“A demon,” I echoed, disbelieving. “Like Dumas?”
“That’s right. Though understand, his human appearance was a projection, nothing more. He chose it to better pass among your kind. Most like him make no attempt to mask their true natures — and though they often walk unseen among the living, the dead such as yourself do not have the luxury of such blindness. The monsters at the edge of the map are, in fact, quite real. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.”
“You’re not a demon, though,” I said. “You’re human, like me?”
“I fear my ontological status is somewhat more complicated than that, but I was once human, yes. Though it was so long ago, I remember little of my life.”
“How did you wind up here? Did you make a deal, like me?”
“Would that I were given such a choice. No, I was cast out of Paradise for sins that, until I committed them, were as yet undefined, by a Maker as petty and mercurial as a poorly socialized toddler.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not nearly so sorry as you will be when you reach my age,” she replied.
Her age. Funny, she didn’t look a day over thirty. And that body hardly conjured images of shuffleboard and bingo. Stunning as she was, I found it hard not to ogle her.
She caught the meaning behind my lusty stare and raised an eyebrow. I blushed and looked away. “So,” I said, “this is what I’m going to look like from now on?”
She laughed then. Sweet Lord in heaven, did Lilith have a laugh. It curled toes, straightened other things, prickled my new flesh with goose pimples. I felt the color rising in my cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous, Collector. You’ll be here long after this vessel’s dead and gone. His grandchildren, too, should he survive long enough to have them. No, you’re just borrowing his body for as long as it suits your purposes. By assignment’s end, you’ll learn to take another at will, and to tamp down the thoughts of the individual inside.”
Realization dawned. “This goddamn radio I’m hearing — it’s no radio at all.”
“No,” she said. “The city’s been without power for at least a week. There’s not a radio to be heard for miles. Those are your vessel’s thoughts.”
“You’re telling me I hijacked a Kraut?”
“Jawohl,” she said. “A rising member of the Hitler Youth, in fact.”
“His chatter’s pretty goddamn annoying.”
“I would expect so. I imagine he’s not pleased with your sudden occupation of his body. The irony is delicious.”
“And your body,” I said, “is it borrowed too?”
“No,” she said. “Like Dumas, I look this way because I choose to. I’ve no need to drape myself in meat. Unless, of course, I find that meat desirable enough, and even then, I prefer to be on top.”
I’d never heard a woman make so frank an innuendo. And I’d never seen a woman as beautiful as Lilith in my life — not even on the silver screen. The combination was enough to take my breath away. Lilith seemed to delight in that.
Thunder struck once more, shaking the building so hard, my teeth rattled.
“We should move,” she said, crossing the room to the empty window frame and peering skyward. “They’re getting closer.”
“Who?” I asked, following.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. As I approached the window, I saw outside a ravaged city — streets cratered, buildings crumbling, tattered Nazi banners fluttering red and white and black from every flagpole and cockeyed lamppost — and above it, the slate sky was dotted here and there with fighter planes. Each wore a single star on its tail, and another on its fuselage. I recognized them from the newsreels that ran back home as Soviet Hunchbacks. As I watched, the nearest of them opened its belly and loosed a payload of bombs that once more shook the earth beneath my feet. Smoke billowed from where they landed some blocks away, and once the sound of their impact died down, I heard a woman’s anguished cry.
“Welcome to Berlin,” Lilith said.
Berlin. The thought — not to mention Lilith’s sudden closeness as we stood, touching, by the window — was exhilarating. Sam Thornton, bounced from recruitment station after recruitment station thanks to a bum knee and a lunger wife, dropped behind enemy lines on a mission to collect damned souls. I felt like a soldier. Like a superhero.
Maybe this undead thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“So,” I said, smiling for the first time since I awoke from the sleep of death, “you said something about an assignment?”
“I did, at that,” Lilith replied, skipping gaily toward the door. “Now follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Fear not, Collector, I suspect you’ll find the task to your liking.”
“C’mon, spill it. What’s the job?”
Lilith beamed, all dimples and pearly whites.
“You and I are off to kill the Führer.”
1.
Even before the Welshman drew down on me, I was pretty sure I was in trouble.
I’d spent the morning minding my own business, paying my respects to a dead friend. A friend I thought I’d long since lost — over a girl, because that’s too often how these things go. We had the kind of falling-out that feels like it’ll last forever, and in the case of folks like me and Danny, I suppose it could have. Only it didn’t last forever. We patched things up just in time for me to lose the boy for good.
Least he didn’t die for nothing. Hell, technically, he didn’t die at all, or at least, not recently. The sack of meat and bone that was Danny’s mortal vessel was three decades in the ground before I ever met the guy. Danny, like me, is a Collector. Was, I should say, since he ain’t much of anything anymore.
That girl I mentioned? She — another Collector by the name of Ana — took Danny for one hell of a ride, which culminated in the destruction of his immortal soul. Sucks, huh? Only Danny got the last laugh. If her batshit scheme had gone to plan, she would have broken her bonds of servitude to hell, but at vulgar cost. Last time any of my kind pulled that sort of juju, it triggered the Deluge — you know, Noah and a big-ass boat — and damn near wiped humankind off the map. This time woulda done the same, had Danny not stepped in. So I guess you could say the poor bastard died, or whatever the hell you call it when the dying guy’s already dead, saving the world. If that ain’t worth a few moments of quiet graveside reflection, I don’t know what is.
So that’s precisely what I did. Went to Danny’s mortal grave — a humble, weather-beaten headstone already draped with moss in a quiet, half-forgotten corner of a quiet, half-forgotten cemetery deep in the Kent countryside this fallen hero’s only monument — and said my piece. I didn’t figure the universe would begrudge me a few minutes’ mourning.
I didn’t figure, but I should have.
You wanna know what really irks me about being damned? It’s not the big stuff — the guilt, the torment, the recriminations; those I figure I’ve got coming. It’s the little things that get me. Drop a hundred slices of toast, and none of ’em will land butter-up. Flip a hundred coins, and not once are you gonna call it right. Take a bad beat from the cosmos, lose a friend, and need one goddamn morning to yourself to get your head straight? Well too bad, because that’s precisely when the Welshman in the Bentley’s gonna show.
I’m not talking metaphorically or anything. I mean I was standing in the cemetery, the chill November mist beading up on my meat-suit’s pea coat, when this dove-gray Bentley — mid-Sixties, if her curves were any indication, and in fresh-off-the-floor condition — splashes up the rutted drive, and out steps this big bruiser of a guy with arms like trees, no neck, a crooked nose, and a suit he probably coulda bartered for a second, lesser car. Black worsted-wool and well tailored, it somehow only served to accentuate his massive frame, his cauliflower ears, and his meaty boxer’s face. A pewter cravat hung around what passed for his neck — how it looped around and tied, I’ll never know — and a matching scarf was draped across his shoulders. Black leather gloves stretched tight as he flexed his ham-hock hands. He eyed me a moment in my borrowed meat-suit, a rail-thin teenaged boy who’d been struck down by an aneurism just last night. Then, in a heavy Welsh accent — all odd angles and hairpin turns — he said, “Sam Thornton?”