“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. “But that doesn’t change what has to happen next.”
She stepped toward me then. Out of the tub and across the narrow expanse of floor, her scuffing heels leaving streaks in the ghost-white dust. Her strange, mystical guile was no more. The woman before me was awkward, coltish, fragile, determined.
A strange thought struck me then. In all the time I’d known her, she’d never looked more beautiful.
“I know that,” she said. “And I don’t blame you. In fact, I welcome it. It’s time I paid for all I’ve done. I just wanted you to understand.” She stood on tiptoes, and kissed me on the cheek. Then took my hand, and placed it against her bare chest. I felt the warmth of her skin, the rapid beating of her heart. “Goodbye, Sam Thornton. Be well.”
“Goodbye,” I told her. And then I reached my hand inside her chest, and wrapped tight her soul.
It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Her soul was at once ancient, and brand new. Wisp thin and blown-glass fragile in my hand. No gray-black swirling, nor blinding white, it was instead all the colors of the rainbow, and none at all. The most vibrant, beautiful light I’d ever seen. And her entire life, spread out before me. Her coming to in Paradise, all full of hope and possibility. Her subsequent fall — she so confused at what she’d done. The Brethren a beacon of redemption in her mind. The pain of finding out how wrong on that count she truly was.
And amidst it all, the briefest moment of hope and joy — of love — a blinding bright pinprick of happiness before a long descent into bitterness and despair: Lilith, standing in a field of heather, the heat of a nearby bonfire on her cheek. A young, intense, dark-eyed man, his arms around her, their foreheads touching. Grigori, I realized.
“It’s almost time,” she said, in a language I did not speak, but through her ears, her mind, her experience I understood. “Soon, you’ll all be free.”
“But not you, my love.” He held her tight. Kissed her. Kissed me. Tender, sweet. “I can scarcely bear the thought of leaving you to this existence.”
“Knowing you’re free is enough for me,” she said — I said — caressing his stubbled cheek. “Knowing you’re free will give me the strength to endure anything that hell dare inflict upon me.”
“Promise me something,” he said.
“Anything.”
“If this goes wrong–”
“It won’t.”
“If this goes wrong,” he repeated, “and we emerge as… something less… then you owe it to us all to end us.”
“That won’t happen,” she said. “I know the mages warned against it, but we’ve taken every precaution.”
“Every precaution but one: your promise to kill us should it come to that.”
“But I couldn’t.”
“You must. We’ve all decided. We beg it of you. None of us wish to end up monsters, to be as enslaved by our own darkest impulses as we now are to our demonic masters. Without your promise, there will be no ritual — not tonight. Not ever.”
She smiled then, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Then I promise.”
Grigori’s face crinkled into a smile as well, and he kissed Lilith once more. “Thank you, my love.” Then he looked to the sky and said, “It’s time.”
Then the ritual. Then the flood. And untold anguish at what she’d done.
I released Lilith’s soul, gasping. We were huddled together on our knees in the half-built flat. Outside, twilight had given way to starry black. I wrapped my arms around her shivering, naked form, and we sat like that a while; shattered, sobbing, too broken to do anything else.
As we held each other in the darkness, the child-thing’s mouthpiece rang in my ears.
“The healing process is both long and painful”, it’d said, “but ultimately it’s up to you how well it goes — and how you deal with the challenges it poses along the way. Even flesh twisted by consuming fire can be taught to feel again with time.”
and
“Lilith’s fate is in your hands: for as ye sow, so shall ye reap.”
and
“It falls to you to do what must be done.”
“There has to be another way,” I’d pleaded then. To which he told me:
“There always is… Only you can decide what’s right.”
So, weeping in the darkness, that’s exactly what I did, I decided what was right, and did what must be done.
I took off my coat and button-down, stolen from the morgue from which this meat-suit came, and wrapped first the latter and then the former around Lilith’s shoulders. She eyed me a moment in confusion, and then buttoned the shirt with clumsy fingers.
Her shivering abated.
That done, I kissed her on the forehead, my eyes still wet with tears, or perhaps wetted anew.
Then I rose without a word and left her in the darkened building.
Broken.
Human.
25.
It’s not often one has occasion to meet the Devil.
Mine came some hours after I’d left Lilith at the apartment, as I stood upon the well-trodden apartment courtyard, grass patchy and shiny from bikes and balls and countless feet, that sat above the spot Hitler’s Führerbunker once occupied.
I’d been there a while. Pondering right and wrong, punishment and absolution, trying to get my head right regarding all I’d seen and done.
The voice of the child-God’s conduit had guided me back at the flat, I thought — guided me in a direction I’d not considered until that moment, though in retrospect seemed the only thing I ever could have done. I suppose as an implement of judgment, I was well chosen, if double-edged, for if I could forgive Lilith her trespasses against me, it was a reflection on us both. Now, though, as I stood upon this once unhallowed ground that had somehow given way to normalcy, it was Thomed’s voice that rang in my ears.
“If our souls are, in fact, immortal, why would our Maker confine Her judgment to the first twenty or fifty or one hundred years of life? Why would a loving parent punish their child for any longer than it took for that child to learn their lesson? My conclusion, long coming, is that She would not. That absolution lies not beyond our reach, no matter how far gone we seem — at least, so long as we stretch forever toward it.”
“That presumes our Maker is a loving parent,” came a voice from behind me, echoing the very words that I’d used when I replied to Thomed.
I turned to find beside me a handsome, blond-haired man of maybe seventeen, with sharp-angled, almost pretty features, blue eyes, and smile-bared teeth of gleaming white. He wore an age-creased leather jacket open over a vintage Judas Priest T-shirt, and a pair of whiskered blue jeans. Well-worn black Chuck Taylors graced his feet.
“How did you –” I began to ask, but he waved me off with a laugh.
“Your mind — and, hell, your very soul — are an open book to me, Sam Thornton. I own the latter, after all. Although at the moment, you’re wondering if perhaps I’m only leasing it. After all, if Lilith can get a reprieve, then why not you?”