The One We Feed (16 page)

We turned to
go back down the hallway. The young officer was shaking his head as if trying
to clear it, while Castor followed us with his eyes. Ananda held out his hand
in parting, and Castor took it.

“Goodbye, sir.”

“Next time you
need someone to have a look at the vegetation, just come over here and let us
know, okay?”

“I will.”

The policeman
smiled in an almost fatherly way, but as the physical contact continued, his
face began to drain of intent, and soon the muscles were lax.

“Ananda!” I
whispered. “Stop.”

But the second
Buddha stepped forward and laid the other hand upon his shoulder, right next to
the speaker of his walkie.

“You will look
after the creatures of this world. It is the duty you chose, isn’t it?”

His salt and
pepper eyebrows drew together.

“You’re right.
I...yes.”

“The trees are
all sick.”

“I’ll make
sure someone has a look.”

Ananda smiled.
“A credit to your profession,” he whispered and let go.

Before he
could do anything else, I grabbed his arm and pulled him down the hall forcibly
while trying not to look as if I was propelling him. Behind us, the cops stood
in silence, scratching their heads and feeling a bit disoriented.

I smiled at
the man behind the bullet-proof glass as we moved through the outer door and
caught him shaking his head in my periphery. Ananda and I  held hands to the
car, but I could feel the wall between us. Ananda was troubled, and that was
something I’d never once discerned from him. He got into the car without a
single word and put on his seat belt.

I stopped at
the tailgate to catch my breath and figure out what I could possibly say. Scolding
made no sense, and, really, how could I find fault with him? The trees of the
world would lament if ever Ananda stopped climbing them.

I got in and
closed the door. He stared straight ahead, hands folded neatly in his lap.

“Ananda,” I
said quietly, “Arthur said that there were certain things that you shouldn’t
do. I know it makes no sense. I know it seems absolutely crazy to you, but
there are rules out here for everything and if you break them, it draws
attention to us.”

He looked out
the window.

I reached up
and smoothed out my forehead. “Just tell me why you were in the park at all. I
mean, you were supposed to go to the library after you got off work. I know you’re
your own person, but we’re trying to keep you safe.”

I looked at
him, waiting for an answer. He took a deep breath and turned back toward me.

“You should
not worry so much.”

“I know, but….”
I thought back on how different things were now, how many people had taken Eva’s
place in my heart. It had been hard on her, to have me care so much. Could it
be that it was possible to love someone too much for their good? “I know. You’re
certainly old enough to take care of yourself, but the world has changed so
much since you were on your own.”

“No,” he
whispered so softly I almost didn’t hear it, “no, it hasn’t.”

I closed my
eyes and was certain he was exactly right. Thousands of years, and the only
thing we’d really learned was how to make hacking each other to pieces for the
sake of greed and envy into a more organized past time. Reesa certainly hadn’t
asked to be thrown into a pit of hell by some of the most enlightened men on
earth. And they certainly hadn’t thought twice about doing it, either.

“Why didn’t
you go to Arthur?”

“I couldn’t
find him,” Ananda murmured.

“So why didn’t
you come back to the hotel?”

He was silent.
I prodded him with a stare.

Jinx’s gift
kicked in, as it so often did whenever I really wanted to know the answer to
any question and was feeling a bit impatient. In response, my mouth dropped
open.

“I couldn’t…remember
how.”

My heart began
to race. My hands found the steering wheel and stroked it unnecessarily. My
stomach ached, one more reminder that it had nothing better to do.

“What do you
mean you couldn’t remember?”

“I don’t know
what I mean,” he replied in the tone of a child being chided for misbehaving. “I’m
sorry, but I am not used to it yet.” It was another unfamiliar phrase for him,
and he pronounced it with the air of one examining a rare object.

“Used to it?” I
turned on him, angry even though I had no reason to be. The anger wasn’t
directed at him. It was at myself, because I had a sneaking suspicion I knew
why. In my mind’s eye, a picture formed of sandaled feet standing in a puddle
of my blood. “How long has this been happening?”

His eyes fell
to his hands. “Since we left the Vihara.”

My voice was
choked suddenly, but I coughed it loose. “How bad is it, Ananda?”

“How bad can
it be?”

“What are you losing?”
 

He shrugged
slightly. “Just little things here and there that I hear and learn. But I don’t
know they’re gone until I try to find them.”

“That’s
normal. Have you forgotten anything from before, I mean, before you started
forgetting?”

“I don’t think
so.”

Events piled
up and then rearranged so neatly that I almost marveled at how obvious it had
been. Arthur would never have allowed his cousin to suffer. He had known for
years where Ananda could be found and had left him there, in the care of the Guardians,
for very good reason. Yet he’d allowed his cousin to tag along, regardless of
the danger. Now I knew there was no danger, and he must have too. All along.

“Damn it,
Arthur!” I swore, my hand colliding with the wheel hard enough to shake the
car.

Ananda blinked
in my direction. “Do not trouble yourself. I am able to be with you now.”

“It’s not
that, Love.” I reached out for him apologetically and clasped his hands as if
for dear life. “Ananda, I am so happy to have you with us. I just...I think it’s
my fault.”

To my
surprise, he smiled and gave a nod. “I know. Thank you. I felt the monastery
was no longer the place I should be, and now I am out.”

“You know?”

Him too?
It
would have been nice if someone had told me.

He smiled and
squeezed my hands. “Jinx said he thought it was you, but I always knew. I knew
when it was happening. Your blood...it was different.”

“You stepped
in it.”

He nodded. “I
knew I would be able to leave. I knew that there was no danger anymore.”

If I had taken
Jinx, Karl, and Ananda’s gifts without otherwise harming them, that meant it
wasn’t necessary to kill people to acquire their talents. Then I realized that
Ananda still had gifts, ones I’d acquired but had not stolen: his pacifying
touch, his ability to go into the
jhana,
his ability to see the future. I
turned to him, aghast, but he was already shaking his head.

“Those other
things come after Parinirvana.” He lifted my hand to his face and kissed it. “You
take only what is dangerous. Benevolent and caring as always.”

I fell back
against the leather seat, stunned, and hid behind my free hand. “I’m scared….”

“Men who fear
their own darkness are perhaps the safest men,” Ananda said gently.

“Why is this
happening?”

“What does it
matter?”

“I’d like to
know how I’m functioning, if it’s all the same to you. It’d be nice to know
what I’m capable of. To know what is possible.”

“That phrase
is strange,” he said, shaking his head. He relinquished my hand so that I could
drive. The truck rumbled to life. I pulled away, still a bit shaky. “The word ‘possible’
implies within itself,” he continued, “ the unfettered nature of reality. Everything
that is real is possible; everything composed of real elements must also be
possible. Therefore anything that can be thought, if thoughts be real elements,
must by definition be possible. To say you wish to ‘know what is possible,’ are
you not
actually
establishing a boundary for something that is
boundless? You are, in fact, trying to know what is
im
possible, but if
you know that, then it would be possible again. Trees do not speak, so it is
impossible
to hear one, until someone listens in spite of impossibility and does.” He
sighed. “Everything is possible. That should be understood.”

I smiled in
spite of how I actually felt. “You win.”

“You are teaching
people to forget what is impossible, Lilith, and nothing more. For some the
realization is deadly. That is a result of their flaws, not yours.”

My smile
faded. “Should I care about it any less?”

He leaned on
his armrest and continued to smile benignly. “For you, that would be
impossible. That is why you are one of three.”

“Impossible,
huh?”  

“Yes. Reality
has limits.”

“I’ll remind
you that you said that.”

“I’ll
remember.”

“You sure?”

“No.”

“Are you all
right with that?”

He chuckled. “It
was always possible, and I am at peace with reality.”

Chapter
11

Falling Down

She looked as I remembered her
from the hundreds of times I had gone back there to view her final moments. Her
pretty face composed, her expressive eyes wide and clear, her arms spread,
white fingers combing through the breeze like feathers.

“Live better
or die as nothing more than this,” she says to a younger me, a lost me from so
long ago, it seems. Again and again, I hear those words, but never do I tire of
hearing them. Her final thoughts, so ironic, recorded in my very future,
forever with me, in a way she could not be. She the architect, I the construct,
and yet made from the same stuff.

I wanted to go
back to that night, when we two had shared some union that crossed space and
time, the moment when we spoke our final words to one another, but even for me,
a person who saw the future constantly, who could swim in and out of other
pasts, recapturing that was impossible. It had been one instant.

As malleable
as time had come to be for me, it still came down to one instant.

Her back was
to me this time, the pink blouse untucked, her high heels discarded on the
gravel of the roof. She glanced down, and without hesitation, stepped off. As
many times as I had seen it, I still ached. There was only one comfort: that
when she had passed, I was all around her, from every moment of crisis in my
life. She had not been alone.

I waited for
that other self, whoever she may have been, to collide with me, to relay all
the information she felt I should know. I did not wait long.

A cold jolt to
the system where thousands of sounds, sights, and smells crashed like a tidal
wave over the continuity of my thoughts, and set me adrift. I floated for
minutes, or years, but what did time really matter?

I opened my
eyes and was temporarily disoriented. Spread out before me was a city scene, an
intersection of two main streets. I was standing on a bridge over it, my hands
resting atop the thick metal rail. In a shifting of the tides, my memory
resettled, and the plan returned to me.

They would be
beneath me soon.

I turned and
walked to the other side of the pedestrian bridge. It connected a mall to a
recreation center and conveniently crossed directly over the route her captors
intended to take. As inconspicuous as they tried to be, it was somewhat
difficult to miss a caravan of black SUVs kissing each other’s bumpers around
every turn.

I touched the
earpiece. “Can we be sure which one she’s in?”

The boy’s
voice was smaller still, nestled in the hollows of my ear. “No. I was kind of
hoping you’d use your mojo and figure it out.”

An excellent
idea.
“Duh.
Sorry, I forget I can see through stuff if I want to.”

“Happens to
the best of us. If you were super-hero material, you’d already be wearing your
tights.”

I chuckled. Wind
whipped around my hair and threw a few loose strands into my eyes. I caught
them and pushed them behind my ear.

“So jeggings
don’t count then?” I looked down at my tight black clothing, wondering what
accessory could possibly be added to make me look like more of a cliché.

A cape. In
this wind shear, it would look awesome.

“No, they absolutely
don’t.”

Below me, the
traffic light changed. Cars shifted positions, honked at the droves of people meandering
through crosswalks with no regard for rules. Calliope music from a nearby
merry-go-round echoed over the whole scene in some kind of diegetic irony.

“Are we sure
they’re going this way? It seems too crowded.”

He hissed. “They’re
not stupid, Lily. If they know I’m around, then they know I’m up to something. They’re
hoping that if I am, I won’t risk exposure.”

“I take it
your webpage hasn’t gone up yet?”  

“Nearly. I’ve
got almost everything I want on it. It’s the hardware that’s an issue.”

“You mean you
didn’t learn your lesson and don’t have some incredible warehouse somewhere
storing servers in a special climate-controlled environment?”

“You know me
so well. Soon, mademoiselle. Soon.”

I shook my
head, hoping he could see me from the rooftop not so far away. “Would you
believe me if I said
I
wasn’t ready yet?”

“Yes, but don’t
worry. You’ve got a few years before people really start to wonder where all
the kick-ass knowledge is coming from.”

“Fabtastic,” I
muttered.

I watched the
flags in front of the convention center sweep around their poles, at one moment
caressing, the next strangling. Several seagulls swooped toward the water. The
jarring dings and pipes of the music paused and then resumed in chorus with the
shouts of happy children. The traffic lights changed again, the horns beeped. It
was all quite harmonious, and I was there to disrupt it, but if I thought hard
about it, I could almost believe I was there on a weekend, moving from shopping
to an afternoon of ice skating. I smiled and leaned on my elbows, content with
that idea, lost in a memory of the first time my father had taken Eva and me to
a skating rink.

“Spotted ‘em. They’re
en route, two blocks back, about to turn. Time to go stealth, Ninja Girl.”

I used Petula’s
power and looked for them. “Yeah, I see ’em. Are you ready to roll?”

“When you are.”

I took a deep
breath and put a thumbs-up over my head. “Remind me,” I said as I hoisted
myself up and over the inner railing into the scrubby bushes, “why am I
swooping down from above like a goddamn crow?”

“Besides the
fact that it would surprise the Sirens?”

“Yes.”

“It’s epic.”

A couple
walking across the bridge stopped suddenly when they saw what I was doing. Frozen,
the man was deaf to the anxious pleading of his girlfriend that he should do
something to stop me. I got my balance on the metal of the outer railing, stood
up, smiled their way, and waved.

“Don’t worry,
I’m a stunt woman,” I called.

“They’re
almost on you.”

“Say when,” I
whispered.

The man woke
and shook loose into a mad dash. I could hear his footfalls pounding toward me.
I spread my arms and closed my eyes.

“Now!” Jinx
shouted.

I fell
forward, into midair and inner peace. I spotted her in an instant, a soft blur
of red among a host of black, a rose among thorns. I smiled as I twisted and
brought my knees beneath me in a perfect flip, grinned as glass, plastic, and
steel collapsed beneath my hurtling weight. The sun-roof exploded in a
hailstorm of auto glass, sparkling in the air like tiny stars. Even as I
flattened myself to the roof and reached into the vehicle for the driver, I was
giggling.

It was all
happening much too quickly for them. As Jinx had said, their gifts were
limited, while mine, apparently, were not. Before the car had even reached the
intersection, even as it swerved from right to left, smashing into other cars
across numerous lanes, I caught hold of the driver’s face. He let go of the
wheel, and slammed his foot on the brake.

There was a
moment of stomach-taking imbalance as the sudden deceleration flung me over the
hood of the car. Still laughing, I caught the edge of the open sun-roof and
held on, as from behind the other SUV slammed full speed into the rear bumper. More
glass ricocheted around me. The shriek of tires rang out, as my pilotless
vessel swung into a Pitt maneuver and fish-tailed out of control, right into
oncoming traffic.

I pulled with
all my strength against the laws of motion. The steel frame shrank from my
grasp, warped and smooth. As the undercarriage began to tilt threateningly, I
tucked and rolled toward it. Swallowed whole, I found her within, grasping for
her chair as a rollover became certain.

It was as if I
could see it all, every tiny movement, happening like a list of things to be
read and recorded, slowed and filtered. I grasped the soft leather of her seat
and tore through it. Beneath was the firm structure. My hands coiled around
spring and metal and held as the car upturned, my feet braced against the front
seats. Debris scattered and swirled. Glass rained and swept past tender skin
that healed instantly. The sounds became a cacophony too complex for any mind
to untangle.

I was not
bothered by the upheaval; my eyes were focused upon hers, my smile unshaken. She
looked back in sleepy amazement, just in time to see me materialize.

Over and over
we tumbled. My muscles pulled and tore, rehealed and tore again. Bone bent to
the breaking point. Something heavy hit me hard in the small of my back, but
all of it was worth it if no harm came to her.

The rocking
stilled, but the car continued to slide until it crashed, full force, into an
oncoming vehicle. The roof compressed in upon us. I was forced around her by
lack of space, the back of my neck grazed by the headliner. There were a few
moments of stillness. I glanced around. In the seat beside her, now wedged
between the twisted roof and scarred pavement, a Siren was suffering from a
major head laceration. Blood gushed from the wound, and he was too incoherent
to heal it. He moaned in ineffectual agony, and the sound of it woke me.

My sense of
self-preservation reasserted itself. I let force drain from my muscles. My legs
came loose, slicked by blood seeping from my calves. I buckled and landed on
the open square where once a passenger window had been.

Time to go.

I unclasped
her seat belt and took hold of her other restraints. The fragile chain links
fractured in my hands, and in an instant we were free. I cradled her until she
could stand upright, and when she had gotten her bearings, I jumped up to the
window above my head.

“Come on,” I
called down to her and stretched out my hand.

She looked up
at me in drugged-out shock and did not move.

I looked
around. The scene was chaos. Traffic had come to a standstill of carnage, other
vehicles smooshed together and slowly emptying. Behind us, the third SUV had
been sideswiped by another vehicle, but from what I could see, the men inside
were intact and quickly adjusting to the new situation. Up the road, the first
SUV had come to a dead stop. The doors were already opening.

“Come on!” I said.
“I’m not going to hurt you! I’m trying to help you!”

She blinked at
me. Beneath her, the immortal groaned once again. She looked down.

“My name is
Lilith,” I said in what I hoped was a friendly tone. She found my face again.

Someone behind
me shouted. A quick glance over my shoulder told me who it was. Guns were being
drawn from hip holsters.

“We have to go
now, Reesa. They’re coming!”

“Reesa,” she
whispered.

“What?”

“You knew my
name.”

“True,” I said
with a smile. “I know a lot about you.”

“How?”

“Don’t ask me
how, but you told me.”

Her hand
reached up. Fingers wrapped around my arm. One swift tug had us both atop the
side of the mangled Suburban.

The distance
between us and our enemies was shortening. A shot rang out and a bullet whizzed
past me. I took hold of her wrist, pulled her close to me, and stepped off the
edge of the car, putting its diminished bulk between us.

“Well, Reesa,”
I patted her head, “now would be a good time to do that thing you do.”

She frowned,
tiny wrinkles forming in her dusty cocoa skin, until she saw my smile and
understood. “I don’t like it...how it feels.”

“Sometimes we
have to do things we don’t like.” I pointed to the building in the distance, a
tall set of windows that had been a Virgin Megastore. “That’s where we’re going.
Three blocks up on the left is a parking garage. We have transportation
waiting.”

She turned and
found it but looked back to me uncertainly.

I shoved her
gently. “Go! I’ll take care of them.”

But she didn’t
move, and the delay was more than they needed. The first agent came around the
end of our hiding place at full speed. I reacted without thinking and lunged
for him. I don’t think he expected it, as he came up short. I took hold of his
collar and pulled him toward me, planting my knee squarely into his ribs. As he
folded, I spun and took hold of his firearm. It was just like the one Karl had
leveled at me. A chill went up my spine.

If she wasn’t
going to run, this was the next best thing.

I turned and
scaled the wreck and, from its higher vantage, picked out a target. I had never
shot a gun before, but it was a relatively easy thing to learn. Pretty much
point and click. The man fell forward even as the gun recoiled, but he was one
amongst many, and, even though they were now going for cover, they were still
dangerous.

I glanced
down. “Reesa, you have to do it now!”