Mariella Hamilton was a tiny, frail specimen of a woman, nestled in the soft white blankets of her hospital bed like a champagne flute wrapped for transport. Looking at her, I couldn't fault the nurse downstairs her skepticism at my claim we were related. Her skin was the color of brown sugar – a far cry from my meatsuit's pasty white – and stretched tight and shiny across her fragile bones. Though she couldn't be a day under eighty, her hair was still largely black, and pulled into a severe bun, so that what few streaks of white were present swirled like creamer through coffee atop the contours of her head. Her eyes were closed, as always, and her hands were crossed atop her breast. Clipped to one finger was a sensor, which ran to the heart monitor that blipped a quiet rhythm from its perch beside the bed – the same rhythm it had blipped, without fail or deviation, for the last twenty-seven years.
I leaned in close and kissed her forehead. Then I took a seat in the chair beside the bed, gathering her hands into my own. I closed my eyes and bowed my head, my lips moving in silent prayer. It was only when the sound of footfalls echoed through the room that I raised my head again, blinking against the sudden brightness as I turned to see the source of the interruption.
Turns out the interruption was a hulking kid of maybe twenty-three, with thick arms, dishwater hair, and dull, close-set eyes that glowered out at the world from beneath a brow that could have sheltered woodland creatures in a storm. He was dressed in the same pale blue scrubs as the woman downstairs, though his were nowhere near as clean, and he was carrying a tray laden with alcohol swabs, a rubber tourniquet, and a handful of needle-tipped test tubes of the type used to collect blood. When he saw me sitting there, he froze. Confusion and good manners played tug-of-war with his face. Eventually, good manners won out, and he smiled, continuing into the room and setting his tray down on the bedside table beside me.
"Sorry to barge in on you like that," he said, his words tinged with the same drawl as the nurse I'd spoken to downstairs. "Mariella here doesn't get company too often. Truth be told, you scared the hell out of me!"
"Did I?" I asked.
"You did, at that," he said, looping the tourniquet around Mariella's arm above the elbow and tapping at one suddenly protruding vein. Seated as I was, the kid towered over me, the scent of soap and sweat and sick clinging to his massive frame.
"So," he said, his eyes never leaving his task, "how is it you know ol' Mariella?"
"Actually, I don't. It's Quinn I'm here to see."
At that, the guy went rigid. Thick ropes of muscle flexed beneath the skin of his forearms, and his jaw clenched in sudden tension. A moment later, he appeared once more relaxed, but it was too late – I knew my words had hit their mark.
"I don't think I know any Quinn," he said, feigning levity. "You sure you got the right room?"
"Yeah, I'm sure I got the right room. Just like I'm sure you know exactly who I'm talking about."
The kid was quick, I'll give him that. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he'd kicked the chair out from under me. My cheek exploded in white-hot pain as I slammed face-first into the floor, the upturned medical tray clattering to a rest beside me. Then he leapt on top of me, knocking the wind from my chest. He grabbed a fistful of my hair in one meaty hand and yanked, wrenching my head upward and exposing the tender flesh of my neck. My muscles burned in protest at the awkwardness of my position, and I wanted to thrash, to fight, to struggle against his iron grip. I wanted to, but I didn't. It didn't seem prudent, what with him holding a needle to my jugular and all.
"Who are you?" he hissed into my ear. Needle dug flesh, and I squeezed shut my eyes as I fought the urge to flinch. "What are you doing here?"
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out but a sort of dry, creaking noise. The pressure against my jugular doubled, and I tried again.
"I – I was… I was looking for
you
…" I wheezed. I couldn't get any air into my lungs. My head was fuzzy; my vision dimmed. "It… it's me –
Sam
!"
Suddenly, the weight atop me was gone. I rolled over to see the guy crouching awkwardly over me, and staring at me with an expression of shock and bewilderment. The needle he'd been wielding fell forgotten to the floor beside me.
"Sam? Is that really you?"
"Last I checked," I said, dabbing at my blood-pricked neck with one hand.
Two things happened then that I confess I wasn't expecting.
The first of them was he slapped me – hard. Getting slapped by a guy that size is hardly a dainty affair; it was more like getting socked in the face with a two-by-four. My head snapped back from the force of the blow, and rebounded off the floor with a
fwack
. Everything went kinda spotty for a minute, and my cheek burned in remembrance of his hand.
The slap I probably shoulda seen coming. But the second thing? The second thing I wouldn't have predicted in a million years.
The second thing was, the dude grabbed me by the lapels of my suit coat, hoisted me up off the floor, and kissed me like he meant it.
10.
When he finally released me from his grasp, I slumped back to the floor, a bemused grin breaking across my face.
"I've got to be honest with you, sweetheart – that meat-suit of yours isn't exactly my type. But still, it's good to see you, Ana."
"It's good to see you, too, Sam." All trace of her meat-suit's Southern accent had disappeared, replaced by Ana's crisp Balkan tone. She looked at me a moment from behind those dull, close-set eyes, and traced the line of my jaw with one thick, calloused finger.
Then she slapped me again.
This time, I wasn't so surprised. I turned my head in time with the blow, so this one was like getting smacked
gently
with a two-by-four. But hell, she hadn't killed me yet, which by my reckoning meant things were going better than expected. Then again, the day was young.
Ana Jovic was without a doubt one of the best Collectors the world had ever seen. In the fifty-four years I'd known her, I'd never once seen her falter in her task; she did every job with quiet efficiency, neither hesitating nor belaboring the kill – and never,
ever
, missing her mark. It was Danny who'd discovered her back in '57, possessing unwary travelers between collections and living feral among the ruins of her old village – a burned-out farming community thirty miles east of Sarajevo. And it was Danny who suggested, as he put it, that we "bring her in" – that we invite her to join our little Collectors' supportgroup/cabal. At first, I was reluctant – the girl was wild and uncontrollable, living like an animal off the land – but once I gained her trust and heard her tale, I realized we couldn't not.
See, Ana was born in 1931 to a family of ethnic Serbs in what was then Yugoslavia. When the fascist Ustaše seized power in '41 and declared Croatia an independent state, they set out to purge their nation of Serbian influence in the interests of cultural purity. The Ustaše called it ethnic cleansing, but it was genocide, pure and simple.
In February of '42, Ana's village was overrun by an Ustaše death squad. The men, they rounded up and shipped to work camps. The women, they raped. The children, they shot dead in the streets. Ana, even then a resourceful child, fled into the woods, seeking refuge in the icy mountain wilds. The rest of her family was not so lucky. Ana watched from afar as, along with the rest of the townspeople, her mother and father were slaughtered, and the home that had been in her family for generations was pillaged and vandalized. Something in her snapped, then, and that frightened little girl made a choice that sealed her fate forever.
For her home was not the only thing her family had passed down through the generations: it was said that Ana's family had the Gift – that hers was a line of mystics dating back to Roman times. Of course, Ana had thought little of the stories, or of her mother's teachings; after all, it seemed that nothing ever came of them – never once had she seen any evidence that they were any more than family lore. But once the men had come and killed her family, Ana thought differently. Ana came to believe.
She spent a month out in the woods before the demon came, and in that month, the soldiers had all gone. Their places had been taken by Croat families who set about rebuilding the town and claiming it as their own. They were not to blame for what had happened, but at that point, Ana hardly cared.
Now, summoning a demon is a difficult task – one that the most powerful of mages might try their whole lives in vain to accomplish. It is blood magic of the most potent and dangerous kind. That Ana managed it at all is impressive; that she did it at the age of eleven is unprecedented. And the creature she summoned was no mere foot-soldier, but a demon of the highest order. He was so taken with the young girl that summoned him, he decided that rather than simply smite her for her impudence, he would offer her a deal: her soul in return for whatever she desired.
What she wanted was her parents back – but as the creature told her, that's beyond even the most powerful demon's reach. But of course, he said, there were other options – other ways for her to rectify the wrongs she had endured. At first, she wouldn't hear them, but her demon was both patient and persuasive. So in the end, she settled for revenge.
When the demon finished with that town, there wasn't a person left alive. He'd torn flesh from limbs, and ripped still-beating hearts from panicked, sweatslick chests. He had bathed in the blood of innocents. And all at the behest of one frightened little girl.
Of course, that frightened little girl had assumed that there'd be comfort in what she'd done – that once she'd avenged her family, she'd find some measure of peace. But she couldn't live with the knowledge of the damage she had wrought. For weeks, it ate at her, until finally she couldn't take it anymore. So she did the only thing she could think to do. She wandered back into her once more ruined town, her once more ruined home. With bloodied hands, she wrenched a shard of glass from the shattered window in her family's empty parlor. And, lying on the floor of what was once her bedroom, she sliced deep into the tender flesh of her wrists, only to find that, for her, oblivion was not in the cards.
Her body died, of course, but Ana herself remained. She honed her abilities as a Collector, but between jobs she would return to the village she had twice seen destroyed. Maybe it was penance; maybe it was to remind her of who she'd been in life. Whatever her reasons for returning, it was clear the place was poison to her soul. But Danny and I, we changed all that. We brought her in. We spirited her away. We flattered ourselves with the thought that we were helping fix this damaged creature out of the kindness of our hearts, but the truth was anything but. We were all of us beyond fixing – and of the three of us, Ana was the only one with the courage to admit it. Which is probably why we both fell so hard for her.
"So," she said from behind her boy-mask, "are you going to tell me what you're doing here?"
I rubbed absently at the spot on my cheek where she'd slapped me, palm rasping against two days' stubble. "I told you, I'm here to see Quinn."
"And you expect me to believe that?"
"Honestly, I don't give a damn what you believe."
"Sure you do, Sam – you always have. Tell me, in the twenty-seven years since Quinn was shelved, how many times have you come to see him? Once? Twice?"
The truth was more like a half a dozen, but still, I knew it wasn't enough. Not for Ana. Not for Quinn. "I don't see how it's any business of yours," I snapped.
"I suppose it's not. Except that you never seemed to give a damn about what happened to Quinn, and now out of nowhere here you are, and on a Monday, no less – the very day I always visit. It does cause a girl to wonder."
She was right, of course, about why I was here – that it was her I was here to see – but she was dead wrong about me and Quinn. I didn't stay away because I didn't give a damn. I stayed away because it hurt too much to see him like this. I stayed away because I couldn't help but feel responsible. I stayed away because I was a coward.
See, Quinn was a mistake –
my
mistake. I'd collected him myself in Belfast, back in '72. Like the rest of our little cabal, Quinn was a contract kill. Belfast back then was at the height of the Troubles – by spring of that year, clashes between the Unionists and the IRA had reached a fever pitch. Between the bombings and bouts of open war in the streets, hundreds of innocent lives were lost, and thousands more were injured. One such innocent was Quinn, who lost an eye and both his legs when a car bomb detonated a few yards from where he stood. At the time, he was a scholarship student at Queen's University, working toward a degree in engineering. Quinn was from a working-class Catholic family, and his father had died when Quinn was still a child; it had been his dream that his studies would one day allow him to support his widowed mother. But when a roadside bomb ended that dream, Quinn was forced to find another way.
The deal he made was simple: his mother would be taken care of, in return for his immortal soul. When I came to collect him, he didn't protest, didn't fight – he just closed his eyes and smiled. And when I wrapped my fingers around his soul and his lifetime of experiences washed over me, I wept at his decency, his tenderness – at the cruel acts of heartless men that had led him to my grasp. So when I heard that he'd been forced into Collection, it was only natural that to me we bring him in.
Truth be told, I don't know what tipped off the higher-ups to the fact that he'd been disobeying orders and consorting with other Collectors. Maybe he'd been acting oddly. Maybe one of the dead-drops we used to communicate had been compromised. Maybe it was just bad luck. What I do know is that when they found out, they brought the full weight of hell down on him. They tortured him for days – and you'd best believe that demons know a thing or two about inflicting pain – but still Quinn never talked; he never gave us up. Maybe if he had, they'd have spared him – allowed him to continue his existence as a Collector.