The Anathema tc-2

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Yeah,” Alex said, still raw from the experience, his voice catching, “I’m sorry about that, you know. About what happened to Edward.”

  “It happens,” Anastasia said, shrugging.

  “No one is interested in your apologies,” Renton said contemptuously.

  “Hey,” Alex objected, turning toward him and glaring. “What does that mean?”

  Renton’s expression was unreadable, hidden behind his plastic smile and his permafrost eyes. Alex had known him for months, spoken to him daily, and he still did not understand him at all. Edward hadn’t talked enough while he was alive to make it clear whether he was Renton’s friend or his coworker, so Alex couldn’t tell if he actually resented him, or if he was simply giving him a hard time for the hell of it.

  “Enough,” Anastasia said mildly, her eyes snapping over to Renton in an obvious chastisement, and then returning tiredly to Alex. “I am very tired. Let me finish what I have to say, and then you can go to the hospital and I can have some tea before I go to bed. As I was saying, because you are an idiot, taking care of you is a full-time job.”

  “Could you lay off, Anastasia? My arm hurts.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but it could. Or, I could just kill him and then hide the body,” Renton suggested. “I’m certain no one would care.”

  “Since I already have a fulltime job, as does Renton, and as I am currently short one bodyguard, I decided to kill two birds with one stone.” Anastasia stopped, considering. “Or, perhaps it would be simultaneously killing two birds with two stones. It doesn’t matter. One of our subsidiary cartels, Kiev Oblast, paid tribute to the Black Sun years ago, in the form of the two youngest children of the cartel head pledged to our service. I have transferred them over from Mr. Cole’s class. The boy will take Edward’s place. I have no use for his sister at the moment,” Anastasia said frankly. “So she will be looking after you. She is my second-cousin, incidentally, so try to be nice to her.”

  “Hold up, just slow the fuck down. What are you talking about, Anastasia? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “No?” Anastasia asked, looking surprised. “The last time you went on a date you needed a great many, as I recall. Moreover, my dress was ruined in the process. I am being proactive this time around. Besides, I think you will like her. Renton, would you go get Katya for me?”

  Renton nodded and left the room, leaving Alex glaring at Anastasia, and Anastasia completely ignoring him. After a while, he gave up. It was like water off a duck’s back, anyway.

  “I don’t need a bodyguard,” Alex repeated sullenly, crossing his arms, and then flinching when he remembered his painless injury.

  “Katya won’t be one, then,” Anastasia reassured him. “Think of her as a caretaker.”

  “What does that even mean?” Alex complained. “I think I like that idea even less.”

  Anastasia shrugged, scratching the great black wolf behind one of its ears as it lay its head on her lap, its black eyes still locked on Alex with a definite malevolence. He shuddered at a number of memories that he would have preferred to stay suppressed.

  “Like it or not, I can’t just let you run around kicking things over to see what happens,” Anastasia said firmly. “Besides, she is multi-talented. I think you will find having her around to be very beneficial. In any number of ways. And I will tell her to be discreet,” Anastasia promised. “She won’t act like Renton does, making puppy-dog eyes and following you around everywhere.”

  “Hey,” Renton objected as he walked back into the room, looking hurt.

  The girl beside him was almost as tall as Renton, with short auburn hair and lightly tanned skin. She kept her eyes modestly on the ground, and her school uniform was fitted and pressed, but she didn’t seem particularly humble or nervous to Alex.

  “This Katya Zharova,” Anastasia said, gesturing for the girl to join them, Renton hurrying over with another chair. The girl bowed her head to Anastasia modestly, and then sat down in the chair next to Alex, giving him a perfunctory smile that he was in no mood to return, even if she was somewhat cute. “Katya, this is Alex Warner. We have already discussed your instructions. You will be looking after Alex for the foreseeable future. Please keep him safe, and try not to let the complaining bother you. It’s a character flaw that must be tolerated, for now.”

  Katya gave her a short, serious nod.

  “When do I start, Ana?”

  Anastasia stood up, and Renton hustled over the door to open it for her.

  “Immediately, I think. Mr. Warner here has a rather pressing desire to go to the hospital.”

  Alex opened his mouth to argue, to say any of the dozens of things he’d come up with while sitting there, fuming and ignored. But Renton choose that exact moment to turn the pain in his arm back on, so instead he ended up doubled over, clutching his forearm and wishing aloud for an unpleasant death for Renton, Anastasia, and the whole human race.

  4

  There didn’t seem to be a single street in Shanghai that wasn’t crowded. Margot had been walking through the city for hours; broad, neon lit avenues packed with cars and bicycles giving way to claustrophobic alleys where vendors lined the walls, towered over by the concrete towers that hid the night sky. Everything seemed to be in motion, in a frantic race with no obvious goal, a consuming hunger for change, for profit, for the new world that they were building out of concrete and dreams and exports to the fading western world. She imagined that New York must have felt this way, once, back when the skeletons of the skyscrapers were first being erected by an army of immigrants, all hustling for their part of the new prosperity. It gave her a headache.

  “Any luck, Margot?”

  Alistair’s voice in her head, something else that she did not appreciate about her new situation. Back at the Academy, even Renton hadn’t had the balls to try to violate the privacy of her own well-shielded mind. Vampires had an innate resistance to psychic interference, one that most telepaths found insurmountable. Apparently, however, that did not apply to Alistair.

  “None whatsoever. My feet hurt, my head hurts, and I am getting very cranky. Thus far, I haven’t seen a single Caucasian, much less the people we are looking for. I suppose that, if you’re asking me, then the others have come up empty as well?”

  Margot knew that the delay meant Alistair was debating what to tell her, and she took that to mean that she was right. She felt a certain satisfaction at guessing the motives of the Chief Auditor.

  “That’s not exactly true, Margot. Xia reported something a minute ago; we’re just not sure what to make of it…”

  Margot turned down the next alley, waiting for Alistair to elaborate, surprised when he did not. She thought hard in his direction, even visualizing the snapshot of him that she been forced to memorize to aid the uplink, but it availed her nothing. She tried for Rebecca Levy, an admitted long shot given her limited telepathic abilities, and got nothing. Margot came to a halt in the middle of the narrow alley, a vendor pitching knockoff sportswear to one side, a tennis shoe vendor on the other, and puzzled over the wall in front of her, creating an unexpected dead end. She consulted the map of the city that Alistair had implanted in her mind and could not find it. Then Margot cursed her own stupidity and started to scramble.

  It was too late to try to dodge the attack, but she did manage to roll with it, diminishing the force of the blow. The Weir’s claws tore gouges from her shoulder, exposing white bone, and the impact sent her tumbling backwards. She hit the ground rolling, trying to give herself some distance to work with.

  Obviously, they were feeling confident. They let her get back up to her feet.

  They hadn’t bothered with an isolation field, probably to avoid tipping Margot off to their presence, or to avoid alerting the other Operators scattered around the metropolis. Foregoing it meant casualties and chaos among the normal citizenry, something that was normally avoided, but not an apparent concern for her adversaries. Three Weir lurked in a rough group, ambling cautiously toward her
, the alley behind them filled with the wreckage of shattered stalls and mutilated bodies, some still able to move and cry out. Margot knew there was nothing she could do for them. She never even considered trying.

  Behind them, a western woman in a fancy black cocktail dress and too much gold jewelry watched the scene unfold, her hair braided with jewels, stones, and clasps of platinum and jade. Margot felt the involuntary grin, lips pulling back as her razor teeth extruded a few centimeters, a defensive reaction as a primal as a lion’s roar. She had never met one before, but she knew it by instinct — Anathema. This was no Witch. This was an exiled, heretic Operator, and she could feel the Ether recoil at her very existence.

  Margot stood up, putting one hand to her chest to check on the damage. Her hand came away sticky, but the wound had coagulated, and the bleeding was slow and thick. In a minute or two, it would heal completely, without leaving as much as a scar. Just another part of her gone quiet and dead, porcelain-white silicon where there had been flesh and blood. Nothing she wasn’t used to. Nothing that would stop her, or even slow her down. Mixed feelings about Alistair and loneliness for the Academy aside, Margot wanted the job badly. She was going to be an Auditor, no matter whom or what got in her way.

  Starting with this lot.

  The Weir that had struck her was licking her blood from its jagged talons, a long purple tongue snaking grotesquely through its furred paws. The other two lagged behind, advancing cautiously, one on each side. They looked hungry and eager, which meant that they had underestimated her. Margot charged them, weaving her way between the wooden stands of the vendors and the frantic passersby who could not seem to decide which way to run. She kept her head low and moved as fast as possible, though she wasn’t certain the precaution was merited until the head of a nearby shopper exploded like a wet balloon.

  Margot’s eyes narrowed, searching the rooftops automatically for the sniper, hoping to see the light reflect from the scope, but she had no such luck.

  It didn’t matter. Margot hit the first Weir running, driving her shoulder into the matted fur of its chest, bowling it over and then stepping on and over it, grabbing the Weir on the right side by its arm and the scruff the neck. The creature bit and spat and clawed, tearing out chunks of the flesh above her ribcage and out of the side of her head, but Margot ignored it, using her momentum to spin the thing sideways, up and over, headfirst into the wall. She did not have time for technique; she just muscled him around and swung like a hammer throw, the crown of its skull breaking right through the cinderblocks, leaving a crater several inches deep. The Weir shook, convulsed, and leaked disgusting fluids from the remnants of its head. The remaining monsters exchanged what was obviously, even on from a Weir, a worried look.

  The alley was crowded, and Margot never stopped moving, so she got lucky again — the sniper’s second shot went wide, sinking deep into the new asphalt roadway a second behind Margot. She ducked underneath a broad swipe from the claws of the closest Weir, and then landed a sidekick solidly to the side of the knee. The Weir had not bothered to try to dodge the strike, and she didn’t really blame it — normally, even an Operator could not hope to damage a Weir hand-to-hand. Margot was different, though, as life never failed to remind her. The Weir’s leg bent like a eucalyptus tree in the wind, and the Weir shuddered and cried out. She used the opportunity to close and wrap her hands around the thing’s long, muscular throat, the greasy fur sliding underneath her hands as she squeezed. The Weir convulsed and raked her back with its claws, but she ignored it, pressing her thumbs into the trachea. By the time the last of the Weir had made up its mind to charge, she had collapsed its companion’s throat and was back on her feet.

  The Weir moved too fast for her to dodge, so Margot braced for impact instead, but the creature fell limply to the ground in front of her. A split second later, she heard shots and rolled, hoping to evade the sniper’s scope. This time, Margot saw the muzzle flare from one of the roofs, but again, she didn’t have time to do anything but dodge.

  As it turned out, she didn’t have to.

  A shadowy figure tossed the sniper over the side of the building, and he crashed down through the top of a car next to Margot. He landed in a heap, to the sound of crunching plastic and glass, and then he didn’t move again. Mitsuru Aoki ported down after him, appearing next to Margot in a flash of sparks and light, a belated isolation field sinking down along with her, silencing the bedlam all around them, the cries of the dying and the wounded.

  At that point, Margot remembered to look around, but the Anathema had already fled.

  Mitsuru gazed at her with burning red eyes, giving her an appraising look. She also wore a heavy jacket that hung to her knees, made of woven Kevlar, but Mitsuru’s coat wasn’t shredded and punctured and hanging off one shoulder by a thread like Margot’s.

  “Report,” Mitsuru snapped.

  Margot reported, crisp and concise, as she had been trained to do.

  Everything had been blurred since she had gotten off the plane. Margot had gone straight into the field, no time for sleep, only a telepathic briefing from Alistair. He implanted a map of the city and images of the targets in her head, as well as a dossier and a working knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin. Then she had been set loose on the back alleys of Shanghai. Margot hadn’t seen anything or anyone even vaguely suspicious until she had been attacked, without even the pretense of an isolation field, a nicety that even the Witches never dispensed with. She briefly outlined her concerns about who they were actually fighting — namely the Anathema, but Mitsuru nodded as if she had expected to hear that.

  “Are you alright?” Mitsuru asked, nodding at her shoulder.

  Margot poked at her shoulder experimentally. The wound had crusted over, and part of the scab came off when she touched it, revealing cold, white skin underneath. She pressed it with her razor sharp fingernail until she drew blood, but Margot didn’t feel a thing.

  “I am very difficult to injure,” Margot said, considering whether or not to abandon her shredded jacket. She wasn’t entirely sure that the Lycra long-sleeve that she had worn beneath it was still capable of preserving her modesty. “My fighting style is easy to misinterpret.”

  “I understand,” Mitsuru said, with surprising sympathy. “Can you move? The car should be here any moment.”

  “I’m good,” Margot said, nodding, deciding to hold on to the remains of the jacket, settling for tearing the tattered sleeves off, making it something of a vest. “Where are we going?”

  “We were hoping to draw them out,” Mitsuru admitted, walking briskly for the street. “This attack was the break we were waiting for. I acted as a telepathic conduit for Alistair, and he cracked that Anathema woman wide open. Alistair is tracking her remotely, to see where she runs. Even if she suspects that we are following her, eventually, she will have to attempt to return to base. Central will send a team to clean things up here, make sure nobody remembers this.”

  Margot nodded, following Mitsuru back out to the street. There was a definite satisfaction in knowing that she had been the one to flush the Anathema out. It had to be another gold star in a folder somewhere, wherever they kept the records on the candidates for Auditor. Margot knew it was possible. Mitsuru had been elevated barely two months ago, and with Alice Gallow out indefinitely and Rebecca only sporadically available, the Audits department was desperately shorthanded. Shorthanded enough that she’d been working for them more often in recent weeks. Margot’s feelings on this were more mixed than she ever would have admitted publically.

  She missed the security of the Academy; she missed all the people, even if she didn’t like most of them. She missed listening to Eerie tell her about the crazy dreams she’d had the night before while she breakfasted on pink and green Pixie Sticks, Margot sticking with dry toast and black tea. She wondered if Alex was keeping his hands to himself. She wondered if Emily had worked up the nerve to be a bitch yet. She missed her room, even though she still slept there on occasion. Neverthe
less, the only thing Margot knew how to do was keeping moving forward.

  “You are stronger than you look,” Mitsuru observed neutrally. “You did well, in the alley.”

  Margot nodded and kept moving forward, out into the exhaust, the neon, and the endless traffic of Shanghai, pulsating like a fiber-optic jewel on the coast, surrounded by choppy black seas. She moved through the motion and noise as if it were water, as if she was born to it. Margot’s head swam with impressions and hazy memories: half-understood appreciative shouts from the construction workers across the street, jetlag from the long flight from Vladivostok via Tokyo, twelve and a half lost hours, a series of plastic cups filled with ice water, a Russian novel she’d bought in the airport but couldn’t bring herself to read, turbulence over the China Sea. She could almost read the promises of the neon signs, the business cards jammed in the phone booths advertising hookers, the words of the Cantonese pop music that the wind carried. The breeze was still damp and fresh from wherever it had come, and she had to imagine it was a better place, one not so thoroughly poisoned with light.

  She could have been any number of things, of course. Margot knew that as well as she knew her own name. However, her nature was what it was, and she couldn’t be sure if she had always been that way, or if it began the day that she woke up screaming on a slab in a morgue in the arms of a laughing old vampire. Margot would not pretend that she was doomed to the life she lived, though. Nothing had been inevitable. She had made each decision deliberately.

  Most of her kind chose to join the Syndicate. The almost pervasive information gathering society managed to stay far enough ahead of everyone else to make a business out of it, and made the most natural employer for a vampire at large. Her guardian, a much older vampire named Christopher Feld, had approached her to make that very offer not long ago. She had rebuffed the offer angrily, without knowing exactly what had upset her. Margot had heard that the guardian relationship was supposed to be important amongst vampires, but apparently, Feld didn’t hold to that philosophy, because she had hardly ever seen him before. Still, when she heard of his death, she locked herself in her room and stared blankly at a wall, unable to recall precisely how he had looked.