Paper Children

by James Fahy

  “But she was spotted here, less than an hour ago,” my supervisor told me.

  “Spotted?” I pressed, noting once again that we were dealing with a girl.

  “A witness came into the local police station, gave a statement. A bloody strange one too. The constabulary didn’t know what to make of it, but of course Cabal monitor all police reports and statements.”

  Of course they do, I thought.

  “The police thought it was a hoax, or just some drunken rambling, but given what we’re in the middle of at the moment, the statement triggered alarm bells.” She pointed upwards in a swish of pale silk. “High up bells. The kind that I hate ringing most of all.”

  “The senior directors?”

  She nodded, pursing her dark lips tightly, looking for all the world as if she were sucking a lemon. “Coldwater got scent of it. I was already here on scene when she called me. Says she’s coming down herself. On her way right now. We better have something useful to tell her before she gets here.”

  “Who’s the child this time?” I wanted to know. “Who was taken?”

  Cloves withdrew a slim pad from somewhere beneath the pashmina and flipped through it. “Cora Winterbourne,” she said. “Eight years old, only child. I’ve already checked for parallels before you ask. The Winterbournes have money,” she shrugged. “Some small influence, but nothing in the league of the Cunningham Bowls. They sit on a lot of city boards, but minor things. Local WI, traffic zoning. Small fucking potatoes.” She flipped the pad closed angrily.

  “But you think her disappearance is connected to that of Melodie Cunningham Bowls?”

  Cloves took off her sunglasses and squinted at me as though I was an idiot. “Yes, obviously,” she hissed. “But I don’t know how. The two families don’t really know one another, outside of the usual. The girls were not friends. Different schools, different hobbies, no common ground where they may have met.”

  I frowned, looking out across the river, where the early morning light danced on the surface. “What are the Winterbourne’s political leanings?”

  I saw that Cloves got immediately what I was driving at.

  “They’re MM members,” she confirmed. “That’s the only link I could find. Not fans of the Genetic Others by any standard. But you know, Harkness, despite your personal opinion, more than half of the city we call our world are MM members.” She looked me up and down witheringly, her hand straying to the throat of her pashmina. “Not everyone is like you. We don’t all think the species can hold hands in a circle and sing happy campfire songs. No matter how many street carnivals the monsters throw, to many they will always be monsters. It’s the majority opinion.”

  Beneath her pashmina, Veronica Cloves wore a laced jet choker. I knew this without seeing it. She never took it off, no matter what event or what outfit. And I also knew why. She had shown me once, to make a point at the time, the scar tissue which lay beneath. The marks from when a vampire she had trusted in her youth had tried to tear her throat out, and very nearly succeeded. Veronica Cloves was not the kind of person to die a victim though. She had been gnashing at the throat of the world ever since, in my opinion.

  I could understand her personal misgivings. They were based on experience. But most MM hatred for the various GO groups was based on something more common to every other prejudice. Mindless ignorance and fear of the unknown.

  “It’s still a link,” I said, returning her glare evenly. “Someone out to ruffle MM feathers? A vendetta against them? There are plenty of GO supporting groups out there, some more militant and radical than others.”

  “That follows no logic,” Cloves dismissed. “Why would any GO supporters do something like this, less than a week before the very first GO Halloween festival? The entire point of the celebration is to show we can all get along, that vampires are cuddly smiley folk too, am I wrong? Why would you want to kick a hornet’s nest of bigotry before that? All that any such stunt would achieve would be to damage the GOs’ image further.”

  She had a fair point. “Maybe someone doesn’t want the Fangfest parade to go ahead?” I wondered aloud. I made a mental note that it may be wise to go and speak to Dove again, see if he or his people have had any direct threats or trouble… other than the recent spate of vampire executions, that is.

  “We can’t order it to be cancelled,” Cloves noted. “Cabal don’t take sides. Not officially anyway. You know as well as I do, our job is to keep everyone placated. We support the fucking stupid GO mardi-gras, and we also give our full support to the human quarter currently having their nearest and dearest ankle-biters swiped from their homes.”

  “Cabal do like to sit on the fence,” I muttered darkly.

  “Harkness,” Cloves said, her voice a little weary. “Cabal are the fence. Don’t you get that yet? We’re the only thing keeping the two sides of this city from tearing itself to pieces. Our fence keeps them apart.” She pulled a cigarette from somewhere about her person and lit it. “But it makes my job more than a massive ballache where there’s some sneaky little fuckwit going around drilling holes in it.” She jabbed the cigarette in my direction, making me jerk back a little. “Which is why we need to be all over this like a cheap suit.”

  I stared around. None of the Cabal Ghosts made eye contact with me. Or acknowledged us in any way. They never do.

  “You say she was spotted here?” I said, gathering my thoughts. “This Cora Winterbourne girl? But I take it she’s gone now. No corpse at least, thank god. She couldn’t just have disappeared into thin air.”

  Cloves blew a plume of smoke into the air, glowing as it caught the cold bright sunlight. She smiled, tight-lipped and without the barest hint of amusement.

  “Oh that’s where you’re wrong, Dr Harkness,” she said. “Very wrong indeed. And that’s precisely why the police didn’t take this witness statement seriously.”

  I frowned in confusion. “Where is this witness?” I wanted to hear what they had to say.

  Cloves flicked a thumb behind her, at the other end of the bridge, where two identical Humvees were parked, the ghostmobiles, as we call Cabal’s preferred mode of transport. “He’s sleeping it off in the back seat. I’m taking him in for further questioning of course.”

  Lolling against the window in the backseat of one of the two cars was the squashed face of a sleeping man. He looked old, tired, dirty and weathered. Most of his face was covered with an uneven scruffy beard, and his mainly bald head appeared to have some kind of plastic bin-liner by way of a hat, attached by a headband.

  “A homeless guy?” I surmised.

  Cloves glanced towards the hill. “One of the lost-boys from NeverSoberLand over there,” she told me. “The itinerant colony of Castle Mound. He reeks of some kind of alcohol.” She considered this. “Or possibly toilet detergent, damned if I have any clue what the hell he’s been drinking.” Her nose wrinkled in obvious distaste. “It will take forever to get the smell out of the car. But I have his statement from the police report.”

  I was dubious. “Are we sure its reliable?”

  Cloves rolled her eyes. “The only thing reliable in this city, Harkness, is that nothing is bloody reliable. But there are descriptions given that do parallel the suspect seen at Cunningham Bowls’ ill-fated birthday bash. Which is the only reason we are giving the time of day to a drunken man wearing a bin-liner.” She handed me her DataPad. It contained the witness statement.

  “Read it fully later,” she said as I glanced down. “I’ll sum up what Trashcan Joe told us. Just after dawn this morning he was walking along here.” She indicated the street by the bridge, with its close, waterfront housing. “Apparently the bins are emptied around mid-morning, so he likes to get up early for a busy spree of dawn rummaging. It’s amazing how much good food the people who live in this area throw out in the trash.” She raised her eyebrows. “His words, not mine. What he claims to have seen, and we have no idea how lucid he was at the time, is a smouldering creature in the pre-dawn light, carrying a y
oung girl in its arms.”

  “Smouldering?” I looked at her questioningly. “As in… sexy?”

  Cloves folded her arms, glaring witheringly at me. “As in actually smouldering. Smoking, like it had just stepped out of…”

  “The infernal abyss?” I pondered, inadvertently channelling the words of the distraught Mrs Cunningham Bowls as my mind flicked back to the apparition I had sensed in my bedroom the night before. During what I had decided to call my ‘episode’. The smell of burning meat.

  “I was going to say ‘a fire’.” Cloves narrowed her eyes, looking suspiciously at me as though I’d gone quite mad. “Its skin was black and burned. It was ‘dressed funny’, whatever that means coming from the man literally wearing garbage, and apparently it had a wide smile, like a clown, or like the Cheshire Cat, whatever one of those may be.” She shrugged, bemused.

  “It’s a character from Alice in Wonderland,” I said, looking around the bridge and picturing the creature in my mind’s eye. Trailing wisps of black smoke, grinning white teeth in a dark and shadowy face.

  “He was terrified,” Cloves said. “I daresay he was almost scared sober. But however afraid he was, this monster had a little girl, still in her nightdress. Flopping around like a limp doll. He says he couldn’t say if she was dead or asleep, but he couldn’t just do nothing. Even vagrants have honour it seems.” Her lip curled in a sneer, which annoyed me.

  “Why wouldn’t they?” I snipped. “They’re just people, Cloves. Like you and me.”

  “Don’t compare someone like me to someone like that.” Cloves narrowed her mouth to a thin line. “For that matter, don’t compare someone like me to someone like you, either.”

  “He confronted the… thing?” I cut her off with the question.

  She shook her head. “He says he didn’t get a chance. This is the best part, Harkness, in case your cup of crazy isn’t quite full yet.” Cloves stared out over the river. “He claims, and I quote directly at this point: ‘an angel appeared, all dressed in white’.”

  She paused dramatically to let this sink in. The river lapped under the bridge beneath us. Somewhere in the distant city, the bells of Christchurch solemnly rang the hour, their chimes distant.

  “Are you making this up now?” I said after a moment.

  “A girl with golden hair, in a plain white gown. Appeared on the bridge out of thin air, to challenge the dark monster,” Cloves continued. Her facial expression told me that she wished most dearly that she was making this up. “She just popped into existence.” Cloves snapped her fingers. “According to our eyewitness, the dark and horrible creature roared at her, and then the angel moved across the distance between them, without moving.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Exactly what I asked him too. She ‘hopped through space’ by all accounts. One second she was paces away from the confronted, smoking fiend, the next she was somehow right in front of it and grabbed the girl from its arms. Before the thing could react, both the angel in white and the small girl were gone. Vanished into thin air.” Cloves made a popping noise with her mouth. “Like a goddamn soap bubble.”

  I struggled to process this.

  “The smoky creature was furious, I’m told. Our shabby friend, still gallantly and bravely hiding behind the bins at the edge of the bridge feared for his life, but whatever this thing was, it leapt over the bridge and into the river.”

  “It swam away?”

  “It went under and didn’t come back up. Just a hiss of smoke, so I’m unreliably informed.”

  I peered over the edge of the bridge at the murky, fast flowing water.

  “I already have divers down there right now,” Cloves told me, anticipating my next question. “They’ve found nothing so far. In my opinion because the entire story is likely the product of a mind that has been rotted over years from cheap gin and toilet cleaner.”

  I had to agree; the story seemed farfetched, even for us. A brimstone smoking devil lurching through the streets carrying off children to its evil lair is intercepted by an angel of the Lord? Here in Oxford? Seriously?

  But there were too many coincidences popping up. Dove had told me of rumours that the latest vampire killings being work of a seraph, an avenging angel. And the description of the creature spotted trying to kidnap this second child, Cora Winterbourne, had a lot in common with the stories I’d heard from the Cunningham Bowls. The dark appearance, the too-wide smile. I said as much to Cloves, who didn’t seem impressed.

  “We don’t have much conclusive proof to hang our hats on when our only witnesses who have seen this apparent perp are scared children hyped up on too much sugar and a crazy street person,” she said. “But some facts remain. The Winterbourne girl is missing, there’s no way that mental-case sleeping in the back of the car could have known about that. And his description of the girl being carried matches up, right down to the nightdress the brat’s parents say she was wearing when she went to bed. What I want to know is less who or what this supposed angel was, but how it appeared and disappeared and where in the hell it took the girl.”

  I had no idea. The vision of Dove/Allesandro was running through my mind again. The shadowy entities crowding my bedroom and the feel of that… presence… behind me. I could still hear that high pitched giggle in my mind. It was all too easy to pair it with a wide and smoking grin. I wondered if I should mention the events at my apartment to Cloves. I actually genuinely considered it for a moment, before I remembered who Cloves was and just how quickly she could have me incarcerated if she suspected I was losing my mind.

  To be fair, part of me wondered if that was indeed what might be happening, a side effect of my epsilon serum becoming less and less effective as time went on. It had been months since I’d drank from Allesandro. How long the virus retardant effect of that odd transfusion were going to last were anyone’s guess. I’d had visions of him before in the past. We had a strange mental link, he had told me, to his mortification. I’d drank from him twice. It wouldn’t get any stronger unless he drank from me too, something I had made very clear was never going to be on the cards.

  “Earth to Harkness,” Cloves said testily. “Thoughts? Theories? I didn’t drag you down here just to make my outfit look good by comparison. What’s going through your head?”

  Scanning around, without any real idea what I was expecting to find – sooty hooved footprints, a discarded devilish pitchfork perhaps. The only thing which caught my eye on the bridge was a flapping piece of trash caught in the rails of the bridge itself, something like a sweet-wrapper.

  “You said our homeless guy told you the trash is collected mid-morning?” I asked, tilting my head to one side. “He was out… foraging early, right? That’s why he was here in the first place.”

  Cloves blinked at me coolly. “I tell you a tall tale of creatures from the Old Testament duking it out here on the bridge, Harkness, and the only thing you’re fixating on is the punctuality of our great city’s refuse collection service?”

  I walked away from her, towards the scrap. There were always pieces of trash and litter in the streets after the garbage trucks had done their rounds. Losing a little here and there was unavoidable. These errant losses were usually tidied up by following drones an hour or so later. But the bins had not been emptied yet, it was too early. The rest of the streets, both Quaking and Paradise, were spotless.

  I worked it loose from the railings, standing back up and examining my findings. It wasn’t a sweet-wrapper as I’d first thought. It wasn’t even paper, but a thin loop of flat clear plastic, studded with neat holes at one end and matching nubs at the other.

  “What have you found?” she asked, stalking over to me in curiosity.

  “It looks like a medical bracelet,” I said, turning it over in my hands. “The kind you get when you’re admitted to hospital, for ID.”

  “A name?” she sounded hopeful. I shook my head, staring at the centre of the strip, where a name would usually be.

 
“Not a name,” I said. “Just a barcode.”

  A car had come around the corner and both Cloves and I watched as it pulled up to a halt at the end of the bridge. It was a sleek, silver thing. The driver got out, clearly a Cabal Ghost by her attire, and trotted around to open the rear passenger door.

  “Pocket that,” Cloves hissed out of the corner of her mouth, and, feeling oddly like a naughty schoolchild, I stuffed the barcoded medical bracelet into the pocket of my parka.

  Felicity Coldwater emerged from the car in a regal and stately manner. If you didn’t know her, you would probably assume she was an upmarket pastor’s wife, dressed in a long cashmere coat of palest pink, a string of expensively plain pearls dressing her neck, with matching earrings framing perfectly styled hair that would have had any presidential candidate weeping on the floor with inferiority. Twinkly-eyed, she actually gave us a little cheery wave as she stepped out of the car, her hands encased in soft calfskin gloves.

  I’d learned not to be fooled by appearances. Coldwater was one of the Cabal directors. She may look as though she were ready to open a village fete or judge the best homemade jam at one of the more exclusive branches of the Women’s Institute, but you didn’t rise to that level of power without balls of steel and a ruthless streak so wide it had longitude. She had funded a dangerous man in the past, believing his spiel about curing the Pale virus, when in actuality he had been a psychopath hell bent on releasing a nerve gas over the city that would have killed every single Genetic Other on the spot. Vampires, Tribals, Bonewalkers, everything else.

  She hadn’t suffered for her little ‘boo-boo’. It had all been brushed under the carpet. As I’ve said, directors were almost untouchable. Very few people even knew it had happened. Cloves and I both knew about her little incident of misdirected moonlighting. I had ended up with a lot more funding, and Cloves got a promotion. Such do the wheels of Cabal turn. But I was under no illusions that this gave us any leverage over the woman. She could make both our lives a living hell if she chose to. This smiling elfin creature now striding towards us had once ordered the entire city of Cambridge to be fire-bombed without the blink of an eye, after all. Like all senior directors, she had the power to mark any citizen ‘blacklisted’. This meant the entire force of both the police and Cabal would hunt you down. There would be no safe quarter in the city to hide. And when you were ‘brought in’, it meant living the remainder of your life in solitary confinement. Incarcerated without question, indefinitely, and only another Senior Board member could overturn that ruling. With people like Coldwater, it was always best to play nice.