Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

“What? No,” Alex shook his head, confused. He found himself wondering what he had done with the gum, anyway. All he had in his mouth was a soggy paper stick. “I didn’t mean that. What made me all fucked up?”

“Oh,” Eerie said with concern, sitting down next to him on the speaker. “Is it bad?”

She peered into his eyes, concerned, and Alex couldn’t help but grin at her until she smiled back.

“No, not at all,” he said earnestly. “I was wondering, you know, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

Eerie looked at her hands shyly.

“It’s just me, Alex.” She smiled at him hesitantly. “Because I… because it was in my mouth, you see? Because my whole body is like a drug, Alex.”

“No shit?”

At the time, anyway, it sounded reasonable enough.

“Uh-huh,” Eerie said, nodding. “For normal people, anyway. That’s how the Fey communicate with each other, chemically. Pheromones and particular compounds in… you know,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Sweat. Saliva. That sort of thing.”

Eerie blushed, and Alex wished he could think of something cool to say to change the mood. Alex snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her small round face was earnest, and it was easy to see how nervous she was. His eyes drifted down to her lap, to the strip of thigh that showed between the hem of her skirt and the top of her black knee socks, and for a moment, his train of thought disintegrated. Then he caught himself, and quickly looked back up at Eerie’s face, but she did not appear to have noticed anything. She was staring off at the still-packed dance floor, the crowd increasingly disheveled, energetic and sweaty.

“Is this like empathy?” Alex asked doubtfully. It didn’t feel anything like what Rebecca did — he had no special awareness of Eerie, her thoughts, or her feelings; rather, a general sense of well-being, a fading physical high, and a strange, benign fuzziness.

Eerie shook her head emphatically.

“No, not at all. It’s all chemistry. I like being around parties. They make me happy. When I’m happy, the people who, you know, come into contact with me, they are too.”

Alex sat next to her, and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything at all to talk about. Eerie sat restlessly beside him, kicking her legs against the speaker they hung off of, watching the people dance with obvious desire to rejoin them. He wished he could have thought of a good reason to make her stay there, beside him.

Eventually, she climbed back up to her feet, brushing off the back of her black skirt where she’d sat down, and smiled coyly at Alex.

“I’m going to go dance now. Will you come this time?”

She held out one hand, offering him help up.

Alex shook his head, smiling weakly.

“You’ll regret it, you know,” Eerie admonished him, obviously disappointed. “You will wish you had, Alex.”

She walked off to the dance floor without looking back at him.

I already do, Alex thought bitterly, brushing his hair away from his eyes and feeling bitter. I already do.

“I haven’t seen you in some time, Alice. How have you been?”

Alice’s smile reminded Chris of the Cheshire Cat. Except much more frightening.

“A busy girl is a happy girl. But I’m certain that you’ve heard,” Alice cooed, sitting down across from him at the cafe table. “Unless you’ve lost your touch for these things?”

“Hardly,” Chris said, smiling back at her tiredly. “I’m afraid that there is still very little that goes on in our sordid underworld that I am not eventually made aware of. Word is that you’ve been working quite a bit these last few weeks. Saigon, Los Angeles, Manila, Paris… all operations targeting the Terrie Cartel, if I’m not mistaken.”

The waiter was clearly unnerved by Alice, and delivered the coffees Chris had already ordered in a hurried manner that made it abundantly clear that they would not be seeing the boy again. Alice seemed vaguely amused by this.

Chris had to admire their waiter’s keen sense of self preservation. Not everyone was so quick to spot Alice for what she was.

He’d first met Alice in Berlin, during the strange and exciting years after the First World War, not long before she’d started working as an Auditor. She didn’t appear to have changed much since — her hair was dyed black, now, and a faint white scar was etched along one cheekbone, but she didn’t seem to have aged at all. Even her clothes weren’t much different from the first time he’d met her, at a friend’s party in a flat in Fredericksburg, in a slinky black dress and high-laced shoes with pointed toes, though she’d ditched the dress and shoes in favor of tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. The coat she hung over the seatback was too heavy and long for the weather, so it had to be armor.

Chris liked to flatter himself by thinking that he looked much the same himself, except that his hair had faded to white a few decades ago. He dyed it for several years, before he’d lost interest in the pretense. Otherwise, like Alice, the body he inhabited appeared to be somewhere in its early thirties. Even the fantastically expensive cream-colored suit that he wore was fundamentally similar to the things he’d worn in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, though tailors had been better back then. One of the tragedies of the modern world.

“You aren’t mistaken, Chris.” Alice blew on her coffee, then set the cup back down, apparently deciding it was too hot. “But it’s more than the Terrie Cartel that I am dealing with. Witches, and Weir, and who knows what else.”

“I heard about some of that,” Chris said, idly stirring the coffee he’d ordered out of politeness. “Even for me, that’s a bit hard to swallow — Operators working with Witches. I thought your people were conditioned to make that kind of thing impossible?”

“We thought so, too.” Alice shrugged. “Not the first time Analytics has been wrong, you know.”

Chris nodded uncertainly, brushing an imaginary crumb from the front of his immaculate white blazer.

“Quite. Still, such a thing has never happened before. I would not have believed it to be possible, under normal circumstances.”

Alice shot Chris an inquisitive look.

“What, exactly, makes the current circumstances abnormal?” The question sounded innocent enough, but Chris knew better than to think that Alice would ask for anything. Alice took. It was what she did. “We’ve had rogue cartels before, after all. The Terrie Cartel is probably the biggest we’ve ever had to sanction, but it’s hardly a unique situation.”

Chris spread his hands innocently and put on the face that had sold more stories than he could count.

“I’m afraid that we’ll need to come to some sort of accommodation before we can discuss that any further,” he said, as if he regretted the necessity. “Of course, if it were up to me, I’d tell you gratis, but that would be bad for business, you understand.”

“I do, actually.” Alice blew on her coffee and sipped at it cautiously, then set the cup carefully back down in the chipped white saucer. “I appreciate your position. But, I wonder if you appreciate the significance of mine.”

Chris looked at Alice thoughtfully for a moment, and then gave her a tired smile.

“Believe me, I know that if you want to, you can force the information out of me,” Chris admitted. “I’m something of a coward when it comes to pain, after all, and I do intend on living a long, long time. While you do have a certain amount of leverage, give some thought to this, Alice — won’t you have questions you need answered, in the future? Who will you turn to, once you’ve used me up? Who else would talk to an Auditor?”