The Big Reap tc-3

by Chris F. Holm

  Bare footprints, woman-petite, disturbed the pale dust at my feet.

  I followed them with my gaze. They led toward a large jetted tub.

  Delicate fingers looped around the edges of the tub — their owner crouched and still, hiding, hoping I couldn’t see.

  “Lilith,” I said.

  Her reply was shaky, frightened. “Sam?”

  She rose, then, her jerky unsure movements a far cry from her trademark otherworldly grace. She was naked. Cold. Shivering. Her eyes wide, furtive, and dark-rimmed.

  When she saw the grim expression on my face, she frowned.

  “So this is how it’s to be, then. I’m made human once more so that I can have the privilege of being killed, collected by my very own.”

  “You set me up, Lilith. You used me.”

  She smiled, but there was no humor in it, only sadness. “All those years ago, back on the beach, did I not tell you that I would? It’s what I do. It’s who I am. So let’s not overly prolong this little reunion, shall we? Just do what you came to do and get it over with.”

  “I think I deserve some answers first.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “I do.”

  “And what makes you think I have any to give?”

  “I need to know why. Why after all these years — after all that we’ve been through — you still think so little of me. First using me to wage your little war on God so you could pay him back for damning you, expecting me to collect Kate MacNeil and jumpstart the apocalypse. Now using me as your fall-guy to clean up all evidence of what you did in helping the Brethren escape the bonds of hell and bringing forth the Great Flood.”

  Her face looked pained. “That’s what you think you were in this? A scapegoat? A patsy?”

  “What else am I supposed to think?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What’s done is done.”

  “It matters to me,” I said. “The why is every bit as important as the what.”

  “Look around, Sam. Did you take the fall for what I did? No, you didn’t, I did. I wasn’t setting you up, I was insulating you. Protecting you from the retribution I was certain was to come. I won’t deny helping the Nine was the greatest mistake in my long and storied existence, but I didn’t task you with killing them in order to erase the evidence. In fact, I knew killing them would likely bring said evidence to light.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because for the longest time, I thought that they could not be killed. Because your encounter with Simon taught me otherwise. And because a very long time ago, I made a promise to a friend.”

  I laughed, a shrill, humorless bark that echoed through the skeletal dark. “I thought you didn’t have any friends.”

  “I don’t. Not anymore. Do you know why I’ve held you at arm’s length all these years? Why I went out of my way to convince myself that you meant nothing to me?”

  “I always assumed it was out of the unkindness of your heart.”

  Lilith lowered her head. “I deserve that. But you should know, as Collectors go, you weren’t my first.”

  “Yeah, you might’ve mentioned it a time or two,” I said, bitterly. “I’ve heard no shortage of bitching through the years about the burden and the insult that was you being saddled with the likes of me. I’m sure I’m just the latest in a string of hundreds.”

  “No,” she said softly, “you were my tenth.”

  It took a moment for her words to sink in. “You mean…”

  “…that the Nine were all assigned to me? I do. And what I did, I did only to save them. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before. I swear, I had no idea that the Flood would come. Or that they’d become such monsters. If I had, I never would have gone through with it. You want to know why I wanted so badly to punish your precious God? It wasn’t for damning me. It was because he allowed my greatest act of kindness — the best, most selfless thing I’d ever done — to result in the greatest genocide this world has ever known. And once the floodwaters receded, all I was left with for my trouble were the corrupted shadows of my former wards, my only friends. They were decent people once. Flawed, yes, but brave and kind as well, not unlike you. Did you know they each of them selected deceased vessels for the ritual? Not one of them was willing to displace a human soul in return for their own freedom. And they waited a century for the proper celestial alignment to perform the ritual. Not because that’s how long it took to come around, but because it was the first time the alignment occurred in a place uninhabited by the living. We knew, you see, the force of the soul’s destruction — a savage warlord whose forces had raped and slaughtered hundreds, by the way — would shake the very ground around us, but we had no idea just how severe the effect of releasing such heinous evil would be. To the world, and to those within the ritual circle. It hardened them. Tainted them. Made them into something darker than they were. But then, I shouldn’t need to tell you that, your own experience in Los Angeles was but a hint of what they experienced, Daniel’s soul being far less tainted than the one they used, and look at the effect it’s had on you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “But that doesn’t change what has to happen next.”

  She stepped toward me then. Out of the tub and across the narrow expanse of floor, her scuffing heels leaving streaks in the ghost-white dust. Her strange, mystical guile was no more. The woman before me was awkward, coltish, fragile, determined.

  A strange thought struck me then. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never looked more beautiful.

  “I know that,” she said. “And I don’t blame you. In fact, I welcome it. It’s time I paid for all I’ve done. I just wanted you to understand.” She stood on tiptoes, and kissed me on the cheek. Then took my hand, and placed it against her bare chest. I felt the warmth of her skin, the rapid beating of her heart. “Goodbye, Sam Thornton. Be well.”

  “Goodbye,” I told her. And then I reached my hand inside her chest, and wrapped tight her soul.

  It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Her soul was at once ancient, and brand new. Wisp thin and blown-glass fragile in my hand. No gray-black swirling, nor blinding white, it was instead all the colors of the rainbow, and none at all. The most vibrant, beautiful light I’d ever seen. And her entire life, spread out before me. Her coming to in Paradise, all full of hope and possibility. Her subsequent fall — she so confused at what she’d done. The Brethren a beacon of redemption in her mind. The pain of finding out how wrong on that count she truly was.

  And amidst it all, the briefest moment of hope and joy — of love — a blinding bright pinprick of happiness before a long descent into bitterness and despair: Lilith, standing in a field of heather, the heat of a nearby bonfire on her cheek. A young, intense, dark-eyed man, his arms around her, their foreheads touching. Grigori, I realized.

  “It’s almost time,” she said, in a language I did not speak, but through her ears, her mind, her experience I understood. “Soon, you’ll all be free.”

  “But not you, my love.” He held her tight. Kissed her. Kissed me. Tender, sweet. “I can scarcely bear the thought of leaving you to this existence.”

  “Knowing you’re free is enough for me,” she said — I said — caressing his stubbled cheek. “Knowing you’re free will give me the strength to endure anything that hell dare inflict upon me.”

  “Promise me something,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  “If this goes wrong–”

  “It won’t.”

  “If this goes wrong,” he repeated, “and we emerge as… something less… then you owe it to us all to end us.”

  “That won’t happen,” she said. “I know the mages warned against it, but we’ve taken every precaution.”

  “Every precaution but one: your promise to kill us should it come to that.”

  “But I couldn’t.”

  “You must. We’ve all decided. We beg it of you. None of us wish to end up monsters, to be as enslaved by ou
r own darkest impulses as we now are to our demonic masters. Without your promise, there will be no ritual — not tonight. Not ever.”

  She smiled then, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Then I promise.”

  Grigori’s face crinkled into a smile as well, and he kissed Lilith once more. “Thank you, my love.” Then he looked to the sky and said, “It’s time.”

  Then the ritual. Then the flood. And untold anguish at what she’d done.

  I released Lilith’s soul, gasping. We were huddled together on our knees in the half-built flat. Outside, twilight had given way to starry black. I wrapped my arms around her shivering, naked form, and we sat like that a while; shattered, sobbing, too broken to do anything else.

  As we held each other in the darkness, the child-thing’s mouthpiece rang in my ears.

  “The healing process is both long and painful”, it’d said, “but ultimately it’s up to you how well it goes — and how you deal with the challenges it poses along the way. Even flesh twisted by consuming fire can be taught to feel again with time.”

  and

  “Lilith’s fate is in your hands: for as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

  and

  “It falls to you to do what must be done.”

  “There has to be another way,” I’d pleaded then. To which he told me:

  “There always is… Only you can decide what’s right.”

  So, weeping in the darkness, that’s exactly what I did, I decided what was right, and did what must be done.

  I took off my coat and button-down, stolen from the morgue from which this meat-suit came, and wrapped first the latter and then the former around Lilith’s shoulders. She eyed me a moment in confusion, and then buttoned the shirt with clumsy fingers.

  Her shivering abated.

  That done, I kissed her on the forehead, my eyes still wet with tears, or perhaps wetted anew.

  Then I rose without a word and left her in the darkened building.

  Broken.

  Human.

  25.

  It’s not often one has occasion to meet the Devil.

  Mine came some hours after I’d left Lilith at the apartment, as I stood upon the well-trodden apartment courtyard, grass patchy and shiny from bikes and balls and countless feet, that sat above the spot Hitler’s Führerbunker once occupied.

  I’d been there a while. Pondering right and wrong, punishment and absolution, trying to get my head right regarding all I’d seen and done.

  The voice of the child-God’s conduit had guided me back at the flat, I thought — guided me in a direction I’d not considered until that moment, though in retrospect seemed the only thing I ever could have done. I suppose as an implement of judgment, I was well chosen, if double-edged, for if I could forgive Lilith her trespasses against me, it was a reflection on us both. Now, though, as I stood upon this once unhallowed ground that had somehow given way to normalcy, it was Thomed’s voice that rang in my ears.

  “If our souls are, in fact, immortal, why would our Maker confine Her judgment to the first twenty or fifty or one hundred years of life? Why would a loving parent punish their child for any longer than it took for that child to learn their lesson? My conclusion, long coming, is that She would not. That absolution lies not beyond our reach, no matter how far gone we seem — at least, so long as we stretch forever toward it.”

  “That presumes our Maker is a loving parent,” came a voice from behind me, echoing the very words that I’d used when I replied to Thomed.

  I turned to find beside me a handsome, blond-haired man of maybe seventeen, with sharp-angled, almost pretty features, blue eyes, and smile-bared teeth of gleaming white. He wore an age-creased leather jacket open over a vintage Judas Priest T-shirt, and a pair of whiskered blue jeans. Well-worn black Chuck Taylors graced his feet.

  “How did you –” I began to ask, but he waved me off with a laugh.

  “Your mind — and, hell, your very soul — are an open book to me, Sam Thornton. I own the latter, after all. Although at the moment, you’re wondering if perhaps I’m only leasing it. After all, if Lilith can get a reprieve, then why not you?”

  I didn’t argue the point. I couldn’t. He was right; I was.

  “The question you need to ask yourself is, a reprieve from what? A wise man who lived and died not far from here once said the only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life — your memories, your attachments. That by burning them away, hell is not punishing you, it’s freeing your soul. So perhaps, Sam, all you need to do for your reprieve is to let go.”

  “That’s a nice speech,” I told him, “but I think I’ll take my chances with the high road.”

  “You could,” he said lightly. “You surely could. But think on this: Lilith was the first woman in all Creation, the first of your precious Maker’s pets to fall from grace. If it took Him this long to get around to redeeming her, how long do you figure it’ll be before you get your turn?”

  “I’m okay with waiting,” I replied.

  “Really?” he asked, smiling brightly. “I’ve never thought of patience as one of your strongest suits. Nor do I consider it a virtue. If you ask me, patience is a sign of weakness, an unwillingness to pursue that which you desire.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “or maybe that which I desire is best obtained by not pursuing it.”

  The boy rolled his eyes. “Fuck — five minutes with that damn-fool monk Thomed, and already you’re spouting nonsense Zen koans. You know he’s crazier than a shithouse rat, don’t you?” I opened my mouth to object, but he placated me with raised palms. “Okay, okay, say for the sake of argument you’re right. That your Maker has a plan for you after all. Maybe what you should ask yourself is why should you assume His plan is worth a damn?”

  “Come again?”

  “Think about it. If all you’ve experienced to this point has been your Maker’s preposterous Rube Goldberg plan to redeem His very first lost soul, doesn’t that make you nothing more than a patsy? A bit player? A hapless pawn in a rigged game that placed heaven and hell at odds with one another and resulted in no shortage of suffering for you and those you love? If your Maker has a plan, then every awful aspect of your life was ordained before you were even born, dictated by the petty whims of a power-mad deity bent on forever pushing the limits of his poor, pathetic subjects just to see what makes them break — like some fucking hard-hearted toddler standing above an anthill with a magnifying glass. If your Maker has a plan, then it was His plan, and not simply those strikebreakers, who shattered your knee and rendered you unemployable. It was His plan, not random chance, that caused your beloved Elizabeth to contract tuberculosis. It was His plan that you take Dumas’s deal and give your soul over to the likes of me. His plan that drove your wife from you, and resulted in her granddaughter and her family getting slaughtered at the hands of a rogue angel. Hell, that resulted in the Flood that so pissed off Lilith in the first place. And if your Maker truly is both omniscient and omnipotent, how do you square the horrors that brought you to this very patch of ground so many years ago? Why would a loving God allow Hitler to live at all? Allow millions to suffer and die at his hands?”

  “Seems to me free will’s to blame for most of the horrors in this world. Free will, and maybe you.”

  “Sam, that hurts, particularly because you show such promise, such verve. I don’t deign to visit all my charges, you know — just the ones in whose future I see great things. I’d hate to see you squander such potential sitting around, waiting for the phone to ring. Perhaps your Maker will finally get around to redeeming you a million years from now; perhaps not. But what I offer you is concrete. It’s here-and-now. And it’s there for you whenever you decide.”

  “What exactly are you offering me?”

  “I’m offering you a seat at the table. A chance to make a difference — to serve as trusted council for yours truly, and as a guide to those like you who’ve suffered the misfortune of somehow offending their mercur
ial Maker. Perhaps under your tutelage, they need not find their path so rocky.”

  “And if I say no — what then?”

  The boy smiled. “You mean how will you be punished? You misunderstand my offer, Sam. If you say no, I’ll simply ask again. And again. And again. A million years is a long time to keep on asking, and affords countless chances for you to tell me yes.”

  Just then, a woman’s voice called from a balcony above. “Sven? Sven, wo bist du?”

  The boy’s smile faded, replaced by sudden confusion. He shook his head in puzzlement, and muttered something that sounded like a sneeze, which I assumed was German for “excuse me”. Then he turned and trotted across the square toward the building from which he called, the boy a boy once more, the Devil inside him gone.

  I was alone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  You’ll note that as this series goes on, these acknowledgments ain’t getting any shorter. If you people don’t cut it out with all your love and support, I’m gonna end up way too cheery to write these things. So if book four finds Sam eating his way through Tuscany and relearning how to love, remember: it’s on you.

  Thanks to Marc Gascoigne, Lee Harris, and the whole Angry Robot crew for making my Collector novels the best versions of themselves. Thanks as well to Martin Stiff and Amazing 15 Design for turning Marc’s brilliant cover concept into the best pulp covers in the business.

  The following folks are but a few who’ve lent me a hand along the way: John Anealio, Josh Atkins, Jedidiah Ayres, Patrick Shawn Bagley, Frank Bill, Nigel Bird, Stephen Blackmoore, Jerry Bloomfield, Judy Bobalik, Paul D. Brazill, Drew Broussard, R. Thomas Brown, Kristin Centorcelli, Joelle Charbonneau, Sean Chercover, Adam Christopher, David Cranmer, the Cressey clan, my fellow Criminal Minds bloggers, Sean Cummings, Laura K. Curtis, Paul and Sarah Damaske, Hilary Davidson, Vanessa Delamare, Neliza Drew, Jacques Filippi, Sarah Fischer, Renee Fountain, Cullen Gallagher, Victor Gischler (who, it should be noted, supplied the name for Admiral Fuzzybutt), Kent Gowran, Guy Haley, Rob W. Hart, Janet Hutchings, Julie Hyzy, Abhinav Jain, Sally Janin, Jon and Ruth Jordan, John Kenyon, Larry Killian, Owen Laukkanen, Jennifer Lawrence, Benoit Lelievre, Ben LeRoy, Sophie Littlefield, Jeremy Lynch, Jennifer MacRostie, Sarajean Malpica, Dan and Kate Malmon, Erin Mitchell, Scott Montgomery, Micah Morris, Joe Myers, Stuart Neville, Lauren O'Brien, Sabrina Ogden, Dan O'Shea, Miranda Parker, Brad Parks, Todd Robinson, Linda Rodriguez, Ian Rogers, Melanie Sanderson, Ryan Sayles, Brandon Sears, Kieran Shea, Julia Spencer-Fleming (and her husband Ross), Josh Stallings, David Swinson, Brian Vander Ark, Meineke van der Salm, Steve Weddle, Chuck Wendig, Elizabeth A. White, and Shaun Young.