The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

“Well,” I winked, “if you don’t count being cured.”

  He mouthed the word back to me and perked up, the gun seemingly forgotten. “How?”

  It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times. I realized, as he framed the same question, that it didn’t matter how. What mattered was that it was possible, that it was real, that it was mine. How could I be afraid of it? It was mine. I could save people like him. What was there to fear?

  I tilted my head to one side and pointed at my chest. “It turned out Karl’s logic was sound, sort of. Moksha killed my parents. There were two of us, my sister and me. I was too old, already had plans for myself, but Eva...she was malleable. She may not have been the next Buddha, but she created a way for me to be.”

  He swallowed. “You...you cured Karl?”

  My smile turned to a blush. “I guess. Not entirely sure how it happened or if I can duplicate it on command, but it’s happened now four times. I’m willing to try to help you, if you can help me.”

  His mouth dropped open.

  “Put the gun down,” I said with nod, “or I’ll use one of the talents I’ve acquired on you.”

  “Why would you help me? After...after what….”

  I laughed again. The look on his face was its own reward.

  “Someone has to,” I said, when I could catch my breath. “In truth, I don’t know. I just know that there’s good in you yet.”

  He seemed doubtful of that, but I could see the longing in his eye. He wanted to believe me, but he’d been burned before.

  “You’re a sucker, not a psychopath.” I picked up the phone cord and reeled the handset upward, laying it in the cradle. “Call him. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth. If you tell me what I want to know, I’ll do what I can.”

  He looked between the gun and the phone. After long moments of agonizing uncertainty, he set the revolver aside, picked the handset back up, and dialed the number.

  Karl answered with the first ring. Without any prompting, he greeted Hal by name and said, “She’s telling the truth. My abilities are gone, but...I feel different.”

  Hal was perplexed. I pushed the loud speaker button and hovered over the mic. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “Yes,” he chuckled. “It turns out I can find you sometimes.”

  “I let you.”

  “Ah.”

  “Have you been checking in on him since our last conversation?” I locked eyes with Hal. He was staring at me in astonishment. “Making sure he didn’t get in too deep?”

  “I was about to call him when you kicked in the door.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Hal. “That makes two, Hal. Two people willing to understand, if you’ll explain everything. I need to know about the girl, Reesa, and why Mara is so terrified of her. I also want to know more about this Devlin guy.”

  Hal looked from the receiver to me and back again. “He’s a seer now?”

  “Not quite,” Karl said. “It’s the jhana.”

  “I, on the other hand, have Petula’s gift, William’s gift, and, oh wait, did I mention, I see the future?” I sighed heavily and stood up. “Tell me you’re working on why that is, with all your nifty science stuff, Karl.”

  “How did you guess? I spoke to William yesterday. He’s agreed to come by and help us. I’ve also seen to Petula. She’ll be arriving in a few hours.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anything,” he granted. “And if Hal is willing to drop by when you’re finished speaking with him, I am more than sure he can help us too.”

  I dipped my head at the silent man in question. He seemed so utterly discombobulated that at any moment, he might pass out.

  He was beyond answering.

  “I’ll call you when I know what’s going to happen. Oh wait, you’ll already know. Wow, this is hard to get used to.” I hung up the phone.

  Hal sank back into his chair and gazed at the revolver in absent-minded wonder. “I can tell you what you want to know.”

  “Start with Reesa.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl, the one he wanted to bring here.”

  His gaze cleared. He looked up at me, amazed. “How do you . . .?”

  I tapped my head. “Super noodle. I know she’s a Rakshasi, just tell me why he keeps her in a coma.”

  He shook his head vaguely. “I don’t know how she does it, but...she can control them somehow. They’re dumb killing machines, but when she’s with them, they’re almost human again. Mara said...he said that she was talking to them, or something….”

  “And they listened,” I finished, hearing the words in Petula’s little voice.

  “Yes. Ordinarily, Mara would not have been so concerned about that. He just started cutting out their tongues so that they couldn’t speak, but when he went to recapture her from the pit….”

  I walked around the desk slowly, my eye on the gun, and knelt down beside him. “What?”

  “He thought she’d turned, but then she turned back. He pulled her out, and she changed shape. She can go in and out of the Rakshasi condition. He said it was astounding.”

  “But I thought the Rakshasa were all shape-shifters.”

  “That’s just a myth,” he said. “People made that up, used Mara’s creatures to explain all sorts of things. They have always been monsters. It’s why his compound is always in the desert or in the snow. He has to keep them away from people, somewhere where, if they escape, they can’t get far without dying from exposure or be seen.”

  I reached out and put my hand over his wrist, testing his words with Ursula’s gift. He didn’t appear to notice it at first, but when he did, tears dripped loose and hung on his nose like melting icicles. “And Devlin?”

  “I did a favor for him, several centuries ago. He owed me. Lent me a Siren to pass on to Mara. That’s how it started. Then suddenly, I owed him.”

  “And the Sirens?” He lifted his other hand to place over the top of mine. It was as if the thing had no sensation, the way he moved. He seemed tired, then. Much as Moksha had the last time I had seen him. I hoped that whatever he had seen in me, Hal could see too. “I know that they can make people do things by using sound. Is that right?”

  “They can get inside the mind, break it down. Make a man think he’s a king or make him forget he ever knew love. They give lies a form. They can turn the brain to mush if they want to.”

  “Mara uses them as part of the deconditioning?”

  “Yes. They tear down the rational walls and make it easier for them to fall on each other. The process is survival. Survival turns them to monsters.”

  “Why would the Sirens help him?”

  “There aren’t that many of them, but most of them are...damaged.”

  “How so?”

  “Power goes to their heads, I suppose.” He gave a shuddering sigh and shook his head. “Same with all of us really.”

  I got up and sat on the desk in front of him, still holding his hands. The gun was beside me. I nudged it aside with my hip.

  “I’m going to find Devlin,” I vowed.

  “He moves around. I think he’s at the Circle right now. At least, he was the last I heard.” Hal looked sadly at the gun and then up at my face. “Is that everything?”

  “Not quite,” I said softly. “Where’s the Circle?”

  “Just outside of Yosemite. Jinx knows where it is.”

  I smiled. “Now that’s everything.”

  His eyes widened, sparkling like a child’s. No one else would have thought as much, I imagine, but to me he seemed completely angelic.

  “How do you do it?” he asked.

  I opened a desk drawer and rifled around until I found a pair of scissors. “Bear with me,” I murmured, laying his hand atop mine, “I’m going on a hunch.”

  Chapter 15

  Amazing Grace

  The day was long. Longer than usual given that we spent most of it quitting our ties to the bay and driving across the state toward the Circle. Arthur drove, while I sat in the
back with Jinx, my knees squashed against Ananda’s seat.

  I knew I had to return to Reesa, find out how it was that she could avoid the permanence of Mara’s well-crafted transformation. There had to be a way to use it to reverse what was happening to the others.

  I had left her in the pit, surrounded by monsters, and horror, and memories. I returned to her in her coma, her breathing still slow and artificial.

  Easing into her mind was a labor of intense focus. I was raw inside since I had put Hal on the plane to Missouri. Every emotion I felt impacted her and sent her unfocused thoughts wandering. Moments shattered with each attempt, questions were answered in snippets and misfiled reality. Finally, I pulled back and spent a good long while watching her, letting her induced calm lull my heart into an acceptance. My mind and soul were injured, but I was not the issue. I had to acknowledge myself, but turn to her.

  Ready and waiting, with no certainty that what I would see would be less horrible than what had come before, I overlapped her consciousness and waited.

  The magic of modern medicine and the susurrus of the Sirens could dull the waking mind, shut down the “I,” but it could not take away the past, because the past was a structure in the brain. Memories had weight. It may have been the weight of a neuron or two, but in the tiny space of a mind, and the short span of a life, that was quite heavy.

  She was sitting on a hard wooden bench. Around her neck, attached to the stiff cotton dress, was a wide, itchy, lace collar. Patent shoes that her feet had already begun to outgrow strangled her toes. The church was hot, like they always seemed to be. Large groups of people burning with passion for the lord, as her Gran had said, all fanning themselves with programs. She kicked her legs back and forth idly, scratched her neck, and sighed loudly.

  At the podium, the Reverend was talking. He had a voice that made her want to listen but words that didn’t seem to mean anything to her. It was like listening to a lullaby. There was no point listening to lullabies and trying to understand. They were meant to chip away at thoughts and chisel the mind into a smooth sphere around which nightmares could swish but never find a landing place. Lullabies were for the singers, and all the listener got was peace.

  She kicked her legs at that and leaned her head against the soft body beside her. A wrinkled brown hand reached up and roundly patted her head. A gesture like a lullaby.

  Reesa began to feel sleepy. I felt her mind fill with muzzy fog. Then suddenly there was music and movement, voices raised in an impossible chorus that sounded more perfect than anything ever could. She was blasted to her feet by the chaos of it, or rather, the order it imposed upon the chaos of the dreamworld. The tight shoes pinched her pinky toes. She bent down sleepily and poked at them, as everyone around her stood upright, no need for hymnals, and sang like angels.

  She wasn’t listening. At that moment, all songs and sounds were lullabies, until something changed. She felt it. The meaning caught her, and unlike a lullaby, sharpened the world, honed it on a melancholy note, and made everything clear as crystal. This was not a song to soothe; this was a song to teach and mend.

  Gran was the one who sang lullabies, but this song turned her voice to a battle cry, created a stronger, braver her. Reesa looked up from her shoe, forgot the itching collar, and with every neuron, listened.

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.

  That saved a wretch like me.

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind, but now, I see.

  ‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear

  and Grace my fears relieved.

  How precious did that Grace appear

  the hour I first believed.

  I knew the song well. Practically everyone. But even I had never heard it sung as Gran sang it. It filled my heart with something huge and warming, yet simple and bracing. It made me want to leap, and dance, and struggle; and it made Reesa feel the same.

  She stared at her Gran, a small woman in a crisp navy dress, white gloves, and matching hat. Her eyes were shut, her face filled with joy. She nodded in time with the music. Her body shifted back and forth. She was the song in every way.

  The service ended eventually, though the song went on and on, in rounds, in riffs, in reverie. At last they were leaving to the ghostly remnant of it, shaking hands with the Reverend, holding hands through the parking lot. Then they were in the stifling heat of the old Cadillac, and Reesa could ask the question that burned inside her.

  It felt like an enormous question, one almost too serious to ask because it felt as if she should already know, because everything knew, because it was already a part of everything and everyone. But if there was anyone Reesa could plague with those kinds of questions, it was Gran. Gran knew everything.

  Gran was still humming, impervious to summer, or itchy lace, or pinchy shoes.

  “Gran?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that song about?”

  Gran stopped humming. Afraid she had said something wrong, Reesa glanced at the old woman. The soft face had hardened in pensive consideration that went on all the way home. The little wrinkles around her eyes got deeper, her brow furrowed gently, but Reesa smiled. It was what Gran’s face did when she was going to give a very important answer that had been thought out until thick ignorance was hammered into silk.

  “Well, child,” Gran began. Her voice was soft and low, rich with music, marbled by the thick molasses of the old South. “It’s about the Grace of the Lord, but really it’s about a lot of things.”

  “What’s the Grace of the Lord?”

  Gran parked her car in the driveway and turned it off. Instead of unbuckling her seat belt, she leaned back against the scalding leather.

  “That’s a tough question, you know.”

  “Why?”

  Gran sighed deeply. “Because the answer is different for every person you ask.”

  Reesa frowned and scratched the itchy collar. Gran’s face betrayed the knowledge of Reesa’s waning focus, though Reesa did not notice this.

  “Some people believe that the Holy Spirit is a real thing, you know, like a hand or a foot, that God uses to reach out and touch people, and the Grace of the Lord is what happens when you touched by it.”

  Reesa tilted her head and tried to picture the big hand or monstrous foot.

  “Some people, though, think that it’s just a kind of feelin’ that sneaks up on you when you afraid or maybe overwhelmed.”

  “A feeling?”

  Her Gran turned in the seat and held out a gloved hand. “The word means...oh lovely, or perfect, or flowin’ like a dancer, or well-mannered like a lady. But in the song...Well, you know how it feels when you’re happy and havin’ fun, and nothin’ seems to bother you, then all of a sudden somethin’ bad happens. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  Reesa thought back but didn’t have to think far. Her whole body felt the sadness of her aunt’s death from a sickness. Reesa had come back from preschool to a house full of misery. The air had been stale, and the words had been like a blow to the stomach. It was the first time she had heard “Never coming back.” I knew exactly how she felt, exactly what her Gran meant.

  “Yeah,” Reesa whispered.

  Gran reached out and covered her uncertain fidgeting with warmth. I could see from her eyes that she knew more about the subject than that tiny version of Reesa could grasp.

  “Well, Grace is like the opposite.”

  Reesa wrapped that one hand up in both of hers and put it to her face.

  “It’s when you’re frightened, alone, sad, hurtin’, and all a sudden, you feel calm, like it’s all going to be all right. Does that make sense?”

  Reesa shook her head.

  “When you’re happy, you don’t pay no mind to the rest of the world. But the world goes on all the same. The world is….”

  “Not a fair place,” Reesa said, and I knew it was a repetition of an oft-heard phrase.

  “Exactly, and when you’re busy bein’ happy, yo
u don’t look around, you don’t see the bad things that happen, are happenin’ all around you. So when one happens to you, it feels sudden and huge!”

  “That makes sense.”

  Gran smiled and patted her with the other hand. “Well, Grace is just the opposite. Believe me when I tell you, life is gonna hit you with bad things. Sometimes it will storm and rain ’em down on you. Sometimes it’ll seem like all there is in the world is sickness, pain, ignorance, and death. And when you’ve had all you can take, your mind just….” Her voice trailed off into the past.

  “Just what?”

  Gran swallowed hard and blinked even harder. “Your mind just can’t take anymore. It stops payin’ attention and goes numb. It’s like the darkness just blinds you, and that’s when you listen, when you feel past it. That’s when you touch Grace, and it touches you. Misery turns you into a shell, and there’s so much emptiness that somethin’ has to fill it.”

  Reesa took off her seatbelt and began to tug off her shoes. “But what makes it fill you up?”

  Gran shrugged. “Some people say God, some people think that’s just how the universe is.”

  “But what do yooouu think?” Reesa sang wiggling her toes, now freed and grateful.

  “I don’t think it matters. Worse thing you can do is ask questions like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because some questions can’t be answered, and tryin’ to answer ’em means you have to say things that might not be true, and doin’ that means you have to defend those lies, means you have to tell other people who have a different answer that they’re wrong, and they have to tell you you’re wrong, when nobody can ever really answer.”

  “But every question has an answer.”

  I agreed with her though she was only about five or six. You might not know how the universe worked, but there was at least the possibility to learn, if you had enough time.

  Gran smiled patiently. “True, I s’pose, but not important. Grace means forgivin’. Grace means lettin’ go. Grace makes you see everything clearly, and when that happens, answerin’ questions, arguin’ with someone else, findin’ a source, that’s just pointless. It is what it is.”