The Wrong Goodbye

31.

“Good morning, Collector. Nice to see you’re amongst the living, so to speak. Though I confess I am surprised to find you here.”

A week had passed since Los Angeles. Lilith and I were standing in a cemetery on the edge of Ilford, east London. The sky overhead was the color of slate, and a cool mist beaded up on my woolen pea coat. I looked down at the headstone at my feet. It was mottled with age, and bright green moss clung to one side of it. In weathered letters, it read:

For not the first time, I wondered about my own grave —I’d never seen it. I’d died penniless on the streets of New York, one more John Doe for Potter’s Field. Though all of Danny’s family money didn’t make him any less dead. Now, in fact, it seemed he was a fair bit more.

“I thought I should pay my respects,” I said.

Lilith scoffed. “To the man who nearly condemned you to an eternity of Nothingness?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” I confessed.

“It always is.” Though this was a cemetery —and mid-morning —Lilith wore an evening dress of bright red, and lipstick to match. Neither showed any evidence of rain. “I knew,” she said. “About your little group, and what they meant to you. Truth be told, I was sorry when you and they parted ways.”

“You knew? Why didn’t you ever say?”

“Everyone’s entitled to their secrets. And everyone’s entitled to those little vices that help them to survive. Regardless of what my superiors might think. We’re all of us consigned to this life against our will, Collector. I no more blame you for my fate than you should me for yours.”

She raised a hand, caressed my borrowed face. “So tell me,” she said, “were you tempted?”

“Tempted? Tempted by what?”

“By your precious Ana’s ritual. By the stories of Brethren, and by the freedom that they represent. Tempted to leave this task, this life, this punishment behind.”

I thought about it. A simple answer eluded me.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Anyways, the price was far too steep. I couldn’t take innocent lives to save myself. I’m not worthy of their sacrifice.”

She frowned, but said nothing.

“Lily, why are you asking me this?”

“Because you need to know I would have been, if I were you. And if I’m ever faced with a choice like that, you’d best believe I’m going to take it —no matter what the cost.”

“If that’s true, then why tell me?”

“We’re not so different, you and I. We’ve both been sentenced to an eternity of torment without even being given a proper chance. The difference is, I aim to do something about it —no matter what the cost. And when the time comes for me to make my move, I’d suggest you stay out of my way. Are we clear?”

“Crystal. Only you know what?”

“What?”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“How’s that?”

“Ana did what she did in secret. Convinced her friends to trust her, even as she betrayed them. And in the end, she didn’t care who her plans hurt. You, on the other hand, claim not to even like me, and here you are trying to ensure I steer clear should you ever make your move. I think you care more about me and my kind than maybe you let on.”

Lilith smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps you’re right. Or perhaps you simply see what I intend you to. At the very least, we can agree it would be best for both of us if you’re never in a position to find out which.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Good. You should know, you did well last night, Collector —word is Charon is most pleased. And as the unrest between heaven and hell descends to allout war, he is an ally worth having.”

“He used me, didn’t he? He knew I wasn’t to blame for taking the Varela soul. He just needed me to hunt down Ana. To breach the circle, so he could get to her.”

“Is that so bad?” she asked. “Some jobs, you send a god. Some jobs, you send a monkey. This appears to have been the latter. Your Ana was quite adept at masking her movements —which is how she managed to waltz into Dumas’s skim-joint undetected. And she was a gifted mage —her protections without weakness. Had you not maneuvered yourself into the position that you did, no power in the heavens could have taken her. It seems to me Charon did exactly what he had to do, the same as you. Given the sheer volume of pathetic monkey lives he saved, I’d say you owe him thanks.”

“Maybe,” I granted. “Still, I wonder–”

But it didn’t matter what I wondered. Lilith was gone.

I stayed a while at Danny’s grave, and said a prayer for his demolished soul. I wondered what it was like to cease to be, and then I pondered what a foolish thought that was —for who could ever know? My heart ached at the thought that I’d misjudged him —at the thought that he’d simply been victim to his heart in death as he’d been in life. And unbidden, my thoughts turned to Ana —so beautiful, so fierce —who to her last was still that frightened, feral child we’d thought we’d rescued, and never truly had.

I thought of Gio, then, as well, who —after two nights spent shaking in his hospital bed, had at last opened his eyes. I thought of Theresa, who’d never left his side a moment —repaying him in kind for his time spent at her bedside so many years ago. She and I had wrestled him into a cop car amidst the chaos at Ana’s cursed building, and disappeared in the confusion —me wearing the body of a cop, the Jonathan Gray left dead for the forensics guys to find. I figured any manhunt would end once they ID’d the body, and then Theresa and Gio were free to disappear. Maybe Gio had a week before hell caught up with him. Maybe he had a decade. And who knows? Maybe they never would. Apparently, he wouldn’t be the first to beat the odds.

Once I’d taken my leave of Theresa and Gio, I’d set out on a long walk, eventually burying the Varela soul in a sun-choked patch of grass outside a liquor store. Then I plopped myself on a bench across the street and sipped Maker’s from a paper bag until my Deliverants arrived to spirit him away. No doubt I drew my share of looks, getting good and sloshed inside my hijacked uniformed policeman, but no one dared challenge me, and I wasn’t going anywhere until I knew for sure the Varela job was behind me. I’d never seen Deliverants abscond with a soul be fore; they arrived in dribs and drabs, eventually swarming the lawn and digging free their package by burrowing beneath it and pushing it skyward. Then they lined up single file and passed it gingerly from back to back until it disappeared from sight. It was morbid and oddly touching, an otherworldly funeral procession. Those who walked past it didn’t seem to notice —though somehow, not a one of them crunched a Deliverant underfoot, nor did they stand in the dark procession’s path. Perhaps the living are more aware of the magic that surrounds them than they’re given credit for.

Tires splashing through a puddle shook me from my reverie, and brought me back to Ilford —to Danny’s grave. I turned around to find a massive, dove-gray Bentley parked behind me on the cemetery drive. Somehow, despite its opulence, it didn’t seem out of place among the graves beneath the stone-gray sky.

The driver’s side door opened. Out of it stepped a man. Bald and broad-shouldered, he had a lantern jaw and a nose that looked like it’d taken a punch or twenty in its time. He wore a starched white shirt, a suit of black, and black leather gloves to match. A pewter cravat hung around his neck, and a matching scarf was draped across his shoulders. He looked at me in this borrowed frame —a rail-thin teenaged boy who’d been struck down by an aneurysm just last night —and said, in an accent that suggested Welsh, “Sam Thornton?”

An icy finger of fear ran down my spine. “Never heard of him,” I said, in my best attempt at East End cockney.

“Your accent is bloody rubbish,” he said. “And anyway, you’re him.”

“OK, I’m him,” I said glibly, as though the fact he knew who I was didn’t terrify me. “And you are?”

“Just the hired help. The boss would like to meet with you.”

“Who, exactly, is the boss?”

“That’s really for the boss to say.”

“So I’m to come with you right now?”

“That’s right.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

The big man shrugged. “Find out.”

I thought about it. Decided not to.

“No,” I said. “I’ll come.”

The big man nodded once. If I had to guess, I’d say I disappointed him.

He opened the Bentley’s rear door. “One condition,” I said to him.

“What’s that?”

“You got any change?”

The big man cocked his head at me quizzically, and then rummaged through his pockets. I held out my palm, and he dropped three pound coins into my hand. I took two, and handed one back. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll only be a second.”

I trotted back to Danny’s grave and placed the coins atop his headstone.

Then I climbed into the waiting Bentley, and, doors locking, it pulled out of the graveyard, headed toward God knows where.