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

other ‘subjects’ were. I assumed this meant there were other manila folders somewhere in Cabal’s archives, but without access to them these numbers it was all meaningless to me. Other GOs perhaps?
    They knew where he worked, of course. Every GO residing in New Oxford and every one of the other free towns was required to register and be on record, but this was hardly rocket science. The man had given me his business card, for God’s sake; he clearly wasn’t in hiding.
    No rap sheet. He seemed to have stayed off the law’s radar. Undesirable activity, as far as vampires were concerned, was human attack. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, the GOs generally dealt with it internally, swiftly and sternly. It was bad PR for both sides, considering they were picketing for equal rights. A rogue human attack could set things back years, and the great and good of the GO cause had little patience for any of their own kind who were unable to keep their fangs behind their lips.
    No tattoos either. This didn’t shed any light on anything either, although I admit part of me was oddly disappointed with the news.
    Don’t judge me. I never said I was Snow White.
    I flipped the useless file closed irritably and finished my hot chocolate in as angry a manner as is possible when slurping hot molten goodness. I burned the roof of my mouth, which only made my mood worse.
    Truth be told, I was shook up. Scared and well out of my depth. It wasn’t just the fact of what had happened to my supervisor, which was horrific in itself, or the fact that my bosses were trying to hush the whole thing up. It wasn’t even that I had been press-ganged into this unwanted new ‘promotion’ of unofficial Blue Lab Snoop. It was that I was having to lie by omission to my team. It was that I was well and truly out of my – admittedly narrow – comfort zone. Perhaps most of all, it was that despite Cabal’s seeming faith in me to be a team player, the very private conversation I had held with the vampire Allesandro at the lecture put me in a very difficult position.
    He had told me bad things were coming. That they would need someone on our side of things. I had apparently been hand-picked by the other side as well.
    Gosh, I was popular all of a sudden. Go me!
    I hadn’t revealed the details of this exchange to Harrison, Cloves or their senior, of course. I did retain some small sense of self-preservation, after all, but what did this make me? An unwitting vampire conspirator? Some kind of double agent, a go-between for two very suspicious and unfriendly teams. I wasn’t sure quite what I had done to get myself dragged into this odd mess, but I was feeling very sulky about it.
    I had been twirling the business card Allesandro had slipped into my pocket, flipping it over and over in my fingers while I stared out of the window from my perch on the old armchair, furious with the world at large. Now I stared at it.
    The telephone number, and the handwritten message, in frankly very un-gothic biro: ‘ When you need me – A ’
    Sighing, I dialled the number.
    It was still daylight hours, so the young female voice which answered was undoubtedly human. I had assumed, and she confirmed, that the number on the card was the number for the vampire club.
    The nocturnal GOs often had human staff to do their day work for them. Sanctum was a vampire club, run by them for the burgeoning human tourist trade, but it had human staff for such mundane day-to-day tasks as table bookings, taking deliveries, all those pesky things which had to be done under the sunshine (such as it ever was in Britannia).
    The woman on the phone sounded breathless and sultry. Professionally so. In my opinion, she was trying a little too hard, but I reasoned it had taken her a while to answer the phone when I’d called, so for all I knew she was out of shape and had to run up a flight of stairs to answer. Probably corsets were involved. I decided not to judge.
    I enquired after