The Big Reap (28 page)

The guards approached me. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. A rifle-butt to Goebbels' temple, and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Then the two guards slung their rifles over their shoulders and each grabbed one of Goebbels' arms, dragging him from the room.

It mattered not to me. In fact, I was kinda glad they knocked him out. If they hadn't, he mighta ratted on me.

But, unconscious as he was, he couldn't. Nor could this Mengele's magic anemometer, now in pieces on the floor. So, Goebbels and the guards gone, I crossed the room and closed the door, wearing the flesh of Hitler's new bride, Eva Braun.

 

16.

“Collector!”

Lips like summer peaches against my own, warm and sweet. Fingers caressing my bare chest. My eyes opened to slits, eyelashes crosshatching the scene before me as I struggled to raise my head. Lustrous curls of fire-red hair that smelled of vanilla and musk cascaded down across my field of vision. Through the gorgeous locks, which tickled as they dragged across my naked skin, I caught a glimpse of wine-colored nails leaving half-moon imprints on my pectoral muscles. Felt the pressure of the palm attached to them against my breastbone, a steady rhythm.

A fella could get used to this, I thought.

Then my chest seized and I doubled over, expelling a chum-bucket's worth of murky, bilious water from my lungs and stomach both. That part was somewhat less erotic.

My lungs' contents purged, consciousness began to return in dribs and drabs as blessed oxygen suffused my cells with its glorious, life-sustaining whateverness. (Seriously, I sometimes feel like I shoulda paid more attention in biology – if for no other reason than the stranger aspects of it seem to play a very real, and very squicky, role in my everyday existence.) Much to my surprise, I was not in Guam, but in the cave beneath Grigori's castle keep, a cave in which I'd been certain I was going to expire.

I racked my brain, remembered crushing Ricou's soul with my bare hand, remembered his bear-trap jaw not letting go even in death. Remembered too his weight pulling me down down down into the cold, black depths.

Then a taste like summer peaches. And then right back to the here and now.

I looked around, slick hair splashing water to and fro as I did. My clothes were sodden, my shirt undone. Buttons scattered on the rock ledge all around me; the stone was splotched dark where I lay, and dusty brown everywhere else. Not the one nearest my point of entry through the cemetery, but the other; the one framed out by the pointed arch. Though as I looked across the chunky fish-stew water of the underground lake, its surface pocked with sickly bits of bobbing gore and pale white flesh, I realized the dock onto which the cemetery tunnel opened was likewise framed. How I could see so far with no obvious source of illumination, I had no idea.

Then, as I cast my gaze about, I saw Lilith's silhouette – framed in a corona of light of her own making, which rendered her as obscure as an eclipse – and I realized it was she who saved me, and it was she who lit my way.

“What… why…”

“That thing you killed,” she said, looking fresh and dry despite the fact she'd not only just pulled me from the murky water, but resuscitated me as well, “was somehow tied to Grigori's occlusion spell. It was not Grigori, was it?”

“No,” I said, my voice hoarse, my punctured trachea aching from the strain of speaking, “that wasn't Grigori. It was Ricou.”

Lilith smiled in triumph, and a hint of something else as well. I don't know why, but it looked to me like relief. “Ricou,” she said. “Of
course
. That's why he was funneling money into Chile, Bolivia, Guyana, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. He was looking for his brother. He was trying to keep us from getting to him first.”

“Guess we showed him,” I said, wincing as I ran my hand across the crescent of bite-marks that curved from my right clavicle down to my armpit.

“Indeed,” she said, arching an eyebrow at the mess that was me.

“So the occlusion spell…” I prompted.

“…lifted once you killed Ricou,” she said.

“Why? Why wouldn't Grigori keep this place hidden?”

Lilith frowned a frown that coulda won awards. “Perhaps he did not anticipate Ricou would be so easilydispatched. Or perhaps he simply did not intend to return, and needed a physical anchor onto which to transfer the spell. Who am I to speculate as to the peculiarities of his magicks?”

I shook my head. Doing so hurt. “Dunno. Seems fishy. Doesn't track.”

“I think that's you you're smelling,” she said, her perfect nose crinkling. “Tell me, Collector, did you kill Ricou by crawling inside him and then burrowing your way back out?”

“Near enough,” I said. “But that business with the occlusion spell, it doesn't explain what prompted you to come, or to pull me from the drink.”

Until that moment, I don't think I'd ever seen Lilith look sheepish before. “I thought you may have needed help, is all. Turns out, I was right.”

“You know you saved this meat-suit's life.”

“Yes, well,
this
one – unlike the corpses you've historically favored – happens to contain a living, breathing mortal man, and I know how you hate to have deaths not assigned to you weighing upon your conscience.”

“Why Lily, that may just be the sweetest thing you've ever said to me.”

Lilith bristled. “You misunderstand me, Collector. I merely meant to suggest your subsequent moping at the sacrifice of this man would stand in the way of doing the job at hand. And time, I'm told, is of the essence.”

“You know what, Lil? I think I understood you fine.”

In the distance, I heard a scrape of metal on stone. It was the door to the cave through which Yefi – or rather Grigori – and I had entered, grinding open once more. Lilith glanced toward the noise, her brow furrowing in worry.

“What is it?” I asked her.

She answered with a question of her own. “Can you walk, or must I carry you?”

I flexed my legs each in turn. Climbed unsteadily to my feet, while a strange, scrabbling sound drew ever closer on the far side of the underground lake. Found to my great surprise that I could support my own weight. Said, “I'm good to walk – why? What's out there, Lily? What's headed our way?”

Lilith put a hand to the small of my back and pushed me into the narrow aperture at the back of the small stone platform. It led to a spiral staircase, carved into the natural rock. “Grigori's little hamlet may be once more visible to me and those like me– “

As if there were anyone who fit
that
bill, I thought.

“–but that does not mean he's left it unprotected.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning by the time that I arrived, every man and child in town was dead, bled dry by the townswomen – or, rather, the beasts that they've become. The blood gives them strength, and stokes their hunger. And,” she said, closing her eyes as we ascended, the glow she emanated dimming slightly as she allowed her attentions to wander beyond this narrow staircase to the town beyond, “it seems that they can sense their master's absence, because to a one, they're on their way here. And they're not happy.”

“Jesus,” I said, feeling Lilith's glare of disapproval on the back of my head as I ascended in front of her, “he wanted to keep this place safe, he couldn't just use ADT?”

From below us, snarling. Lilith's hand on my back, urging me onward. “The fuck is going on down there?” I asked.

“Don't worry. They can't cross water. They'll have to find a way around to reach us –scale the walls, perhaps – which should slow them down a little, at least.”

“Okay, a) I think you haven't the faintest idea what the words ‘don't worry'
mean if scaling the walls is only gonna slow them down a
little
, and b) how the fuck could you possibly
know
that?”

“I've seen their kind a time or two before. This isn't the first time Grigori's employed them as a smokescreen to mask his flight.”

“Nor the first time hell's gone after him, apparently,” I observed drily, which might have been tough for her to discern on account of my rising panic and stair-induced huff-and-puffing.

“You forget, Collector, that I'm a good deal older than the Great Truce, and so are the Brethren.”

“Here's hoping his hell-bitch version 2.0 didn't get the aqua-upgrade.”

“Honestly, do you hear yourself sometimes? What you people have done to the language of Shakespeare seems far more blasphemous than anything Lucifer or I have ever done.”

“See?” I said, smiling. “You
can
act your age. All you're missing is an impassioned ‘get off my lawn'.”

A strange slavering kicked up behind us. The townswomen had reached the base of the stairs, their animal utterances echoing up the spiral staircase like ocean-sounds through a conch shell. As I glanced worriedly over my shoulder, I caught a glimmer of amusement in Lilith's eye. “I could think of nothing more fitting to punctuate my point than those being the last words this poor vessel of yours has the ignominy of uttering.”

“Yeah, well, I've never had much use for punctuation.”

We reached the top of the stairs. Hit the wooden door – arched to match the stairwell, and the platform below – at a run. Pushed it open so hard I damn near toppled out.

Good thing, too. If I hadn't stumbled when I went through the door, the crazy undead townie chick woulda taken my head off with her goddamn battle-axe.

The lady wasn't looking so hot. Too thin and wiry by half, all bone and gristle and harsh angles. Skin so pale it appeared translucent, and hypoxic blue as well. Red-rimmed eyes shot through with blood, and retinas blood-red to match. Nails grown unnaturally long and sharp, thick and yellowed and splitting – from her fingers
and
her bare feet. Face smeared red around a wide gash of mouth too wide for her face, as if Grigori's infection had warped her very physiognomy, inside which gleamed elongated canines glazed pink. I wondered if that was her husband's blood all over her face, or her child's. It was spattered elbow-high across both arms, as well, and her simple cotton housedress was stiff from it – an apron of gore. But given her crazed, lustful stare – inhuman eyes rolling, her pupils pinpricks on account of the castle's ample lamplight – I'd say whoever's blood that was, it had only served to whet her appetite.

She'd been swinging for my head. Which, thanks to my stumble, was a good head lower than it usually was. The axe-blade whistled past so close, she parted my meat-suit's hair. I stumbled forward, Frank's muscle-memory carrying me through a tuck-and-roll before I so much as realized what was going on. I came out of the somersault on one knee, pivoting and reaching for a gun that wasn't there.

Turns out, it didn't matter. Lilith was just fine on her own.

The woman's swing continued full-bore past me toward Lilith. Lilith laughed and caught the blade midair with both hands – grabbing the sharpened edges as if they were rubber-gripped handles – and used the momentum of the woman's (ah, to hell with it – I may as well just say
vampire's
) swing to lift her off her feet and slam her into the stone wall. She hit hard enough to loosen mortar, and then stuck there, nails dug in as she peered with rage and hatred down at us over one shoulder. She scurried up the wall, then, like a spider – faster than I would have thought possible, had I not seen Simon Magnusson perform a similar trick – and then hurled herself downward toward Lilith.

Doubtless she was going for a killing blow. Unfortunately for her, when it came, she was on the receiving end of it.

As she plummeted toward Lilith, claws and teeth bared like a jungle cat's, Lilith spun, swinging the axe in a loping uppercut with such force that she split the vampire in two from head to crotch. Each side hit the stone floor with a wet
FWACK
, bouncing from the force of impact. Brain matter and entrails spewed across the floor and walls, but still, the woman's left side and right flailed madly about, eyes moving independently as what was left of her human consciousness tried and failed to grapple with the confusing barrage of nonsensical stimuli its body was supplying. Luckily, it didn't have to grapple long. Lilith brought down the axe blade in two quick chops, lopping the split remains of the woman's head. Then Lilith ground the mangled beast's stilled heart to pulp beneath one bare heel. “Head and heart,” she said. “Only way to be sure.”

“Words to live by,” I said, wide-eyed, horrified, and trying not to puke.

Lilith shook viscera off her hands with nonchalant grace and stepped lightly toward the arrow slit to the right of the door we'd just exited. Three feet high, but a scant six inches wide, it looked out over the craggy mountain slope, the village of Nevazut, and the switchback dirt road that connected the two. “Come on,” she said, “we'd best get moving.”

“Why's that?”

“Because the rest will be here soon.”

I trotted over to the window and looked out. The mountainside was crawling with them, hundreds, maybe more. Ten times the number I would have guessed the town contained. Some, as haggard as the one Lilith just felled, charging up the dirt path at a sprint; some even farther gone scrabbling on all fours straight up the steep mountain slope. A few of the more human specimens carried torches, which pushed back the night and their fellow creatures both, who shrank from the illumination as would any nocturnal beast. All but the most animal of them had weapons – pitchforks, scythes, axes, and the like. And they were all headed this way. In fact, even though I peered out from a narrow slit in a slab of rock meters deep, I couldn't shake the feeling that, to a one, they were looking at me.