I wore the body of a young man who’d expired ten hours prior, the result of a congenital heart defect. Dropped over on the soccer pitch, bleeding out inside but not yet dead. Docs patched him up enough for my purposes, and filled him with fresh blood besides, but couldn’t spark his heart back into rhythm. Made the online version of Berliner Morgenpost, which the web-browser in the Edinburgh internet café I used to access it translated well enough for me to glean the salient points.
I hadn’t taken many dead vessels of late. I’d told myself they weren’t worth the bother. Sacrificed my ideals for expediency, and told myself that I deserved the break for all I’d done. Saved the world twice over by my count. Started thinking of myself as a caps-implied “Good Person”. Problem with that is, Good Person is a moving target. And this past year, I found that target moving on without me. Maybe my run-in with the creepy child-thing had gotten to me. Maybe it was the sting of Lilith’s betrayal. Whatever it was, I realized I couldn’t just keep on keeping on — that the path on which I’d stood led nowhere worth going.
The construction site around the building was paddocked with chain link six feet high — new and shiny, just like the city itself, untarnished by the corruption of the ages. The gate was fitted with a keyhole lock. Easier, even, to pick than a padlock, but hardly worth it when I could duck into the quiet, empty alley, and be up and over the fence in seconds.
Which is what I did.
The front door was unlocked. Too many subcontractors coming and going to bother, I suppose. Once inside, I considered searching the place from the bottom up, but something tugged at my gut like swallowed fishing line, pulling me inexorably upstairs.
“It will end where it began,” the child-thing had told me.
I found the stairwell by memory, felt the eerie sensation of decades dropping away. The stairs had been restored to their prewar state, though construction-dusty and unlit as they were, they reminded me of my first visit here, bomb-shaken and powerless. Not sure if those last adjectives were intended to describe the building then, or me, or both.
There were no apartments left intact upstairs. They’d been gutted. All that was left of them was framed-out walls run through with ductwork and electrical wiring, black against the twilight blue that spilled in from the windows on all sides. I strolled through them like a ghost in my own life, passing through the walls and years both, and not stopping until I stood atop the dusty floorboards facing a familiar window, glass broken in my mind, but here so new its gleaming white frame and double panes were still affixed with stickers emblazoned with the manufacturer’s logo.
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.”