Read Online Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) by James Fahy - Free Book Online Page A

For some reason this detail stuck with me, a distressing sight. I had never considered my boss as a vulnerable person. She would have survived a direct nuclear hit, but the sight of her stockinged foot, bent at an odd angle to the chair leg, made her seem like a small child.
    She was clearly out of it, either drugged or beaten senseless. It was hard to see. The light was so poor and the camera kept jiggling, like one of those annoying found footage horror movies which always give me headaches.
    It lingered on her a moment or two, blurring and refocusing, and then a voice, so low and guttural it was almost a growl, echoed from the monitor’s speakers.
    “Familiar sight, eh?” the voice spat. There was a burst of static, interference. “Used to seeing test subjects? Makes for an interesting science project. You humans are so fond of those.” The voice sounded furious, lip-biting, blood-spitting angry. “Well, it’s your turn now! How many killed? How many for the sins of mankind? This is only the beginning! I promise you.”
    The picture was lost for a second. More static, a high squeal, and then it was back. A hand had entered the frame. “You think you are untouchable! Cabal, the new order. You think you own the world! But we remember what was done! And there will be payment, an eye for an eye…” The hand raised up in front of the camera; it was gloved and gripping a pair of large and unpleasant pliers. “And a tooth for a tooth! Five sinners, five will pay!”
    The camera became too shaky to make much out, the cameraman was shuffling toward the chair, towards Trevelyan, pliers held aloft. She was beginning to stir, groggily. The cameraman chuckled, a noise that chilled me, in the midst of all the anger and the shouting, a bubbling wet chuckle which sounded utterly unhinged. “Five will pay, and the sun will rise!” it spat. “Harkness, Harkness, poor poor Vyvienne needs your help … the sun will rise!”
    The screen went to full static-hissing snow.
    I sat frozen. Servant Leon Harrison turned the monitor off and silence descended.
    All three Cabal members were looking at me closely. Cloves and Harrison with calculating looks. The minister, or whatever he was, gazing at me emptily through heavy lidded eyes. I stared at the blank screen, mute with horror. That thing doing the talking, the kidnapper, whoever, whatever it was, so angry, so utterly bat-shit crazy and dangerous, had just sang my own name out of the screen at me.
    “Now perhaps you understand why we are hoping for your cooperation, Dr Harkness,” Veronica Cloves said. She sounded roughly two minutes away from fetching thumbscrews and starting her own fun home video interrogation.
    “I don’t know what to say.” I looked up at them, still feeling nauseous. My forehead had broken out in a sickly sheen of sweat, I was deeply hoping they would recognise it as revulsion and not interpret it as guilt. “I don’t know … I don’t know why it said my name.”
    The person who had made the DataStream clip, was almost certainly a he , but I couldn’t help thinking of it as an ‘it’. I’d never heard a voice like that. Almost animal.
    “Voice pattern analysis suggests that the speaker, and, if we can assume, the kidnapper, is a Genetic Other,” Servant Harrison said. “Specifically of the type who deem themselves ‘vampires’. You met with a vampire only last night, the same night your supervisor went missing, and only hours before this DataStream was made and her teeth were returned to us here.”
    After the initial shock, I was slowly regaining my equilibrium. “And what?” I asked. “Are you suggesting that this is a personal issue? Revenge on me for something, because I’ve had a few bad break ups, believe me, but none of my exs have been quite so gibberingly psychotic, and as far as I remember, they all had pulses.”
    “We’re not suggesting that you were involved with the abduction, Dr Harkness,” Harrison countered.
    “Really?