The Anathema Read Online Free

the same sharp, angry tone.
    “You see, Todd, this is what I really do. My other job, my day job as it were, is working as a councilor at a school. I even have a degree in psychology for all the good it does me. Over the years, I have seen many lonely, hurt kids. A lot. Some of them I can help, and, some of them,” Rebecca said, with a failed attempt at an indifferent shrug, “I can’t.”
    She loomed over him, her shadow seeming to fall down on him from high above. Todd felt as if he were nailed to the ground, his limbs moving in a bizarre pantomime of swimming as he sought enough purchase on the concrete floor to crawl, to scamper away from this terrible woman and her blazing, unforgiving anger. He muttered apologies that were incoherent even to him, begging for mercy that he knew with certainty he would not receive.
    “Kids feel things more, you know? And I can’t forget all of it. I wish I could, let me tell you. I would sleep better. What I can do, though, is share them,” Rebecca sneered at him, and he felt as if he were the vilest, smallest thing on Earth. He wished he had not left his .38 revolver back at the security desk, because then he could have used it to kill himself. “All I needed was someone who deserved it.”
    Rebecca pitched her cigarette and it bounced off Todd’s forehead, causing him to cry out in surprise.
    “Sometimes it’s overwhelming to live with all of it, even for me. Years worth of trauma, abuse, rejection and despair, extracted from the minds of too many children to count. You’d be surprised what people will do to kids. It’s a sick world. But it amazes me, how tough children are, what they can learn to live with.” Rebecca smiled, and it was the least pleasant smile Todd had ever seen. “I doubt you are as resilient. You can scream, if you want. It turns out that no one ever comes to save you.”
    Todd flinched away from her hand, but Rebecca moved faster than he did, and caught him by the wrist, her fingers knotting around his arm. Then he was assailed by emotions, by the echoes of memories that were not his own and yet were firmly embedded in his mind. It was like a yawning void of despair placed directly in his heart, a sense of betrayal and guilt and disappointment so profound that he could not even cry out against it. He could feel the inescapable weight, the violation of trust and confusion and repulsion, and his mind recoiled in the face of it. He felt tiny and naked, shattered in the wake of fear and self-hatred that ate away at the very foundation of his being, eroding his mind away as inevitably as a cliff disintegrating into the sea.
    Rebecca shook her head in disgust and walked away from the drooling, whimpering shell of a man. She composed a narrative of the events that had occurred, from the moment she had received the tip about Christopher Feld’s last whereabouts from the remnants of the Society three weeks ago until now, and then thought hard in Alistair’s direction. He must have been looking for her, because the response was almost immediate.
    Rebecca? Where the hell have you been?
    You’ll have to read it off me. I’m too beat to manage an explanation.
    There was a moment of silence, then a brief stinging sensation while Alistair probed her thoughts, absorbing the record of her experiences, and then another delay while he processed the data. Normally, the lag in communication between two telepaths would have been virtually unnoticeable, but she had expended most of her power in the last day and a half of hunting, and had exhausted her reserves implanting terrible memories and emotions in Todd’s shithole of a mind.
    I understand. What do you need?
    I need an apport. I need a medical team waiting for Alice on arrival. Then I need Xia to come down here and burn this whole fucking place and everyone inside it to ashes.
    Are you… certain, Rebecca? What about the other prisoners?
    It’s too late, Alistair. There is no one in the building that both