The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  “Gran,” she said and tugged at the floral apron. The muttering stopped. The wrinkled face peeked over a shoulder at her. Reesa held up the picture. “I’m a black girl.”

  Gran heaved a sigh and bent over, took the photo from her gently, and patted her head. “You are what you wanna be. Mirrors are for fixin’ your hair, not readin’ your future. Now put this back where you found it.”

  Reesa went back to her blocks, but the memory stayed with her, a cornerstone of her identity. She was what she wanted to be, not a black person, or a downtrodden person, or an uneducated person, or any of those things people so conveniently labeled her. It wasn’t stubbornness that had gotten her through the intervening years of turmoil, of foster homes and dangerous moments. It was a fundamental difference of opinion. People told her what she was, and she, by virtue of her first lesson in philosophy, refused to acknowledge their authority.

  That’s what made her so dangerous. She would not compromise. She would not become a monster.

  As I pulled myself from her dormant mind, and went back to my body, I could not get the image of the old woman’s face out of my head. She had seemed so soft, but if she was a Civil Rights activist, if she had marched with Dr. King, then that softness was deceptive. That softness was what happened when a person was beaten, tormented, ridiculed but knew that they were righteous. That was the face of a warrior that had fought to the last, for everyone.

  She had raised Reesa, cared for her while her granddaughter finished school and worked her many jobs to support them, and what she had raised was not a weakling or a victim.

  We choose our battles and our weapons.

  And if every person only ever made one, just one spiritual weapon, how quickly could the war end?

  I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees.

  “Katsu.”

  Chapter 20

  The Unity of Opposites

  Hours later, Ananda and Devlin lay in exactly the same position, the vampire’s head atop my friend’s chest, one of the Arhat’s hands resting across his forehead. The club remained closed, much to the chagrin of the line of slavering thrill-goers in shades of charcoal. Whatever the reason, whatever blissful connection they had made, it seemed that Devlin no longer cared for his little fiefdom.

  I got up and sat across from Arthur. He was reading his book, as always, but broke his concentration for me once again.

  “Should we go back? It’s time.” I picked up a few Go pieces and rolled them around in my hand—little black and white pebbles that clattered against each other. The board was still set from the game that had been finished the day before, swirls and boxes that from far enough away would just look gray, no territory gained, nothing lost, just a blur of those two colors.

  The unity of opposites.

  He put down the book and began dividing the pieces almost as if making a point. “Did you mention me?”

  “No, but something tells me it wouldn’t take much for him to figure us out. He did call me ‘one of the three.’”

  My pile of white was growing. I released the ones captive in my hand and traded them for a few white.

  “It cannot be avoided,” he murmured.

  I frowned his way, darkly enough for him to notice and smile at me reassuringly. “So do you know what’s going to happen? Is that what you’re actually telling me?”

  His smile grew. “Should not be avoided.”

  “‘Should not’ because it will lead to something you’ve foreseen? I thought omissions were still lies.”

  His smile faltered. For a moment, there was the glimmer of the old, talkative Arthur who had explained everything to me, whose voice echoed in my thoughts like a squawking parakeet. He leaned forward and took my hands in his, for one instant looking as though he wanted to say something. I met his gaze expectantly, and in response he retreated.

  “The only reason I guided you at all was because the path was so far from anything in your experience that you would be helpless to find it, otherwise.”

  I pulled away and slumped back in the chair, hurt. “I see.”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head, saying nothing, but I knew what he wanted to say. Again, I heard his voice and knew it was right.

  Of myself.

  I couldn’t help it though. He had said we’d be a team, but somehow I was feeling more and more alone with each passing day. He had predicted that we would not always be together, but deep down I didn’t want to accept it.

  “Ever since that night,” I whispered, sure he understood what I meant but wincing even as I said it, “you’ve been so quiet. I know you have to leave at some point. I can accept it, but...are you shutting me out because you can’t say goodbye?”

  He smiled. “There is no goodbye for us, my dear.”

  I propped my head up on my hands and looked him in the eye. “And here I was just getting used to the idea of being a loner again.”

  “You have never been a loner. That is a myth you created.” He walked over to Jinx and tapped the young man on the back, while I stared after him in silence.

  I got up and went outside to the truck. We piled in and drove to the coven house. Jinx seemed remarkably relaxed. I found a space along the side of the country road close enough to the gate so that he could wave at Ulrich as we got out. The somber man was busy insisting that the clubbers crowding the guard box go home and call the switchboard to find out when the place would be reopening. I was about to interrupt his heated conversation, just to hear his accent, but he took one unhappy glance at us and leaned on the buzzer.

  As we descended into the pit, I turned to Jinx and grinned. “He didn’t seem happy to see us.”

  “Ulrich’s never happy to see anyone, especially when they want him to buzz them in. Every visitor is just one more act of attrition he has to perform.”

  “It’s a button.”

  “It’s a symbol,” he mumbled in commiseration. “When you’re meaning on this earth is reduced to the importance of a mindless robotic arm and you have to push something as small as a button for centuries, soon the idea of the act festers until you come to believe that that fucking button is pushing you. That fucking button is laughing at you. Pretty soon, that fucking button is god and you are in hell.”

  “That how you feel about your keyboard?”

  He rolled his eyes. “My keyboard allows me to express my ideas. That fucking button makes him look like a mindless shmuck. How would you feel?”

  At the bottom of the stairs, the secondary post was deserted, likewise the front desk. The lights were dimmed, and, unlike the last two times we had been there, the world was not drawn in the vibrating lines of thumping bass. The dance floor was empty, the bar vacant; and for the first time, I actually took the time to give the place a good once over. It was a natural cavern, hung with lights instead of stalactites, and what had seemed like arches leading to other parts of the compound were tunnels that had been only partially decorated and concealed.

  “They really like reveling in their own mythology, don’t they?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that once a day a guy in the back lets out a swarm of bats, just to keep up appearances.”

  “Bats are too cute for them. More like a bag of king vipers. You said they were in bed?”

  I cleared my throat, “I said they were lying down.”

  He shrugged and made a sound in his throat. “Same diff. They’ll be back here then.”

  He sauntered by me with his hand in his pockets and led us to the left corridor. I glanced at Arthur. He was staring at one of the platforms. I nudged him with an elbow.

  “You okay?”

  He sighed. “This place has echoes.”

  “No kidding. I actually saw it. I think it burned into my eyelids. I’m trying not to see it again.”

  His lips curved into the tiny smile of the weary soul. “They are learning something, I have no doubt.”

  “More creative ways to….”

  “Their limitations,” he said with another glance at
the platform. “The loss of pride, the cessation of shame, the embracing of the things that cause pain, whatever form they take, are useful lessons.”

  “Everything means something, huh?”

  He turned a blink my way. “So I am told.”

  “Is it true?” I asked with a dubious laugh.

  He shrugged almost comically. “The opposite could also be said. A man who seeks to rarefy his character does not look for the answer to everything, only to some things.”

  “So says the man who discovered the oneness of all things.”

  The smile grew. “A tiny thing.”

  “Be careful,” I said with a smile, “that was nearly egotistic.” I took his hand, banishing for one perfect moment the idea that we might part. We walked, arm and arm, into the tunnel and followed it farther back into the mountain. At the antechamber, Jinx cleared his throat.

  “Shave and a haircut,” he called. Without an answering response and finally unafraid of Devlin’s ethical distinctions, he stepped into the room and through the door opposite. I made to follow, but something at my left caught my eye.

  I halted in my tracks and stared at the painting, wrapped in its golden frame, slightly hidden behind folds of the thick velvet, and suddenly knew why Devlin had seemed familiar to me and what his entire story to Ananda had been about.

  “Fucking cockmongers.”

  Jinx snorted. “Told ya.”

  It was a portrait of a man. Long, curly, auburn hair. Aquiline nose and pointed chin. Aristocratic finery and a stylish skullcap-like hat. But what truly caught me was the expression in the eyes. It was distant, cold; and the artist had captured it perfectly.

  “I hate that painting,” Devlin said from behind me. I turned. He was barefoot and still wearing his clothing from the night before, though his shirt was ruffled and undone, the green blazer discarded. His arms were crossed, and he was watching me carefully. “It’s not my best side.”

  “Vlad the mutherfucking Impaler?” I gasped. “Shut up!” I couldn’t help it. I turned to Arthur, still standing in the hall and pointed. “Dracula was real!”

  Arthur nodded and, with a stern expression, stepped in and locked eyes with our host. “Devlin, I presume,” he said, as if he certainly understood a man who abandoned a previous incarnation of himself.

  I spun to catch the micro-expression on Devlin’s face. It was almost invisible, a momentary tick of awe. Then it was replaced by a cool and even stare. “My goodness! May I say I am stunned. If I’d known, I would most certainly have insisted upon meeting elsewhere out of deference to your lifestyle.”

  “Unnecessary,” Arthur said quietly.

  I looked back and forth, certain the universe was about to implode, while they just stood there looking at each other. What were they thinking? Was Arthur offended, for the first time since I’d met him, or was he about to say something profound? Or was Devlin about to admit defeat, curl up his toes, and slink back to Ananda with his tail tucked?

  I licked my lips.

  “Do you play chess?” Devlin asked Arthur.

  “Yes.”

  I looked at Devlin. He was just barely smiling. “Would you like to have a game? I have an antique set over here.”

  I almost threw my hands up in anti-climactic defeat until I realized that it was not anti-climactic. It was perfect. Two mighty strategists meet, and what do they do? Of course.

  What better way to take each other’s measure?

  I was trapped in a Milton-Bradley commercial. They sat facing each other across a large chess board of inlaid stone. It was a beautiful set, complete with smoothly curved, snowy white pieces and jagged volcanic shards that, of course, Devlin preferred. I sat down on a nearby wing-backed chair and tried not to smile as Arthur made the first move.

  “So let me get this straight,” I said loudly, interrupting Devlin’s pensive silence with absurd pleasure, “you are Vlad the Impaler, the guy who ate dinner in the killing fields and drank corpse juice out of a cup?”

  His eyes rolled upward from the board with an almost audible grinding and a sharpened glare. “All exaggerated, I can assure you.”

  “But you are that guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “The guy who murdered whole villages of people, poisoned wells, and salted the earth to keep his enemies from winning?” I searched Ananda’s face to see if he heard me. He seemed to have gone deaf; he smiled at the chess table and pointed out to the mass-murdering dictator a possible move. Devlin waved him aside patiently and picked up another piece, which he set down with a satisfied smile.

  “The very same.”

  Arthur made a second move. Devlin frowned at the board and crooked a finger around his chin.

  “It would have been unnecessary, if not for certain difficulties.”

  “And whose fault were they?”

  “The effing pope’s,” he replied dryly. “As loathsome as the infidels were, he did not want anyone of my house to play the hero. If I had had the troops I required”—he picked up a pawn and moved it forward—“I would have retaken the Holy Land, and the landscape of today would be very, very different.”

  “You sure it wasn’t the forest of thirty thousand bodies on spikes that bothered him?”

  “It was fifty thousand,” he growled, while Arthur made yet another speedy move. “And that was after he refused me. That bastard would not have cared if I had raped the virgins and drowned the infants in the river. Crusaders had done as much for centuries.

  “All things are justified in war, except actually believing in your cause. It makes a warrior terrifying, uncontrollable, and marvelously effective. Normal people never really believe, because men who have seen death know that we are all the same in the end, no matter how much we dehumanize each other. Believers do not see it that way. To believers, the ends justify the means.”

  I glanced at Jinx with a raised brow. The hacker was setting up his several laptops at the desk against the far wall and trying not to remark upon Devlin’s lucid self-examination. I wanted to believe Devlin was a villain, to resent him for all the things he’d done in his long lifetime, but I could not.

  Sometimes the machine moves without the man.

  “So what you’re saying is that the pope was just resentful of your success at being a bloodthirsty, murderous asshat?”

  I expected him to rage at me, but he had steeled himself to my tactics and was staring absently at the quickly changing board.

  “My father was deposed by the Turks. I was imprisoned by them. I took my country back with a scant army and my own intelligence. I hated them more than anyone on earth ever could. Who better to fight the battle?”

  “I see your point. But you realize that because you believed, you were the last person who should have fought?”

  “Hind sight is twenty-twenty.”

  “Would you go back and change it, if you could?”

  “What a ridiculous question,” he commented in a dry tone. “The man sitting before you arises from the decisions made. He cannot conceive of a time without those decisions. So the answer is no. I did what I had to do and I regret nothing.”

  I shook my head. “No wonder you’re immortal.”

  Arthur moved almost as Devlin dropped a piece. The vamp was left to gaze at the board in mild dismay, a consciousness divided.

  “It’s no secret, Ms. Pierce, that you are a psychic,” he said in annoyance. “I’d prefer it if you came out and asked me questions directly, instead of swatting at me like a mouse tied to a stake.”

  He reached for a piece, then for another, then back to the first. As soon as he had moved, Arthur deposited a white piece on one of his squares and removed a pawn from the board.

  “I’m the cat in this metaphor?” I questioned, looking at the perfect, shiny nails I’d been manicuring with a mental file for the last few minutes.

  “You seem to be enjoying yourself.”

  “You’re kind of a jerk. I like being a bully to jerks. Payback’s a bitch, didn’t you k
now?”

  “Ha!” he said without delight, and watched as Arthur lay another of his carefully positioned maneuvers to waste with a swift and decisive move. “You sound like a believer.”

  I leaned forward, the voice of rage growling in my thoughts. “So tell me how you became immortal, really?”

  “It happened exactly as I said it did. I wanted the infidels dead for deeply personal reasons, but in a world where God trumps all, I believed my personal reasons were but symptoms of a greater worldly reason, that is to say, that God was so displeased with them, that even the earth wanted them gone. I believed that God had charged me with a mission I alone was uniquely disposed to accomplish. I believed it was my duty to slay every last Turk.”

  I sat back and looked at Jinx, wondering if that was enough motivation to provide a human brain with the focus it took to ignore the decay of natural biology. He shrugged and sat down, leaning his chin on the back of the desk chair.

  “And you became so fixated on accomplishing that one goal that you ended up forgetting to die?”

  Arthur knocked down a rook and swept it into the margins. Devlin was beginning to look unnerved. He thought out his next move over the course of several tense minutes, but it wasn’t good enough. Arthur responded in a single thrust of his arm.

  “I….” Devlin tilted his head and shifted slightly in his seat as though uncomfortable. “Yes. I suppose so, but the writings didn’t help.”

  “Writings?” Jinx was already spinning in his chair, fingers at the ready.

  “‘He who eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in him.’ The book of John, chapter six, verse fifty six,” Devlin said helpfully. “I believed that, perhaps more strenuously than did any person before or after me.”

  “Don’t know about that,” Jinx whispered, “lots of fucking human sacrifice, the world over.”

  The black army was dwindling in record time, and slowly Devlin’s expression was changing. He looked as if he might just leap up and toss the whole table in Arthur’s face if he didn’t suspect that being a living God had its unseen advantages.