Craving (44 page)

I closed my eyes against the tears. Kicking and screaming, my companions were black-bagged and restrained in the back of identical tactical vehicles. It was all because of me.

Chapter 26

As I sat bolt upright, soft arms released me. I turned, dizzy, frantic, overwhelmed, and found Ananda staring at me with a knowing glint in his doe eyes. Reaching up, he placed a soft hand on my forehead. As if it was rain, all my misery slid off me into the sand and was forgotten.

“I . . .” I began, trying to find dry land in the ocean that had become my reality, full of undercurrents and crushing upheavals. “You . . .”

He held his finger up to his lips.

And I knew.

The fight with Karl had never taken place. Nor had my conversation with Ananda. The Guardian had remained true to his vow, silent until . . . until what?

He got to his feet, shaking clouds of sand out of delicate folds. Before I could say anything, he was back in the tree, staring down at me like an amused squirrel.

I had time. If I could just get somewhere and figure this all out, I could get us both out, and maybe even end this fight. It all came down to understanding why I was having these visions and how best to act on them. But to do that, I had to find a place that was safe.

I jumped to my feet and looked around, trying to recall the map I’d been building in my mind, but my thoughts were so confused. Ignoring Ananda’s attendant as he tried to stop me without touching me, I made a dash for a door I had spotted off the courtyard. It appeared to be unguarded, until suddenly there was a man standing in front of it. I nearly collided with him, I was moving so quickly, but he caught me around the waist easily.

“Lilith,” he said into my ear.

I held up my hands in instant submission. “Don’t take me back to the cell, please!”

“It should be easy to find you somewhere else.”

I frowned and held very still, feeling his chest move against my back as if every breath were labored. “When Karl sees that I’m gone . . .”

“I’m head of security,” the man said. “I’ve already been given permission to put you in the main quarters if need be. But I can’t leave you alone.”

The way he said it sounded apologetic, and my fears were instantly at ease. If there was a friend to be found in this place, he seemed to be that man.

I turned to express gratitude, and was jolted by the sight of the man I had, but moments before, witnessed gurgling in his own blood.  His hair was tousled, tie undone, and his earpiece dangling from an unbuttoned collar.

“William!” I gasped.

Surprised that I knew his name, he blinked at me. “How . . .”

I shook my head. “Just get me someplace where I can think.”

He nodded and took my arm chivalrously. He said nothing as he led me from the garden to one of the residential wings, though he closed his hand over mine as it rested in the crook of his elbow. I tried not to show my anxiousness as I mulled over how much time I had left, if the visions could be trusted.

When I had visited Club Trishna, and when Mathew was kidnapped, they had proven linear, warning of things that would come, however imperfectly. They seemed to hold snippets of information, designed to guide my choices or more often than not, events that proceeded from a choice I had made, showing me the negative impact that choice would have, before I’d even finished making it.

How could I know if this vision followed that pattern, how much of it was accurate, and how much of it was garbled in the reception? What if, as my abilities grew and refined, they became richer in detail, more trustworthy.  The only way I’d know was to test them.

I turned and looked at my escort. He was quiet, subdued, and yet he watched me as if waiting for something. If I trusted him, would he prove worthy? Maybe it was time to try Ursula’s methods on for size.

I knew then, inexplicably, that though physical contact was not necessary for the magic to work, it did help. Something about his skin and the warmth that emanated from it, the transference of energy, told me that if I asked, I would know the truth. I thought back on all I now knew, on Karl’s little speech about his choice of beverage and understood why Ursula had been so able to read me, even though she had never touched me.

Eva’s blood was my blood.

“Can I trust you, William?” I asked, just as we entered the hall.

He halted in his tracks and blinked at me. “Yes.”

I smiled my most glowing smile and gave him an approving nod, because I was positive he was honest to his core.

He walked to a door and, using a magnetic pass card, opened a set of double doors. On the other side was a large room that reminded me of the honeymoon suite Howard had booked for us.

My spirits sank.

There was a king-sized bed packed with pillows, a fabulous set of mahogany furniture, fine fabrics, soft carpeting, and above all, that same haphazard faux-elegance. I felt as if I was trapped in Las Vegas, minus the views of a garish strip of neon lights that turned the darkest shadows into cheerful, hope-filled day.

From the balcony, there was a view of the garden and Ananda’s tree, though the legend was no longer inhabiting it and the raked lines in the sand were being redrawn.

On the other side of a regal archway was a bathroom the size of Eva’s apartment, tiled entirely out of rose-veined marble. I wandered around it with William in tow, trying to phrase my question just right.

“You should clean up a bit,” he suggested, “since you have the time.”

I gazed at him. His had a look of gentility on his broad, masculine face. Cocking my head to the side, I realized that I could clearly picture him as a man in uniform. He had the spine of a Devil Dog and the deportment of a Naval Academy grad. Never once had he been disrespectful toward me, even though he had no reason to be polite. Sure, he’d shoved me into a cell, but who wouldn’t with Karl giving the orders?

“William,” I took a deep breath and glanced around, “if I needed to know something important, would you tell me?”

His brow furrowed slightly. “What do you need to know?”

“Are my friends in danger?” I sat on the edge of the pool-sized tub. “Is Karl planning on sending a SWAT team to capture them?”

“Friendzzzzz . . .?” he commented on the plural. I stared back emotionlessly until he sighed and looked away. “Not that I know of.”

It was my turn to frown. I put my face into my hands and wondered what I was meant to do. Had the vision been warning me against attempting to control Karl with my new talents? Had it been trying to show me the outcome of Jinx’s hack—that they could tell if their system were invaded and trace him somehow? Was it some eventuality that might come to pass if my actions had proceeded from that point?

Most importantly, could it now be avoided?

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

William said nothing. He reached inside a closet and pulled out a towel and bathrobe, and hung them from the hooks just inside the archway.

“You should . . .”

“Not now,” I cut in, realizing how abrasive I sounded just in time to correct my tone. “I don’t need to bathe, I need to meditate.”

It was a phrase I never thought I would say.

“Your friends are fine. Karl doesn’t care about them as long as they don’t interfere and you cooperate.”

I shot to my feet and began pacing. “How can you be sure?”

“I just am. Detective Unger was released, remember?”

I didn’t want to mention my other friends, the ones that they might
not
know about, namely Arthur. I could still see Ursula’s ravenous death-grin as she ripped the image of him from my mind.

I turned away from William and wandered toward a makeup desk and lighted mirror.

“Forgive me if I don’t trust him entirely.” I plopped onto the stool and was about to rifle through the contents of the drawers, an activity that usually perked my spirits, but I caught sight of my face and froze.

At first confused, I turned and looked behind me, but the room was normal. William stood a few feet away beside the foot of the tub, gazing at me with his passive keenness. Suddenly uneasy, I turned back to the mirror and realized that it wasn’t the room’s fault, it was mine.

My face was completely different, or more appropriately, looked like it was a mask being worn by someone with better and more pronounced bone structure. My skin was flawless, all fine lines and minor bothersome spots gone. It looked as if my complexion had transformed into beautifully pale sandstone, supple yet still stony, struck through with the pink stria of my lips. My dark hair, usually a rat’s nest of wave and frizz, had smoothed to a shimmering Pantene commercial. My dark eyes seemed to refract more light than usual, from obsidian to star sapphire. My expressions were so precise that my look of abject shock might have been used in a CIA handbook of what to look for during interrogations.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” William hadn’t cared if I showered; he’d wanted me to see myself.

I stood up and looked at my reflection in a full-length mirror to my right. Gone was the protective layer of whale-fat I had convinced myself was the epitome of feminine virtue. My well-maintained muscles seemed to jut from beneath my flesh. Sliding my hand under my T-shirt, I found my stomach had completely smoothed into the washboard Howard had always wanted. My mouth hanging open, I looked for the scar on my hip, where a nail had torn through my skin during a friendly wrestling match with a neighbor boy, only to find that it too, had vanished.

“What . . .?” I gasped. “What the hell is going on?”

“You have control,” William explained a little too happily for my state of mind. I dropped my hands, dumbfounded. “It means there are no more DNA copying errors. Right now you’re regressing to the point at which you stopped maturing and began decaying. You’re twenty-five again.”

Twenty-five was not the best of years. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

His lips parted, but he said nothing.

I did a twirl and looked at all of my other womanly attributes, to find them all exactly where they should have been, which was
not
where I had left them.

“Fucking cockmongers . . .”

He made a noise in his throat, as if he could no longer stand seeing me in distress and nearly lunged for me. With a determined expression, he took hold of my wrist and pulled me back into the bedroom. Without preamble, he pulled out one of the comfy chairs surrounding a round game table and pushed me into it. Sitting across from me, he put his elbows on his knees and took my hands in his.

His earpiece dangled from the collar of his coat, forgotten completely.

For a few moments, he tried to form words, his eyes sometimes pleading, sometimes ashamed. As distracted as I was, I couldn’t help but feel curious and compassionate. Something about his face and the tiny looks he gave me piqued the interest of Moksha’s little gift to me.

“What?” I coaxed gently.

“I want to tell you how it happened for me. I’ve been wanting to, all this time. I need you to know.” The words tumbled out, colliding with each other, leaving him looking confused at his own need. “I’m not sure why.”

Feeling as if I was party to some sort of dire confession, I leaned in and gave him a tender smile. “It would really help, thanks.”

He cleared his throat and bowed his head over our joined hands. “I enlisted in 1942. I was young and had been itching to do my part. When I turned eighteen, I signed my name and was more than happy to do anything that would pay the Japs back.”

He blushed and glanced up at me. “I mean . . .”

“I get it,” I reassured.

“I didn’t have any special skills. I grew up on a farm in Kentucky. I was just a dumb kid, but I had fantastic luck. Pretty soon, they started calling me “Clover” and making jokes about how if I was in a unit, everyone else was going to die.”

I chuckled. “The unkillable man? That’s ironic.”

He shrugged, his face still obscured. “It was just dumb luck that I lived so long, but during the worst parts, like D-day, that’s how you got promoted. You were just the longest lived.” He sighed heavily. “I never realized how dark this world really was. At the time, I thought that there must be real evil in the universe, for things like . . . what I saw . . . to happen. Either there was evil, or there was nothing at all.”

For a moment, I was back in my grandfather’s lap, his first grandchild. I was listening contentedly while he told his old war stories to my father, an untouched pitcher of iced tea and a tape recorder between them.

“I can’t even imagine,” I breathed.

“I was at Auschwitz.”

My soul frosted over. Nothing else needed to be said.

He let go of me long enough to push his hands through his sandy hair. Then he anchored himself to me once again.

“After it was over, I . . . I just couldn’t go back to the same old farm. Lots of the guys went back, talked about home like it was heaven, but for me, having been there . . . I couldn’t go back to thinking the world was supposed to make sense. I traveled instead. Went to Asia for a while, wandered around there. When I was nearly forty, I sort of found myself in Tibet.”

I perked up; Tibet was reputed to be the Buddha’s homeland.

“I started going to this temple. The head monk spoke a few languages, and we could sort of communicate. Before long, I was studying there. They gave me a place to live, food to eat, something to focus on besides my memories.”

Jinx would laugh and ask him about Raz Al Gould, but something he said struck a chord with me. “It was a temple run by the Sangha, wasn’t it?”

A guilty nod. “They seemed so wise, and maybe they are. Or maybe there’s no such thing as wisdom.”

“Someone once said wisdom is knowing what you do not know.”

William granted me a smile. “When they gave me the sutras to read, I thought they were entrusting me with the greatest knowledge on earth. I read them obsessively, but at first, saw nothing. It all seemed too far removed, lost in translation, obscured by time and changing meaning.”

That was exactly how it had always felt to me, and though I had read them, I just could not see how they had done so much to people like Eva, and apparently, William.