“And tonight?” Danny asked. “Have you really devised a spell that will protect against the Deluge, or are six billion fucking people an acceptable sacrifice for your freedom?”
“For
Danny’s face twisted in horror. “So your protection spell–”
“–is one-way,” she said. “It will keep us safe from what’s to come. It’s all I could manage. It’s all we really need.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, to Ana or to me I wasn’t sure. But then he threw me the Varela soul, and said to her, “I won’t let you do this. I can’t.”
I dropped the Varela in my pocket. Watched the two of them standing there inside the circle —Danny’s eyes brimming with tears, and Ana shaking with rage barely contained.
“You have no right to take this from me,” she spat. “But if you don’t want to join me, you may prove useful yet.”
She was on him so fast, I didn’t have a chance to react. She swung the skim blade down hard on his gun hand, its rounded edge connecting with his wrist in a crunch of shattered bone. Then she kicked out his knee, and he toppled forward. With speed and strength that smacked of magical enhancement, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and dragged him backward to the center of the circle. He knelt before her, his arms dangling at his sides, his face a mask of pain. His back arched as her knee pressed against it, the skimming blade poised above his breast.
“What do you say, Sam —do you suppose our boy Danny’s soul is dark enough?”
“Ana, don’t.”
I eyed Danny’s gun, which lay ten feet from where I stood —three feet inside the circle. She picked up on my intent and said, “I wouldn’t.”
“Sam,” Danny said. “I’m so bloody sorry.”
“Hey,” I told him, “you can’t help who you love.”
He laughed through the pain.
“For what it’s worth,” she said to him, “I’m sorry, too. But this is my only chance. There’s only one way this can end.”
I glanced around for a weapon —for anything to end this stalemate. All I saw was the silhouette of Charon sketched in crows —highlighted by the jittery spotlight of an approaching police helicopter, and standing there infuriatingly immobile as if he cared not what went on below.
Or perhaps as if he was incapable of intervening.
Danny tracked the direction of my gaze, and spotted Charon lying in wait. Then he nodded at me almost imperceptibly, as if he understood what must be done. As if giving me his consent.
Such a small gesture —so small, Ana hadn’t even noticed it. And yet it was enough to break my heart.
A lump rose in my throat then, and tears welled in my eyes. But I refused to let them spill over. Not when I had a job to do.
“Wait,” I said, shouting to be heard over the helicopter’s din. “There is another way.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re going to go through with this regardless —I get that. Big boom. Big flood. But you and I both know Danny’s soul ain’t dark enough to break hell’s bonds; he just proved that by handing over the Varela you need. So I propose a trade.”
Ana smiled —feral, vicious. “Varela for Danny, is that it?”
“No,” I said. “Varela for my freedom. Danny’s, too, for that matter.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s the circle, right? Those inside break free of hell’s bonds, those outside are shit outta luck. So you let me in, and I give you the Varela. You do your thing, Danny and I go free, and so long as we avoid the ensuing flood we walk away as happy as clams.”
“You’re playing me,” she said. “The Sam I know is far too much of a Boy Scout to suggest a thing.”
I stepped toward her. The three of us were awash in spotlights, a second helicopter joining the first. Like heaven’s light shining down upon us. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”
“I’m too fast for you,” she hissed. “You’ll never reach the gun in time.”
Someone shouted to us through a bullhorn, but their words were lost on the wind. I took the Varela from my pocket and held it out to her. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.
I stepped into the circle, scuffing my feet along the way.
Dried blood flecked off beneath my soles, and broke the ring.
Ana, realizing what I’d done, screamed in rage, and drove the skim-blade into Danny’s chest.
Lines dropped down from above, police in riot gear rappelling from the heavens like God’s own army of angels, too late to do anything but watch. For a moment, the whole world felt as though it bent inward toward Danny’s prostrate form, which seemed to vibrate, to hum, his every pore erupting with white-hot light.
So this is how the world ends, I thought. Turns out, it’ll be a bang after all.
And in the instant before his soul let loose, bringing forth another flood, ten thousand crows streamed through the open roof, engulfing the lot of us in a fury of talons, beaks, and ink-black feathers.
They swarmed the circle, coalescing into the vast, impossible form of a hunched old man two stories high.
Just as soon as he had formed, he toppled over, engulfing Ana and Danny’s tangled forms in his teeming black mass.
And just like that, he disappeared into the Nothingness.
Along with Ana.
Along with Danny.
In the silence that ensued, I cried.
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
“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
