“Now,” he said to her, eyes glancing all can-you-believe-this at the camera the whole time, “nice and slow, how bout you tell us your name, and what it is you’re trying to say, okay?”
The old woman swallowed hard and licked her cracked, bleeding lips, calming by degrees. Then she looked directly into the camera lens, and said, with all the attitude of a pissed-off tween diva, “My name is Ada Swanson, and I want my mommy.”
Once the video hit the web, the response was full-on nuts — as, most assumed, was the old lady herself. But the obvious falsehood (in most folks’ eyes, at least) of her claim aside, the fact remained that she was found in pajamas consistent with those Ada’d been wearing the night of her abduction, and she’d been carrying Ada’s stuffed rabbit, Admiral Fuzzybutt, when she’d been found by these yahoos. Not a similar one, mind you, but the real effing deal, as identified some hours later by her mother. Seems the Admiral had himself a craft-project mishap one day when Ada was three — by which I mean his left ear was lopped off with a pair of scissors — and Ada’s mother was forced to reattach the ear with the only thread she had on-hand, a royal blue. She did so inexpertly, though not without a certain flair. Anyways, her choice of thread and lack of skill were distinctive enough to convince Mom and cops both. They took the woman into custody and interrogated her for hours in an attempt to find out who she was and where she got the bunny.
But if the news was to be believed, her answers made no damned sense. She stuck with her story of being Ada Swanson, taken from her bed by dark of night. By whom? She didn’t know, exactly. Seems she could only see them when the moon was full, whatever that means. Taken where? A cabin nestled in the woods as hard to look at as her captors or maybe not, she claimed, seeming confused and unsure because she also spoke of spending her nights beneath the stars, of bare dry earth beneath her feet (even on those rare instances in which it rained), and of the watchful eyes of animals in the darkness. When pressed on the question of where this maybe-cabin was, she couldn’t say.
And how had she happened upon the Monster Mavens? Why, she’d escaped, of course, or maybe been let go, only to wander for days through the frigid Colorado wilderness, parched and starved and hypothermic, before finally running into the first people besides her elusive captors she’d seen since she’d been taken. Which was how long, exactly? Days, she thought sometimes, or maybe months, or maybe decades. Her story was vague and unhinged, full of nightmares of bloodletting and half-glimpsed half-human creatures who brushed her hair and cooed over her and plumped her up inside their imaginary cabin with stolen sweets and wild root vegetables and the spit-roasted meats of countless tiny woodland creatures even as they slowly drained her dry — but word for word, unnamed sources told the papers, it matched the big bucket of crazy she’d unloaded with scarcely a pause for breath straight into Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera as they’d trudged back to the Monster Mavens van with her in tow.
Word was, her fingerprints came back inconclusive. Which is what I woulda told the press, too, if I’d run ’em and they came back matching a missing six-year-old girl’s. DNA results were pending, said the news — but the state was backlogged, their lab drowning under the rising tide of pending cases, so it could be weeks before they had anything to report. In the meantime, no one came forward to identify the woman, which made sense, because Lilith was pretty damn sure she was Ada. She told me as much a few days back, after popping in on me from out of nowhere and damn near scaring me right out of my borrowed skin.
“Like the duds,” she said. “Very… ironic. I hear the kids are into that these days.”
The duds in question were a paunchy, lugubrious sixty-something Italian man with deep-set eyes, a gentle voice, and delicate, uncalloused hands, upon the third finger of the left of which he wore a clunky gold ring, absent jewels but stamped with the image of the crucifixion. A cardinal’s ring, which made sense, on account of he was a cardinal. A cardinal Lilith damn near killed by sheer force of startlement, if his race-horse heartbeat and resulting dizziness were any indication.
I tugged free my meat-suit’s Roman collar, setting it on the scarred wooden desk of the study carrel at which I sat, and gulped air in an attempt to calm him. He was a pious man, well-intentioned yet ill-equipped for the recent turn his life had taken, meaning me. The carrel was piled high with books, half of them older than the European conquest of the Americas, plucked from the shelves of the Vatican’s Secret Archives in which I sat. The place was deserted; all the Vatican was abuzz with Easter preparations, leaving few with time for study or quiet reflection. It was five months or so since I’d vanquished Magnusson, four since the nameless creature in the desert, and I’d spent the ensuing days doing my damndest to locate any mention of the remaining feral Brethren, to no avail. Lilith figured it was best to take them out first, before tackling the ones who’d been tipped to hell’s hate-on for them and would therefore see me coming. Problem was, they were the very definition of off-the-grid. Even the Pope’s own private library didn’t have shit-all on them, though I did find some peculiar references to Christ’s own purported bloodline (which, apart from the fact that it shouldn’t exist since scripture never mentions him fathering a child, seems to include two heads of state, four saints, and all three Bee Gees) and a centuries-old reference to a near-apocalypse ushered forth in a great city by the sea as a consequence of the damnation of an innocent girl — only to be foiled by one of the devil’s own.
But I didn’t put much stock in prophecies.
“Nothing ironic about it,” I told her. “I needed access. This guy had it. End of story. Besides, you’re behind the times. I hear irony is dead.”
“Yes, well, so are you,” she said. “Although I can’t help but notice this meat-suit of yours is not. That makes what — eleven live ones in the past five months alone? Dare I hope you’ve lost your taste for piloting the dead?”
“Dare all you like, but it won’t make it any truer,” I told her. “Like I said, I needed access, and this guy had it. Dead cardinals are hard to come by, and anyways, even if I could find one, it wouldn’t do me any good. He’d raise a few eyebrows if he was seen walking around.”
“And here I thought his sort was big on resurrections.”
“Resurrection,” I corrected, “as in singular. Now, what’re you doing here, Lily?” I confess, that last was testier than I intended, but truth be told, her teasing hit a little close to home. I had been taking a lot of living vessels lately. I kept telling myself it was on account of access or some other necessity, but the fact is, the Sam of old would have found another way. When it comes right down to it, taking living vessels was… easier than it used to be. Less hand-wringy. Maybe my heart was growing harder. Maybe something inside me had given up. Or maybe being so close to the dark energy released by Ana’s failed ritual in LA — the one that resulted in Danny’s death — had tarnished me in ways I’d yet to understand. Whatever the reason, it troubled me, but not enough to stop. That alone was enough to make me wonder if I’d lost something fundamental to what made me me.