The Annihilation Score Read Online Free

collaboratively discussed, and permanently re-interred in lead-lined coffins. It’s easy to forget that I’ve harbored an unacknowledged grudge against her for years: hard to remember how long it’s been since I last had any kind of heart-to-heart with a girlfriend who understands what it is that I do.
    Unfortunately I now need to curtail this account of our discussion because, drunk or not, diplomatic or not, some of the subjects we touched on are so far above your pay grade that it isn’t funny. However, I think it is safe to say that BLUE HADES are concerned about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN and are positioning their human-compatible assets—including Ramona—to keep a closer eye on our activities. They are (whisper this)
actively cooperating
, and you may see more joint liaison committees meeting in the next year than in the previous six decades combined. So it would behoove you to
pay attention
to whatever you’re told in diversity awareness training courses about dealing with folks with gray, scaly skin and an affinity for outfits featuring high, opaque necklines. Beyond that, however, my lips are sealed.
    *   *   *
    I’m in my narrow oil rigger’s bunk bed by midnight, lights out and head spinning pleasantly from the fizz and the craic. For the first time in weeks I am relaxed. There is congenial company, a job to do which involves nothing more onerous than staying awake during committee meetings, sedate middle-aged partying in the evenings, and zero possibility whatsoever that I will be hauled out of bed by a dead-of-night phone call in order to go and fight nightmares. What more can a girl ask for?
    (Well, the bed could be wider for one thing, and half-occupied by a sleeping husband for another. That would be an improvement, as long as he isn’t stressing out about committee meetings and co-workers and things that go bump in the night. (We both do it, and sometimes we actually make each other worse.) But anyway: that’s a trade-off—blessed peace and anxiety-free quiet against the security blanket effectof being able to reach out in the night and connect. And right now, peace and quiet is winning by a hair’s breadth.)
    Lecter is tucked away in his case, which in turn is locked inside the not-insubstantial gun cabinet that I found in my room when I arrived. I can feel his dreams, tickling at the back of my head: disturbing but muted echoes of Vakilabad. I feel slightly guilty that I haven’t taken him out for practice in—is it really two days? Two days without tuning up? It seems like an eternity. But he’s quiescent right now, even glutted, as if in a food coma. That’s good. It means I can ignore his hunger for a while.
    So I doze off to sleep. And I dream.
    Did you know that keeping a work journal like this—only to be read after one’s demise—can be therapeutic?
    Let me tell you about my fucking dreams.
    Lecter talks to me in my dreams. Like this one:
    I’m dancing and it’s black and white and it’s a waltz, the last waltz at the Vienna Opera Ball—spot the stack of clichés, my internal critic snarks. My partner and I have the floor to ourselves, and we are lit by a lighting rig infinitely high above us that casts a spot as pitiless and harsh as the supernova glare of a dying star. My partner is a full head taller than me, so I’m eye-to-eye with the ivory knot of his tie—yes, white tie and tails, very 1890s. I’m wearing an elaborate gown that probably came out of a glass cabinet at the V&A, fit for a long-dead Archduke’s mistress. I can’t see his face and he’s clearly not Bob (Bob has two left feet) for he leads me in graceful loops, holding me in a grip as strong as spring steel. I let him lead, feeling passive, head whirling (or is that the Buck’s Fizz I put away earlier?), positively recumbent as he glides around the floor. It’s a two-step in 3/4 time, rather