The Big Reap

24.

Berlin had changed so much since I’d first laid eyes on it in the last flagging days of the Third Reich. Then, it seemed an apocalyptic wasteland, ground zero for the worst evil the modern world had ever known. The decent people who’d lived there did so in quiet and in fear, scarcely glimpsed because they were as afraid of their own fascist regime as they were of the Allies intent on leveling the once-great city they called home. Now, the city was great once more. A bustling modern metropolis — vibrant, colorful, and lively. A shining example of what humankind can accomplish, a center of art and commerce, of science, of community.

It seemed the child and his grotesque conduit were right about one thing — given time and tending, even the deepest of wounds can heal.

It was amazing to me the building in which I first awoke as a Collector was still standing. It had been redone tackily sometime in the decades hence — a sad, Sixties-modern façade slapped up over the original brick face — but it seemed Berliners found the new façade as much of an affront as I, because it was halfway through the process of being removed. Scaffolding climbed up one side of the building, and on the rooftop sat an idle crane; yellow construction refuse tubes led from upper windows to dumpsters below. For a moment, I wondered where the workers were — it was scarcely twilight, after all — but then I realized it was Saturday, the city awash with the spark of possibility that only ever seemed to fully ignite come weekend.

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.”

“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.”

“But I couldn’t.”

“You must. We’ve all decided. We beg it of you. None of us wish to end up monsters, to be as enslaved by our own darkest impulses as we now are to our demonic masters. Without your promise, there will be no ritual — not tonight. Not ever.”

She smiled then, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Then I promise.”

Grigori’s face crinkled into a smile as well, and he kissed Lilith once more. “Thank you, my love.” Then he looked to the sky and said, “It’s time.”

Then the ritual. Then the flood. And untold anguish at what she’d done.

I released Lilith’s soul, gasping. We were huddled together on our knees in the half-built flat. Outside, twilight had given way to starry black. I wrapped my arms around her shivering, naked form, and we sat like that a while; shattered, sobbing, too broken to do anything else.

As we held each other in the darkness, the child-thing’s mouthpiece rang in my ears.

“The healing process is both long and painful”, it’d said, “but ultimately it’s up to you how well it goes — and how you deal with the challenges it poses along the way. Even flesh twisted by consuming fire can be taught to feel again with time.”

and

“Lilith’s fate is in your hands: for as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

and

“It falls to you to do what must be done.”

“There has to be another way,” I’d pleaded then. To which he told me:

“There always is… Only you can decide what’s right.”

So, weeping in the darkness, that’s exactly what I did, I decided what was right, and did what must be done.

I took off my coat and button-down, stolen from the morgue from which this meat-suit came, and wrapped first the latter and then the former around Lilith’s shoulders. She eyed me a moment in confusion, and then buttoned the shirt with clumsy fingers.

Her shivering abated.

That done, I kissed her on the forehead, my eyes still wet with tears, or perhaps wetted anew.

Then I rose without a word and left her in the darkened building.

Broken.

Human.