An entire box of human tongues, purpling slugs covered in slime, packaged oh-so-neatly and dropped on the Sangha’s doorstep.
I woke, back on the rock, groaning and trying not to throw up. A methodical rhythm was being carved out of random mechanical noise. I realized a few moments later that the grating sound was meant to be music and that it was coming from a group of people farther down on the rock. I glanced at Jinx in commiseration, only to find his head bobbing like an enthusiastic metronome.
“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, b
ut 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 ch
anged!”
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?”
The One We Feed Page 4