Turns out the interruption was a hulking kid of maybe twenty-three, with thick arms, dishwater hair, and dull, close-set eyes that glowered out at the world from beneath a brow that could have sheltered woodland creatures in a storm. He was dressed in the same pale blue scrubs as the woman downstairs, though his were nowhere near as clean, and he was carrying a tray laden with alcohol swabs, a rubber tourniquet, and a handful of needle-tipped test tubes of the type used to collect blood. When he saw me sitting there, he froze. Confusion and good manners played tug-of-war with his face. Eventually, good manners won out, and he smiled, continuing into the room and setting his tray down on the bedside table beside me.
“Sorry to barge in on you like that,” he said, his words tinged with the same drawl as the nurse I’d spoken to downstairs. “Mariella here doesn’t get company too often. Truth be told, you scared the hell out of me!”
“Did I?” I asked.
“You did, at that,” he said, looping the tourniquet around Mariella’s arm above the elbow and tapping at one suddenly protruding vein. Seated as I was, the kid towered over me, the scent of soap and sweat and sick clinging to his massive frame.
“So,” he said, his eyes never leaving his task, “how is it you know ol’ Mariella?”
“Actually, I don’t. It’s Quinn I’m here to see.”
At that, the guy went rigid. Thick ropes of muscle flexed beneath the skin of his forearms, and his jaw clenched in sudden tension. A moment later, he appeared once more relaxed, but it was too late —I knew my words had hit their mark.
“I don’t think I know any Quinn,” he said, feigning levity. “You sure you got the right room?”
“Yeah, I’m sure I got the right room. Just like I’m sure you know exactly who I’m talking about.”
The kid was quick, I’ll give him that. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he’d kicked the chair out from under me. My cheek exploded in white-hot pain as I slammed face-first into the floor, the upturned medical tray clattering to a rest beside me. Then he leapt on top of me, knocking the wind from my chest. He grabbed a fistful of my hair in one meaty hand and yanked, wrenching my head upward and exposing the tender flesh of my neck. My muscles burned in protest at the awkwardness of my position, and I wanted to thrash, to fight, to struggle against his iron grip. I wanted to, but I didn’t. It didn’t seem prudent, what with him holding a needle to my jugular and all.
“Who are you?” he hissed into my ear. Needle dug flesh, and I squeezed shut my eyes as I fought the urge to flinch. “What are you doing here?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out but a sort of dry, creaking noise. The pressure against my jugular doubled, and I tried again.
“I —I was… I was looking for you…” I wheezed. I couldn’t get any air into my lungs. My head was fuzzy; my vision dimmed. “It… it’s me —Sam!”
Suddenly, the weight atop me was gone. I rolled over to see the guy crouching awkwardly over me, and staring at me with an expression of shock and bewilderment. The needle he’d been wielding fell forgotten to the floor beside me.
“Sam? Is that really you?”
“Last I checked,” I said, dabbing at my blood-pricked neck with one hand.
Two things happened then that I confess I wasn’t expecting.
The first of them was he slapped me —hard. Getting slapped by a guy that size is hardly a dainty affair; it was more like getting socked in the face with a two-by-four. My head snapped back from the force of the blow, and rebounded off the floor with a fwack. Everything went kinda spotty for a minute, and my cheek burned in remembrance of his hand.
The slap I probably shoulda seen coming. But the second thing? The second thing I wouldn’t have predicted in a million years.
The second thing was, the dude grabbed me by the lapels of my suit coat, hoisted me up off the floor, and kissed me like he meant it.
10.
When he finally released me from his grasp, I slumped back to the floor, a bemused grin breaking across my face.
“I’ve got to be honest with you, sweetheart —that meat-suit of yours isn’t exactly my type. But still, it’s good to see you, Ana.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Sam.” All trace of her meat-suit’s Southern accent had disappeared, replaced by Ana’s crisp Balkan tone. She looked at me a moment from behind those dull, close-set eyes, and traced the line of my jaw with one thick, calloused finger.
Then she slapped me again.
This time, I wasn’t so surprised. I turned my head in time with the blow, so this one was like getting smacked gently with a two-by-four. But hell, she hadn’t killed me yet, which by my reckoning meant things were going better than expected. Then again, the day was young.
Ana Jovic was without a doubt one of the best Collectors the world had ever seen. In the fifty-four years I’d known her, I’d never once seen her falter in her task; she did every job with quiet efficiency, neither hesitating nor belaboring the kill —and never, ever, missing her mark. It was Danny who’d discovered her back in ’57, possessing unwary travelers between collections and living feral among the ruins of her old village —a burned-out farming community thirty miles east of Sarajevo. And it was Danny who suggested, as he put it, that we “bring her in" —that we invite her to join our little Collectors’ supportgroup/cabal. At first, I was reluctant —the girl was wild and uncontrollable, living like an animal off the land —but once I gained her trust and heard her tale, I realized we couldn’t not.
See, Ana was born in 1931 to a family of ethnic Serbs in what was then Yugoslavia. When the fascist Ustaše seized power in ’41 and declared Croatia an independent state, they set out to purge their nation of Serbian influence in the interests of cultural purity. The Ustaše called it ethnic cleansing, but it was genocide, pure and simple.
In February of ’42, Ana’s village was overrun by an Ustaše death squad. The men, they rounded up and shipped to work camps. The women, they raped. The children, they shot dead in the streets. Ana, even then a resourceful child, fled into the woods, seeking refuge in the icy mountain wilds. The rest of her family was not so lucky. Ana watched from afar as, along with the rest of the townspeople, her mother and father were slaughtered, and the home that had been in her family for generations was pillaged and vandalized. Something in her snapped, then, and that frightened little girl made a choice that sealed her fate forever.
For her home was not the only thing her family had passed down through the generations: it was said that Ana’s family had the Gift —that hers was a line of mystics dating back to Roman times. Of course, Ana had thought little of the stories, or of her mother’s teachings; after all, it seemed that nothing ever came of them —never once had she seen any evidence that they were any more than family lore. But once the men had come and killed her family, Ana thought differently. Ana came to believe.
She spent a month out in the woods before the demon came, and in that month, the soldiers had all gone. Their places had been taken by Croat families who set about rebuilding the town and claiming it as their own. They were not to blame for what had happened, but at that point, Ana hardly cared.
Now, summoning a demon is a difficult task —one that the most powerful of mages might try their whole lives in vain to accomplish. It is blood magic of the most potent and dangerous kind. That Ana managed it at all is impressive; that she did it at the age of eleven is unprecedented. And the creature she summoned was no mere foot-soldier, but a demon of the highest order. He was so taken with the young girl that summoned him, he decided that rather than simply smite her for her impudence, he would offer her a deaclass="underline" her soul in return for whatever she desired.