass of dark curls, and always looked like she should be clucking around a bride at a giddy Greek wedding, but this morning, as I made my way into the circular atrium with its elevator lined walls, her demeanour was stiff and her face looked concerned.

  The reason for her discomfort was immediately apparent. Three men were standing by the desk, dark suits, close cropped hair, ramrod straight posture. Anonymous faces set in varying degrees of granite. Everything about them screamed secret service, or at least ex-military. The only thing missing were those twiddly little earpieces you always saw them wearing on TV. I didn’t know any of them, but I recognised them for what they were immediately. Here at the lab, we called them ghosts. They were basically Cabal security. Henchmen and bodyguards to the highest of the high, and lo and behold, as I squelched my way toward the desk, acutely aware I was leaving puddles of melting snow on the pristine floor as I advanced, I saw the fourth figure, previously screened by the ghosts. An older man, late fifties, solidly built, with short silvery hair, and a face which looked as though it had given up smiling long before the wars. I knew the face from TV. This was Leon Harrison. Servant Leon Harrison.

  “Dr Harkness,” Miranda said, her voice rather strained as she tried to appear breezy as always. “I was just about to try and call you. These … gentlemen are—”

  “Here to see you,” Servant Harrison cut in, silencing our secretary effectively. His voice was severe. “We need a moment of your time. I am—”

  “I know who you are,” I said, tugging my gloves off as I reached the desk for Miranda to DNA-check me in. She stared at my hand as though she didn’t have a clue what she was supposed to do. These guys had her really spooked. But, I suppose that’s the effect Ghosts have.

  “You’re Servant Harrison of the Cabal High Council,” I said, peering at Harrison and his silent goons. “I didn’t realise we warranted level two scrutiny here in the trenches, but still, I don’t think there’s
a employee here who doesn’t know your face, sir.”

  To explain Harrison’s position in the food chain, he was basically a lion to Veronica Cloves’ hyena. The Cabal member who had all but roasted me at the lecture last night was a dangerously powerful woman in her own right, but she wouldn’t dare approach the half-eaten zebra until Harrison had filled his belly, licked his bloody muzzle and wandered off to sleep in the savannah. He looked rather unprepossessing, even in his crisp suit, but he was practically royalty. The fact that he was here at Blue Lab was worrying in the extreme.

  “And indeed I know yours, Dr Harkness,” he replied. “You are correct, I would not usually pay a personal visit to R&D, but this is a somewhat sensitive issue…” This was even more worrying. I had no idea why I would be on the radar of someone like him. I work with rats. It’s not a glittering career. I try to stay off the map as much as possible.

  He gestured towards one of the elevators as Miranda removed the tube from my finger and busied herself checking that I was still human as usual.

  “I really must insist you come with us at once,” he said.

  I turned to Miranda. “Are my team in yet?” I asked. She shook her head mutely. I had never seen her so quiet, but then the three hulking ghosts were practically oozing silent government menace from every pore. “Then will you let them know I’ll be down as soon as I’ve … assisted … Servant Harrison with…” I glanced at him, “… whatever it is I’m needed for?”

  He gave no indication that he had any intention of discussing anything here in the lobby. I had half-hoped he might at least give me a sketchy idea as to why I was about to be frogmarched into an elevator by Cabal nobility, knowing that Miranda, who was not the embodiment of discretion, would be sure to tell Griff and Lucy everything as soon as they arrived. I felt like I was trying to leave a message for my own protection, like in an old movie … if my lawyer doesn’t hear from me in half an hour… but he wasn’t biting.