We fell to the ground, his flagging strength no longer capable of supporting my weight. As we landed, he slid down the blade, and then my arm. My hand was clean through his chest, blade still extended, the dead husk of his soul impaled upon it.
Brown faded to ash. Firm became fragile became so much dust. Soon, I was lying broken and bloodied but alone in the charred remains of the dead man’s office, a tumorous nodule skewered like morbid fondue-fodder at the edge of my blade, and a bloated, blackened Gareth beside me.
I lowered the blade, raised my free hand to Magnusson’s soul. It crumbled like chalk between my fingers.
My vision dimmed. My meat-suit failing.
I slipped away.
Exquisite. Excruciating. As if some sadistic needle-fingered creature was tearing every nerve out of my meat-suit’s body one by one like a gardener yanking up a particularly pernicious root, and running them across a bed of lemon-juice-soaked sandpaper before lighting them on fire.
It took moments.
It took forever.
And then, next thing I knew, I was in Guam.
4.
“Good evening, Collector. You’re looking well.”
She was lying, I was pretty sure; I must’ve looked like shit. My leg-wound seeping lymph through its bandages, my thick dark hair on end, my meat-suit’s early-twenties baby-face dusted here and there with patchwork stubble. Of course, the fact that Lilith was lying to me was no surprise.
That she was complimenting me, on the other hand, was a major cause for concern. It set off big red lights and klaxons in my borrowed brain. Then again, that could have been the booze. Cause I’m not going to lie, by the time she tracked me down, I was pretty fucking drunk.
I opened my eyes and lifted my head up off my threadbare beach towel, propping myself up on one elbow, which dug into the powder-fine sand through the thin layer of tropical-fish-printed fabric. The sun was setting over the Philippine Sea, a disc of lava that bled orange across the horizon on either side where it touched. As the green afterimage of the brilliant sunset faded, I saw that Lilith was standing some ten feet down the beach from me, her creamy white skin untouched by sun despite our tropical environs. And my, how much skin she showed.
She wore a string bikini of royal blue, stunning against her pale white skin, three scant triangles covering her naughty bits, intended, it seemed, more to heighten anticipation than out of any sense of the demure. A gauzy white sarong was tied about her waist and fluttered in the southern breeze, as did her thick mane of lustrous red. Her feet were bare. Nails painted crimson, hands and feet. My footprints cratered the white sand in a meandering dotted line from trail head to where I lay just above the high tide line, churning the beach in a rough circle around my chosen spot, but Lilith stood among a field of pristine white.
The beach was empty but for the two of us. Faifa’i Beach is secluded even by Guam’s standards, a jounce along a pitted gravel road into the jungle and a hike up the narrow cliff-walk trail past the rusted anti-aircraft gun leftover from World War II, and across a narrow wooden footbridge over roiling surf. Most of its visitors don’t relish the thought of making the sun-drunk trek back to their four-wheel-drives in darkness, which means they clear out early. Me, I don’t give a shit. If I fall and break my neck on the walk back, smart money says I wind up right back in Guam anyway.
Besides, I wasn’t planning on walking back. My plan consisted of polishing off this-here bottle of rum which, I was surprised to discover, I was well on my way to doing, and passing out till morning. Far as I was concerned, the universe owed me a drunken night beneath the stars in a balmy tropical paradise after the cosmic bitch-slap that was reseeding. When my last meat-suit kicked, I found myself eyes-open on the floor, puking blood and grand-mal seizing in the middle of some cheesy island bar. Patrons huddled over me, eyes wide as those of the lacquered fish that graced the walls, while a short, lined Japanese woman dressed all casual and fanny-packed like she was on vacation held my shoulders down and wailed. By the time the ambulance arrived, my trembling ceased. I stopped puking before we pulled into the hospital. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t convince the docs to let me go, nor the poor, distraught woman who — language barrier aside — I was pretty sure was my new meat-suit’s wife to let me out of her sight. So after a night spent tossing and turning under her watchful, worried eye, I gave up on my new ride — a salt-and-pepper Japanese man of maybe fifty — and hopped a ride in the fresh-faced, indigenous Chamorro kid with whom I shared a room. He was maybe twenty-two or -three, and from what I could gather, came in sometime yesterday thanks to a sea-urchin-stick in his left leg while cliff-diving with his friends. I waited till my meat-suit’s missus ducked out to use the bathroom, and then body-hopped on over, puking in the trashcan beside his bed and pulling his privacy curtain before walking, flip-flopped and board-shorts-clad, right out of the hospital. I lifted a wallet out of some dumb-ass tourist’s beach bag, and then spent twenty minutes trying to track down a toothbrush and some toothpaste to get the taste of vomit out of my mouth, finally hitting paydirt at a strip-mall drugstore with signs in English, Mandarin, and Japanese. Woulda bought a pack of cigarettes there, too, but I feel shitty smoking in a meat-suit that’s gonna keep on breathing once I vamoose. Better to save the death-sticks for the already dead. Once I was minty fresh, I rounded out my shopping spree with a bag of fast-food burgers and a bottle of rum, and set out to find a nice, quiet patch of sand where I could drink away the memory of dying yet again.
I shoulda known Lilith would come along all pretty-like and ruin my fun.
“Evenin’ yourself, Lily,” I said. “Pull up some beach and stay awhile.”
She hates it when I call her Lily. It’s kinda why I call her Lily. But this time, instead of correcting me, she just plopped down on the beach beside me. We sat awhile in silence, our eyes trained on the horizon, watching as the sun was slowly extinguished by the sea. As darkness descended, she plucked the rum bottle from its resting place between my knees, and took a long, slow pull. Then she offered it to me. I drank as well. Her lips tasted of peaches.
“Lily, are you all right?”
She took so long in responding, I began to wonder if she would. “The Truce is broken,” she finally said. “The peace has failed. The heavens are at war.”
I digested her words a moment, took another swig of rum. “Funny — you don’t sound too happy about that. There was a time you looked to spark that selfsame war.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were pained. “There was, indeed. For centuries, it’s all I thought about. And if given the chance, I’ll regret that fact for centuries to come. It was a foolish act of rebellion against an absent father whose crass withholding I should have long ago accepted. It’s mortifying, really, the lengths to which I was willing to go for just a moment of His attentions — even if those attentions were in the service of punishing me. Now, I realize the cost is simply too high — and the payoff far too meager.”
I was taken aback by her words, so blunt and so unguarded. Not once since New York, when she conspired to jump-start the End Times by framing an innocent girl for a vicious crime and attempting to condemn her soul to hell, had she ever admitted what she’d done. Not once had she expressed remorse. I was beginning to think she was incapable.
And yet…
If there’s one thing I should have learned in all my years with Lilith, it’s that she has a limitless capacity to surprise.