Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) by James Fahy

have a rather … impressive set of personal firewalls set up, Dr Harkness. It does not suggest a trusting nature.”
    Good thing really , I thought, considering people had been trying to hack my system to hell while I was strolling to work.
    “We could break through eventually of course,” he assured me. “But as time is something of an issue here, it will be far easier for you to simply log on, find these files, and extract them. We want to know what’s on them.”
    *
    And so now here I was, driving away from the lab in Veronica Cloves’ funhouse-coloured Batmobile, with a DataStream stick of encrypted information my boss had hidden in my computer, and a worryingly slim file of intel on a vampire I barely knew. This was an odd Tuesday morning, all told.
    “Nice ride,” I commented. “Not very subtle for a secret agent though.”
    “Cabal doesn’t have secret agents,” Cloves snapped. “It’s important the population know that we have nothing to hide. Why do you think I spend so much time on the DataStream? People fear a shadowy, faceless government. Give it a friendly face, mine to be exact, and everyone’s happy. As far as New Oxford is concerned, Veronica Cloves is a sweet-natured and reassuring voice in the darkness. Cabal cares deeply about its people. That’s the message. I’m as visible as I can be.”
    “You were pretty visible in that purple suit at the lecture,” I nodded.
    “Where are we headed, Harkness?” Cloves glowered at me, not rising to my comment. Clearly she was still fuming that she and I were apparently Cabal’s version of Cagney and Lacey. Not that she would know who that was if I pointed it out. No one watches the classics except me.
    I needed more of a plan than I had currently formed. Ideally, I wanted to hole up in a Starbucks somewhere and read through the file on the vampire, but not with Cloves at my side. I didn’t like the woman, and certainly didn’t want her breathing down my neck all day. Part of me was still distracted by the fact that Cabal even had files on the vampire. Did they have similar files on every known and named GO? Did they have them on humans too? I pictured a vast warehouse filled with filing cabinets somewhere deep underground, and a dusty folder with my own name, containing everything from old diary pages to my hard-earned primary school swimming certificates.
    “Look, if you seriously want me to do this, we’re going to have to do it my way,” I said, sounding far more resolute than I felt. “You want me to schmooze vampires on behalf of Cabal, and you want me to do it under the radar. Well, I don’t think rocking up to the district with a high ranking and very public Cabal figurehead next to me is perhaps the most subtle way to do it.”
    Cloves glanced at me sidelong. “I’m hardly thrilled about this arrangement myself,” she said. “But it sounds awfully as though you are desperate to ditch me.”
    I bit my tongue. I would have called an exorcist if I thought it could get rid of her. “I just think we can save time if we divide our labours,” I said. “You work on decrypting the mystery files my boss thoughtfully dumped in my computer. Trust me, I would be absolutely no help at all with all that superspy stuff, anyway. I can’t even do Sudoku.”
    “And you?”
    “You can drop me at my place, Bartholomew Road, down in Iffley, east of the river. I have to read up on my vampire homework if I’m going to make contact with this guy from the presentation tonight.”
    “Tonight?” Cloves snapped. “Time is rather of the essence, Dr Harkness. We need to move on this as quickly as possible.”
    I sighed. This woman’s attitude was grating on me already. “I might not have had much interaction with the GOs, Servant Cloves, but I am fairly certain of only one fact, and that is that they are definitely night owls. There’s not much to do with them while the sun is up. Unless you want to play giant Jenga with a lot of