Anubis excerpt - meet Laura (Patreon)

1711 word excerpt.  

The newsletter that comes out tomorrow will include the first 876 words of this excerpt.

Excerpt: Subject to change. Not edited

The Senate hadn’t suffered from poverty but most of them had willingly forgotten the past, regurgitating the accounts from the past only because it kept them in power.

None of them believed until the Utah facility incident.

Except for one.

There was no reason for Laura to think someone had entered the front door of the house, just the awareness ingrained by years of training.

She turned. She waited.

Max Denton appeared doorway to the kitchen, blonde hair, clean-cut, wearing a dark grey suit. It enhanced the cunning in his eyes. “You must be off your game today.”

“I knew you were coming.”

“Yet you didn’t come check to see who it was.” Max smiled like he’d won the game.

It would seem after all these years the man would have learned, Laura did not play games. “If you’d been someone I needed to worry about, I would have never known you were there.”

His expression hardened.

It was a look that might have set others on edge, even other Wardens, but not her. She’d lost the ability to fear the day her father died.

Max scraped his gaze across the kitchen stopping on the cur half in and out of the [AW1] window.

“Why are you here Mr. Denton.”

“Honorable Denton.”

There was nothing honorable about the man. “Well?”

He waved a hand indicating the room. “Then I’m here for the atmosphere.”

“I heard politicians prefer Cancun.”

“And I prefer to be on the battlefield with the people sworn to protect us.”

Laura huffed. “My oath is to protect human life.”

The smile Denton wore shriveled into a cold frown. “And it’s our job to make sure you’re funded well enough to do that.”

Humility was a small price to pay to insure just that.

He went back to staring at the cur like a man staring at a prized possession rather than a monster that could flay him open.

Laura used the small patches of floor clear of blood to move closer to the counter and stopped by the head of the cur.  She removed a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her suit jacket and put them on.

Movement shifted behind her. Tiles scraped against tile. The air stirred and Max’s cologne went to war with the scent of old blood. “To think there were once thousands of these things and we fought them with rocks and spears.”

Laura straightened up. “The Anubis came into power during Egypt’s First Dynasty. It was destroyed during the High Middle Ages, not the Stone Age.”

“Swords, catapults, shield, pikes, or rocks. When it came to the Anubis, it was all the same.” His eyes glittered. “And the creation of the curs using the weak, sick, the unwanted - genius.”

“Genius?”

“Absolutely. The Anubis took what would have been a burden to its resources and turned them into the perfect weapon. One that took orders but didn’t need to be guided. Soldiers he endowed with raw power, strength.” He took a breath. “Immortality.”

“You sound jealous.” And jealousy was one of humanity’s dangerous attributes.

His smile returned. “Aren’t you?” There was more meaning in the question than the actual two words that formed it.

“No.” And she wasn’t.

Laura had long ago come to accept her mortality, even embrace it. To live for thousands of years, to lose a sense of time, time that grew into a wall that separated you from the world and allowed you to forget there were lives beyond your own. Shackled to your culture because everyone else’s vanished before you could know they existed. To see the sunrise and set so many times it was meaningless. To have enough time to forget how important friends and family were and enough time to forget them when they were gone.

No, Laura didn’t envy the longevity the Fenrir gifted the Varu, if anything she pitied them for all the things they would never appreciate.

“You say that now, but what about in ten years, twenty? When your hair is gray, and your body aches? When you get feeble and your health fades.”

“We’re humans.” A lock escaped the chignon Laura wore and she tucked it behind her ear. When she was young her father had braided her hair every morning while they talked. After he died, Laura had gone to pinning it at the back of her head with an antique silver comb and pin that had belonged to her mother. “And death is a natural part of the life cycle of being human.”

“But what if it didn’t have to be? Theoretically, I mean.” There it was again, that tone.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we already put a strain on this planet. Living longer doesn’t do any good if you don’t have food, clean water, or air to breathe.”

“Now, Laura.”

“Warden Phillips.”

Max tipped his head. “As you wish, Warden Phillips.” He smirked.

Laura stopped by the head of the Anubis and took out a pair of latex gloves.

“But if there were such a means to extend life, in concern for the planet,  it wouldn’t be given to everyone.”

She put on the gloves. “In other words, just the wealthy.”

Laura tipped the head to the side exposing the sharp-force injury. The linear slice remained smooth until it reached the spinal cord, there bone fragments littered the area around the severed vertebrae suggesting resistance before dispersing into the tissue where the weapon cleaved the flesh exiting out the other side.

“No, Warden Phillips, it would be given to the worthy.” He made a half-circle along the edge of the footprints left behind by the chaotic movements of Dr. Dante and the cur that stalked him.

“And who decided who’s…worthy.”

“It would be a cooperative, church leaders, political allies, global leaders.”

“The Senate.” She stood.

“Yes, with a few additions.”

“What about conflict of interests.”

Max held his hands behind his back. “People like us once advised kings, emperors, the Pope, of all the people in this world I think we’d be the most qualified to make those types of decisions.”

Aside from a few gray hairs, thin creases at the outside corner of his eyes, nothing else about him had changed. But then, no matter how many times a snake shed its skin, it never became something else.

Laura returned to tracking the trail of blood fanning out across the counter, following the path of the cur’s body as it broke through the window, leaving its lower half draped over the counter to the floor.

From a distance, the cur could have been mistaken for a Sarvari, especially to the untrained eye. Close up, the imperfections in the conformation of its skull, ear set, and muzzle, were visible despite the perpetual black of its coat.

Despite those differences, it should have been impossible for Dr. Dante to survive the attack. He was a scientist, not trained military, who was nowhere as dangerous as a Warden.

Yet he’d not only survived, he’d beheaded the creature.

The panicked retreat of red tracks left behind by Dr. Dante, turned, then blurred as if he’d slipped. No friction lines interrupted the arch an unavoidable result unless there was enough speed and momentum.

And even the best-trained Warden couldn’t move that fast.

Silver glinted in the darker shadow cast by a garbage can. The meat cleaver was wedged between in the gap behind it with the handle jutting out.

“I’m going to hold a meeting in ***. It’s by invitation only,” Max said.

Laura gave him her attention.

“I would like for you to be there.”

“What’s the meeting for?”

“You know when you attend.”

When not if. “How important is it for me to attend, I have a lot on my plate right now.”

“I’d say it’s a life or death situation.”  Max nodded at the remains of the cur. “I’ll let you get back to work.” He left the way he came leaving Laura alone with the remains of the animal. When his footsteps faded she retrieved the cleaver from behind the garbage can.

Blank spots marked where Dr. Dante’s fingers had gripped the handle.

The tool of a butcher against a monster made to kill, and somehow the cleaver had won. If there had been more Laura doubted it would have been the same outcome.

Which left the question, why had only one of the six known curs come here instead of all of them? Why not a group attack? Or had it been an attack at all?

… the perfect weapon. One that took orders but didn’t need to be guided

Even a poor trainer could train a dog to bite, but sometimes the best couldn’t get them to let go.

Was that what had happened? Had this been a test of obedience? Clearly, the intention hadn’t been to kill Dr. Dante or all of the curs would have attacked.

Or maybe the creature did exactly what it had been ordered?

If Laura was right, and this had been a controlled test, the cur could have targeted anyone? So why Dr. Dante?

What did they gain?

She scanned the room again, from the fallen fridge to the red skid mark where he’d pivoted to swing the cleaver and the perfect imprint of his shoe when he’d stopped.  An obvious clue as to how impossible this entire event was.

People like Max Denton didn’t get where they were by missing such telling details. And even if he had there was the body of a cur.

Yet not once had he questioned how Dr. Dante had lived?

Laura had made a concentrated effort to ignore any attention Dr. Dante gave to his shoulder, as well as how he paled when she mentioned Paul Dekker’s name.  Suspecting he’d been bitten was not the same as confirmation. Without confirmation, she didn’t have to think about the possible reasons he’d survived an unfinished tie.

Perhaps he didn’t have to.

Laura had remained ignorant not because she trusted the Mah but because she trusted the Senate even less.

But what did Max Denton gain by not alerting his peers?

Maybe because it wasn’t about what he’d gain, but about what he’d lose?