The Big Reap (15 page)

“Now,” he said to her, eyes glancing all can-you-believe-this at the camera the whole time, “nice and slow, how bout you tell us your name, and what it is you're trying to say, okay?”

The old woman swallowed hard and licked her cracked, bleeding lips, calming by degrees. Then she looked directly into the camera lens, and said, with all the attitude of a pissed-off tween diva, “My
name
is Ada Swanson, and I want my mommy.”

Once the video hit the web, the response was full-on nuts – as, most assumed, was the old lady herself. But the obvious falsehood (in most folks' eyes, at least) of her claim aside, the fact remained that she was found in pajamas consistent with those Ada'd been wearing the night of her abduction, and she'd been carrying Ada's stuffed rabbit, Admiral Fuzzybutt, when she'd been found by these yahoos. Not a similar one, mind you, but the real effing deal, as identified some hours later by her mother. Seems the Admiral had himself a craft-project mishap one day when Ada was three – by which I mean his left ear was lopped off with a pair of scissors – and Ada's mother was forced to reattach the ear with the only thread she had on-hand, a royal blue. She did so inexpertly, though not without a certain flair. Anyways, her choice of thread and lack of skill were distinctive enough to convince Mom and cops both. They took the woman into custody and interrogated her for hours in an attempt to find out who she was and where she got the bunny.

But if the news was to be believed, her answers made no damned sense. She stuck with her story of being Ada Swanson, taken from her bed by dark of night. By whom? She didn't know, exactly. Seems she could only see them when the moon was full, whatever that means. Taken where? A cabin nestled in the woods as hard to look at as her captors or maybe not, she claimed, seeming confused and unsure because she also spoke of spending her nights beneath the stars, of bare dry earth beneath her feet (even on those rare instances in which it rained), and of the watchful eyes of animals in the darkness. When pressed on the question of where this maybe-cabin was, she couldn't say.

And how had she happened upon the Monster Mavens? Why, she'd escaped, of course, or maybe been let go, only to wander for days through the frigid Colorado wilderness, parched and starved and hypothermic, before finally running into the first people besides her elusive captors she'd seen since she'd been taken. Which was how long, exactly? Days, she thought sometimes, or maybe months, or maybe decades. Her story was vague and unhinged, full of nightmares of bloodletting and half-glimpsed half-human creatures who brushed her hair and cooed over her and plumped her up inside their imaginary cabin with stolen sweets and wild root vegetables and the spit-roasted meats of countless tiny woodland creatures even as they slowly drained her dry – but word for word, unnamed sources told the papers, it matched the big bucket of crazy she'd unloaded with scarcely a pause for breath straight into Nicholas-not-Nicky's camera as they'd trudged back to the Monster Mavens van with her in tow.

Word was, her fingerprints came back inconclusive. Which is what I woulda told the press, too, if I'd run 'em and they came back matching a missing six-year-old girl's. DNA results were pending, said the news – but the state was backlogged, their lab drowning under the rising tide of pending cases, so it could be weeks before they had anything to report. In the meantime, no one came forward to identify the woman, which made sense, because Lilith was pretty damn sure she was Ada. She told me as much a few days back, after popping in on me from out of nowhere and damn near scaring me right out of my borrowed skin.

 

“Like the duds,” she said. “Very… ironic. I hear the kids are into that these days.”

The duds in question were a paunchy, lugubrious sixty-something Italian man with deep-set eyes, a gentle voice, and delicate, uncalloused hands, upon the third finger of the left of which he wore a clunky gold ring, absent jewels but stamped with the image of the crucifixion. A cardinal's ring, which made sense, on account of he was a cardinal. A cardinal Lilith damn near killed by sheer force of startlement, if his race-horse heartbeat and resulting dizziness were any indication.

I tugged free my meat-suit's Roman collar, setting it on the scarred wooden desk of the study carrel at which I sat, and gulped air in an attempt to calm him. He was a pious man, well-intentioned yet ill-equipped for the recent turn his life had taken, meaning me. The carrel was piled high with books, half of them older than the European conquest of the Americas, plucked from the shelves of the Vatican's Secret Archives in which I sat. The place was deserted; all the Vatican was abuzz with Easter preparations, leaving few with time for study or quiet reflection. It was five months or so since I'd vanquished Magnusson, four since the nameless creature in the desert, and I'd spent the ensuing days doing my damndest to locate any mention of the remaining feral Brethren, to no avail. Lilith figured it was best to take them out first, before tackling the ones who'd been tipped to hell's hate-on for them and would therefore see me coming. Problem was, they were the very definition of off-the-grid. Even the Pope's own private library didn't have shit-all on them, though I
did
find some peculiar references to Christ's own purported bloodline (which, apart from the fact that it shouldn't exist since scripture never mentions him fathering a child, seems to include two heads of state, four saints, and all three Bee Gees) and a centuries-old reference to a near-apocalypse ushered forth in a great city by the sea as a consequence of the damnation of an innocent girl – only to be foiled by one of the devil's own.

But I didn't put much stock in prophecies.

“Nothing ironic about it,” I told her. “I needed access. This guy had it. End of story. Besides, you're behind the times. I hear irony is dead.”

“Yes, well, so are you,” she said. “Although I can't help but notice this meat-suit of yours is not. That makes what – eleven live ones in the past five months alone? Dare I hope you've lost your taste for piloting the dead?”

“Dare all you like, but it won't make it any truer,” I told her. “Like I said, I needed access, and this guy had it. Dead cardinals are hard to come by, and anyways, even if I could find one, it wouldn't do me any good. He'd raise a few eyebrows if he was seen walking around.”

“And here I thought his sort was big on resurrections.”

“
Resurrection
,” I corrected, “as in singular. Now, what're you doing here, Lily?” I confess, that last was testier than I intended, but truth be told, her teasing hit a little close to home. I
had
been taking a lot of living vessels lately. I kept telling myself it was on account of access or some other necessity, but the fact is, the Sam of old would have found another way. When it comes right down to it, taking living vessels was… easier than it used to be. Less hand-wringy. Maybe my heart was growing harder. Maybe something inside me had given up. Or maybe being so close to the dark energy released by Ana's failed ritual in LA – the one that resulted in Danny's death – had tarnished me in ways I'd yet to understand. Whatever the reason, it troubled me, but not enough to stop. That alone was enough to make me wonder if I'd lost something fundamental to what made me
me
.

“I have a lead,” she told me. “A little girl who disappeared four years ago from her Colorado home just reappeared. Only she's not so little anymore.”

“Look, Lily, I don't mean to criticize, but that sounds kind of flimsy. I know you haven't been among the living for a while now, but kids grow up. It's hardly news, let alone evidence of Brethren involvement.”

Lilith gave me a look that could have shattered glass. “I don't mean to say that she got taller, you fucking dolt, I'm telling you she wandered out of the woods an old woman.”

I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “She what?”

“You heard me.”

“You sure she's not a nut?”

“That's what the authorities believe, of course,” she said, “but they're wrong.”

“And you think there's Brethren mojo behind her aging act?”

“Do you recall what Jain said to you?”

I narrowed my eyes at her in puzzlement. “Jain?”

Lilith shook her head subtly – more to herself than to me – and clarified. “The one you killed in Mexico.”

I thought back. “If I could be killed,” I quoted as best as I could remember, “my mountain cousins would have found a way. They begrudge me my appetites, as if their method of procuring sustenance is any more humane.” Realization dawned. “You think the mountains are the Rockies, and the humane methods are sucking her life-force dry bit by bit but leaving her alive?”

“I do indeed.”

I looked around. Slammed closed the book that I'd been poring over. A plume of dust that smelled like dried vanilla poofed out of it and pricked at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. “Then fuck this place,” I said. “Let's find me a new meat-suit and head to Colorado!”

“Excellent,” said Lilith. “As it happens, I have just the candidate.”

 

The police combed the woods, of course, aided by countless volunteers from as far afield as Fort Collins and Durango, sweeping through the brush in dotted lines of men and women with only ten feet in between. But despite the fact the area surrounding Colorado Springs was too dry for any significant snowfall to accumulate the terrain was steep, uneven, and tough to navigate, and there was just too much of it to cover with any degree of confidence. After a week spent trudging back and forth along a grid two square miles centered on the spot the woman had been found, the police called off the search.

Lucky for me, the Monster Mavens hadn't, and who could blame them? Their fifteen minutes of fame had brought them endorsements, late-night talk appearances, even the promise of a book deal. They were gonna milk it for all that it was worth, and with a YouTube audience now numbering in the hundred-thousands, that meant trying to find the mysterious cabin of which the old woman spoke. And, of course, the strange, subhuman creatures within.

Did they believe the woman to be Ada? Hard to say. Nicholas, based on what little I could glean from the not pot-dulled bits of memory I'd been able to access, didn't, but Topher and Zadie seemed earnest enough. Lord knows they played it up whether they believed it or not. And the internet gobbled it up like so many McNuggets. The old woman had her own Wikipedia entry, and the comments section of the Monster Mavens' blog was chock-a-block with speculation. SCULLY58008 was betting, against all odds, on some sort of hillbilly brainwashing cult, while LilMsGlinda was leaning toward a coven of witches looking to fatten up the old lady Hansel-and-Gretel style so they could eat her. VanH3llsing, predictably, guessed vampires. And Area69 said dollars to donuts it was aliens, or a government cover-up of same.

If they only knew how much weirder the truth really was.

It was six days in to the Monster Mavens' search –
our
search, I should say – that we'd found the cabin.

We'd been hiking in a haphazard zigzag – something Topher (never
Christopher
, a rule even Nicholas-not-Nicky obeyed, though neither Topher nor Zadie extended him such courtesy) cooked up between sips of Early Times straight from the bottle as he hunched over our maps beside the fire at camp one night. “The cops don't know what the eff they're doing, man,” he'd told me conspiratorially, the sheer paint-blistering offensiveness of his whiskey breath making me wonder whether it might be prudent to be sitting farther away from open flame. “The sorts of things we're looking for, they don't follow lines or grids, you get me?”

I didn't. Luckily, Topher was too drunk, and too comfortable in his role as alpha-male to require – or even expect – a response.

“We gotta, like, listen to our
souls
, bro. They'll lead us true, you wait and see.”

And as stupid as that sounded, it kinda sorta worked.

We'd been on the trail for hours. Lungs hoarse in the thin mountain air, Topher and Zadie snapping at each other all day in the benign way all couples do when their company runs brittle. They'd been pushing hard to find some scrap of fame-stretching evidence ever since the calls started drying up a few days after the discovery of the old woman, and they were both haggard, tired, and grumpy as all get-out. Not that I had a ton of sympathy for them. They had each other, after all, while I had no one, and on a pettier note, they got to walk all day with those ski-pole-looking thingys that helped with balance or whatever, while I was stuck pretending to be their cameraman. That meant hauling thirty pounds of camera around on one shoulder and maneuvering by viewfinder, which in turn meant I'd experienced several days of stumbles, backaches, and motion sickness. But I'd gotten my revenge, I guess. I was supposed to be editing and uplinking the footage of our mystical snipe-hunt every night from camp, but in fact, I'd been doing no such thing. Wouldn't even know how, to own the truth. Hell, there was a pretty good chance this camera I was carrying wasn't even
on
. Not like I could tell the difference either way. Best I could hope for was to remember to take the lens cap off.

But that goddamned camera was good for one thing, at least: it could see the fucking cabin. Which is more than I could say for the three of us. Though whether we couldn't, or just
wouldn't
, I'm not entirely sure; Lord knows how Brethren mojo works. The sensation was not unlike the one I'd experienced when I'd first arrived at the shuttered public bath house Magnusson had been using as his laboratory. But while that building simply resisted looking at, causing my eyes to slide right off it with nothing more than the scantest of impressions, the cabin flat-out would not show itself to my – or Topher's, or Zadie's – naked eye.