Chris Holm - The Big Reap

“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 .”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “But that doesn’t change what has to happen next.”

She stepped toward me then. Out of the tub and across the narrow expanse of floor, her scuffing heels leaving streaks in the ghost-white dust. Her strange, mystical guile was no more. The woman before me was awkward, coltish, fragile, determined.

A strange thought struck me then. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never looked more beautiful.

“I know that,” she said. “And I don’t blame you. In fact, I welcome it. It’s time I paid for all I’ve done. I just wanted you to understand.” She stood on tiptoes, and kissed me on the cheek. Then took my hand, and placed it against her bare chest. I felt the warmth of her skin, the rapid beating of her heart. “Goodbye, Sam Thornton. Be well.”

“Goodbye,” I told her. And then I reached my hand inside her chest, and wrapped tight her soul.

It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Her soul was at once ancient, and brand new. Wisp thin and blown-glass fragile in my hand. No gray-black swirling, nor blinding white, it was instead all the colors of the rainbow, and none at all. The most vibrant, beautiful light I’d ever seen. And her entire life, spread out before me. Her coming to in Paradise, all full of hope and possibility. Her subsequent fall — she so confused at what she’d done. The Brethren a beacon of redemption in her mind. The pain of finding out how wrong on that count she truly was.

And amidst it all, the briefest moment of hope and joy — of love — a blinding bright pinprick of happiness before a long descent into bitterness and despair: Lilith, standing in a field of heather, the heat of a nearby bonfire on her cheek. A young, intense, dark-eyed man, his arms around her, their foreheads touching. Grigori, I realized.

“It’s almost time,” she said, in a language I did not speak, but through her ears, her mind, her experience I understood. “Soon, you’ll all be free.”

“But not you, my love.” He held her tight. Kissed her. Kissed me. Tender, sweet. “I can scarcely bear the thought of leaving you to this existence.”

“Knowing you’re free is enough for me,” she said — I said — caressing his stubbled cheek. “Knowing you’re free will give me the strength to endure anything that hell dare inflict upon me.”

“Promise me something,” he said.

“Anything.”

“If this goes wrong–”

“It won’t.”

“If this goes wrong,” he repeated, “and we emerge as… something less… then you owe it to us all to end us.”

“That won’t happen,” she said. “I know the mages warned against it, but we’ve taken every precaution.”

“Every precaution but one: your promise to kill us should it come to that.”