Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1)

by James Fahy

  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  I didn’t have time to go through the five stages of acceptance with my lab assistant right now. I had just needed a ride here. I was still trying to process the fact that either the Cabal or whoever had sanctioned the Military Applications Division at Blue Lab had signed off on a minor act of genocide.

  By process, I mean temporarily ignore. One thing at a time, Phoebe. One thing at a time.

  “I know this all seems weird,” I said to Griff, who was frowning up at me, his hand on the banister. “I swear I have a good reason to be here, it’s just … not easy to explain right now. You’ll have to trust me. Okay?”

  He peered up at me with a worried expression in his big brown puppy dog eyes. I think he suspected his boss had gone off the deep end a little.

  “It’ll just take a minute. You stay down there. See what’s on the DataStream or something,” I suggested, forcing a winning smile.

  I turned and hurried the rest of the way upstairs before he could reply. I winced inwardly, realising that I had basically just acted like I was trailing a troublesome five year old. I had all but sat him at the kitchen counter with a carton of juice and some cartoons to keep him entertained while mommy was working.

  As I made my way across the cream-coloured landing and found my boss’ bedroom door, however, I heard the DataStream come on downstairs and Griff beginning to idly flick through channels. Something about crop circles outside the city walls again. There was a lot of that going on lately. It was on the DataStream every other day. No one knew who was making them. Not people obviously. We didn’t step outside the walls. I wondered why Cabal would want everyone knowing about them, unless of course they were as clueless as the rest of us? Fishing for information, hoping someone watching would know something about it. Casting their net of enquiry over the DataStream in the hope of catching something wriggling?

  I shook my head, shaking off the conspiracy theories. I’m a paranoid by nature, and it’s easy to get carried away. Much more likely they were just trying to keep everyone’s minds off real issues, such as the current energy crisis, the civil unease over the vampire GO rights movement, and the rumours of Tribals becoming more organised than mere packs. To my mind at least, the crop circle stories was the Cabal equivalent of following a segment on harsh new taxes with a human interest story about a water skiing budgie. Keep the masses entertained, distracted. Keep them happy.

  I shook my head to clear it and reluctantly checked out Trevelyan’s love nest, leaving Griff to his Stream.

  It was a spartan bedroom, like the rest of the house. The bed was neatly made. Wardrobes were built into the walls, a dresser by the window. There were no fluffy toys on the bedspread, no loved mementos of childhood. My boss was a single woman, it wouldn’t have surprised me if there had been.

  I didn’t like being in here, in another woman’s bedroom. It made my skin crawl. There’s snooping and then there’s snooping. I’d happily hack into my supervisor’s secret work files but I drew the line at rummaging through her underwear drawers. I wasn’t here to discover her bra size, and I was worried in case I accidentally found some fluffy handcuffs or something.

  I had already been surprised enough to find that chirpy, smiling Lucy was a closet vampire superfan, I didn’t need to know what Trevelyan got up to in her bedroom as well.

  After a cursory sweep, I tried the guest bedrooms which similarly came up blank of anything of interest, and I ended up in the last second story room, which I discovered was an office.

  I had no real idea what I was looking for, or why I had even come to her house in the first place. It had been opportunistic, I suppose, too tempting not to swipe the box file from the lovely and helpful Melanie and have a rummage.

  My supervisor, prior to getting kidnapped and disfigured, had been deeply involved in the dubious MA Division as well as my own. She had my name as her bloody password. There had to be a reason why, and seeing as the only files she still had at Blue Lab were encrypted, I had hoped something might have turned up here too – something I could work with.

  A search of the drawers and cupboards of the small upstairs office confirmed my suspicions. Someone had indeed been here before me on a clean-up operation. I knew this because every drawer and cupboard I opened was completely and thoroughly empty. There wasn’t even dust. What office contains no paperwork at all? Thanks, Cabal.

  Atop her desk, I fired up her home workstation, which was nowhere near as sleek and advanced as Veronica Cloves’ model, but as I had expected, the same clean sweep had passed through here too. The system was an empty shell. There wasn’t even a desktop background. No files at all. Even the recycle bin had been deleted. I hadn’t even known that was possible.

  I mean, how do you delete the recycle bin? Where do you drag it into? Itself?

  As you can tell, I’m no Matrix-style hacker.

  Frustrated, I turned to leave the room and give up this hopeless wild goose chase when something caught my eye.

  The decor in this room was as impersonal as the rest of the house but it was obvious that Trevelyan spent more time in this office than any other room. It at least had her framed Blue Lab certificate on the wall, as well as her Doctorate in Applied Technical Engineering plus a few other academic achievements she was either proud of or, more likely, was required to display for reasons of competency.

  It wasn’t these few framed personal items which I had noticed, though. I had my own certificates framed back at my place. It was a photograph which had caught my eye. Framed, mounted and almost hidden, placed as it was on the wall behind the door. I had almost missed it completely.

  Crossing the office, I took the photo down off the wall. It was old, black and white, a formal pose of several people. It looked pre-wars to me.

  There were five people in the photograph, all men standing in what was clearly a lab setting. They were holding champagne flutes and wearing white lab coats. The man on the far right was holding the bottle by the neck. They all looked young, mid-twenties to early thirties, and very pleased with themselves. Clearly, this was a commemorative photo. Some kind of graduation? Or the marking of a science team’s breakthrough?

  The man on the far right, I saw instantly, was clearly related to my boss. He had the same eyes and the same strong jaw. He must have been Trevelyan’s father.

  He had his arm companionably around the shoulders of the next man in the frame, who looked the youngest of them all. He was a thin, gawkish-looking nerd with thick glasses. The photo had caught this guy halfway into a grin, which made him look even goofier than he would probably have appeared. Who was this then? The protégé of Vyvienne’s father?

  The next man along, in the centre of the photograph, looked faintly familiar to me but I didn’t know why. He was a large solidly-built man, also wearing thick-rimmed glasses over heavy lidded eyes, and was sporting a very luxuriant and well-trimmed beard which covered half of his face. He was standing with his arms folded, centre-stage, smiling proudly out of the frame with his champagne glass tucked under his hand. He looked like the most senior of the five present, a proud father-figure with his close knit team around him.

  Next along came as something of a surprise to me. I definitely knew this face. In this old photo, the man was younger, slimmer, and looked far less self-important than every other time I had even seen his face on the DataStream. However, there was no doubting that this was a floppy-haired, smirking version of Marlin Scott, the same super-rich businessman who my new best friend Servant Cloves would be schmoosing at his Mankind Movement fundraiser this evening.

  There was no mistaking that hooked nose or clever eyes. Scott was a powerful figure in the industry. I hadn’t known he had a background in science but here he was, inexplicably, in the photo. He was an engineer, surely? What on earth was he doing drinking champagne with Trevelyan’s old man and the other guys, Nerdboy and Superbeard?

  It was the fifth figure, however, which had really caught my attention. It was seei
ng this man that had made me cross the room and practically tear the picture off the wall.

  That man standing next to Marlin Scott. He was young in the picture, grinning like the rest of them, clearly celebrating something and looking as caught up in the moment as everyone else. These five pre-war scientists, with their eyes bright as buttons, smiling out of their black and white world so distant from my own, enjoying a world without the Pale.

  The young man on the far right, leaning on Marlin Scott’s shoulder and holding the champagne bottle cheekily just out of frame was younger in this photo than I was now. Twenty two maybe, twenty three? He was handsome, if a little thin in the face.

  My hands gripped the photo so hard I almost thought the glass would shatter as I stared at him.

  I hadn’t heard Griff come upstairs, didn’t look up when he entered the room or when he stood next to me, looking down curiously at the photo I was gripping.

  “Hey, did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, scrutinising the picture. “Who are those guys?”

  Beneath the photo, on the card mount, it read ‘To my darling daughter Vyvienne, me and the rest of the team, raising glasses to a world without fear – Love, Dad.’

  I swallowed a couple of times before I could answer.

  “I don’t know all of them,” I said, my voice sounding oddly tinny in my own ears, “but this guy here? The youngish guy holding the bottle…?”

  My finger jabbed the man on the far right of the science team as I looked up at Griff.

  “That’s my father.”

  21

  I took the photograph with me when I left the house, dragging Griff behind me. I didn’t know what to think.

  Why the hell was my father in a photograph with Trevelyan’s old man and the others? What the hell did it all mean?

  I had decided the time had come to take action.

  I checked my watch, it was close to 5pm now. The winter days were short and it was already dusk. It would be full nightfall soon.

  “Where are we going now?” Griff asked as we climbed back into his car.

  “You’re going back to work, handsome,” I told him, a steely look in my eyes. “But frankly I’ve had enough of this cloak and dagger crap. I want answers.”

  I glanced over at him, his face lit by the dashboard in the deepening gloom.

  “You can drop me … at the library,” I said with feeling.

  22

  The Bodleian Library is not just any old place. Maybe once, it was one of the great libraries of the whole world.

  Built around an earlier private library back in the fifteenth century, it expanded and opened to our city’s noble scholars later in 1602. It is an ancient and venerable hall of knowledge. Its reading rooms have been home to many a famous mind over the centuries. Five different kings have studied here, forty or so Nobel Prize winners, twenty six of the old civilisation’s Prime Ministers, and more writers than you can shake a quill at. Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, Tolkien…

  My interest in the Bod this evening, however, was neither academic nor historical. I wasn’t hoping to rifle through its catalogue of millions of printed books and manuscripts in a handy motivational montage which might explain my current conundrum.

  I was heading there, to the heart of old Oxford at the centre of the University, because it was here at the Bod where the wealthy Mankind Movement champion, Marlin Scott, was holding his evening fundraiser.

  You could hire out rooms at the Library for private or corporate functions. Marlin Scott’s shindig was being held in the Divinity School, the University’s very first teaching room and its oldest examination hall.

  It was a grand setting, which suited Scott. He wasn’t, if his public persona was anything to go by, one for understatement. I wanted to know what the geriatric saviour of our city, the man behind the construction of the wall, knew about my father.

  “I thought your father was dead, Doc?” Griff said as we drove through the sleet and the gathering gloom.

  “He is,” I replied. “He died in the wars. He was a field surgeon.”

  The temperature was dropping and I was beginning to wish I hadn’t left my coat back in the lab.

  “My mother died when I was born. The wars had already been raging for years, it was just me and dad. I was nine when he died. A skirmish out in Derbyshire, a town almost overrun by the Pale. He was part of an Evac Team, sent in to lift out any civilians still holed up there.”

  “Something brought his helicopter down right in the middle of the Peak District, out in the wilds. Deep valleys up there, high moors. They disappeared off the radar. A Search and Rescue Team went out after them, of course.”

  I rubbed my hands together in the cold, trying to coax some warmth into them.

  “They found the crash site and the bodies, what was left of them anyway. The Pale had found them. They didn’t leave much behind to identify.”

  “Jesus…” Griff muttered under his breath.

  I glanced at him.

  “Everyone lost someone in the wars. A whole lot of people just disappeared. I grew up here after he died. Safe behind Marlin Scott and the Bonewalkers’ magnificent wall.”

  I smirked to myself. It sounded like a tribute band.

  “And you had no idea that your father had worked with Trevelyan’s dad?” Griff pulled up near the Turf Tavern on Holywell, not far from the library.

  “None whatsoever,” I admitted, shaking my head in disbelief. “I knew he had been a scientist before the Pale, before the wars started, but that was long before I was born.”

  I glanced down at the photo on my lap in the dark car.

  “I’ve never seen him look as young as he does here.”

  I re-read the message from Trevelyan’s father to his doting daughter again. What the hell had the Development Team been? I had no answers. Trevelyan may have had them but she was gone. There was another source I planned to confront.

  Marlin Scott himself.

  Griff tried to come with me but I sent him away. He was clearly worried and asked me solemnly if I was in some kind of trouble. I admitted that I thought I was. There wasn’t much he could do to help, however, other than keep up the good work with the rats.

  I thanked him for driving me around like a chauffeur, and promised solemnly that I would explain to him what the hell this was all about as soon as I could, asking him to check in on Lucy if he was headed her way, and then left the car and disappeared into the snowy night streets of New Oxford.

  The Bod is an impressive building, quite monumental and utterly otherworldly in that way so common to my city. Oxford has always seemed fluid in time to me. The strange additions over the years, the salvaged buildings from other parts of Britannia, the sky-scraping glass needles of the new Northern Sector, these all just added to the feeling that this city was half in the present, half in the past, and another half somewhere on the other side of the looking glass.

  Yes, I’m aware that’s three halves. I did tell you it’s an odd place.

  The impressive, ancient exterior of the Bod was made to seem ever more eldritch tonight by the falling snow and with enormous spotlights casting a soft bluish glow over the outer walls. Large free-standing pennants bearing the logo of Scott Enterprises (a stylised portcullis if you’re interested) flanked the entrance, and there were many expensive-looking cars in the parking lot, with valets rushing here and there while guests poured into the building.

  I didn’t have an invitation, of course, and I realised I was severely underdressed for such a grand high society gala. There were very official-looking doormen welcoming New Oxford’s great and good, and as I reached the steps to the main entrance, one of them gave me a look of alarm.

  Come on, I thought, I didn’t look that bad. Okay, so most of the people around me were either in full tuxedos, evening gowns or a combination of pearls and mink stoles, but I didn’t exactly look like a derelict off the street from the south eastern Slade Sector.

  I wondered if I looked like some cr
azy GO rights activist, here to ruin the fun of all the Mankind Movement supporters. Maybe I was hoping to throw a bucket of pig’s blood over Mr Scott, for being such an unashamed genetic bigot?

  “I’m sorry, miss,” the doorman said while not looking remotely sorry, “but this is a private function, invitation only. I’m afraid I can’t allow you in.”

  I stared past him up the steps into the warmly-lit building. There were crowds of people filing though the corridors inside, heading for the Divinity School. I could hear distant band music, upbeat swing drifting out into the dark car park.

  “Do you know Veronica Cloves?” I asked him. He looked confused.

  “Well, of course, Servant Cloves is one of my favourite DataStream hosts. Everybody knows her, but…”

  “She’s inside,” I said curtly.

  “I’m aware of that, miss,” he said in his patient yet no-nonsense tones. “However, if you’re a fan or a member of the press, I’m afraid you will have to approach her office directly at the Cabal Headquarters at the Liver Building over in the South Park Complex, same as everyone else. There’s no one giving autographs here tonight.”

  He rocked slightly on his heels, fuelled by self-importance.

  “As I said, miss, it’s a private function.”

  “I know it is,” I said, shooting him my most withering look. “My name is Doctor Phoebe Harkness and I am working closely with Servant Cloves on internal Cabal affairs. I’m not asking for her goddamned autograph. I’m telling you to go and find her, and tell her I’m here.”

  The doorman raised his eyebrows. He looked slightly uncertain but not entirely convinced.

  Frankly, I wouldn’t have believed me either. I wasn’t even carrying any ID.

  “Is there a problem?” said the person standing behind me, sounding bored but impatient to get inside.

  The doorman looked past me as I seethed, but something on the doorman’s face, the look of abashed surprise, made me reconsider my initial impulse to turn and land a haymaker on whatever silver-spoon blue blood was irritated by my holding him up.