Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“Problem? Nah —just giving Sammy here the nickel tour!” Then, to me: “You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Sam, but old Psoglav here is the best skimmer in the business. A real surgeon with his blade. Ain’t that right, Psoglav?”

Psoglav said nothing, instead plucking said blade up from where it lay atop the stilled lathe —so quickly that I scarcely saw him do it —and testing the set of its edge against the ash-gray callus of his thumb. The blade itself was flat-topped like a chisel and very fine, with a tapered stem and a handle fashioned from what appeared to be a human bone. I confess I didn’t like the way Psoglav was looking at me while he held it.

Psoglav smiled at my obvious discomfort, flashing what looked to be a set of crude iron teeth jammed willy-nilly into his mottled gray gums, and then his hand flicked out at me, placing the tip of the blade under my chin so fast I didn’t even have time to exhale, much less react. Every muscle in the demon’s body was tensed, but the blade barely grazed my skin. Still, it was sharp enough to draw blood —I felt it dripping warm down my chin.

I wanted to move. To recoil. Hell, to take a fucking breath. But Psoglav could kill this meat-suit with a lightning flick of his wrist, so I didn’t dare. Instead I stood there, bleeding in the darkness.

“This monkey,” he said to Dumas, who seemed for all the world not to notice the drama unfolding before him, “he our new Collector?”

I said nothing. Dumas answered, “Perhaps.”

The pressure on the blade increased ever-so slightly, and my bleeding quickened. The damned thing was so sharp, though, I barely even felt it.

“I hope for his sake he proves more reliable than his predecessor.”

Dumas smiled. “You hope no such thing. I know you’re still chomping at the bit to have a go at Daniel, and it looks to me like you’d be more than happy to exact your revenge on Samuel in his stead.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was full of steel. “Though if I were you, Psoglav, I wouldn’t.”

Though Dumas’s words were conversational enough, Psoglav’s eye widened in sudden fear, and faster than my own eyes could even register, he recoiled. The blade gone, I raised a sleeve to my bleeding chin and resisted the urge to collapse into a puddle on the floor.

“My apologies,” Psoglav said —to Dumas, though, not to me.

“Think nothing of it,” Dumas replied, the tone of levity in his voice restored.

“With your permission, boss, I think maybe I should return to my work.”

“Of course, of course,” Dumas replied. “The machinery of capitalism stops for no one —not even me.”

We took our leave of Psoglav, and Dumas shut the door behind us. I heard the diesel engine cough and sputter, and then roar to life once more. Soon, the awful racket of the lathe’s turning resumed.

“That Psoglav’s a real charmer,” I said, dabbing at my chin.

“Oh, he’s a tad excitable, I’ll admit, but he’s damn good at his job.”

“Not a fan of Danny’s, huh?”

“Seems there’s a lot of that going around lately. Although in Psoglav’s case, I’m not surprised. Most of the Collectors in my employ can’t stay far enough away from him, but Danny? Danny pestered poor Psoglav any chance that he could get. Always asking questions, bugging him to watch the skimming process, and generally following him around like some yippy little toy dog. Maybe Psoglav worries you’ll pick up where Daniel left off.”

“He’s got nothing to worry about. I’m never going to come work for you" — again , I added mentally —"and what’s more, I’m pretty sure you know it. So you wanna tell me what that little dog-and-pony show was really all about?”

“I just need you to understand the skill required to maintain an operation such as this, and the consequences of any lapse in said skill, so that you can begin to understand the severity of the situation in which we find ourselves.”

I thought back to my showdown with the bugmonster, and let out a single, barking laugh. “I’m pretty sure I understand the severity of my situation.”

“And I’m just as sure you don’t . See, Psoglav is a rare breed —a creature of such speed and singleminded focus that you’d think he’d been conjured for the sole purpose of extracting skim from souls.”

“Yeah? And?”

“And he’s the fourth such beast to hold that post.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What I’m saying, Sam, is that human souls are as volatile as they are fragile, and that for all of his talent, Psoglav, like his predecessors, is not infallible. Sooner or later, he will slip. Perhaps he’ll simply tire of his task, and his attention will wane. Perhaps one of the thousand tiny shards kicked off during the skimming process will find its way around his leather armor and send him on an unintended little trip. Perhaps he’ll simply sneeze. It doesn’t much matter what winds up causing Psoglav to slip; what matters is that when he does , he’ll take this cave and maybe half the canyon with him. Just as his predecessor did to my operation in Nepal, and as his predecessor’s predecessor did to the house I ran in Cook, Australia. It’s why I’ll only ever put a skim-joint at the ass-end of nowhere; I learned my lesson back in San Fran in ’06.”

I thought back. “What the hell happened in ’06?”

Dumas laughed. “Sorry, Sammy —sometimes I forget how pathetically short a span you monkeys get to live. I meant 1906. My skimmer cracked that one but good; between the shockwaves and the subsequent fire, over three thousand of your kind perished. Of course, they figured it was an earthquake, and I guess it was, at that —the buffoon cracked that soul so bad he disturbed the very plates beneath the ground, and leveled a city in the process. Since then, I’ve made it a policy to steer clear of urban centers, and to never, ever start a skim-joint on a fault line.”

“Big of you,” I said.

“Just good business,” he replied, oblivious to my biting tone.

A thought occurred to me. “You said three thousand of my kind were killed that day, but what about your kind? What happens to Psoglav, and to your customers, if this place blows?”

“You mean do they die ? Why, Samuel, are you concerned my little tale might dent your rep as the first to kill a member of the Fallen in millennia?”

“Hardly. Just didn’t square, is all.”

“Oh, come now, you’re a resident of hell —what’s the harm of copping to the sin of pride? And anyways, your reputation is intact; a cracked soul has never, to my knowledge, killed one of my kind. It does sting like a mother, though, I’ll tell you that —the blast can strip flesh from bone and limbs from bodies, and those closest to it usually slink off to a quiet corner of the Depths for a century or so to nurse their wounds and try to grow back what they’ve lost. Even still, some of them never come back quite right; my San Fran skimmer’s blind for good, and the poor bastard’s now got the reflexes of a tree sloth.”

“A real heartbreaker, that.”

Something tickled at the back of my mind, and I found myself thinking back to the mess that was last year’s Manhattan job. See, what happened was a bigwig seraph by the name of So’enel decided to go rogue and incite a war between heaven and hell. To do so, he conspired to mark an innocent soul for col lection —a major no-no according to the Great Truce —and since it was my handler the shitweasel was conspiring with, I was the one dispatched to do the deed. Lucky, no?

But even less lucky was Mu’an, the messengerdemon who served as go-between for Lilith and So’enel. Once their plan went south, So’enel endeavored to eliminate any evidence of his involvement —and since Mu’an fell solidly into that category, the seraph sent a cadre of his angelic lackeys to shut him up for good. They caught up to Mu’an at Grand Central, and unleashed a holy fury the likes of which the modern world had never seen. Mu’an escaped with his life —barely —but the force of the angels’ attack nearly wiped the terminal off the map. To this day, the government considers the blast an act of terror, and no fewer than three dozen extremist groups took credit for it. I wondered how many would take credit for the ferry boat in Maine that foundered a couple days back after an explosion ripped a hole in the hull and killed half the passengers on board; just the latest in a growing list of angel-on-demon violence.