The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “I remember, you son of a bitch,” Alice said, shaking him back and forth. “You were supposed to kill me, but you didn’t do it. You died, fighting right next to me. You don’t have to remind me about any of that shit. Why don’t you skip to the part where you’re still alive, or whatever you vampires call it, before I decide to skip to the part where I show you what your insides look like?”

  “It’s so cute,” Chris said, beaming, “the way you think that you’re angry with me. If you remembered what I had done to you over the years, I guarantee you would tear me limb from limb without hesitation. You hate me and you don’t even remember. Hell, you won’t even remember this, so what’s the harm in telling you? I’ve made you fall in love with me a dozen times, and you don’t even know how much that would disgust you.”

  “You have such pretty eyes,” Alice said admiringly. “It would be a shame to have to dig them out of your skull.”

  “I like it when you say things like that,” Chris said, leering. “I’ll think about that the next time we fuck.”

  Mitsuru stepped forward nervously, putting one hand on Alice’s shoulder.

  “Alice, be careful,” Mitsuru warned urgently. “He’s trying to get under your skin, make you lose control.”

  “It won’t work,” Alice said, pinching Chris’s face between her fingers.

  “The boss decided to let you run around for a little while, but I guess eventually even he lost interest,” Chris continued, his face white but his eyes full of laughter. “Since you developed your convenient little memory problem, we’ve been passing you around like the last cigarette in the pack.”

  “Actually, maybe I am going to kill him,” Alice said through gritted teeth.

  “No,” the girl said, from somewhere right behind them. “You won’t.”

  It wasn’t possible, of course. Mitsuru was running a telepathic surveillance protocol that gave her something of a sixth sense; nothing that had even a vestige of thought could approach her without her knowing about it. She did notice the girl at the last moment, but by then it was far too late to react.

  She went for Alice first, not that it mattered. Mitsuru didn’t see anything other than a blur, long blond hair whipping through the air, and then a series of impacts with Alice that sent the shotgun spinning away on the ground and left the Auditor on her knees, clutching her head, bleeding from her shattered nose.

  Mitsuru caught the first blow on her forearm, a wide strike coming in high for the head the she could barely see. The force behind it was terrific, and Mitsuru’s arm went numb on impact. She finally got a good look at her then; a girl, no more than seventeen, blond hair hanging wild and long, baggy grey pants and a midriff-exposing tank top. She looked as if she could be going to play an intramural softball game. But she moved like quicksilver, and hit so hard that Mitsuru thought she might have broken her arm. The kick the girl threw was a straightforward push kick, delivered from the hips, normally a simple attack to avoid, something Mitsuru should have seen coming. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had landed that strike on her, even in training, but this girl did, slamming her foot into Mitsuru’s solar plexus hard enough to bruise her sternum, knocking the air from her lungs and sending her tumbling back into the dust at Xia’s feet. Mitsuru barely had time to catch her breath before she saw a disturbance in the dust in the air that meant that the girl had passed by her, no doubt heading for Xia. There was the sound of a fire springing briefly to life, then a sequence of sickening crunches.

  Chris stood up, brushing ineffectually at the dirt and dust that flecked his ice-cream white suit.

  “Alice, meet Leigh. Leigh, Alice. Be nice to her, Leigh-my-dear. She really gave her all to try and save you a few months ago.”

  Mitsuru might have been able to make it to her feet. She wasn’t hurt so badly as to make that impossible. But she wasn’t sure what she would manage to do when she got up, so she waited instead, and watched the vampire-girl strut calmly back to where Chris stood. And she could only be a vampire, the way she’d bypassed Mitsuru’s surveillance, the way she moved like a machine built from skin-and-bone. Mitsuru didn’t have a shred of doubt about it.

  “Now,” Chris said, looking down at Alice happily. “Let me introduce you to the very last people you will ever meet.”

  * * *

  Alex managed to slip out of the living room while Emily and Anastasia were engrossed in watching a strange movie that was either about Julia Child, or some self-pitying despicable hipster trying to be Julia Child, he couldn’t tell which. He was exhausted from spending the last week practicing his protocol with Katya on the beach, and he headed immediately for bed. He was brushing his teeth when he found the little cushion with the dense center that Eerie had made for him. He looked at it for a long time before shrugging and sliding it beneath his pillow.

  He generally fell asleep fast, thanks to the induced sleep that was the after-effect of his protocol, but that night, as soon as his head hit the pillow, he found himself resting in a profoundly comforting wreathe of scents, predominantly sandalwood with a hint of distant salt water. As he drifted off slowly toward sleep, he found himself thinking of Eerie, dancing quietly and unselfconsciously, somewhere in the midst of strange lights, moving through colors that he did not have names for. The light around her, the light radiating from her, as sweet and golden as honey. After a while, it became difficult to tell whether he was dreaming.

  * * *

  Christopher Feld. She knew him by reputation, from the files. The files said he had a thing for white suits, a compulsive sexual appetite, and a knack for surviving that made him legendary in intelligence circles. The files also said that he talked a lot, and that he enjoyed doing so. Mitsuru could confirm that from observation. She’d been watching him strut around for a couple minutes now from where she lay in the dirt, and he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

  She knew the back-story, of course. It was a big part of the whole ‘Terrie Cartel Defection’ narrative, back when they thought it might be an isolated case, an anomaly. Christopher Feld was one of the very best agents of the Syndicate, an independent intelligence agency staffed mostly by vampires. He was purportedly one of the only survivors when the European branch of the Syndicate was wiped out by the Witches, in league with Terrie Cartel, not too many months earlier. He’d contacted Alice in the wake of the attack, and fed her a story about freeing his wife, who he claimed was being held by the Terrie. Together, they had hit a Terrie building in London, and Alice hadn’t been seen again until Rebecca had tracked her down, using what had been thought to be Christopher Feld’s last known movements.

  Unfortunately, he looked to be doing quite a bit of moving around, at least from where Mitsuru lay.

  “You are still with us, right, Alice?” Chris asked mockingly, though Mitsuru noted that he was careful to keep out of Alice’s reach, despite the fact that she was still clutching her bleeding head. “I’d hate for you to miss any of this. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, but the whole wife thing was a total dodge. I really believed it at the time, though. Those personas the Witches build are amazing. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?”

  Chris laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever said. The blond girl he called Leigh stood next to him, looking vaguely bored. Two other men came up to join them, emerging from wherever they had been concealing themselves. One of them was tall and lanky, the other short and rail-thin. Both of them were dressed for combat, in contrast to Leigh, decked out in fatigues and body armor.

  “Let me introduce you to the team,” Chris offered enthusiastically. “I put it together with you in mind, after all. This is Martin,” he said, gesturing at the tall, dusky-skinned man, who appeared to be somewhere in his thirties, “and technically, he would have telepathically neutralized you, if things had gone to script and you hadn’t shown up for another hour. And then, over here,” he said, patting the short, black-haired man on the shoulder, so painfully thin that even his very small cloth
es hung off him absurdly, “is Kim. Kim does a neat thing with basic forces manipulation that would have been really great for dealing with Xia.”

  Chris threw his hands up in the air and shouted.

  “And I am really quite disappointed! A great deal of thought and effort was put into this. Half of them aren’t even here! The Auditors,” Chris scoffed. “You were supposed to be the biggest obstacle that we had to face, more than the Committee or the Black Sun, more than Director himself. But here you are, all the remaining Auditors save Rebecca Levy, who we have already incapacitated. Leigh alone was enough to beat all of you! I expected more. Your reputation is completely unmerited.”

  Mitsuru felt a certain relief at his monologue. He made no mention of Alistair. That could only mean that they had overlooked him, somehow, that the Chief Auditor was still alive, free, and capable of fighting. That reassured her tremendously. Alistair, she thought hopefully, would think of something.

  Chris crouched down, and looked at Alice as she clutched her head with mock sympathy.

  “Still, she is remarkable, isn’t she? How hard would you say you hit her, Leigh dear?”

  “I went easy,” Leigh said flatly. “We aren’t supposed to kill her.”

  “Right. She leveled you with one punch, Alice, before you could apport, before you could do anything. Your whole team, too,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Leigh’s a vampire, obviously, but instead of giving her over to your kind, to your Academy, she was given to the Witches, to the Outer Dark, and look what they have done, look what they did to my precious ward! She’s a full synthetic, Alice. Every part of her has been replaced, but she didn’t become inanimate like the others, she wasn’t consumed by it. She thinks and feels and acts, but her body is artificial, it rebuilds itself from surrounding materials. She has been made superior to all of my kind, Alice, she has been made whole, and she is only the first.”

  “Enough of that,” Leigh snapped, eyeing Alice contemptuously. “Are you certain, Chris? This one was really her?”

  “Yes,” Chris nodded. “You can’t see much of it through the implanted persona, but she’s down there, underneath it all.”

  Mitsuru didn’t know what they were talking about, but she did know that she had to do something. They seemed preoccupied with Alice right now. She wasn’t sure what she could do against four of them, but she was obligated to try something. Mitsuru moved with all the patience she could manage, turning her head a few inches to look for Xia. He was embedded in a wall behind her, somehow, broken and bleeding. The readout on the remote viewing protocol she was operating told her that he was, at least, alive.

  “Well, can we kill the others and be done with it?” Leigh asked, her eyes flicking over to Xia and then Mitsuru, who cancelled the protocol and froze in place, her heart beating frantically in her chest. “No matter how much you like to brag, they are dangerous. I would feel better if they were dealt with.”

  “I’m not sure,” Chris said, frowning. “They weren’t supposed to arrive for another hour. I’m worried that if we kill them now, it might alert the Academy somehow, and throw off the rest of the plan.”

  “I don’t think it matters now,” Leigh said, folding her arms. “They don’t have any combat personnel left worth speaking of. What could they possibly do to interfere?”

  Chris stood back up and started to pace. Mitsuru started to move her hands toward her guns.

  “Alistair oversold your people, Alice,” Chris said casually. “Alistair oversold all of you and the threat that you posed us. We were ready for war! Since you were his old outfit, and he did put all of you together, who can blame him for puffing up your reputations a bit? I suppose he got sentimental, thinking about fighting all his old friends…”

  Mitsuru’s hands were frozen. It was like a nightmare. She told them to move and they wouldn’t. The very mention of his name had frozen her. Alistair. Not dead. Not captured. With them. Alistair.

  “Still, have to give some credit to the information he handed us,” Chris gloated. “We knew everything about you people. All your weakness. All the protocols you can operate. Everything about you.”

  Mitsuru’s hands were her own again. She felt a dull, cold space in her chest, but that could wait. Right now, the only thing that mattered was what she knew, and what they didn’t know. What Alistair hadn’t known, what she hadn’t said, on that last night, when they were together, lying across the worn and frayed sheets of his bed, the pillow she lay on smelling like his aftershave.

  She held on to the pain of his betrayal like a lifeline, and reached for her knife.

  22.

  Malbec, he thought drunkenly, staring blankly at the label sitting on the center of the table, his mind unspooling like coarse thread. Malbec was an interesting word. He didn’t think it was very good wine, but he wasn’t going to hold that against the varietal. He wasn’t even sure that he knew a good wine from a bad, but this one tasted too much like raisins for him to enjoy it much, though that hadn’t stopped him from drinking it. Was it a place, he wondered? A word in French? Somehow it didn’t sound very French, to him, but wasn’t that where all wine came from, originally?

  The walk up the hill had been short, but it had taken them a long time to climb up and come back, with Emily walking so close to him, brushing her hand against his, holding on to his arm so that it pressed against her chest, smiling at him invitingly from the soft shadows beneath the tall, spindly trees that crowned the hill, her skin luminous in the radiant moonlight. His head had been spinning even before he had two glasses of wine.

  Alex was leaning back against the couch, which had too many throw pillows on it to be comfortable, Emily tucked underneath his arm, holding her own wine glass. Across the coffee table, Anastasia, Katya and Timor were arrayed in overstuffed chairs, and even Anastasia appeared mildly tipsy. On the opposite side of the room, Therese sulked in a corner, while Anastasia’s two little sisters played some sort of complicated game involving a great deal of shouting and excited involvement on the part of Donner and Blitzen. Alex had lost track of Renton a while ago, and frankly, didn’t care very much – though he did notice that the fawning Svetlana wasn’t anywhere to be seen, either.

  Then Alex remembered that Katya was talking, answering some question Emily had asked that he had forgotten, and tuned back in, trying to figure out from context what it was she was talking about.

  “…we were mostly in Portland until I was twelve and Timor was thirteen. Then we got adopted by the Black Sun, and… is it okay to tell them this part, Ana?”

  Anastasia looked up from her primly held wine glass, an inch of something the color of clarified butter swirling inside it.

  “Of course,” she said indifferently. “You can tell them whatever you like.”

  Emily smiled and Alex wondered hazily exactly how much she was enjoying this, being important, sitting there with the major players in the Black Sun and treated as a peer. He worried drunkenly for her feelings, because he couldn’t believe that Anastasia intended for things to be this way forever.

  “Okay, well, at that point we’d been activated, so we did a couple of years at the Academy, before the Black Sun arranged to pull us out for ‘vocational training’. We came back last year, but we were so far behind academically we ended up in the standard class,” she shrugged, looking a bit embarrassed at the revelation. “Timor finished up his program, more or less, but I had some… disciplinary issues, so I have to go back next year to polish it off.”

  “Interesting,” Emily said, bright eyed. “But you never really said what it was like. Were their other kids to hang out with, at assassin’s camp? Did you meet any boys?”

  Katya blushed and laughed, while Anastasia looked amused and Timor looked aghast. Alex laughed along with Katya, not thinking about it too hard.

  “Yes, and none of your business, respectively,” Katya said, picking up the bottle from the table to refill her glass. “It was okay. Hard work, not a lot of free time, a whole bunch of killing thi
ngs over and over again until it didn’t bother me anymore. Sound like anything that’s happened in your life lately, Alex?”

  “Yeah,” he said nervously, spinning his glass between his palms. “The other day they made me kill and then clean and dress an entire fucking cow. It took all afternoon, and it was, you know, horrible.”

  “I always hated the part with the animals,” Katya said sympathetically, while Timor excused himself quietly and went to go join Anastasia’s sisters. “I felt bad for them.”

  “Me too,” Alex said, nodding emphatically. “Of course, it would help if you hadn’t made me do the same thing the other day to those chickens.”

  “What?” Emily said, looking from one of them to the other in confusion. “That’s where those chickens came from? That’s horrible!”

  “Alex, the Program doesn’t end,” Katya said sadly, “didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “Nobody tells me anything,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Probably because I don’t ask the right questions, or understand the answers.”

  “Well, why do you think that you and Katya have had so many charming experiences in common of late?” Anastasia said mildly. “What exactly do you think you are being trained to do, boy?”

  “Well, Alice Gallow is my teacher, so I did figure that I wasn’t going to be learning first aid and nonviolent conflict resolution, but the Academy is neutral, right? It’s not as if they are training me to kill other Operators or anything…”

  “Are you sure? Then why is it that Katya, who is being educated for that express purpose, has been trained in such a similar manner to you?” Anastasia asked idly. “Are they training you simply to kill Weir? You seem capable of that already, without further desensitization. Wake up, Alex. They are teaching you to be a killer who can sleep at night. Like Katya, for example.”

  “I do sleep fairly well,” Katya offered, swirling the last mouthful of wine in her glass.