“That my delaying is nothing more than forestalling the inevitable?”
“I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning,” he said. His tone carried a note of condescension, like an adult indulging a small child in its silly, pointless ramblings.
I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to push said condescension into anger, and said anger into a rash, ill-conceived response.
“Then let me be clearer, you ugly son of a bitch. Whatever the hell that chunky nastiness was you were gonna stick into me to send me off to my big sleep is now coursing through your system. And as creepy as you look, the parts you’re made of are still human. So my guess is, it’ll work on you as surely as it’d work on me. So yeah, I’m stuck down here, but the upside is, there ain’t no further left for me to fall. So the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, how’s that grip-strength of yours doing? Is the scary hand-monster getting sleepy?”
By the time I finished my taunting little soliloquy, the air was so heavy with roiling, thick black smoke, I couldn’t see Magnusson any longer, so I didn’t know whether my words had riled him. But then I heard him roar once more, followed by the slap of six hands meeting tile, and I knew he’d decided to come after me, rather than waiting in the rafters for the sandman to whisk him off to sleep.
The smoke pressed in around me. The pool had become a gas chamber, a killing floor — thick dark poison all around. The world was roaring now, and the billows of smoke tinged at their edges in sunset orange as the fire climbed ceilingward, engulfing everything combustible along the way. I couldn’t hear Magnusson, couldn’t see him. Could barely feel my extremities, I was so dizzy.
Magnusson, despite the dope and smoke, did not seem similarly afflicted. Which is to say, I never even saw him coming.
When he hit me from behind, I went down hard. He made sure of it — two hands on the back of my head, driving it into the tiles as I fell. I felt a snap, and my left eye went dark, my meat-suit’s orbital socket cracked and jutting. The sensation of vitreous fluid sticky against my cheek made me gag.
His lower limbs he used to pin my arms and legs, while he slammed my head into the tiles again and again and again. My nose gouted. My lips split. I was dazed, disoriented, and fading fast — losing blood, losing consciousness, losing hope. Two thoughts, slippery and hard to hold onto, were all that kept me going.
One was that Magnusson was too smart, too scientifically and mystically adept, to let me die. And yeah, even predeceased meat-suits can kick the bucket; possession’s like the magical equivalent of a defibrillator, capable of shocking the newly dead and relatively undamaged back to life. But if that meat-suit sustains enough damage — as this one was on its way to — it’ll give up the ghost all over again. Meaning me. When that happens, the invading consciousness is expelled. If we’re talking demonic possession, their consciousness simply returns to their physical form, possession for them is more projection than anything. But Collectors have no bodies of our own, so what winds up happening in instances of death is we’re reseeded someplace else at random, stuffed forcibly into someone half a world away. These days, the odds were one in six I’d wind up in China. Though I confess, however reseeding works, it never seems to track with expectations. Twice now, for example, I’ve ended up in Guam. The reseeding process sucks, because death for a Collector, while not final, is painful as all get-out, but it’d be a ticket out of here at least, and Magnusson knew it. Since he’d gone to all the trouble to bring me here, he wasn’t about to let me off so easy. He’d bash my meat-suit’s head in until it had barely enough juice left for me to slump drooling on a chair, let alone body-hop away, and then he’d hook me up to all manner of life-saving machines, leaving me trapped and sedated for an eternity, or near enough.
The other thought was that I could feel his grip-strength weakening. And if his drugs were taking hold, they might provide me with the opening I needed.
When he slammed me once more into the tiles, I shuddered and went slack. I knew he’d have to stop playing Gallagher to this meat-suit’s melon long enough to make sure he hadn’t taken things too far, and I was right. He nudged me. I didn’t move. He rolled me over. I flopped wet-noodle against the oven-warm tile, my one good eye half-lidded despite the scorching, toxic air. He recoiled, startled, when he saw the skim blade in my hand, but then he nudged it with a knuckle on one of his lower limbs, laughing when he realized it was attached.
He stepped back a bit, his form hazy from smoke, and suddenly out of my reach. I wondered if something tipped him to my possum act. But then he rose on four of his six hands, and uttered something rapid-fire and guttural in a language I could not understand. I heard an ungodly shriek in the darkness, but in reverse, the kind of noise you might make by sucking in, not blowing out. And then a mighty wind kicked up, the flames that engulfed the baths began to gutter, and the smoke around us to clear.
As I lay there, trying my damndest to see what was going on without moving anything but my eyeball lest I tip my hand, I was puzzled — puzzled and amazed. Amazed because this man was without a doubt the most powerful mage I’d ever come across, and puzzled because all magic, from the smallest of location spells to breaking the bonds of servitude to hell, requires a sacrifice. The former, blood. The latter, a tainted human soul. The through-line between the two being life.
Then, as the smoke cleared as surely as via a fume hood, I saw where it was going, and what that wretched noise was, and I realized what Magnusson had done.
Gareth’s corpse thrashed atop the pool tiles, his limbs contorting and his ruined, gunshot head thrown back as his thick boxer lips parted wide and drew in an impossible, endless breath of soot and flame and swirling smoke. His body — sacrifice and containment vessel both — bloated and rippled as it struggled to contain the conflagration. His clothes rent. His eyes ruptured. His naked flesh, veined black, stretched to the breaking point and beyond, splitting like an overripe tomato, and glistening wet black like campfire coals after a rain. By the time the fire was contained, he was a massive whale of a man, gray-black and oozing, left to slowly deflate as the firestorm inside him subsided.
The fire contained, this self-made monster, Dr. Frankenstein and his unholy progeny both, grabbed a fistful of my shirt and hoisted me upward. He swayed a bit as he did, staggering as he regained his balance, his strength sapped by the drugs and magic. He said to me, short of breath and slurring: “I confess, Mr. Thornton, you had more fight in you than I suspected. If you can hear me in there, I commend you. But as you can see, your efforts, as in Los Angeles, have proven futile. But fear not; you shall slumber soon enough. Perhaps you’ll even come to understand that for the kindness that it is. After all, is an eternity of dream not preferable to one spent in slavery to hell?”
It was a fair point. An angle I’d not considered. So I thought about it for a good half-second before I decided to roll the dice and stick with hell.
Then I stabbed him in the chest.
He released me when I came to life in his hands, but too late to deflect my blow. The skim blade pierced the desiccated flesh of his chest like scissors going through paper, and I felt his sternum beneath it shatter.
And that’s when things got really weird.
Once the blade passed through Magnusson’s chest, it began to thrum in my hand, as if coursing with an electric current. Magnusson’s eyes went wide, and then clenched shut as the blade burst out of his back, shattering his spinal column to dust. At the blade’s end was the shriveled little walnut that passed as Magnusson’s soul — no light left in it, no experiences washing over me as it separated from his body. Removed from its earthly vessel, said vessel began to crumble like a mummy exposed to the humidity of the open air after centuries spent entombed.