"Spare bodies? That's encouraging."
"I'm not here to keep your spirits up – I'm
here
to keep you alive. I should've never gotten you and Anders involved."
"If you hadn't," Pinch said, "she might be dead already."
"Yeah," I said. "That'll be some comfort if I get you killed."
"So this Bishop guy – how are you gonna see him coming?"
"I don't know. What I do know is that he's close."
"You can sense other Collectors?"
"I can sense this one."
20.
"Kate?
Kate?
"
Pinch and I had been walking for half an hour. Navigating the woods was tougher than I'd expected, and somehow we'd managed to miss the picnic shelter altogether, winding up on the wrong end of the park's long, narrow pond. By the time we got back on track, the shelter was empty. I prayed we weren't too late.
"Kate!" I shouted again, my voice hoarse with fear.
"Sam?" The call came from the darkness to our left. "Sam, thank God!" Kate broke free of the treeline and leapt into my arms, Anders trailing just a couple yards behind. As she squeezed my battered ribs, I winced, but still, I held her tight.
"Jesus, Kate, you scared the shit out of me – where the hell did you
go?
"
"You guys were gone so long," she said. "We started to worry, thought maybe you were in some kind of trouble."
"Damn it, Kate, you know better than that! The last thing we need is for you to go running into harm's way. Besides, Pinch and I had things under control."
Kate saw the scowl on my face, and replied with one of her own. "Sam, what's wrong?"
"Nothing. We have to get moving, is all."
"I'm just glad you two made it back in one piece," Anders said, clapping Pinch on the shoulder. "You and him and a ritual and a knife – who knows what might've gone down?"
"Who, indeed?" Pinch said.
My stomach lurched. I shoved Kate aside, and lunged toward Pinch. Kate squealed in surprise, and Anders looked shocked, but Pinch didn't. He knew he'd fucked up.
After all, when's the last time you heard an eleven year-old say
indeed?
I was fast. Pinch was faster. He plunged his blade deep into Anders' side and tossed him into my path. We collided, and tumbled to the ground in a mess of blood and limbs. As Kate stood frozen, a look of horror on her face, Pinch closed the gap between them.
How could I have been so stupid? I
knew
Bishop was somewhere nearby – I could
feel
it. I should have seen Pinch's sudden bout of nausea for what it was: Bishop taking over. But I didn't. Didn't see, didn't think. No, instead, I led him right fucking to her.
I struggled to free myself of Anders, but he was dead weight – limp and uncooperative. I didn't have time, though, to worry about him. Right now, my only thought was of Kate.
Pinch/Bishop grabbed a handful of Kate's hair and yanked. She yelped and fell to one knee. His gaze traveled up and down her trembling form, as if seeing her for the first time. "My, but you're a pretty one," he said. "Not my type, of course, but I suppose I could make an exception, just this once."
His hand plunged into her chest. Kate shrieked in pain and fear. Muscles screaming in protest, I rolled Anders off of me – he collapsed to the forest floor beside me, blood pulsing around the blade in his side and oozing black from his mouth. I scrambled toward the figures of Kate and Pinch, locked in their horrible embrace, no thought in my head but that I could not let this happen.
I don't even know where the rock came from. I must've picked it up along the way, but even now, I can't recall. Wherever I got it, I brought it down hard on Bishop's head, again and again, until finally, he released his grip on Kate's soul and collapsed to the ground.
The rock fell slick from my hand, and the night air prickled with a sudden copper tang. Still, it wasn't until Kate scampered backward away from me, tears welling in her eyes, that I realized what I'd done.
"Kate –" I began, but then stopped, unsure of what to say. "Kate, I'm sorry. I couldn't let him take you." I looked down at the body at my feet – an enemy no longer, just the bloodied remains of an innocent child. "I couldn't let him take you."
Kate continued her retreat until a tree trunk barred her way. She pressed tight against it, as if she simply could not bear to be any closer to me than she had to. "Don't talk to me," she said. "You don't get to talk to me ever again, you hear me?"
"Kate, listen to me. He was going to
kill
you. Worse, even – he was going to take your
soul
. Do you even understand what that means? An eternity of torment, and not just for you. If he had taken you, he'd have opened the floodgates. We're talking a full-scale war between heaven and hell. You think Pinch would have wanted that?"
"Don't you stand there and tell me what he would have wanted." Tears spilled down her face, a twisted mask of pain and grief. "He was a
kid
, Sam. He was a kid, and you killed him. You're no better than the rest of them. A monster."
I hung my head, squeezing shut my eyes so that I wouldn't have to see the blood that clung stickily to my hands. "I did what I had to do."
"Yeah, well, you won't have to do it anymore. I don't care what happens to me – we're through. I won't be a party to any more bloodshed. You'll just have to find another life to ruin."
Just then, a low, wet gurgle sounded in the darkness. It was accompanied by a hitching, labored breathing, arrhythmic and faint.
Anders.
I left Kate where she sat, wheeling toward the source of the noise. I didn't have long; in moments, the horrid sound of Anders' labored breathing was replaced by an even more terrible silence.
Anders lay on the ground where I had left him. His eyes were clenched, his pain evident. The blade lay beside him in the grass, slick with blood. One blooddrenched hand lay beside it in the grass, and his sleeve was slick and dark as well. It looked to me like he'd removed the blade himself. I wished to God he hadn't. The blade would have slowed the bleeding, maybe bought us a few minutes, but now that he'd removed it, there was nothing left to stanch the flow. Anders was running out of time.
"Kate!" I called, but she didn't answer. "Kate, I need your help!"
Still nothing.
"Damn it, Kate – you can hate me later. Right now, I need you over here, or Anders is going to die!"
There was a rustling in the darkness, and Kate appeared beside me. She said nothing. She didn't have to. The anger in her eyes said it all. It seemed she'd hate me now, whether she chose to help or not. So long as we didn't lose another life tonight, I figured I could live with that.
I grabbed her hand and pressed it tight to the wound in Anders' side. Kate recoiled slightly from my touch, but when I let her go, her hand stayed. "I need you to put pressure on the wound – more than you think you need, OK?"
"He's not breathing."
"I
had
noticed," I said. What I was going to do about that, though, I had no idea. I hovered over Anders' still form, unsure. I mean, I'd seen it done before – in a movie or two – but the whole CPR thing was a little after my time. Honestly, I'm usually more concerned with halting breath than with restoring it.
"Switch with me," Kate said.
"What?" I looked at her, confused.
"Oh, for God's sake,
switch with me!
" She released the wound and grabbed my hands, shoving them in place. "You always gotta be the hero, don't you?" She pressed her mouth to Anders' and exhaled twice. Then she placed her palms against his breastbone and pressed downward in a steady rhythm. I just watched in amazement.
"I took a babysitting course, a few years back," she said, and then once more blew breath into Anders' mouth. "CPR was a requirement. Of course, that doesn't mean I know what I'm doing."
"You're doing fine," I said. In truth, I had no damn idea, but I hoped to God that I was right.
Again Kate pressed her lips to his. This time, when she released him, Anders sputtered and coughed, blood spraying red across his teeth and lips. The breathing was a good sign. The blood was not. Kate might have bought us a little time, but this kid was gonna need a doctor if he was gonna live.
"That… wasn't…Pinch," Anders said, his voice a brittle whisper, his eyes clenched shut against the pain.
"No," I said, "it wasn't."
"Then who?" he asked, between panting, labored breaths.
"A Collector, like me. They call him Bishop."
"I saw… I mean, I
knew
that something was different… that he'd
changed
somehow. I just figured it was the… the ritual. I should have said something. I should have tried to stop him…"
I took his hand in mine. "You did fine, kid. Now, though, I need you to save your strength – we're gonna get you some help. Just relax, and try not to speak."
"But Kate… is she OK?"
I looked her in the eye. Truth was, she looked anything but. "Yeah, kid – Kate's OK."
"Good," Anders said, and then promptly lost consciousness.
Kate checked his neck for a pulse. "Still beating, she said, "for now, at least. You think he's going to make it?"
"No," I said, "but if he's gonna have a shot, we have to move
now
."
"So," Kate said, the brittle, frost-laden grass crunching beneath her feet, "you knew that guy?"
We'd only been walking a few minutes, headed south through the park toward what I hoped was the nearest street. With Anders' limp and blood-slick form cradled in my arms, it felt like we'd been walking for hours. For maybe the fifth time now, I hitched him upward, trying to re-establish my grip. But the kid was heavier than he looked, and the sheen of sweat and blood that graced his arms, his neck, his back, made it tough to hold on. The going was slow, and the makeshift bandage I'd juryrigged from the Flynn meat-suit's uniform shirt wasn't going to hold for long. We were running out of time.
"Yeah," I said, "I know him a bit."
"So what – you guys stand around the water cooler, chat about the souls you've snatched, that sort of thing?"
"Not exactly. Bishop is the one who collected me."
We trudged in silence for a moment. Finally, Kate broke it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know."
"How could you have?"
"I don't know. I just – it's terrible, isn't it? Being taken, I mean."
This time, it was my turn to pause. "Yes. Yes, it is."
"I swear I can still
feel
him. Clawing. Tearing. Struggling to rip free my soul."
"Listen to that feeling," I said. "For the collected, it never really goes away. If you're lucky, you came close enough, and it'll stick with you, too."
"If I'm
lucky?
"
"Damn
right
if you're lucky. Bishop's not done with you yet, Kate. If you can hold on to that feeling, you might be able to sense him coming. It could give you the edge you need to escape him."
"So you can feel it, too? You can tell when he's nearby?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then how – I mean, with Pinch…"
"I didn't listen to my instincts. I got too close to the job. To Pinch. To all of you. I got too close, and you can see where it's landed us all. You can be sure I won't make that mistake again."
"So if he's done it once before, what's to stop him from doing it again? I mean, how do we know that Anders is Anders?"
"What's your gut tell you?"
Kate frowned in concentration. "I – I don't know. I'm still a little rattled, but it's fading. I mean, he
seems
like Anders. Still, that's not a lot to go on."
"It's enough," I said. "No way would Bishop have hitched a ride with Anders. The kid is badly hurt, and he might not make it. If he'd entered Anders, he might not find the strength to leave before it's curtains, and then he's fucked. Folks like me, we're happy enough with the living or the dead, but the
dying,
they're a whole 'nother matter. See, in death, the body expels any invading soul. And since a Collector can't exist without a body, that means when one of us dies, we end up reseeded somewhere else at random. Could be a freshly buried corpse half a world away. It could be a baby down the street, too weak to lift its own head, let alone give us the boost we need to jump away. So you keep listening to that gut – it's done fine by you so far."
Kate shuffled along quietly for a moment, her face set in a thoughtful scowl. "Sam?" she said, finally.
"Yeah?"
"If he'd succeeded in taking me, would I be a Collector, too?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. It's not for me to say."
"Better than the alternative, I suppose. You know, a lake of fire or whatever."
I looked at the crumpled, dying figure I held cradled in my arms. "No," I replied, "it really isn't."
21.
As we approached the edge of the park, headlights shone through the trees – beacons of hope sweeping past us in the darkness. It was late, and the traffic was slight, but I was confident we'd find what we needed. But the slog through the park took longer than I'd expected, and the kid was fading fast. I only hoped it wasn't too late to make a difference.
With Anders' bloody, wheezing frame cradled tight to my chest, I broke from the cover of the trees, staggering out into the street. Behind me, Kate screamed, but I paid her no mind. The screech of tires pierced the night, and the air hung thick with burnt rubber. It drifted blue-black across the roadway, stinging my eyes. I blinked back tears, and squinted against the sudden glare of headlights.