The Early Collector

Tova reads the contract on your kitchen floor with a highlighter in her teeth.

It's 11 a.m. on Day 3. You know it's Day 3 because there's a faint mark on the inside of your left wrist, like a burn that doesn't hurt: two thin lines, crossed, and the number 37 in that engraved handwriting. It changed at sunset. You watched it happen.

"Okay," Tova says around the highlighter. "Okay, okay, okay." She takes it out of her mouth. "So we're doing this. We're doing devil. On a Tuesday."

"It's Wednesday."

"It's devil, babe. Days don't count anymore."

She's sitting cross-legged with the scroll unrolled across your whole kitchen, from the stove to the bathroom door. She has a blonde buzz cut, a gold ring through her nose and her Polish grandmother's rosary in her jacket pocket, which she took out the second she walked in and has not put back.

Malakai is on your couch, where he spent two nights. Or didn't spend them. As far as you can tell, he doesn't sleep. You woke both mornings to find him sitting by the window with the curtains open a crack, watching the street, perfectly still, like a cat or a sniper.

He's in a fresh black shirt. You have no idea where it came from. The suitcase, probably. You've decided not to ask about the suitcase.

Tova keeps looking at him. She can't help it. Nobody could. The first time she saw him, she said "oh, come on" out loud, to God or to you, and had to sit down.

"Clause nine," she reads. "The Collector shall answer one question from the Signatory each day, truthfully." She looks up. "Is that real? He has to tell you the truth?"

"I can't lie at all," Malakai says from the couch. "Clause nine only means I can't refuse one question a day. The rest of the time I may decline."

Tova points the highlighter at him. "Ask him something embarrassing, Ava."

"I'm not wasting it."

"Clause twelve," Tova goes on, crawling down the scroll. "The Collector shall remain within one hundred paces of the Signatory until settlement, to guard the instrument against poaching." She frowns. "Poaching?"

"Other collectors," Malakai says. "An unsettled soul gives off a scent. Like bread in an oven. Most of my kind will leave a sealed instrument alone. Not all."

"Like the dog thing," you say.

"Like the dog thing," he agrees.

Tova's eyes go to you, then him, then back. She holds up her rosary like she's showing a bouncer her ID. "If you hurt her," she says, "I'll find out how to kill a demon. I have a library card. I have time."

Malakai looks at the rosary. Then at her. And he smiles, a real one, slow and warm, and Tova's whole face goes pink to the tips of her ears.

"Noted," he says. "I'd expect nothing less from her friend."

"Oh, that's not fair," Tova mutters to you. "He can't do that."

You go to work, because rent doesn't care about Hell.

The Lamplighter at 9 p.m. on a Wednesday is half full: dockworkers, grad students, two old guys arguing about the Orioles. Lazlo Dacre, your boss, is behind the bar in his apron, gray beard, reading glasses pushed up on his bald head. When Malakai walks in behind you and takes the end stool, Lazlo goes quiet and looks at him for a long time over the tops of those glasses.

"Bourbon neat," you say, sliding it over before he can ask.

"You keep remembering," Malakai murmurs.

"Don't read into it."

Earlier, he held out his hand for your phone and typed his number in. It saved as Malakai. In the bathroom, you changed it to The Devil. You'd like to see him read into that.

The whole bar is aware of him. The grad students at table four have stopped pretending to study. A woman at the rail has turned on her stool to stare, her date forgotten. Even the old guys lowered their voices. He just sits there, turning the glass slowly on its napkin, his ember eye half-hidden under his hair.

At 11:40 the door opens and the temperature drops ten degrees.

The woman who walks in is wearing a white suit. Silver-white hair cut sharp at the jaw. Red lipstick. Violet eyes, actually violet, and she is so beautiful that the man at the rail knocks over his beer. She walks straight to the bar like she owns it, and stops in front of you.

"So you're the birthday girl. Ava, isn't it?" she says. "Hm. I thought you'd be taller."

"Nerezza," Malakai says. He hasn't moved. His voice has.

"Kai." She smiles at him without looking. "Don't get up." She lays a sheet of black paper on your bar. Silver ink. A seal like a broken coin. "Writ of forfeiture. Signed by the Auditor himself. The benefit was delivered in full on the first night, so the soul is due on demand. I'm here to collect her early."

"Collect," you repeat. "Me."

"Don't worry," Nerezza says kindly. "It's very fast."

She reaches across the bar for your wrist.

Every light in the Lamplighter goes out at once.

Someone yells. Glass breaks. In the dark you can't see anything, and then you can, because the only light in the room is coming from the end of the bar.

Malakai is standing between you and her. You didn't see him move. You don't think he did move, not the way people move. And he's wrong. He's still himself, his shape, his face, but the darkness around him has thickened and risen, smoke pouring off his shoulders like a cloak, and curving up from his head are two long sweeps of shadow, like horns made of night. His ember eye is blazing. It lights the side of his face red.

He's terrifying. He's the most terrifying thing you've ever seen. And his back is to you.

"She is under my seal," he says. His voice fills the room without getting louder. "Clause forty. Settlement at the fortieth sunset. Not one minute sooner. Tell the Auditor that his writ is paper, and that I'll be within a hundred paces of her every second until then."

Nerezza's lipstick smile doesn't move. But her hand pulls back.

"You've never cared this much about a clerk's job," she says.

"Leave."

The lights come back on. The grad students are under their table. The woman at the rail is crying. Lazlo is holding a baseball bat you didn't know he owned.

Nerezza picks up her black paper, folds it once, and tucks it into her jacket. At the door she pauses and looks at you, really looks at you, with something almost like pity.

"Ask him," she says, "why a crown prince is doing a clerk's work."

Then she's gone, and the fog closes behind her.

He walks you home without a word. At your door he stops on the landing and says, "I'll be on the roof," and climbs the narrow ladder to the hatch before you can say anything at all.

You lie in bed for an hour with the lights off and the chain on the door and your heart refusing to slow down. You can still see it. The smoke. The horns. His back to you.

Your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

The Devil.

You stare at the name you gave him. Then you open it.