The Big Reap

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.

It occurred to me then where they’d all come from. These weren’t simply the current female occupants of Nevazut. This was all the women who’d ever lived here. Ten generations. Twenty. Robbed of the release of death by a dark master intent on amassing an army on the off chance they’d prove necessary.

Looking at ’em all, I wasn’t too psyched to be that half-chance.

“You know what?” I said. “You’re right, let’s get moving. Where to?”

Lilith gestured down the broad, drafty hall, toward a vast open space with ornate staircases on either side. “Up,” she said, “to Grigori’s study. Our best bet to find out where he’s gone.”

We ran in silence down the hall and up the stairs. The hall was pale stone, studded everywhere with heads of large game: bear, deer, elk, ram, musk ox. The modern era’s decorative equivalent of Grigori’s favored heads-on-pikes motif, I guessed. As the hall widened into the great room that housed the twin staircases, I saw he had complete specimen trophies as well: elephants and lions and gazelles, all staring at us with lifeless eyes of glass as we sprinted past.

I took the stairs two at a time, my hand trailing along the wooden banister for balance, each footfall sinking into the heavy pile of a runner the color of blood. One floor. Two. Heavy wooden doors, fixed with hinges and cross-braces of iron, blurred by on either side. Lilith moved so fast ahead of me I could barely see her.

Somewhere, in the distance, I heard the brittle-bone-snap of old wood splitting. Pictured a door much like these only larger giving in and vampires pouring through like ants out of a mound.

They were inside.

We reached the main landing, onto the left- and right-hand side of which the two sets of stairs on either side of the great room connected. I turned and looked behind me, then wished I hadn’t. They’d reached the great room, scrabbling along the floor and walls. I watched, frozen in horror, as they approached. And then I felt Lilith’s iron grip on my elbow, pulling me backward, toward the landing’s largest door, which was centered on the back wall of the room.

She threw it open, tossed me inside. And then she stepped inside herself, slamming shut the heavy door and dropping into place what sounded in the darkness like a heavy wooden beam, barring entry to anyone or anything outside.

A lantern flared, bathing the room in amber light.

An office. Large, drafty, and high-ceilinged, with two slit windows like down below, no glass in either, and a cold, ash-filled fireplace expansive enough for me and five friends to stand inside, provided I actually had five friends, and we all agreed to stoop a little. I worried its chimney was large enough to afford some enterprising vampire entry to the room, and apparently, so did Lilith, because she yanked at a lever to one side of the mantle, and — with a grinding protest of long-immobile iron — closed the flue, for all the good it’d likely do.

Above the fireplace was an oil painting, four feet by seven or thereabouts. It depicted a smiling Grigori in the foreground. Behind him was the castle in which we stood — blood running from its windows, and heads on pikes all around. Two tapestries hung floor to ceiling in the room, one between the narrow windows, and another on the wall that contained neither door nor fireplace. The former depicted a great war between angels and demons, with nine observers to one side looking on. The latter depicted a great flood.

In the center of the room was a desk. It was the size of your average aircraft carrier, piled high with books and scrolls and, to my surprise, a sleek desktop computer, the kind that’s all flat-screen and wireless and stuff, with a keyboard and a mouse that aren’t attached. But the computer was tipped over and all smashed up, a small pry bar atop the ruined tech. I guess he didn’t want us checking out his search history or me Googling to find a prospective new vessel. Behind the desk was a tall, ornate chair that looked as if it had been originally intended for a place of worship; it had a tapered back some seven feet high with a peak like a church steeple, and a wooden cross atop it.

I guess irony wasn’t dead after all.

I took in the scene, huffing and puffing from my recent sprint up the stairs. My Ricou-bitten shoulder was throbbing like toothache. My scabbed-over trachea had begun oozing blood anew. As I sucked wind, I caught a harsh, boozy note in the chill office air, and noted that the papers on one side of the desk were stained yellow and warped into an undulating, crinkly mess, as if wetted and then dried. Glass shards glinted dully among them, as well as an intact, corked bottle neck, and as I approached to look, I caught a glimpse of something else, on the floor behind the desk; something disgusting. A shriveled, glistening green-brown mess of strange organic matter about the size of a high-end sleeping bag — the kind that looks like a mummy’s wrap, or a cocoon — gone downy white in patches from some sort of fungal infection, its mucoid secretions seeping into the stonework beneath and running weak-tea-brown in the cracks between the flagstones. Beside it was a stack of folded clothes I recognized as Grigori’s. Some feet away there was a small wooden crate, its lid pried open and leaning against one side of it, a mass of straw visible within.

“Grigori, you naughty man,” said Lilith, and I thought I caught a note of admiration in her voice. “Ricou wasn’t all you brought back here from the Americas, was he?”

“Come again?”

“I know where he’s gone — or, rather, I’ve I good idea how he got there. And more importantly, how you can follow.”

There was a thud at the door. Two hundred pounds of wood and iron rattled like cheap particleboard. Strong though it was, that door wouldn’t keep them out forever.

“You mean how we can follow.”

“No, I don’t. This mode of transportation is inaccessible to those of us who no longer inhabit organic vessels — to the Chosen, to the Fallen, and to me. I suspect that’s why Grigori went to the trouble of procuring it, despite its rarity, expense, and unpleasantness.”

Another smack against the door, more forceful this time. I heard a groan as the bolts that affixed the metal brackets holding the beam lock in place began to loosen. “Okay,” I said, “you wanna tell me what, exactly, we’re talking about here?”

“Sure,” she said, plucking an unlabeled, clear glass bottle full of slightly cloudy yellow liquid, in which floated something thumb-sized, curled, and white, from the shipping crate. She held it up for me to see, “you’re going through a wormhole.”

“You mean like science fiction?”

Lilith laughed. “No, I fear this is far messier and more magical than that. You’ve heard of the alchemical practice of astral projection, have you not? Remote viewing?”

“Of course, but I was under the impression the people who were doing it were just tripping their faces off on whatever wacky shit they ingested to induce the state.”

“Well, you’re half-right. The compounds employed to induce the state are potent, indeed — some of the harshest toxins of the plant and animal world both — and the practice itself has largely become a joke as the old ways died off, only to be halfheartedly revived by latter generations of dilettantes and pretenders with no notion how to harness and focus the incredible power of the tools they yield.”

“So what is that stuff, then?”

“This stuff, as you so glibly refer to it, is a staggering work of alchemical art, crafted some four hundred years ago by one of the finest practical magicians this world has ever known. A witch doctor, you might have called him, by the name of Shaddam, who made his home in the swamps of what is now south Florida, and who was burned at the stake by the Spanish during their Inquisition for his crimes against God and nature both.”

“All very impressive,” I said, impatiently. Then, with worry, as I saw the white something inside the bottle wriggle, “Uh, is that a live worm?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lilith. “It’s only half of one. And a damn rare half of one at that. I thought this species long since banished from your plane.”

“Right. Because it being whole is the implausible part. Not the four-hundred-years-old-and-still-alive bit.” I looked at the shards of glass atop the desk. The papers stained from the liquid within. And no sign of any worm, half or otherwise. “Wait — don’t tell me I’ve gotta eat that thing.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re going to drink it. The whole bottle, in fact. Every drop.”

My stomach fluttered at the very thought of that worm thing sliding down my throat.

I nodded toward the desk. “Grigori didn’t drink the bottle down.”

“Grigori’s body courses with centuries of dark magic, and he’s long strengthened himself by feeding on the blood of others. He is no longer entirely human, even if his body is, or near enough. He has no need of the medicinal properties of the tincture in which the worm resides. It is a potent mélange of wormwood and peyote, psilocybin and belladonna, all steeped in pure grain alcohol. Believe me when I tell you, you’re going to want to be drunk for what happens next.”

“And what happens next?”

“As I said, this bottle contains but half a worm. The mouth-bearing half, to be precise. The, uh, bottom half is somewhere else. Once you consume it, it will, well, cause you to generate a sac of sorts, much like the one you see at your feet. Its other half will do the same. Within the cocoon, the worm will feed on you, causing your vessel to be digested. Fear not, it derives no sustenance from your meat; what it gleans its energy from is the molecular resonance which anchors you to this particular plane of existence. The creature itself exists across many planes at once, which is why it can be split in two without injury. Once it’s done with you, you will pass, reassembled, like so much refuse from its system. This worm was long used whole to facilitate astral projection, for in its normal feeding cycle, the victim would simply experience wild hallucinations only to awaken precisely where they were they began. But a few dark mages realized its potential for physical transport as well.”

She handed the bottle to me. I eyed it dubiously. “So I drink this, and then get eaten, and then get shit out someplace else?”

“The same someplace else as Grigori, one imagines. The bottle, you see, is unlabeled, and if the crate is any indication, one of six — though two more, it seems, are missing, given I’d assume to Drustanus and Yseult — so it’s doubtful they lead to different locations.”

“What if he — or they — are waiting for me on the other side?”

“A possibility,” she said. “In which case, I recommend you kill them before they kill you — as is your intent in chasing them anyway. But I doubt they will be.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

She nodded to the mass of organic matter on the floor, which was decaying before our very eyes, and in so doing, releasing a gag-inducing stink that didn’t serve to calm my already mutinous stomach. “Because that,” she said. “And this, remember, is just the mouth-end.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Mind your tongue, Collector. The point is, they’re not likely to stick around at the other end of their makeshift sidereal conduit, not when it could potentially be used to follow them. And anyways, Grigori’s got several hours’ head-start on you, so there’s a chance he and his fellow Brethren’s trail will prove long cold by the time that you arrive.”

“This plan of yours sounds better by the minute,” I said. “I get eaten by a worm and then maybe ambushed or maybe find the place deserted.”

“I fear you haven’t any other options at this point, Collector. But take heart, this mode of transport does have its benefits.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“It’s the only way that poor meat-suit of yours gets out of here alive.”

“And what about you?”

“Oh, I can take my leave of this place any time I want,” she said, striking a dramatic pose and vanishing, only to reappear a moment later across the room. “But somebody’s got to stay and clean up Grigori’s mess before it spreads beyond this little hamlet to the world at large. These poor women are too far gone to save, but not yet too powerful to kill.”

“So you get to go all Buffy, and I wind up worm food?”

Lilith smiled. “My dear Collector, you wound up worm food long ago. Now drink up. You’ve a bad guy to kill.”

I uncorked the bottle. Watched the grub-looking worm thingy wriggle toward the surface, its front end opening into a four-pointed star of a mouth, exposing a pink interior ringed all around with tiny teeth. Got dizzy from the sight, and from the tincture’s noxious fumes.

And then, eyes closed, I drank.