The Big Reap (7 page)

Then I remembered I had a needle chock full of noxious who-the-fuck-knows-what still sticking out of my neck.

Which I rectified, forcibly, by removing it and driving it as hard as I could into Mr. Angry Eyes' shoulder, depressing the plunger with my thumb as the needle breeched his leathery flesh.

Magnusson roared then, and smacked me so hard I sailed clear across the pool, shattering a display case containing a fetal cow with two front-ends on my way to cheek-firsting into the tiles. A tinkle of glass and a water-balloon splash accompanied the skin on ceramic
slap
of my landing, and the bonfire air grew heavy with the dizzy, gag-inducing scent of formaldehyde. The poor dead calf-times-two spun on its side like a top until it skittered to a stop above the floor drain, plugging it and preventing the formaldehyde from draining. Then an ember from the growing fire drifted into the noxious puddle, and, with a sudden, breath-sucking
whoosh
, fire and fumes were one.

Magnusson and I were separated by a wall of flame, he eyeing me, me eyeing him. My borrowed heart soared as I realized the fire had encircled him, cutting off any hope of egress as it transformed itself from minor emergency to full-blown conflagration. Then the spidery bastard, after crouching low a moment like a snake coiling in preparation to strike, hurled himself straight upward into the air, all six hands and no small amount of magic working in perfect synchronicity to launch him far higher than Newtonian physics could possibly have justified. There, he clung with his hand-feet to the rafters, hanging like a bat and glaring down at me in anger and in challenge.

His freakish hand-feet alternated one over the other down the rafter until he was directly overhead. I moved. He followed suit. I ducked through a growing wall of flame – my sleeve over my face in a vain attempt to avoid the bitter sting of the burning formaldehyde fumes in my throat, my nasal passages, my eyes, trying to escape the rigid line of the rafter to which he was confined. But I underestimated the agility of his monstrous, many-limbed form. He swung on two arm-legs first once, then twice, then thrice, and with the agility of a gymnast , leapt from one rafter to the next, catching it such that he once more hung upside-down above me. Grinning. Taunting.

“Do you really think you can escape me, child? I assure you, you cannot. I am in every way your better, and you're trapped beneath me in your lake of fire, with no hope of escape, no options left to you except to surrender, or to succumb. I can wait you out all day if need be, but I suspect the flames will take you far sooner than all that. And when they do, I'll pounce. Perhaps by then this place will be halfway to cinders, and I'll be forced to find another sanctuary in which to house you during your great slumber. Perhaps this place can yet be saved. Either way, you've accomplished nothing but to forestall the inevitable. Well, that, and to force me to take the life of a loyal servant.”

“You sure about that?” I shouted, my voice hoarse and weak from the fumes. I fell to my knees amidst the flames. By choice, I told myself, since the air down low was cooler, clearer, and seared the tender tissues of my eyes, my throat, my lungs less. But, the fact is, the air was so thick I couldn't keep my feet.

“Excuse me?” he asked, as if he hadn't heard my words.

I stayed low, belly-crawling across the tile in an attempt to change my position relative to his under the cover of the thick, black roiling smoke. My elbow bumped something and bled warm and wet onto the tile. That something skittered off into the darkness. I pressed a palm to the wound, and cast about for whatever it was that just sliced through clothes and skin like so much nothing, spotted it glinting polished gold some feet away. Like hope; like the beginning of a plan.

I picked up the skim blade. The dull throb in my elbow, so subtle and deep a slice it scarcely even hurt, told me the ancient blade was still diamond-sharp, and as my fingers wrapped around it, searing it to my skin like chicken to a grill, I learned all too well it was still blister-hot from its time spent in the flames. But as it bonded to me, and weapon and flesh became one, I did not cry out, so unwilling was I to display weakness to the monster above.

I called to him again, the blade in my hand lending steel to my voice. “I asked you, are you sure?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“That my delaying is nothing more than forestalling the inevitable?”

“I'm afraid I don't take your meaning,” he said. His tone carried a note of condescension, like an adult indulging a small child in its silly, pointless ramblings.

I figured it shouldn't be too hard to push said condescension into anger, and said anger into a rash, ill-conceived response.

“Then let me be clearer, you ugly son of a bitch. Whatever the hell that chunky nastiness was you were gonna stick into me to send me off to my big sleep is now coursing through your system. And as creepy as you look, the parts you're made of are still human. So my guess is, it'll work on you as surely as it'd work on me. So yeah, I'm stuck down here, but the upside is, there ain't no further left for me to fall. So the question you've got to ask yourself is, how's that grip-strength of yours doing? Is the scary hand-monster getting sleepy?”

By the time I finished my taunting little soliloquy, the air was so heavy with roiling, thick black smoke, I couldn't see Magnusson any longer, so I didn't know whether my words had riled him. But then I heard him roar once more, followed by the slap of six hands meeting tile, and I knew he'd decided to come after me, rather than waiting in the rafters for the sandman to whisk him off to sleep.

The smoke pressed in around me. The pool had become a gas chamber, a killing floor – thick dark poison all around. The world was roaring now, and the billows of smoke tinged at their edges in sunset orange as the fire climbed ceilingward, engulfing everything combustible along the way. I couldn't hear Magnusson, couldn't see him. Could barely feel my extremities, I was so dizzy.

Magnusson, despite the dope and smoke, did not seem similarly afflicted. Which is to say, I never even saw him coming.

When he hit me from behind, I went down hard. He made sure of it – two hands on the back of my head, driving it into the tiles as I fell. I felt a snap, and my left eye went dark, my meat-suit's orbital socket cracked and jutting. The sensation of vitreous fluid sticky against my cheek made me gag.

His lower limbs he used to pin my arms and legs, while he slammed my head into the tiles again and again and again. My nose gouted. My lips split. I was dazed, disoriented, and fading fast – losing blood, losing consciousness, losing hope. Two thoughts, slippery and hard to hold onto, were all that kept me going.

One was that Magnusson was too smart, too scientifically and mystically adept, to let me die. And yeah, even predeceased meat-suits can kick the bucket; possession's like the magical equivalent of a defibrillator, capable of shocking the newly dead and relatively undamaged back to life. But if that meat-suit sustains enough damage – as this one was on its way to – it'll give up the ghost all over again. Meaning
me
. When that happens, the invading consciousness is expelled. If we're talking demonic possession, their consciousness simply returns to their physical form, possession for them is more projection than anything. But Collectors have no bodies of our own, so what winds up happening in instances of death is we're reseeded someplace else at random, stuffed forcibly into someone half a world away. These days, the odds were one in six I'd wind up in China. Though I confess, however reseeding works, it never seems to track with expectations. Twice now, for example, I've ended up in Guam. The reseeding process sucks, because death for a Collector, while not final, is painful as all get-out, but it'd be a ticket out of here at least, and Magnusson knew it. Since he'd gone to all the trouble to bring me here, he wasn't about to let me off so easy. He'd bash my meat-suit's head in until it had barely enough juice left for me to slump drooling on a chair, let alone body-hop away, and then he'd hook me up to all manner of life-saving machines, leaving me trapped and sedated for an eternity, or near enough.

The other thought was that I could feel his grip-strength weakening. And if his drugs were taking hold, they might provide me with the opening I needed.

When he slammed me once more into the tiles, I shuddered and went slack. I knew he'd have to stop playing Gallagher to this meat-suit's melon long enough to make sure he hadn't taken things too far, and I was right. He nudged me. I didn't move. He rolled me over. I flopped wet-noodle against the oven-warm tile, my one good eye half-lidded despite the scorching, toxic air. He recoiled, startled, when he saw the skim blade in my hand, but then he nudged it with a knuckle on one of his lower limbs, laughing when he realized it was attached.

He stepped back a bit, his form hazy from smoke, and suddenly out of my reach. I wondered if something tipped him to my possum act. But then he rose on four of his six hands, and uttered something rapid-fire and guttural in a language I could not understand. I heard an ungodly shriek in the darkness, but in reverse, the kind of noise you might make by sucking in, not blowing out. And then a mighty wind kicked up, the flames that engulfed the baths began to gutter, and the smoke around us to clear.

As I lay there, trying my damndest to see what was going on without moving anything but my eyeball lest I tip my hand, I was puzzled – puzzled and amazed. Amazed because this man was without a doubt the most powerful mage I'd ever come across, and puzzled because all magic, from the smallest of location spells to breaking the bonds of servitude to hell, requires a sacrifice. The former, blood. The latter, a tainted human soul. The through-line between the two being life.

Then, as the smoke cleared as surely as via a fume hood, I saw where it was going, and what that wretched noise was, and I realized what Magnusson had done.

Gareth's corpse thrashed atop the pool tiles, his limbs contorting and his ruined, gunshot head thrown back as his thick boxer lips parted wide and drew in an impossible, endless breath of soot and flame and swirling smoke. His body – sacrifice and containment vessel both – bloated and rippled as it struggled to contain the conflagration. His clothes rent. His eyes ruptured. His naked flesh, veined black, stretched to the breaking point and beyond, splitting like an overripe tomato, and glistening wet black like campfire coals after a rain. By the time the fire was contained, he was a massive whale of a man, gray-black and oozing, left to slowly deflate as the firestorm inside him subsided.

The fire contained, this self-made monster, Dr. Frankenstein and his unholy progeny both, grabbed a fistful of my shirt and hoisted me upward. He swayed a bit as he did, staggering as he regained his balance, his strength sapped by the drugs and magic. He said to me, short of breath and slurring: “I confess, Mr. Thornton, you had more fight in you than I suspected. If you can hear me in there, I commend you. But as you can see, your efforts, as in Los Angeles, have proven futile. But fear not; you shall slumber soon enough. Perhaps you'll even come to understand that for the kindness that it is. After all, is an eternity of dream not preferable to one spent in slavery to hell?”

It was a fair point. An angle I'd not considered. So I thought about it for a good half-second before I decided to roll the dice and stick with hell.

Then I stabbed him in the chest.

He released me when I came to life in his hands, but too late to deflect my blow. The skim blade pierced the desiccated flesh of his chest like scissors going through paper, and I felt his sternum beneath it shatter.

And that's when things got
really
weird.

Once the blade passed through Magnusson's chest, it began to thrum in my hand, as if coursing with an electric current. Magnusson's eyes went wide, and then clenched shut as the blade burst out of his back, shattering his spinal column to dust. At the blade's end was the shriveled little walnut that passed as Magnusson's soul – no light left in it, no experiences washing over me as it separated from his body. Removed from its earthly vessel, said vessel began to crumble like a mummy exposed to the humidity of the open air after centuries spent entombed.

We fell to the ground, his flagging strength no longer capable of supporting my weight. As we landed, he slid down the blade, and then my arm. My hand was clean through his chest, blade still extended, the dead husk of his soul impaled upon it.

Brown faded to ash. Firm became fragile became so much dust. Soon, I was lying broken and bloodied but alone in the charred remains of the dead man's office, a tumorous nodule skewered like morbid fondue-fodder at the edge of my blade, and a bloated, blackened Gareth beside me.

I lowered the blade, raised my free hand to Magnusson's soul. It crumbled like chalk between my fingers.

My vision dimmed. My meat-suit failing.

I slipped away.

Exquisite. Excruciating. As if some sadistic needle-fingered creature was tearing every nerve out of my meat-suit's body one by one like a gardener yanking up a particularly pernicious root, and running them across a bed of lemon-juice-soaked sandpaper before lighting them on fire.

It took moments.

It took forever.

And then, next thing I knew, I was in Guam.

 

4.

“Good evening, Collector. You're looking well.”

She was lying, I was pretty sure; I must've looked like shit. My leg-wound seeping lymph through its bandages, my thick dark hair on end, my meat-suit's early-twenties baby-face dusted here and there with patchwork stubble. Of course, the fact that Lilith was lying to me was no surprise.

That she was
complimenting
me, on the other hand, was a major cause for concern. It set off big red lights and klaxons in my borrowed brain. Then again, that could have been the booze. Cause I'm not going to lie, by the time she tracked me down, I was pretty fucking drunk.