The Sin Collector (2 page)

I had noticed in all my years that a fair amount of the time people did not like to talk about loved ones they had lost, but talking about Anne never seemed to bother George. He talked about meeting Anne in 1944 and marrying her only two months later before he was sent overseas in World War Two. He asked me what I knew about WWII, and I quickly said nothing more than ninth grade history had taught me. The memory made me shudder. I remembered WWII as clearly, as if it were yesterday. It was among the last times I was called upon to perform the ritual of a Collector. I shoved the memory of it to the back of my mind and focused on George now slowly walking up to my desk. He was always there bright and early.

I gave him a warm smile as he walked through the doors because really, when you saw George you couldn’t help but smile at him. His six foot three slender frame towered over my willowy five foot five stature. His dark grey eyes stood out against his pale skin and his white hair. He smiled back and pulled a chair right up to my desk.

“How is my beautiful Lily this morning?” He asked his voice gravelly from what I assumed to be a few decades worth of cigars. He always smelled like vanilla tobacco. Somehow that small nuance only added to his warm personality.

“Geez you finished that book already, George?” I said chuckling to myself.

“Yes, it was wonderful. Now tell me the newest gossip. What did you do all weekend? Quickly now before Jimmy gets tired of busty beauties and comes out here.”

I would have choked to death laughing if I had been able to choke to death.

“There really isn’t anything to report George, I spent yesterday tuning my bike but that’s all.” I tried to look disappointed at the end because a seeming twenty-year-old should be more exciting than that. In reality though, it was one of my more enjoyable Sundays.

“You and that bike I swear. How do you even drive that thing? It weighs four times as much as you do.”

“I handle it like a pro.” I said sounding slightly indignant. “When are
you
going to be brave enough to let me give you a ride home is the question?”

“When you don’t look like a strong wind is going to blow you away,” he retorted grinning.

We were interrupted by loud cursing coming from the back offices. Jimmy stormed out, startling George. I was used to his outbursts by now. It wasn’t that Jimmy was a bad guy, he just never seemed to enjoy being around people. In that instance, he had chosen the right profession.

“Damn thing froze while I was trying to do the accounting, can you please look at it?” He said through gritted teeth. Jimmy was more than a little wrathful when he couldn’t solve a computer problem himself.

“Sure,” I said, hopping down from my chair. “It was good to see you George. The new non-fictions are over by the window.”

“Bye Lilypad.” he shouted after me.

I settled into Jimmy’s chair after Clorox-wiping everything down for my own protection. I couldn’t get sick, but I could still be extremely grossed out.

“Accounting my ass” I mumbled under my breath as I pulled up the search history. I deleted his cookies and his temporary files. At least that got the computer running again. I was idly scrolling through his horrifyingly graphic search history when one title that was clearly out of place caught my eye. Two hours before Jimmy was even supposed to be at work, he had begun researching the book,
Sin-Eaters in Mythology: From Bavaria to Scotland.
My hand froze on the mouse. I had never heard of this book, although honestly I had never really run an internet search on myself. Why would Jimmy be researching this? Why did he come to work early to do so? Was it an interest of his or was he researching for someone else?

Sometimes students could put in a request for librarian assistance when they had a lot of research to do for a paper, but it was August. None of the schools or Universities would have papers due. There’s no way he could be suspicious of me. I chanted that phrase repeatedly in my head. I had only worked here for six months. He couldn’t have noticed that I didn’t age. Had my eyes given me away? Olexander warned me about that once when I was around fourteen years old.

“The day you reach twenty your body will cease to move forward in time. Your features will stay locked in place, never changing. Only our eyes give us away. Only the eyes can reveal the true age of the soul. Not just for a Collector, but with even the most mortal of men.”

I couldn’t imagine I’d ever looked Jimmy in the eyes long enough to stir suspicions. It
had
to be someone else. I needed to go through the request slips, to be one hundred percent sure of who wanted this information. I didn’t want to wait but I knew asking for the request sheets could add fuel to the fire if he was already suspicious. I finished deleting the search history and returned to my desk. I hoped that my face did not look as terrified as I felt. It must not have because Jimmy mumbled thanks and walked past me without any hesitation. I waited all morning for Jimmy to go to lunch so I could sneak into his office and look at the request forms. Finally, at one, I couldn’t take it anymore and I knocked on his door.

“Hey Jimmy, you didn’t go to lunch and I…” he cut me off mid sentence.

“I have a lot of work to do if I am going to get these orders done. I brought my lunch today. Now please no more interruptions.”

I shut the door and tried to stifle the swearing that was pouring out of my mouth.
Crap crap crap.
Now I would have to wait until work was over, and Jimmy left and then proceed to break into my own place of employment. The idea was not sounding like fun. In fact, the idea had me yearning for the evenings of ceiling tile counting. I sat like a statue reasoning with myself the rest of the afternoon. It was possible that this was all just one monumental coincidence. I had seen many strange things in a hundred years. One tiny coincidence could definitely be possible. Maybe.

Finally, at seven-o’clock Jimmy emerged from his office, as he usually did to lock up. Except tonight, he didn’t have his jacket or bag.
This isn’t happening.
I screamed in my head.

“Go on ahead Lily, I still have two more orders to process, I’ll lock up behind you.”

I stood motionless by the door, helmet and jacket clutched in my hand. I nodded and slowly walked out to my bike.
What the hell was I going to do now?
I knew Jimmy would be expecting to hear the roar of my bike start. I put on all my gear and drove to the pub two blocks away. I would wait and periodically check the lot for his car. I sat in a back corner booth and ordered a bottle of beer. I hated the taste of beer, so no need to drink it, but it helped to have something in my hands to focus on. I stared at the label, running my fingers over the raised lettering. I was really putting a lot of pressure on this beer prop. It was going to distract me enough so that I didn’t run around screaming like a lunatic on fire. Times like this I felt truly alone and weary of the world. If only I had others like me to call, to brainstorm this out with, I would be freaking-out less. We were always alone though, each one of us upon their twentieth birthday woke up alone.

“Once a Collector reaches their true potential at twenty years old they begin to solely take sins. Having two Collectors living together in close quarters would be like trying to force two magnets together with the same polarity. It’s simply too much sin, even for us. If I am absorbing your years of Collection and you are absorbing mine, it becomes too much and we repel one another.”

As I had never met another Collector since I had come of age, I didn’t know what this process actually felt like. Olexander had merely said the contact would be very painful if two Collectors were in the same room longer than just a few moments. There were days though that I longed for the pain. I would relish the agony if it meant for a few moments I didn’t feel like the last person alive after an apocalypse.

It had been two hours so I went back to my bike
and circled to the library. He was still there.
Un-freakin-believable
I shouted into my helmet as I flew by the lot. He picked one hell of a time to get a work ethic. The suspense was killing me, metaphorically speaking of course.
Finally, I decided to go home or I was going to be the first immortal girl ever thrown into an asylum. After the stress of the day, it was nice to see the familiarity of my things and smell my spice candles, both welcoming me home.

I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t think my eyes looked one hundred and twenty years old. They looked emerald green with amber flecks. Then I stared harder at my overall appearance. My pale white skin showed no sign of wrinkles and yet it was as if I could feel them. My thick black hair was a mess. To call it helmet hair was an insult to my helmet. Again, there wasn’t a single strand of grey and yet I felt like my head was white with age. No laugh lines around my mouth, not that I’d smiled much. So frustrating to not have a single scar or wrinkle to mark the passage of time. Caught in the trance that was my own reflection, Valentine jumped up on the sink, breaking my concentration.

“Thanks cat” I said as I smoothed his grey fur, “I needed that.”

I paced back and forth through my living room for an hour, and then started to name the ceiling tiles. Around two in the morning I figured it would be safe to try the library again. The lot was empty when I passed it, but I wanted to park at least a block away. I wasn’t a crime buff, but I did own all the seasons of all three CSI’s and I knew my bike was very recognizable. It was dark walking to the library, no moon tonight. I went around to the back door that opened directly to Jimmy’s office hoping against hope that maybe he had forgotten to lock it. The door didn’t budge when I turned the knob.
Damn it all to hell
my brain screamed. I reached into my bag and pulled out a small leather case. I had never been especially good at picking locks. I had done it before for different reasons, but never in such a public place where time was an issue. I took a deep breath to calm myself. The suspense was making my hands shake. After about twenty minutes of fidgeting with the lock-picking pins and diving once into a pile of trash so a police officer didn’t see me, I was in.

I walked cautiously through the cramped, junk filled office. I was afraid to disturb anything on his desk. Struck with the fear that Jimmy’s new work ethic had come with a free sample of
“
power of observation” I all but held my breath. I was surprised to see the accounting folders on his desk; at least he had been telling the truth, that was a good sign. I looked through the filing cabinets for the student request slips and finally found a stuffed manila envelope. It took me an hour just to get through all the slips and none of them was the one I was so desperately seeking.

I closed the blinds on the only window in the office and turned on Jimmy’s computer. There was nothing helpful on his hard drive so I went to his email. Luckily, Jimmy saved all his passwords so I didn’t have to try to profile his under
-
stimulated brain for access. There was a ton of junk mail. That’s what you get when your credit card belongs to a dozen porn sites. I sifted through his inbox and deleted emails, and ended up with nothing. I turned the computer off and sat in his chair completely bewildered. Maybe I should go, I reasoned with myself, just start over again in a new town. I hated doing that. Sure, there weren’t exactly loads of friends to miss, but I liked having a routine and I liked LA. I liked my bike and my apartment and the normalcy of owning a cat. I got up to open the blinds and stopped dead with my hand on the door. The garbage can. A million detective movies can’t be wrong. You always check the garbage can. I sat cross-legged on the floor and dumped the contents out in front of me. The smell of his half-eaten pastrami sandwich was enough to make me gag. I read every crumpled up piece of paper, until finally I found it. Exactly what I had been looking for.

Dear Mr. Whitby,

I am looking for a rare book entitled Sin-Eaters in Mythology: From Bavaria to Scotland. You were mentioned in conversation as having a gift for finding unique texts, and I am hoping to elicit your help in finding this rare compendium of knowledge. You will of course be handsomely compensated for your time. Please let me know if you find any leads. My email address is attached below. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Christopher Owens

[email protected]

I was completely sure I had never heard his name before. I stuffed the crumpled paper into my pocket, and double-checked to make sure everything was as I found. Then I slipped out, locking the door behind me. I got back to the apartment and threw myself on the bed to reread the letter. If it was in the garbage did that mean Jimmy had given up? Maybe this book didn’t exist. Why was I letting this freak me out? And since when was Jimmy an antique book dealer?