The Academy

by Zachary Rawlins

  He watched the other stone fist pull back with resignation. No way to dodge with the grip Steve had on him, and no point in even trying to block the punch. What a strange way to die, Alex thought, his head spinning, his eyes watering with pain at the intense pressure on his arm. Beaten to death by a statue.

  Alex wondered if that was any better than being eaten by wolves.

  “Steve? Alex? Any possibility of a word with you two gentlemen?”

  Michael came striding across the cafeteria purposefully, his smile sad and knowing. In his wake, all of the whispering and gossiping students who had crowded around during the altercation rapidly found other things to do. Steve released Alex’s arm, and Alex immediately hugged it to his chest, both of them trying to act like nothing had happening. His arm even more after Steve let go, and Alex wondered if he’d broken anything. When Alex looked over at Steve, he’d returned to normal, minus the torn clothing. He was breathing hard, and was obviously enraged, but he didn’t look, well, rocky.

  “Steve? Please tell me that you weren’t about to use a combat protocol on another student.”

  Michael towered over Steve disapprovingly. Alex was reminded again that, despite the smile, that Michael was a pretty scary dude, and wondered exactly how much trouble he was about to be in.

  “Mr. Lacroix, sir, he hit me first!” Steve shouted, red-faced, pointing at Alex. “He knocked my tooth out, sir! He hit me from behind!”

  “Terrible,” Michael said grimly. “Is that true, Alex?”

  “Well, yes,” Alex admitted. There was no point in lying about it. “He left out the part where I kicked him in the head, though.”

  Michael looked down at the broken dishes and spilled food, and then at the blue-haired girl, the remains of her lunch still dripping off her sweatshirt.

  “And, how did all this happen, Steve? Anything you’d like to tell me about?”

  Steve looked at the ground and clenched his fists, unable to meet Michael’s gentle eyes, but he said nothing.

  “I thought that might be the case,” Michael said, with a tired laugh. “Alright, Steve, let’s take a walk over to the Administrative building. Alex, I was going to have a chat with you after homeroom already – I suppose we’ll have more to talk about. You can wait in my office after class. Eerie, you can go back to your room and change. If you hurry, you won’t be late. Margot, would you go with her?”

  The pigtailed vampire-girl nodded without looking at any of them, stood up, grabbed Eerie rather roughly by the wrist, and half-dragged her from the cafeteria, still blank-eyed and silent. Alex suppressed an urge to wave at her receding back, and wondered what had gotten into him.

  Michael sighed loudly and stretched, raising his tattooed arms above his head.

  “As if I didn’t have enough tying me to that desk,” he complained loudly, to no one in particular. “Students are definitely the worst part of this teaching gig.”

  Fifteen

  She had people call her Evelyn. No special reason – she’d seen a movie, so long ago that she’d forgotten the title, and that had been the name of the main character. It hadn’t been particularly good, but it was the first thing that hopped to mind the next day when someone asked for her name.

  Evelyn, then. She’d called herself that for almost five years now, which was the longest she’d ever kept a name. She wondered if that meant she was becoming sentimental in her old age.

  Still. It beat admitting that she didn’t have a name of her own.

  Witches aren’t human – although they look very much the same. But, like humans, Witches need to sleep, and Evelyn hadn’t gotten any in almost two days. Also, she’d had to kill a number of people in that time, and that always left her feeling a bit ill.

  The safe house’s popcorn ceiling crawled, shifting with the gentle afternoon light that snuck through the blinds. She could hear a television faintly, from the adjacent room, and the hiss of water running through the pipes. Her sisters, watching TV and showering, respectively. The air conditioner hummed, occasionally breaking into fits of coughing and struggling, only to kick over again and resume its work. Evelyn could not close her eyes without becoming nauseous, and she could not sleep with her eyes open. As a result, she lay on her back and watched the ceiling crawl.

  Evelyn was not suffering from pangs of conscience – far from it. Witches maintain their existence with power drawn from human suffering, so in order to survive, Evelyn had spent decades sowing misfortune and grief in the people she encountered, and then harvesting the resulting sorrow and pain. She didn’t feel bad about it – her nature was parasitic, and she had no more choice in the matter than any of the other parasites that preyed on humanity. Her only alternative, after all, was to starve.

  Cruelty wasn’t part of her nature, and she took no special pleasure in causing pain. Evelyn preyed on strangers almost exclusively, which had allowed her to enjoy her relationships with the humans around her over the years – she’d had friends, in a fashion, and lovers whom she’d been genuinely fond of. And she’d done her best, as far as it was possible, to do well by them. This, however, was not always possible.

  She felt no guilt, and she had shown no mercy. Her species was not capable of either.

  Tired of the ceiling, Evelyn rolled onto her side and stared out the window, through a crack in the blinds. She knew the ocean was close, but she couldn’t see it from here. All she could see were tall pines, close to the building, waving in the wind, and beyond that an expanse of green hills.

  Her last assignment had been no different from any other – she, and her sisters, had been ordered to Los Angeles, where they worked their way into predetermined social circles, romances, and jobs. All of their lives had a relationship in some way to a specific import-export firm owned by one of the Operator’s cartels, and they’d wormed their way well inside it. They’d taken on the local color, become invisible, part of the herd.

  Evelyn genuinely did think of humans as a herd – and why not? She meant nothing unkind by it. Cows were benign by nature, patient and useful. She did not consider the comparison to be unflattering.

  She and her sisters had collected information, made reports on the mundane activities of their day-to-day lives, and waited for orders. Evelyn had taken a husband, an executive in the company that she was surveying, and had rapidly charmed and won over his two daughters from a previous marriage. She’d spoiled them; Evelyn was too old for children of her own, and she was surprised to find how much she enjoyed it.

  It might have been different had they been younger. Evelyn wasn’t much for holding babies and PTA meetings. But both girls were already teenagers, and while they’d been wary and hostile at first, it hadn’t taken Evelyn long to win them over. She hadn’t even used her powers – Evelyn was pretty, fun, and fond of spending money and stylish clothes. She acted more like a friend and less like a mother, taking them for manicures, spa treatments and shopping expeditions in Beverly Hills, and within a few months, she could sense the adoration and hero-worship from the two girls.

  Evelyn didn’t feel bad for them, she wasn’t capable of empathy. But she did feel bad for herself, because she’d enjoyed her time with them, their laughter, their whispered confidences, and their shy adoration. She felt bad for herself because she’d been happy, for a little while.

  Orders were orders, and even as she poisoned her family’s dinner, Evelyn was philosophic. She planned on living for a long, long time, after all. There would be many more such opportunities, stretched out over as many years as she could manage. And some Witches grew very old indeed.

  Still, she was angry with her sister Yolanda. The poison she’d provided was meant to be quick and painless, but had instead induced cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, and then, finally, death. It had taken hours, and it had been disgusting. The girls had been able to beg her to call for help almost up until the end. She was still feeling ill, so maybe that was why she didn’t notice the shadow until it was almost too late.

  Or, it coul
d have been the other way – it could have been that since Evelyn was an old and cunning Witch, because she took precautions and slept fully clothed, that her senses were sharp from the misery she’d consumed earlier. Or maybe the Auditors were simply terrifyingly capable, bypassing both the building’s defenses and her own considerable additions effortlessly, but not quite good enough to overcome her instinctual drive to live.

  Evelyn stared blankly at the shadow on the wall, cast by her bed and her prone form on top of it, as it seemed to thicken and writhe. She blinked her eyes to dispel the illusion, holding them closed as long as she could manage the nausea, and then opening them again.

  The woman stepped neatly out of the shadow on the wall, one foot on the safe house floor, the other still somewhere in the dark behind her, disappearing at mid-calf. Her black hair hung in braids and was knotted with trinkets and coils of wire, almost like a Witch herself. She was tall, taller than Evelyn, and wore something black and heavy that was probably armor, stretching from her ankles to her neck, and heavy, blunt-toed black boots. She waved cheerfully at Evelyn, an automatic shotgun with a conical silencer and nylon grips held meaningfully in the crook of her other arm.

  “Good evening, you miserable cunt,” the woman said with a cheerful smile. “My name is Alice Gallow, and I am here in regards to an open Audit, under the authority of Central. Please do resist, as I am in one hell of a terrible mood.”

  Evelyn didn’t respond. She was already too busy with a working, or rather, a series of workings.

  First, she threw fire in the direction of the Auditor – it was a minor working, and she had no illusions about its chancing of doing anything other than distracting the Auditor – but the illumination and the smoke gave her the opening to activate a second, major working, one that she’d kept almost complete for years, for exactly such a situation.

  Evelyn dove backwards, through the wall, into her sister’s room. An outside observer would have been forgiven for thinking that she found a duplicate of herself watching TV in bed in the adjacent room – both she and her sister shared identical features, blond hair, and ice-blue eyes. Even the loose blue dresses they wore were similar.

  “Light,” Evelyn screamed at her sister, the one who sometimes called herself Nadia.

  Nadia looked up from the television, clearly shocked at her sister’s sudden arrival.

  “What do you mean? What’s happening?”

  She reached into a pocket and pulled a small, rose quartz sphere from it.

  “A transporter, an Operator. She uses the shadows to port,” Evelyn said hurriedly. She removed a length of braided red silk from her pocket, and began tearing it at intervals. “As much light as you can, right now. No shadows.”

  Nadia shook her head, swallowing questions, and closed her eyes. Her hand whitened as it clenched tightly around the crystal, squeezing until a fine stream of dust emerged, a small pile of ground crystal on the shag carpet.

  The room lit up bizarrely, every surface burning from within; the walls, the bedding, the carpet all shown with an internal radiance. It was brilliant, and hurt Evelyn’s eyes, but it left only the faintest shadows. Evelyn finished tearing the scarf, and red smoke began rising from it, coalescing in a halo that rotated lazily around her head, describing a circle a meter-wide in gently swirling crimson embers.

  “Is she an Auditor?” Nadia asked, inclining her head in the direction of Evelyn’s room.

  She could only manage a nod, out of breath from the effort of the rapid series of workings. The woman had to be an Auditor; Evelyn had even heard rumors of one who could walk from shadow to shadow. And it was unlikely that the Auditor would have come alone. There was, she knew, no fighting them, not even if they outnumbered her three to one. But, where to run, and how to make it there?

  “What about our sister?”

  Nadia asked the question softly, as if they were hiding from the Auditor. They both knew she was referring to their other sister, the one whom, just lately, had started calling herself Yolanda.

  Evelyn shook her head.

  “If she could have, she would have made it here by now.” Evelyn’s glance kept darting to the door and the window, and she wondered what to do. “But, if she were dead, we would know. So we have to assume they already taken her.”

  Evelyn felt the ebb and flow of power, as Nadia started another working, probably some kind of attack. Apparently, her sister had finally grasped the seriousness of the situation.

  “Don’t think that I don’t appreciate your position.” Evelyn recognized the mocking voice of Alice Gallow, coming from somewhere in the hall, outside the room. “You’ve got to be wondering ‘How did we attract all this attention? What did we do to merit an Audit?’ Am I right?”

  Evelyn had, in fact, been wondering exactly that. She’d been prepared for potential interference from Operators, and she’d anticipated trouble ever since the orders had come down to break up the job before it was completed. But the Auditors? What she had been working on shouldn’t have been big enough to merit their involvement.

  Well, to be totally accurate, Evelyn had been wondering that, until she heard the Auditor’s voice, still glib and cheerful. Since that time, however, she’d mainly wondered if the working she’d held in reserve would be enough to stop her, or any working that she was capable of for, that matter.

  “Plus, you have to be wondering what happened to your sister, right?”

  Evelyn shuddered at the implication.

  “Well, personally, I hate suspense. So, I’m going to do you bitches a favor, and answer that question right now. Xia, do you mind?”

  The window shattered inward, spraying glass as something heavy came crashing through it. Yolanda collided with the bed like a rag doll, and then crumpled on to the floor, limp and motionless. She was naked, mostly, with her clothes reduced to patches and her hair to a smoldering ruin. Her skin was brilliant red over much of her body, the color of lobster, and her hands and face were charred black.

  Evelyn heard Nadia scream, and felt her release the working she’d been holding in the direction of the window, a blue-white electric current searing the hallway in a brilliant flash. Evelyn screamed for her to stop, but it was too late. Nadia’s light working flickered, and then collapsed from inattention, and the room fell back into the natural half-shadow cast by the lamps.

  Alice Gallow stepped from the shadows in front of Evelyn, grinning, her face shining and unhealthily pale. Evelyn released her working, and the red halo above her head became a burning serpent, a crescent of fire that coursed through the air, simmering and howling as it charged the Auditor. Alice waved one outstretched hand dismissively, and the working disappeared, swallowed up by the shadow her arm cast. Evelyn was tossed to her feet by the impact when the working reemerged from the shadows behind her, sputtering and disintegrating.

  Evelyn knew then with a grim certainty that they had lost. The working she’d thrown was the most powerful she knew, and the serpent should have reduced even a capable Operator to ashes. Instead it failed to even touch her. Evelyn clutched her pounding head, still reeling from the blowback of the destroyed working, and wondered why they were here, and why this horrible thing was happening to her.

  Alice Gallow was holding someone’s hand, pulling a man into the room through the shadow behind her. He was taller than her by a few inches with neatly trimmed black hair, his face almost entirely obscured by blue-tinted goggles and a blue surgical mask. Evelyn thought that he might have been Chinese. He wore a heavy black coat that ran almost to his ankles, and Evelyn guessed that this was armor as well.

  “Alright, bitches,” Alice said amiably, holding up a large pair of silver scissors with a grin. “One chance. Your clothes, in a pile, right here in front of Xia. Then we do the hair.”

  Evelyn heard Nadia making a choking sound. Alice looked at their reaction, and her smile got even bigger.

  “Otherwise, we do it the way we did your sister, right? And I don’t think you want that.” Alice gi
ggled and sat down on the edge of the bed, rolling the charred, stinking body of the Witch away with her foot. “Come on, give Xia a little show. Who knows when he last saw any tits besides mine.”

  Evelyn looked over at Nadia, who was still crouched in the far corner of the room, staring wide-eyed at the Auditor and hyperventilating. She fingered the glass idol in her left hand – the Auditor must know she was holding it, there was no point in making a pretense. Witches can feel fear, and Evelyn felt a great deal at the moment. They can also understand pain, and humiliation – perhaps more than a human could, given that they are the currency of the world that a Witch lives in.

  Evelyn did not understand the Operators ‘Protocols’, but she knew the functional differences between them and the Witches own workings. Witches did not draw power from the Ether, but rather, from the humans around them. This harvested power was stored, in charms and in amulets, in a Witches clothes and her hair. Evelyn had spent years weaving workings into the fabric of the dress she wore, and had been doing the same to her hair her whole life. It was the work, literally, of a lifetime.

  Without her clothes, without her hair, Evelyn would be all but helpless.

  “Auditor,” Evelyn began, trying to keep her voice steady. “What guarantees do you offer us in return for our surrender?”

  Alice leaned her elbows on her knees and looked delighted.

  “Witch, if you do what I say, just like I tell you to, I promise that you will arrive, alive and uncooked, at Central. Whatever they decide to do to you, it’ll be less painful that what I have in mind. Although,” Alice said, her eyes shining wickedly, “you are going to have to cry a bit for me, first.”

  Alice’s laughter was cruel and abrupt, and then suddenly she was behind Evelyn, somehow, clutching her, one hand holding her face tightly while the other caressed her throat.

  “I saw your little family,” Alice cooed, her smile frozen and grotesque. “Those were some nice little girls you had there. It’s too bad that they had to shit themselves before they died. It’s too bad it had to be like that. Now I’m not that nice of a person myself, right Xia? But everybody has limits, even in this business. Everybody has stuff that gets to them. No helping it.”