The One We Feed (5 page)

“What the hell
is that?” I demanded.

“A filthy
Dub-step remix of a deathmetal cover of a nursery rhyme, I think.”

I blinked. The
song echoed over the rock in tachycardic bass. “You did just hear yourself say
that, right?”

Ignoring me,
he set down the tablet. “What did you find out?”

I detailed my
psychic foray and its tragic results, from weird surveillance to box of
tongues. He sat, all the while tapping his knees with impatience. When I had
finished, he shook his head in wonder. The music continued to blare, blending seamlessly
from one track into another. On any normal day, I might have admired the
complexity, but just then, the sounds were putting me on edge. I tried to
ignore it, but an insistent screeching was rubbing over my brain like a
cheese-grater.

“What now,
Jinxy?”

He scrutinized
my forlorn expression and sighed. “A vision that makes no sense, murder, a remote-viewing
chick in a basement, and some nameless, tongue-collecting fucktard who won’t
take the Sangha’s calls. You wrote the soap opera, hellifIknow how it ends.”

While he
chewed his lip ring in thought, I looked around. Mist hung over the bridges and
towers of the city. Soon the temperature would plummet, and it would be yet
another cool, clear California night. Normally that would be appealing, but,
just then, I was dreading it, and the music was somehow making it worse.

I coughed,
trying to press my throat into action. “Do you have any clue what a Siren is?”

“Um, a really
hot woman with a wicked singing voice? Usually found in threes.”

“Really?”

“According to
legend, duh. Didn’t you read the
Odyssey
?” His expression was one I’d
never seen before: the up-tilting disdain of an elite with an elegant
education, combined with the juvenile ire of a science-fiction freak whose
fandom had been affronted.

I rolled my
eyes. “You know what I mean.”

He shrugged
again. “No idea. I’m only a century and a half old, you know, and I never did
get out much.”

“Would Arthur
know?”

He stood up. “Would
he tell if he did? Seems to me that either of those two could have warned you
in advance.”

I looked away.
There might have been a time when I would have staunchly defended Arthur,
insisted that
absolutely
he would divulge
all
pertinent
information, but that time had come and gone. I was a baby bird, being pushed
from the nest to fly or fall, and that was it.

“Maybe they
didn’t know,” I said, but I could hear the dubious tenor of my own voice.

“Right, and
monkeys might fly out of my ass.” The song shifted again, to a high-pitched
chant threaded with a resonant echo of drums. It snaked through my head and
punched holes in my eardrums. I put my hands to my head and tried to block the
sound, but it was much too loud.

“Hey,
Scene-jerks,” Jinx shouted, “Wanna turn that shit down? You’re too young to
need hearing aids.”

A member of
the group looked back at us with a pained expression. The music dimmed and was
replaced by laughter. “Who died and made you the Dark Lord, Red?”

My brows went
up, and, for some reason, I was instantly furious. To my mind, Jinx was a
badass, a colorful addition to a timeless ninja squad, and no one had the right
to insult him. I jumped to my feet in sudden outrage, pushed past my short
friend, and stomped down the rock to the sound of their guffawing. The music
emanated from a very nice mobile docking system that surely cost someone’s
parents a pretty penny. As I drew level with their group, a few of them had the
sense to back away on their hands and knees. I picked up the docking base, tore
the phone from it, and threw the thing down the mountainside. In the sudden
stillness, the speaker made a lovely clattering sound as it broke into pieces.

“As tempted as
I am,” I said in the scathing voice of a woman possessed, “to believe that you
are just ignorant, attention-deprived children, I am going to give you the
benefit of the doubt and assume that at some point in your lives your mothers
taught you manners.”

One of them
swallowed, a few attempted to reply but failed. I glared at their stunned and
horrified faces.

“Then I am
going to assume that they have lapsed and that you are simply in need of a
helpful reminder from a friend.” I reached down and picked up a backpack full
of contraband, turned it over, and sent its contents after the phone. Objects
of all sizes skittered away. A bong fell out and shattered. A bag of Snickers
bars exploded. I lifted a foot and stomped on all of it, a frenzy building in
my heart.

I found a
purse and kicked that down the hill. A girl shrieked and tumbled after it. A
hand landed on my arm. I plucked it off and squeezed so hard that the bones
snapped. A male voice cried out.

“She’s fucking
crazy!” someone else gasped.

“Lily,” Jinx
interjected, but I was on a rampage, something I was becoming very good at.

“I will teach
you something about darkness, you spoiled little….” I stalked toward a few of
them clutching each other as they backed toward a fifty-foot drop.

“We’re sorry,
lady!”

“Sorry is not
good enough!”

“Lilith,” Jinx
insisted, suddenly taking hold of my hand. “Stop, okay? Something’s wrong with
you!”

I was prepared
to deny it vehemently until I caught sight of my reflection in the sunglasses
propped on his forehead. My skin was waxen and seemed stretched thin, my hair
hung around my face in a tangle, my eyes were wild and, most importantly, a
malicious shade of red.

Chapter
4

Duct Tape

I sat in the truck, my head pressed
against the steering wheel in shame, hands shielding me from view.

Arthur had
once told me that there was no sense in naming something; everything was a
continuous process, a thing in constant transition, and to name it, was to deny
that progression. I was not a “Lilith”; I was a “Lilith-ing.”

Every immortal
had begun with a fixation. They had focused on this thought, whatever it was,
to the point that they eventually wound up forgetting to die. For me it had
been strength. I had wanted to save my sister Eva. She must have known that. It
was her strategy all along, to set me on the path. But every gift could also
become a curse. Perhaps the time had come when my desire to win successfully
undid any good I might do. With this obsession, I would never be able to stop
changing. Really, it had been ridiculous of me to get so comfortable with who I
had become.

It was just
that these changes were opposed to the larger goal, the
opposite
of me. Someone
was dead, by
my
hand. Which was bad enough, but what if I hurt someone I
loved? I thought of Eva and knew it could never happen again.

Not ever.

I heard the
clatter of the tailgate being lowered. Jinx was making sure that all of our
belongings were still there. A few moments later, he got in and shut the door
on our bubble of disquiet.

“I’m sorry.” I
wiped my face. “I don’t know what’s going on, why I was so angry. I could have
hurt them if you hadn’t stopped me.” I glanced up at him tentatively, but his
boyish face was inscrutable. “Are they okay?”

“Don’t worry
about them.” Twisting in the seat, he leaned across the center console
suddenly, and, without warning, embraced me. “Are
you
okay?” he
whispered in my ear.

Fresh tears
slid down my face into his hair, turning pink before they found his collar. I
squeezed him closer and then let him go.

“We need to figure
out what’s going on.” He sat back and examined my face. “I’m tired of worrying
about you.”

I managed a
nervous chuckle. “Me too, but how?”

He retreated
to his side, bearing all the signs of an uncertain teenager. Pulling his knees
up to his chest, he wrapped his arms around them. “There’s only one person who
knows everything we want to know and just might tell us.”

I thought of
Arthur but knew that, for all his wisdom, he was just a wise-guy.

“That girl in
the basement, what did you say her name was?”

“Petula.”

“Petula?”

“Yes. Why,
does it mean something to you?”

“Maybe.” He
shook his head and put his feet on the dash, stretching out as if nothing had
happened. “But it doesn’t matter. The only way we’re going to be able to solve
this mystery is if we can get to her and ask her, face to face, what the fuck
is going on.”

For a moment I
thought that I’d misheard him. “What? How is that the
only
way?”

“The
easiest
way,” he clarified with a raised index finger.

I snorted. “I’m
the ultimate snoop, how is it easier to try to talk to her?”

“Put it this
way, we need to neutralize her. The questioning part is just a cherry on top.”

“You mean you
want to interrogate and possibly wax her?”

“
Liberate
her,” he corrected, still pointing at the ceiling. “She’s a prisoner, too,
right?”

“True,” I said
dubiously, sure I was dreaming, “but how the hell are we going to pull that
off? They have cameras, guns, and henchmen. Did I mention that she can
see
you
coming?”

He shrugged
and turned to rummage through the items in the backseat until he found his
mini-cooler of Redbull. “If she was that interested in helping them, she would
have told them what she saw me doing.”

The click and
hiss of his double-sized can almost sounded like mockery, two little nettles
stabbing the back of my skull with unsympathetic optimism.

“What?” I
slapped the wheel. “How can you say that!”

“Trust me when
I say, they would definitely
want
to know. If she had any intention of
really helping them, she’d have told.”

“How do you
know she
hasn’t
told them?” I shouted. “I only saw her for a few
moments!”

He was silent,
his lips pursed. I took a few deep breaths and shook myself even further from
that strange, uncontrollable rage, while he sat demurely, disarming me with a childlike,
wide-eyed gaze over the rim of his can. Before I knew what I was doing, I was
driving across the city again, heading toward doom. Something in his face made
me suspect that he knew more than he was saying, but after how I’d been
behaving all day, I felt uncomfortable demanding answers.

“We have no
choice. It’s either this, or I have to leave you so they can’t track you.”

I started. Until
he spoke, I had not realized how much I wanted him to stay close to me, how
much I truly needed his humor, smarts, and connection with something closer to
my generation than the two statues that sat across from each other smiling
bemusedly at the grid of the
Go
table. It was the RockwellIan circle of
hell.

“I don’t like
it, but….” I smoothed the hair from my face. “I hate the alternative more.”

The sun was
beginning to lower, and it was only four o’clock, a trailer to winter. Mist was
settling over the bridge, obscuring the skyline, thickening the waning light
into a soup.

“When a day
starts out badly,” he murmured suddenly, “it’s best to help it along in that
direction; that way at the end of it, it will have been a success.”

I glanced his
way as the headphones went in, stifling any contradiction. But I had nothing to
say. Some cruel wind had decided to ruffle the pages of my memory and turn them
back by years as if to punish me for my misbehavior.

My mother sat
in the driver’s seat of our minivan, hair in curlers, leaning over me to sew a
button onto my blouse. Her brows furrowed in concentration, she made short work
of it, while I marveled in between moments of intense awkwardness and
embarrassment.

“There now!”
she had said cheerfully and kissed my cheek. “All you need is a needle, a
little super glue, and some duct tape, and you can fix any problem whatsoever.”

I had shaken
my head incredulously. Eva had thrown up on my first outfit. A pot of coffee
had smeared the words across my father’s precious manuscript, thus
necessitating a reprint at the last minute. Two extra trips for cold medicine
and to the sick-kid day-care center, and I had finally arrived at high school
late, only to discover the missing button, which had been sewn on with
mismatched thread. If it got much worse, I was fairly certain I’d lose my mind.

“Tell your
teacher I’m sorry, it’s just one of those days.”

I had stared
at her skeptically. “That’s not exactly a good enough excuse.”

She had smiled
in the way I was sure my father loved more than anything else, like the rainbow
glittering at the edges of the rain hammering our windows. “Look at it this
way; if it stays bad, then at least it’s a successful day from beginning to
end.”

Easy for her to
say, I’d thought at the time, she don’t smell like vomit.

She’d said her
goodbyes and reminded me that she and Dad would be going to the theater that
night and that I should come home on time so that Eva could be dropped off by
the sitter.

“Sweetie, don’t
look like that! If you can’t handle a day like this, how are you going to go
away to school? Try to let it roll off you!”

It was the
last thing she ever said to me.

The bad day
had been a
complete
success, from beginning to end.

“Not enough
duct tape in the world,” I whispered.

Lilith
.

I blinked at
the sudden voice in my mind that was not mine.

“Yes, Arthur,”
I said quietly. Ever since my full-death experience, I could find him anywhere,
so long as he wanted me to. It was not surprising he could find me, too, though
at the moment, I
was
fairly amazed to learn I
wanted
to be found
by him.

Whatever
excuse he came up with, it wouldn’t be enough.

He didn’t say
anything at first. The sound of the tires smoothing out the road echoed around
me.

Be careful.

I shook my
head. What was there to say to a man who seemed to know everything and never
begrudge anyone any of it? He had known, all along, how it would end, that I
would be fine. He did not say anything about the dead man, but why should he? Nothing
could be done about it now, and if he’d warned me, I doubt I would have
listened.

I think what
ticked me off the most was that I felt bad for being angry. No one else had
ever made me feel so guilty in all my life, not even Eva.

“Why won’t you
talk to me, Arthur?” A chill passed over me. Instinctively, I turned on the
heater, though it did not help the miserable ache I was feeling.

I am not your
teacher, Lilith. That is what you wanted.

“I know, but a
friend….”

Would tell you
to be careful, and to be certain you are mindful of your limitations.

I stared at
the road, burning in the afternoon sun, sweating in the cloud cover off the
bay. “I
killed
a man, Arthur!”

I know.

“Why didn’t
you say anything?” I sobbed, my voice raw. Jinx turned away from the view to
look at me. He yanked out one headphone. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

I could feel
his hesitation.
They knew where we were, and we were oblivious.

I laughed and
blubbered at the same time, and for a minute, the road blurred. “Oblivious? Is
that a joke? We’re the three most insightful people on earth; we see the
future
,
and you’re telling me we were oblivious?”

It was
unavoidable.

I swerved
through traffic, nearly driving a cab into the pylon at the edge of the bridge.
“Don’t you care that someone is dead? What kind of Buddha are you?”

You know what
death feels like, Lilith. You know what happens. Is it wrong for me to be
unafraid? Is it wrong for me to accept what cannot be changed?

I kept a death
grip on the wheel as Jinx looked from my stricken face to the road and back
again. “It
could
have been changed!”

I cannot
agree,
he
replied eventually.

“I can’t talk
to you now. I have something I have to do,” I said, but it wasn’t like a phone
I could just hang up. I was afflicted by him until he chose to stop being my
ineffectual guardian angel.

I know, my
dear. Please be careful. There is a roll of duct tape in the glove compartment.

I felt him
leave me, like a breeze passing through my thoughts, setting things to rights
in a benevolent wave of peace. In its wake, I was quieted, my tears stilled; it
was the
dharma
that mattered, and this was it, the road to equilibrium. Jinx
replaced his earbud but watched me from the corner of his eye as I drove almost
blindly to the tan stucco building and its mismanaged parking lot.

A few blocks
from the safe house, he finally looked away and asked to be let out.

“Circle around
once, watch to see if anyone leaves. When they do, come back and pick me up.”

I rubbed my
eyes and finally gave up trying to be anything but miserable. “Why?”

“Just do it.” He
shut the door. I watched him in the rear view as I drove away. He was standing
on the corner, talking to himself as usual. He fit right in in this
neighborhood.

The safe house
was as I had left it, one staff member short. As I parked the car down the
street, I glanced at myself in the rear view mirror and, for the first time,
noticed a smear of blood in front of my right ear. It must have splattered and
been smudged by my fingers. I wiped it off, rubbing furiously.

Out, out
damned spot,
my
mind scolded in mean-spirited iambics.

A few minutes
went by. I contemplated picking up my phone and interrupting Jinx’s
conversation with himself until suddenly an entire contingent of Smiths exited
the building in a rush and got into a cavalcade of neatly parked company
vehicles.

“I’ll be
damned,” I murmured. I pulled out after their queue, turned the corner, and
swept around the one-way streets until I found Jinx, grin in place.

He yanked the
door open. “I guess it worked?”

“Yeah, like, a
whole group of them took off. What did you do?”