The One We Feed Read Free

I had gotten something wrong?
    I fell into a
chair and took a deep breath. No point in being sheepish. Arthur seemed to be a
telepath of some sort, and Jinx would tease information out of me with
swearwords I’d never heard before. The details tumbled out of me. I kept my
voice low but, recalling her filthy shape as it twisted through the air like
some kind of specter, pitched my voice on the edge of hysteria.
    “I’ve tried a
bunch of different approaches, you know, projecting forward, doing what I would have done, and every time, she dies. The same way. She falls and hits the
ground. I can’t stop it.” I tipped forward and closed my eyes.
    “What makes
you think you are meant to stop it?” Arthur said, recording another filing
number and making notes about the state of the binding.
    I threw a look
at Jinx. All his youthful snark was gone. His face had again assumed that weird
composure held by all immortals many years my senior. Not for the first time, I
wondered who he was, or who he had been when he’d discovered the idea ,
the thing that had frozen him in time.
    “Art, she’s
just a fracking girl,” he hissed, shattering my reverie.
    Arthur
shrugged. “And how many times have you been able to purchase your own
cigarettes?”
    The
perpetually youthful face full of piercings twitched. The message was clear:
not everything is as it seems. Some immortals were centuries old and didn’t
look a day over eighteen.
    “Don’t you
think we should at least check it out?”
    “If this girl
is real,” I reasoned, “then what she did...it’s not like anything I’ve seen
before. And if the Sangha keeps her prisoner, then won’t she be on our side?”
    “She struggles
to free herself so that she may die. What makes you think they are harming her?
Could they not be protecting her from herself?”
    Infallible
logic, that.
    I tapped my
fingers on the table and chewed my lip. Arthur was a difficult one to
interpret. Since we’d met, there had been many times when his advice had been
directly opposed to whatever it was he wanted. He seemed to direct by not
directing, and it drove me nuts.
    “So is that a
no, or is that a yes?”
    The copper of
his face smoothed into a smile. “Lilith, you will do whatever you must, but
your visions have never been accurate. The version of you that is relaying that
information is only telling you what you need to hear.”
    I stood up and
leaned over his work. “Well, then I say she’s telling me to save the girl. I
mean, why else would she keep showing me the same thing? If I have to be
splattered with guts one more time, I’m going to jump.”
    His face
lifted, and those perfect, incandescent blue eyes caught my gaze. Trapped and
happy to be, I stared back, wishing he could feel the depths of my sincerity.
    “How can
saving someone be a bad idea?” I insisted in spite of my growing blush.
    “What about
your reasons for saving them?” he said. “Can you honestly, with your purest
self, say that your desire to help this girl is not, at least in part, a
selfish one?”
    I blinked,
stunned. How could wanting to save someone be a selfish desire? Then I thought
of Eva. If I had tried to stop her from jumping off the hotel as I’d longed to,
how outraged would she have been? It was that act that had set everything in
motion, that act that had cemented our relationship even though we were parted
forever. My silence was enough of an answer.
    “You are very
quick to focus on a target,” Arthur sighed. “This is one of your greatest
strengths and will also be your most crippling weakness, if you are not
cautious.”
    Often, I found
that I had to really consider his words carefully. Normally, I would be hurt,
but there was some unexplainable draw surrounding Arthur that made it
impossible to think him an enemy. It more than likely had something to do with
his unique state of being, but he would never tell anyone any details about his
life after his supposed death. He had only ever