The One We Feed (17 page)

She was
shaking, her arms wrapped around her torso. “But...but I can’t!”

A second
bullet brushed past my left ear, nicking it. I dropped into a crouch and opened
fire on the point of origin, a small sedan stopped in the center of the
intersection. “Why not?”

“I don’t know!
I have to be angry or something!”

“What?” A
third shot came perilously close to my shoulder. I stood and fired expertly,
breaking a window and sending one body out flat, but it wasn’t enough. They
were attacking me from two sides, and, no matter how many shooting games a geek
had played, one was never really prepared for such an attack. From my right,
two guns fired at once, and finally a bullet found me. It hit with a dull thud,
somewhere above my knee. Instantly, my leg lost function and collapsed. I
toppled back and went over the side, landing on the ground beside her with a
thud, bleeding profusely.

She gasped,
but before I could tell her it was going to be all right, that I would heal up
without so much as a scratch, something happened.

My lips parted
in a silent cry. Her irises had suddenly become translucent, reflecting red in
the sunlight. Her fingers uncurled from around her mouth, but not before I saw
the nail beds darken with blood. She sank into a kind of crouch, as muscle
shortened and clenched for action, the bones in her legs seemed to condense,
and her entire skeleton shifted. Head down, her wild, unkempt hair looked
almost like a mane, and when she lifted her face to me, her teeth had
lengthened into a row of fangs.

No shots had
come from my gun for several moments. I could hear them shouting to each other,
speculating about me. Crowds of people were lifting their heads from behind
cars, mailboxes, and newspaper machines, gasping and crying at the violence of
the scene. Sirens were wailing nearby as ambulance, fire truck, and police
cruiser came to a halt and peace keepers were forced to run through the traffic
jam to find the injured. But with any luck, we would both be gone, soon enough.

Her
contortions had sent her to her knees beside me. Her breathing was labored, her
skin stretched thin until it seemed almost dark red. Saliva was collecting at
the corners of her mouth, dripping onto pavement. Her voice had gone silent,
replaced by a low and steady growl.

“Reesa,” I
whispered, though in the face of her incredible transformation, I was more than
slightly daunted. “You have to go now.”

Her eye caught
mine for only an instant. In the span of one short breath, she leaped over my
head and hit the ground running. I pulled and pushed myself upright against the
roof of our overturned car and got to my feet. As muscle fibers repaired, the
tiny metal fragments were strangled and pressed from me, and before she had
gotten three or four car lengths ahead of me, my wound was gone.

I raced after
her, catching only a glimpse of an approaching Smith, his mouth to his cuff in
a hurried explanation to whoever was at the other end. People blocked the path,
jumping up as Reesa flew over their heads like a lioness. I took to the cars,
cracking windows and denting hoods as I fought to keep up with her.

Market Street
was filling with bystanders craning their necks for a look, unaware that they
were directly in our path. Reesa landed on the sidewalk before a clot of people
who had been preparing to cross, threw back her head, and, as if in warning,
let out a cry the likes of which I had only heard in movies. Several voices
screaming at once, she howled. The sound instantly struck a chord, and like
rabbits the tight group of onlookers scattered away from her, into traffic,
into each other, anywhere but close to her

Afraid she
might lash out at them, I put on a burst of speed. “Reesa, keep going!”

Her head
swiveled, her crazed eyes found mine, and a red tongue swept over her cracked
and stretched lips. Her gaze flicked to the street behind me, but I could not
afford to slow and look after whoever might be chasing me.

“Go!” I
shouted, landing in the bus stop like a long-jumper.

She turned
back to the street. Cross traffic cut off our escape, but as I reached her, she
had again chosen another way. She went left, racing past mall patrons and all
their packages until she had gained speed. Just as a cable car sped into the
intersection, she launched herself at it in a beautiful flying arc, hit the
windshield, and rebounded into a twist that sent her hopscotching across the
street like a skipping stone.

 “Wow!”

For a moment,
I couldn’t figure out where the voice had come from. Then I recalled the
earpiece and the prosthetic adhesive keeping it in place.

“Jinx, she’s
on her way.”

“Don’t slow
down now! She’s got company!”

“Fuck.” There
was nothing for it; I would have to follow her lead

I backed up
against the wall and then ran toward the blur of cars. People tripped over each
other to stay away from me. I left the ground and, kicking, slammed into a taxi
going at least ten miles an hour over the speed limit. Not as gracefully as
her, I rolled over his hood and managed to land in an open space of street,
with just enough sense and time to crouch and leap out of the path of the
oncoming car.

“Not as
awesome,” Jinx commented.

“Fuck you.” I
sent sightseers in all directions like a possessed bowling ball as I got to the
other side of the street and realigned myself with the parking garage. “Where
are they?”

“You’ve lost
the ones chasing you!”

“No, Jinx!” I
bellowed, dodging a homeless man. “Her! Are they to her yet?”

“I can’t tell!
The SUV is blocking traffic on the cross street and people got out, but I
couldn’t see where they went!”

I found the
opening of the garage, a dark cave amongst the shop fronts, and went straight
to the stairs. I didn’t bother with all of them but climbed as high as I could
as fast as possible. The metal door opened onto blinding sunlight and a roof so
packed with cars that it was hard to believe they could be removed by anyone
but a master of the Rubix cube. Reesa was standing at the far edge, her back
heaving.

“Got her,
Jinx. Reesa!” I called, but she didn’t turn.

I slowed to a
halt and approached her calmly. Her proximity to the outcome I had already
foretold was too great for comfort. Hand out, I inched toward her.

“Reesa? Come
away from the edge, please?”

She didn’t
move. Poised as if to spring off, her body shivered like a plucked harp string.
Something was holding her attention. Upon the far roof, a figure stood. I
examined it, but for some reason, could not quite tell who it was, though only
twenty feet or so divided us. If it was one of them, I didn’t have time to
wonder.

“Reesa?”

Her breathing
began to slow. No matter how advantageous it would have been to keep her in
that form, I could see that her adrenalin was wearing off. Soon she would be
the little girl again. I chanced it, reached out, and touched her shoulder,
still hunched in the bearing of a monster.

“Please step
back with me. We have a way….”

Blonde hair
caught the sunlight across from me. Hazel eyes were dancing as a smile that was
hers, but not hers, twisted on a face that seemed much too cruel.

“Reesa,” the
figure sang from across the divide. “Come with me, child.”

The breath
caught in my chest as my heart fumbled. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them
once more, but what I saw was the same. It was not a mirage.

Eva.

“Reesa,” she
called again, but it was as if she called to me. Her hand was out, and, if not
for the fact that I was holding onto Reesa, I might have tried to take it.

“It’s time to
go, child,” Eva murmured. Her voice carried easily, sweetly slipping into my
ear, wrapping around my limbs until I was stuck fast. My hand fell to my side,
empty, as Reesa climbed onto the rail.

“No,” I
whispered.

I could not
reach for her. In an instant, she had slipped over the side and was gone. Conflicting
desires raged within me. I had fought for both of them, yet one had just
canceled the other out. Struggling, I raised my hands to my face and let out a
sob.

“No!”

But I had
forgotten about the others. From behind, the full weight of a man crashed into
me. I stumbled forward on numb legs, hit the side, and tumbled over. Eva’s face
was the last thing I saw, smiling after me with a villainous grin.

Chapter
12

The Piper

There was only an instant to
spare, but it was enough.

I sat up with
a sucking gasp, my lungs fighting as if I had just risen from the depths of the
primordial ocean. The ground around us was shaking in a light tremor, the
hanging lamp above Arthur’s game table swaying, casting weird shadows on us
all. Jinx was beside me in an instant, smoothing the hair from my face even as
I sobbed.

“You’re okay! You’re
all right, Lily! It was just a vision.”

I fought
terror, held him so tightly I was sure I was hurting him. Suddenly, my skin
warmed, my breathing slowed, and a tremendous sense of peace came over me. It
was all a dream, a possibility, but not something I needed to worry about
anymore.

I fell back
into an embrace. When I opened my eyes, Ananda was looking down at me sadly.

“I...I died,”
I whispered.

His smile was
faint. “Do not exaggerate. You cannot see your own death.”

I blinked. Of
course not. Even if I had been about to die, the message in a bottle could only
come from a living source.

“
She
died. Again. That’s six times now. Their security is impossible!”

He released
me. “Ah. I am sorry.”

Arthur was
sitting in his usual chair beside the window, looking at me over the edge of
his book.

“Eva was
there.”

If I had
blinked, I would have missed it. His eyes flicked to his cousin’s and then
returned to mine.

“Eva is dead,
Lilith,” Jinx said.

“She was there.
She killed Reesa.”

“That is also
impossible,” Ananda whispered. His long, bronze fingers stroked the upper half
of my arm, as if to convince me of my own shape. “It is possible to cheat death
but not to come back from it.”

I looked hard
at Arthur. I stared until my eyes ached and my body tingled with the urge to
rise and pummel the truth from him. “I saw her body. She was dead for hours. I
know
she’s dead.” I said it to gauge his reaction, because for me there was no need
to say it. Her death was the core and reason for my existence. The most shining
hope was not strong enough to resurrect the tiniest portion of her. She lived
now on the edge of nothingness, only in my past.

He sighed and
tenderly laid down his book. Something in his face seemed weary then. The
swinging shadows seemed to caress his features and stay longer than necessary
in the hollows of his eyes and cheeks, painting him like a living
momento mori
.

“Eva
is
dead,”
he said. “The one you saw was only a reflection.”

Beneath my
weight, the smooth muscles of Ananda’s lithe frame seemed to flex with the
strength of his intake of air.

“As the Buddha
sat beneath the tree,” he intoned like a serene tape recorder, “Lord Mara came
to him, riding on a mighty elephant, surrounded by his terrible army. The
foulest creatures, they, deformed of body, with gaping fangs and lolling
tongues and eyes like burning coals. Mara spurred them to attack, but when even
their arrows turned to flowers and not a hair on the Buddha’s head was touched,
Mara sent forth his beautiful daughters to tempt the Lord Buddha. This too
failed, and in rage Mara approached the very seat of Buddha. ‘I should be here,
in place of you, for I am surely more deserving. By what right do you claim
this place?’ The Buddha smiled. ‘I have earned it over eons. I have studied the
perfections.’ ‘So have I,’ Mara sneered. To him, he called his many followers;
they would speak to his merits. He looked upon the Buddha in scorn and said, ‘Who
will testify for you?’ Lord Buddha, sitting in his meditation, reached down
with the fingers of his right hand and touched the soil. The ground shook, and
Mara fell from atop his great height and was afraid. ‘The earth itself will
testify,’ the Buddha said, and Mara fled the tree. Thus, the Buddha destroyed
Mara, Lord of all Illusions.”

His voice
trailed into silence. Our eyes were upon the very real man who sat beside us,
the legend incarnate. In my pain, I had forgotten him, the Lord Buddha. How was
that possible? Thousands of years my senior, the man who begat Eva and me, and
I had regarded him as a hindrance. It was a sobering thought. Swallowing hard,
I sat up and leaned forward on the bed.

“Mara,” I
whispered with a shiver, for I knew what the name meant, “the bringer of death.”

“It is said
that this was the moment of the Buddha’s Enlightenment,” Ananda continued, his
voice alive with true emotion, a resurgence of that follower he had been. “It
is the moment he became immortal, it is true, but Mara is just a construct, a
tale added over time. I learned this story among the Guardians, though I have
liked it very much.”

I turned and
looked at him. He was gazing into space, across time, seeing years as they had
truly been, stretched and interminable, lengthy serpents clothed in tiny scales
of minutia. Close to, they were rough-looking things, but from the distance
afforded by history, they were smooth and seamless, weaving together as if
alive, nipping at their own tails.

Be careful of
their fangs, my dear,
I thought. Serpents were such tricky things.

“Then it didn’t
happen like the story says,” I asked Arthur, though I was sure he would not
answer me.

The Buddha smiled
in that strange quixotic way preserved in countless variations of stone, gold,
and polished wood, retaining his mystery but acknowledging what a nuisance it
was.

“Hinduism had
no place for me. It had to make one in order to survive.”

“Then who is
Mara really?”

Jinx leaped up
from the bed and into his rolling office chair. In a push of wheels over matted
carpet, he was at his terminal, jacked in, and typing as if furious with the
keyboard.

“Mara is a
deceiver,” Arthur said quietly. His smile was gone. He was looking at me from
behind the protective cover of his long, dark lashes. “Like Moksha, he sees the
weaknesses of men, but unlike Moksha, he can become those weaknesses. Each
person sees something different, from the most trusted friend, to the person to
whom you owe the most. In this way, he bends men to his will.”

I took a deep
breath and closed my eyes. This certainly explained Petula’s Mr. Dark Spot. He
was a chameleon, and her ability could see nothing but the lack of truth. Or
perhaps she saw the thing she feared or longed for the most: darkness, the
absence of all others. It was a solemn thought, for even though she was over a
hundred, I still saw her as the child I had cradled in my arms.

“His armies…,”
I turned and looked at the Revolutionary. He was still typing away. “The monsters
with fangs and lolling tongues, were they like Reesa?”

“The Rakshasa
are Mara’s chosen weapon. They always have been.”

Suddenly, Jinx
disconnected from his computer and slid across the floor to us. “This is
fucking amazing. Mara isn’t just a Doctor Who nemesis!”

He looked up
with a smile that was out of place, the sheer delight of the explorer
correlating data, and dropped it as soon as he saw our faces.

“Um...okay, so...Mara
isn’t just a Buddhist phenomenon, either. He’s everywhere. The name Mara has
been given to half a dozen wraiths, goddesses of darkness, evil spirits, and
you name it. From Latvia, to India, to Germany, to the Bible. He’s almost
always the bringer of death, lord of the night, goddess of the moon, or
whatever.” He turned the computer around and showed us a painting of the
supposed creature Mara from Germanic myth. It was a tiny demon who sat astride
the bosom of a sleeping woman. “His name
is
the root of the word ‘nightmare.’
He’s been around since before the Buddha even suckled and has been dancing a
dervish through history ever since.”

I looked back
to Arthur, stunned. “If that’s true, then...he was immortal
before
you?”

He closed his
eyes and bowed his head almost sleepily. It was as if he’d been waiting an
eternity for me to ask that question, and finally things were as they needed to
be. I felt as if I was on a cusp, as if suddenly, he would open up to me, and I
would see through to his heart. It caused my chest to clench with a
memory-twinge of painful anticipation.

I leaned
forward and touched his hand. It was cool.

“Suffering has
always existed, since the beginning of sentient thought. So too has Mara, the
first of us to grasp for immortality and take hold. But he is simple...devious,
but simple, from a time when men were barely men.”

“They’re
barely ‘men’ now,” Jinx mumbled. I looked at him sharply; he was not to ruin
Arthur’s one foray into disclosure. “What?”

I gently tapped
the hand I held. “Go on,” I said, trying to say with my eyes how badly I needed
this.

Benevolently,
he obliged me. “He clings to this, to what he may have from this place. That is
why he remains. He cannot let go.”

I sat back
pensively, Arthur’s fingers sliding through mine. If it was the Thought that
kept men here, and the Thought that turned to torment, then what other way was
there? From one suffering to another, could there ever be a way out?

“First, we
saw, then, we sought, and now we shall seek to seek no more,” he breathed. His
hand was in his lap, he sat as if on a throne, but if it was the face of a
living god, it was a nearly exhausted one.

Immortals
before
Arthur’s infectious meme could rampage through society and turn our eyes
inward? I could not imagine it.

“Are you
saying you evolved
from
him,” I said before Jinx could say it. I was the
one who needed to speak those words. I was the one who needed the answer.

Arthur
shrugged one shoulder. “From him, because of him, in response to him, I know
not. Nor does it matter. I know only that the superstition he begets has no
place in this world’s future. Our natural will to survive will annihilate it,
or we will perish.”

Suddenly, he got
to his feet and walked out the door. I heard his footfalls on the balcony as he
strode heavily toward the stairs. I jumped up and slapped my hands on Jinx’s
shoulders, spinning him in the chair.

“Find me more
on the Rakshasa.”

He saluted and
slid back to his desk. I turned and went for the door.

Ringing in my
ears were those few words that said so much:
“Things will not always be as
they are now….”

I dashed after
Arthur’s retreating form. At the base of the stairs, I caught him, my fingers
curving around the handhold of his collarbone and gripping tenaciously. He
turned and leveled me with such a mournful gaze that I thought I might gasp,
but I managed not to. Instead, I put my hands on either side of his neck and
matched my quickened pulse to his slower one with barely a thought.

“Are you all
right?” I leaned toward him, eye to eye, thanks to the last step.

He managed a
smile. “And so it begins, Lilith.”

“Say it,
please,” I said, though my voice caught in my throat. The sobs were within my
chest, clinging at my heart, strangling me with desperation. I needed him to
feel my tears, but what would be the point in that? They were just water to a
creature that could hear my thoughts and know me so completely. “Tell me I’m on
the path, Arthur, please. Tell me I’m meant to destroy him and I will.”

To my utter
shock and delight, he reached around my arms and took my face in his hands. He
pulled me so close, that I thought, for just a flicker of an instant, this
would be
the
moment, but no, it was something more important than the
lusts of a stupid girl’s romantic inclinations. He held my eyes before his and
looked into me deeply, as if he could not see exactly what I was, as if I was
as much a mystery to him as he was to me. Flattered and distraught, I smiled and
held to him as tightly.

“This is dance,
Lilith. It always was. He and I, circling around. Before us was the idea of us,
until the idea became reality. We circle always.”

For the first
time in our friendship, his voice was not the perfect, unblemished sound of a
low flute. It was hoarse and raw and it terrified me.

“How can I
join?”  

“You are
already a part of it, Lilith.” The pressure on either side of my face grew and
then dissipated into a mere feather as he stroked my jawline with the backs of
his fingers. “You are the center. It was
always
a battle for you, but I
am the only one who knew it.”

“Then am I
meant to beat him?”

His eyes
traced my features lovingly, and a shiver threatened me with weakness. I pushed
it aside for him, for what he needed to say.

“There is no
winning a conversation, Lilith. There is either progress or silence. This world
is stuck in battle, fighting advance, filling silence,
choosing
nothing.
That is the
dharma
, my dear.
You
are the
dharma
. This
world is yours. Remake it in your image.”