The One We Feed Read online

  “What makes you think you are meant to stop it?” Arthur said, recording another filing number and making notes about the state of the binding.

  I threw a look at Jinx. All his youthful snark was gone. His face had again assumed that weird composure held by all immortals many years my senior. Not for the first time, I wondered who he was, or who he had been when he’d discovered the idea, the thing that had frozen him in time.

  “Art, she’s just a fracking girl,” he hissed, shattering my reverie.

  Arthur shrugged. “And how many times have you been able to purchase your own cigarettes?”

  The perpetually youthful face full of piercings twitched. The message was clear: not everything is as it seems. Some immortals were centuries old and didn’t look a day over eighteen.

  “Don’t you think we should at least check it out?”

  “If this girl is real,” I reasoned, “then what she did...it’s not like anything I’ve seen before. And if the Sangha keeps her prisoner, then won’t she be on our side?”

  “She struggles to free herself so that she may die. What makes you think they are harming her? Could they not be protecting her from herself?”

  Infallible logic, that.

  I tapped my fingers on the table and chewed my lip. Arthur was a difficult one to interpret. Since we’d met, there had been many times when his advice had been directly opposed to whatever it was he wanted. He seemed to direct by not directing, and it drove me nuts.

  “So is that a no, or is that a yes?”

  The copper of his face smoothed into a smile. “Lilith, you will do whatever you must, but your visions have never been accurate. The version of you that is relaying that information is only telling you what you need to hear.”

  I stood up and leaned over his work. “Well, then I say she’s telling me to save the girl. I mean, why else would she keep showing me the same thing? If I have to be splattered with guts one more time, I’m going to jump.”

  His face lifted, and those perfect, incandescent blue eyes caught my gaze. Trapped and happy to be, I stared back, wishing he could feel the depths of my sincerity.

  “How can saving someone be a bad idea?” I insisted in spite of my growing blush.

  “What about your reasons for saving them?” he said. “Can you honestly, with your purest self, say that your desire to help this girl is not, at least in part, a selfish one?”

  I blinked, stunned. How could wanting to save someone be a selfish desire? Then I thought of Eva. If I had tried to stop her from jumping off the hotel as I’d longed to, how outraged would she have been? It was that act that had set everything in motion, that act that had cemented our relationship even though we were parted forever. My silence was enough of an answer.

  “You are very quick to focus on a target,” Arthur sighed. “This is one of your greatest strengths and will also be your most crippling weakness, if you are not cautious.”

  Often, I found that I had to really consider his words carefully. Normally, I would be hurt, but there was some unexplainable draw surrounding Arthur that made it impossible to think him an enemy. It more than likely had something to do with his unique state of being, but he would never tell anyone any details about his life after his supposed death. He had only ever spoken to me once about it, and in the forgiving shades of vagueness.

  “I can’t help what I am, Arthur. I can’t help wanting to keep what happened to Eva from happening to someone I can save.”

  He sighed. “I am proud of you for that conviction, Lilith. However, decisions must be made from neutrality and calm, from the foundation of your character.”

  “What does that mean?” Jinx hissed. “Either you care or you don’t. Who the fuck cares why? I bet the high-diving were-chick could give two shits as long as her melon doesn’t end up smeared on a Smith’s boots.”

  Arthur ignored him. “What you really want is for people to have a better life, but sometimes people must save themselves. The most important lessons are self-taught. No dishonest man can be free. He is his own trap, as someone once said.”

  Jinx’s outrage began to rev, and, with my guard down, I could already hear what was going to say and in what decibel he was going to say it. I winced, wishing I could have absorbed the talent of someone named “Mime.”

  “No!” Jinx shouted. “Not fair! You don’t get to quote science fiction at us you antediluvian Mephistopheles! And least of all that hypergraphic prophet-teer.”

  Several voices shushed him at once. He twitched as if the insults were flea bites and looked around at the book shelves with a paranoid scowl.

  “Art, I just think she’s important,” I said in a soothing voice. “I think I at least need to learn more about her.”

  He sighed. “Lilith, your actions cannot always be a reflection of the loss of your sister. You are much more than that one tragedy.”

  “But if I forget….”

  “Moving beyond does not mean forgetting. Your sister knew what she was doing when she jumped. If you regret her choice or lament her passing, you are dishonoring what she did.”

  A lance of self-conscious bitterness skewered me to the spot. I sputtered, but nothing came out. The betrayal was overwhelming. If not for this man and his metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, I’d still be a normal woman. Well, maybe a grief-stricken she-bitch, but human at least.

  Jinx shook his fire-engine head and grabbed my wrist. “Come on, Lily, let’s bug. This place gives me the creeps, all these fucking pages.”

  “You know,” I managed finally, pulling myself out of Jinx’s grasp to press my fists to my hips, “I’m getting really tired of these games. I wish you would just spit out whatever it is you know instead of hinting all the time.”

  He looked away, and it felt like exile. “I am saying what must be said.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe Ananda will have something more illuminating to say.” I turned to stomp down to the children’s section where the fourth member of our group, Arthur’s cousin, had camped out. Initially he had gravitated toward the fairy tales but had somehow been recruited by the head librarian to lead story time until the end of the world. He was slowly developing a Feydakin of five year olds, and parents were having a hard time reclaiming their young. It was really no surprise. He had a way of making everyone feel instantly at ease.

  “Let’s go, Jinx.”

  “He’s in the middle of a Harry Potter novel. I wouldn’t disturb him,” Arthur warned. “Unless you fancy being chased by toddlers with magic wands.”

  Scowling at my ninja shoes, I dragged my cohort back out to the entrance and threw him down on a concrete bench.

  “Fuck!” I shouted to the air in general.

  A woman with expectant preschooler in tow staggered away as if I’d punched her.

  “Here, here!” Jinx said, dusting himself off. “I told you traveling with them was going to get old. You ask what the weather is like, and they think they’re oh-so-fucking clever when they hold up a finger. When will you learn?”

  “Well you’d think the Buddha would be a little more compassionate!”

  Jinx coughed. “Right. But then he’d have to stop quoting Scientology.”

  I collapsed next to him and leaned against a pale green mural that looked like something Egyptians would paint if they knew about circuit boards. I stared at it, thinking it seemed like a visual metaphor of my life among this elite slayer squad. Suddenly the romance of our little mission had faded.

  I thought back on the mysterious girl, her battered, skinny body, her hollowed eyes, her suicidal leap, and felt my chest clamp down. Arthur was right, a pox on his head. I was still trying to save Eva, but that was impossible. Eva was dead and buried. This shape-shifting girl was not my sister, and yet….

  “I know I’m supposed to help her,” I whispered to myself. “I know I am.” But really, what did I know? My visions were always vague, handed down to me by Future Lilith, an arrogant wench who had already lived through whatever it was I was facing. Screw imm
ortality and all its sundry evolutionary gifts. It was beginning to piss me off.

  Jinx was checking his iPhone and rocking in place, already suffering from cyber-withdrawal. “I mean seriously, what kind of answer is ‘Mu’? It’s how a cow goes, not how you answer a question about the indivisibility of the soul! Fuck Joshu. That jackoff can walk home down one of his non-roads, the asshat.”

  I blinked, pulled back to my insane reality by his endless madness. Cuss words and Zen koans. Speaking to these people felt like living with the Mad Hatter and Deepak Chopra.

  Clean cup, Namasté.

  “Will there be anything in those files about that location?” I pinched my nose.

  Jinx scrolled over some windows and nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t have an address. Apparently everyone knows where it is because it’s not a full sanctuary. It’s kind of like the Underground Railroad, you know? A place where any member of the Sangha can come to be safe.”

  “They need to be safe?” I gasped. It seemed to me like there should be a place where other people could go to be safe from them. “Don’t they have abilities?”

  He made a weird hissing sound. “Not everyone has abilities that help preserve their immortality, Lily. Some of them can only tell if people are lying, remember?”

  I clenched my fists.

  “You look pretty stoppable to me, bitch.”

  The words echoed in my head like one of Jinx’s tirades, and with just as much ire. It was bad enough I had stabbed Ursula through the chest with her own knife, but did I have to stand over her and gloat while she died? Even though she had been a scary witch with a penchant for waving her victims’ secrets around in front of a large group of salivating mortals, I still felt a twinge of guilt for it. Not one of my finest moments.

  I should have listened to Arthur.

  But if I had, I would not have seen the depth of my sister’s knowledge or how threatened the Sangha was by her. Indeed, I would not have known about the Sangha at all, if not for Ursula’s last words. They had also been my first hint that Arthur was not what he seemed.

  “That’s a low blow, Jinx.”

  “At least it’s not a sharp one.”

  “I’m one second away from punching you.”

  His fingerless black gloves rose in defeat. “Cool your heels, Balboa. I’m just saying they might be on the lam since you moseyed into town.”

  “And how is it exactly that they know I’m in town?” I crossed my arms. It was a fair question. I was unique among the immortal race in that no one seemed to be able to use their gifts to predict my movements. So how was it possible that the Sangha knew anything about what I was up to?

  He fluffed his hair. The deep crimson reflected off his pale skin in a harsh, unflattering blush.

  “I don’t know, Lily, I’m not the oracle.”

  “So what should we do?”

  “Go to the mattresses.”

  I raised a brow. “You want me to attack them?”

  “No, I want you to gather more data on the psychic plain. Duh.” He dragged me to my feet. “Fuck, you’re so violent. What kind of Buddhist are you?”

  “The kind that believes that death is a beginning.”

  He danced away from me and beat me to my pickup truck. As we drove back to our hotel room, he remained bent over his device, ignoring me and my vengeful wrath. I fumed and fumed, reliving each iteration of my vision. The first time I had seen the girl, she had not transformed. That was a new development. So was that real or was that something I needed to hold my attention? Why was the Sangha holding a little girl captive? And the most interesting question of all, one that had not even occurred to me until Arthur brought it up: Did she even need saving?

  I pulled into our parking space. Holding his phone up so that he could look at it and the ground at the same time, Jinx followed me up the stairs to our room. I fished the key out of his pocket while his drumstick thumbs danced a tattoo across the touchscreen. I smiled, wondering if someday soon we would even need thumbs anymore, if thoughts would just appear on screens for anyone to see.

  The little green light of welcome blinked as I opened our door, but a sense of something out of place drew me up short. Before I knew what to make of the sensation, my vision blackened. As if the immortal light of the sun had just shut off, I blinked furiously into complete darkness, grabbed for the stability of the doorframe while the ground seemed to drop from beneath me. Jinx bumped into me and let out a string of invectives turned upward into a question, but my mind was fishing through an abyss, looking for even the faintest sign of light. I ran my hand upward, and where it touched, smoky tendrils of light began to congeal, sweeping over the black in a caress. The shimmering fog collected, twisted into moving shapes, and took the vague form of a man.

  “Lily, what the shit?” Jinx grumbled. “This is not fucking bumper cars!”

  I swallowed down my rising gorge and squeezed the doorframe. My recent life had been so full of this kind of strangeness that I had learned not to question. Pretty soon, I would be expecting a blue caterpillar to drop onto my shoulder and ask who I was.

  “Stay here,” I commanded in a voice that sounded more like a growl.

  The suggestion of a man gained solidity, and soon I could discern his features with absolute clarity. He was standing beside Jinx’s desk, looking at the conglomerated electronic outpost of several laptops. He didn’t move to turn it on, play with the keys, or jiggle the mouse; he just stood there, staring at it, his tailored suit and ear piece a radiant shade of violet.

  Right after Eva died, I had begun to experience bizarre presentiments, flashes of things that had not happened, but this felt distinctly different. I felt as if I was seeing something hidden, something that had transpired in the recent past, and just the thought of it chilled me.

  His face was unfamiliar, but he was dressed like every other immortal that had ever tried to kill me, trap me, or otherwise torture me, and here he was, in my room, rummaging through my belongings. My rational mind was scribbling mental notes that he was some sort of seer. He had learned through centuries of study how to read the world, trace the echoes we unwittingly recorded on the environment. I became sure that he was watching a ghost of Jinx, as it haunted the chair and worked on past strings of code.

  Suddenly, the man turned, following shapes that only he could see, and found the hollow of the closet.

  My sister’s journals rested there, nestled in plastic caskets to preserve them from the elements. They would follow me forever, my little burden to bear, but they had no place here. Jinx’s habits were well-known, and he would never have suffered something as archaic as a notepad, let alone a hardbound volume.

  I watched the specter frown at them, his dark thoughts draining the red from his violet cloud, turning it to the deep, stormy blue of consternation. But it was no use. I had carried the books into the room, and magical insight could never find me. No matter how long he stared, he would never discover when or how they had come to be there, reverently tucked into their corner. I think he realized it even as

  I did, even as I knew he was going to touch them.

  He reached out and ran his fingers across their spines, unaware that I could feel his touch on mine. Then he snatched one out and snapped the cord of my concentration. My vision blurred, the colors and lights instantly faded, and, before I could stop myself, I had pitched forward into the hotel room.

  The darkness had dissipated entirely. The room was empty, normal, and ugly. Nothing seemed out of place. No strange man touching my sister’s soul in all its myriad pages.

  “So it’s finally happened?” Jinx muttered, sliding past me to his ergonomic computer chair.

  “What?”

  “You’ve finally gone to the dark side. Just let me know if you plan on eating your own arm, ok?”

  I stared around, confused. What the hell had just happened? I wanted to sit down and get my head around it, but a twisting sense of unnamable urgency was tying my soul in knots. I scanned the room for any
sign that what I had seen was real. Surely the invader must have touched something, jostled something. Tiny differences imperceptible to others would stand out to me. I had a perfect memory, and, if there was a single sign, I would find it. I flipped over pillows, lifted the neatly tucked comforters, pushed a suitcase aside. When I turned back to Jinx, I found his studded face wide-eyed.

  “Housekeeping misplace your broom?”

  “Someone was here, Jinx!”

  He blinked in disbelief. “What? Who?”

  “A Smith.”

  He shook his head. “How can you possibly know that?”

  In desperation, I hurled a canvas bag of socks against a wall. The book was beneath it, as if thrown, its pages smashed to one side. The Smith must have balanced it on the edge of the crate and not noticed that it had fallen to the floor.

  I picked it up and held it out to Jinx. “Would I have left this here? Don’t ask me questions. Just pack our shit, now!”

  His jaw flapped in the same breeze that was slowly pushing open our room door. “I can’t shut down all my windows! I have stuff running!”

  I ignored the whine in his voice and began packing miscellaneous items into my suitcase. “Fuck your programs, Jinx, we need to run.”

  I snatched the book from the bed and threw it into its box, my thoughts racing to keep up with my heartbeat. How had they known we were here? Had it been something Jinx had done? Or could it have been something far more metaphysical? Perhaps I had clued them into our arrival just by looking at them and their tiny prisoner. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed possible that there might be immortals out there suspicious enough to have developed a talent for hyper-vigilance. If so, we had made a terrible mistake relocating to this place.

  With a sweep of one arm, I had the entire contents of my toiletry bag replaced, though jumbled. I put away Arthur’s Go board and Ananda’s small DVD collection. When I turned back to Jinx, it was to find him crawling under the desk, winding up cables until they decorated his arms like bracelets. I had only an instant to feel a great sense of admiration for him, my friend who knew me so well.