Read Online The Anathema by Zachary Rawlins - Free Book Online Page A

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. Nevertheless, 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.
    Anastasia had knocked on her door that night and invited herself in to listen sympathetically. Then she made Margot the most extraordinary offer; one that seemed preposterous, even coming from Anastasia. The opportunity to be a new kind of Auditor, a sponsored representative of the Black Sun. To become part of the emerging inner circle of the most powerful cartel of all, something no vampire had ever achieved.
    There had been no need to think it over. Margot knew exactly what she wanted to do. There were any number of things that she could have done. She could feel them falling away from her like dead leaves, possibilities she had shed and abandoned. It was exhilarating; at the same time, it was also terrifying.
    The night flowed past her like water, light, code, and language and Margot moved through it with the brutal grace of a tiger shark, a grey shape flitting across the swirl of color that surrounded her; the promise of violence, an implication carried in the chill of the wind. Margot felt that if she ever stopped moving she would suffocate. The car arrived, a boxy van manufactured in one of the factory towns that had sprung up across the countryside; inside, holding the door open, she could make out the white of