Chris Holm - The Big Reap

And not one of them noticed our presence.

“They cannot see us,” rumbled the child’s pet beast, the child once more unnerving me by responding to my unsaid thoughts, “because we are not here.” The child gestured like a maître d’ showing me to my table, and I took his hint, wandering puzzled into the strange gathering.

Beneath my feet, I noticed the heather had been burned back — scorched black plant matter forming a circle maybe twenty feet around. Inside the circle was drawn a pentagram so large its five points touched the outer edge of the burn zone, white ash against the black. Though I shuffled, puzzled, through it, my feet did not disturb the delicate ash line. As I reached the interior of the pentagram to find another, smaller one rendered inverted inside it, realization dawned. I’d seen something like this once before, during Ana’s failed attempt to recreate the Brethren’s freeing ritual.

A ritual that I was about to witness.

I scanned the faces in the crowd, all frightened, expectant, their worry-lines etched deep by the long shadows of the firelight. A blond-haired boy of twenty hugging tight a fresh-faced girl with chestnut hair and a smattering of freckles across her nose, cooing, reassuring. Drustanus and Yseult, I guessed. A brash, muscular young olive-skinned man pacing back and forth on thick, powerful legs as fast and smooth as a shark through water, his face a brittle mask of arrogance. Ricou, I suspected. A pack of three conversing in nervous whispers, one an Indian boy of not more than fourteen, the other two wild Roman-era Scots, or Vikings maybe — a male unkempt and hirsute; a female small and quick, her hair a simple plait. Jain and Lukas and Apollonia. A broad-faced Asian man in monk’s robes sitting cross-legged in meditation was the furthest from the firelight, young Thomed’s knitted brow indicating his thoughts were far from peaceful. And at the center of the double-pentagram, over a small stone altar, stood two men: one young, handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed, at ease; the other older, bird-thin, sharp-angled, and feverishly intense, hands worrying at a small jute bundle in his hands. Grigori and Simon, respectively.

I reminded myself that these physical forms were meat-suits, nothing more. That the entities inside were older, harder, crueler than they appeared. But still, I could not shake the notion that they were but children, goading one another to go and ring the doorbell of the creepy house at the end of the street.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

Then the tenth of them stepped into the light, draped despite the chill in a slip dress of parchment-colored silk, and carrying in her delicate hands an ornate, glinting gold skim blade. My borrowed heart damn near stopped. My breath caught in my chest.

The tenth was Lilith.

“Did you bring it?” she asked the older of the two standing at the center of the circle: the one I knew as Simon Magnusson — although her word-sounds did not synch up with the movements of her mouth. But when I thought upon that fact, I realized it was not exactly true. What I’d heard had matched her lips’ movement just fine, but what I understood her to say did not. It seemed my child-companion had done me the courtesy of translating.

“I did,” said Simon, his word-sounds and meanings also decoupled in my mind. He unwrapped the tiny bundle in his hands to reveal a small, dark orb, projecting rays of black across the field that seemed to dim the fire, and proved darker still than night itself: a corrupted human soul.

“Good,” she said, and then glanced up at the sky. “The heavens are aligned, which means it’s time.” She handed the handsome dark-eyed man — Grigori — the skim blade, and then with one open palm caressed his face. He leaned into her touch and smiled, one more in a long line of victims to her otherworldly wiles, I thought. “I trust you understand what must be done?”

“I do,” Grigori replied.

“Then do it, and be free.”

I watched the rest in numb horror, knowing all too well how it was going to play out. They took their places around the altar, Grigori and Simon at the center, the soul in the very middle, their hands raised up above their heads, both of them clasping the skim blade well above it. As one they chanted, and the firelight extinguished. A bitter wind ripped across the meadow, stinging against my skin.

The blade came down.

The soul was shattered.

A shockwave of pure, unfettered evil rippled outward from the circle’s center. The Brethren were each buffeted by it, but stood fast, as if anchored by the ash-lines on which they stood. The world around them was not so lucky. The black shockwave expanded exponentially, gaining speed as it blew past me and disappearing beyond the horizon in all directions. The very earth beneath my feet shuddered violently as if with sudden fright. It left nothing of the landscape standing — leveling trees, withering heather to dead husks, felling small game to burst half-rotten in mere seconds.

I fell to my knees, weeping at the sight. Those inside the circle looked stricken — panicked.

From somewhere distant I heard a roar, like every radio ever built was tuned to static and turned up as far as it would go. A salt wind buffeted my cheeks and tousled my meat-suit’s hair. The distant horizon seemed to rise up before me in the starlight, faintly luminescent.

And grew.

And grew taller still.

In the moment before it reached me, I finally realized what I was looking at: a wall of water five hundred feet high, hurtling toward me like God’s own vengeance.

As it bore down upon me, I closed my eyes. Placed my hands over my head. And prayed.

The water hit. I felt its impossible weight slam me to the ground, and crush my bones to dust.

Then the world shifted.

The wall of water was gone.

I stood once more in a vast field of heather, the child-thing and its mouthpiece at my side.

“So now, you see,” the child-thing’s mouthpiece said.

“See what?” I asked, my voice shaky and hoarse with fear. “Why would you show me that? What the hell’s it got to do with me ?”

The massive creature sighed. It sounded like two boulders rubbed together. “It is ever a fault of your kind that you each assume yourselves to be the hero of your own tale. Perhaps it is my fault, for creating you with so narrow a point of view. Thanks to your limited perspective, you see yourself in every scene, and therefore conclude that you’re the star. I showed you this because you need to understand you’ve been nothing but a pawn for all this time, a pet Collector for Lilith to do with as she saw fit.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning the hierarchy of the Depths did not order you to move against the Brethren. They were protected by the Great Truce, and despite recent skirmishes, remain protected by it still. Given that fact, hell alone cannot order their termination; such an order must be unanimously decided by all parties. Charon, for his part, might have assented, for he’s long seen the Nine as an affront to his authority. Lucifer would only act against the Brethren if it proved in some way expedient to him, and he assures me at this fragile time, he considers any violation of the Truce to be quite the opposite. And I certainly did not consent. Which means your orders to eliminate them came from Lilith and Lilith alone.”

“That’s not true. It can’t be.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“But what of the demonic raid on Grigori’s place on the Riviera? On Drustanus and Yseult?”

“They were conducted by Lilith’s partisans. She has a great deal of support among the foot-soldiers of hell, as one might imagine of a woman of her wiles. It seems she’s no shortage of blunt instruments to manipulate.” That last was pointed, and aimed at me.