Craving (33 page)

The stitches had been in the way.

The cars ahead of us were emptying. My guard slid across his seat and opened the door for me, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was remembering that the M.E. had said Eva’s wrist was cut antemortum, and showed signs of healing. If she could do what I just did, then the timeline for her last week was vastly different. What if she had only just left Ursula when she decided to kill herself? What if it was that encounter that told her all she needed to know and drove her to write in an appointment? I had always thought it was the phone call that was important, but what if she had been setting it up for weeks and had picked the date for a reason?

She hadn’t given the year in her journal. It was two numbers, two numbers and a single period. August ninth; eight and nine; eighth line, ninth word, beginning on the page indicated by the
trishna
symbol, and terminating when it ceased to make sense.

A message.

“Ms. Pierce,” he said.

I looked over. They were waiting, very calmly, and were not forcing me from the vehicle.

Gentlemen kidnappers.

I got out and looked around. We were in the grasslands, and as far as I could see in every direction there was nothing but farmland, yet in front of me stood a massive, modern building like a stack of smooth brown boxes. There were other smaller buildings around the property, and it was enclosed by a perimeter fence, but there were almost no people about the premises.

I looked at my guard. “The compound?”

He nodded and held out his arm.

“What is it?”

“A Vihara . . . monastery.”

“And who lives here?”

“The Sangha,” he said quietly. His companions were eyeing me in that same curious way, looking me over as if to assess my fitness. If there were ever a place, aside from a football game, where no makeup, an old T-shirt, and torn jeans were acceptable, I had found it. They were probably all psychics, more entertained by my insides. With a nod and a more decisive stride than I felt, I wondered which end of the attractiveness spectrum I was on in that regard. My head was not mucked up by a collection of useless considerations, scattered hopes, or wasted gestures. Aside from the corner shrine devoted to Eva, it was tidy and while I was away the appliances were unplugged and the newspaper deliveries canceled.

Don’t go nuts now, Lily.

I followed them inside and found an entry rather like a hotel’s. There was a desk, a collection of ambiguous, inoffensive art, and surfaces that a person could eat off. They walked me past all of it, their front for the rest of the world, and took me down a hallway to a large conference room. There were no windows, though, and as I entered the room, I felt a momentary stab of claustrophobia.

Alone, I sat in one of the chairs and tried to recall the specific journal page. I had stared at it for hours, read each line a dozen times. In my heyday, I had memorized so many things, the periodic table, pi to the one-hundredth decimal, even the nations of the world, and her stanzas were just lists of words. I was certain I could recreate it without the record hanging around my neck, for surely they would never allow me to see it again, once it was given over.

I mouthed the words, wrote them with my finger on the table top, and reconstructed their positions in my head. The page ended at thirty-two lines, and I had not taken the time to memorize the following page. Thirty-two lines meant four words of whatever message was intended. I counted, eighth row, ninth word, and from there to the sixteenth line, ninth word, and to my surprise, when I put those words in order, it was a complete thought.

“He is among us.”

Closing my eyes, I sat back, completely uncertain of how that might help me. Jinx had said any set of coordinates would yield something, but knowing her as I did, I couldn’t believe it was an unintentional communication. Then I thought of so many other numbers that might mean something, her birthday, mine, our parents’ crash, the day I got married, the day she graduated. Perhaps all of them would yield a result, and perhaps they would all lead me nowhere. Perhaps I should do as Jinx suggested and chill.

“
Trishna
,” I whispered. It was what she had written in red ink to attract me to that page. Was it a joke at my expense, a warning, or was it an indicator? Was she telling me to seek, in this one case, for the knowledge she had encrypted?

“The cause of suffering,” someone replied.

Chapter 22

I looked up at the man standing in the doorway, leaning against it as if he was completely comfortable making me feel uncomfortable. I found someone who reminded me very much of Arthur. He was not as tall or handsome, was not at all charismatic or inviting, but he had that same caramel skin and vaguely Asian bone structure. His black hair, unlike Arthur’s, was clipped short and smoothed back. Dark like coals, his eyes were untouched by his benevolent expression.

When he smiled at my perusal, he revealed a row of perfect, sparkling, white teeth, the canines just a bit too sharp.

“You have learned some Sanskrit!” he said happily, and in the lilt of his voice, there was the faintest trace of an accent. “Eva would be proud.”

“Don’t,” I hissed, certain that like Moksha, this man was a villain. He had to be, or he would not have treated me so casually. With him, I had the same eerie feeling of recognition, the same vibe of immediate disgust. He was like me, but not like me. “Don’t say her name.”

His amusement did not diminish. “You believe I have committed an offense against you.”

“Moksha killed my parents on your orders.”

His head tilted, almost exactly as Arthur’s so often did when he was about to scold me in that playful way, but there was nothing playful about this man. He was nothing but sly. “You have proof of this?”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “The man is a bit, shall we say, zealous?”

“He’s sick.”

The teeth appeared again. “Aren’t we all?”

Disgusted, I reached up and curled my fingers around the flash drive. “What do you want from me?”

He slid away from the wall and moved smoothly toward the table, his dark eyes drawn to my hand and the treasure it held. “Just your thoughts.”

I snorted and tapped my inner Jinx. “Yeah right, and I’m sure you’ve got a nice shiny penny to exchange for them, huh?”

He said nothing, but his expression hardened. He put his hands on the table and leaned over it slowly, staring down my resolution to refuse them. His gaze searched me hungrily, but blinked, having found nothing in my stoicism.

“Make jokes if you like, Lilith, but I promise you, I am not a person you want to antagonize.”

“Antagonize? What makes you think
I’m
someone to antagonize?” I shot back. My heart was racing and adrenalin flooded my veins. Each tiny movement of his hand or face, though there were few, sent me flailing, like I had an ear infection and was reeling. “What happened to you? What about the Eightfold Path? What about right action, wisdom, liberation?”

He leaned back and looked down his nose at me. “He led us astray and abandoned us. He took the easy way, because he could. It did not affect him the way it affected us and he did not stay long enough to see it. If he could have, he would have condoned our search. If he was experiencing this, he would understand. We have no choice.”

I sat up straight and glared at him. “If you’re so pissed off about immortality, then why don’t
you
jump off a building!”

“It isn’t as simple as living or dying.”

“Oh really? Everyone has issues and we all make do, somehow managing to
not
kill people while doing so!”

“Don’t you dare lecture me!” he hissed, his features transforming just as Ursula’s had. In a matter of moments, he turned from refinement to cruelty and glared down at me as if he wanted to rip me apart with his bare hands. “You have no idea how it feels!”

“Yeah, right!” I snarled, gaining my feet, finally able to put a face to my outrage. “I’m sure endless time to see and do all that you might want to is horrible! I bet it’s just miserable being completely invulnerable to sickness and that whole pesky aging thing! At least you have each other! You
stole
my family from me!”

My voice gave out into a sudden sob. Surprised by my own reaction, my abrupt loss of composure, my tears, I staggered back away from the table, still holding the drive like a talisman. My back hit the wall. I froze and looked around, but there was only one way out. Through him.

He watched me cry, pondering my brush with a mental breakdown, and eventually rethought his method of approach. He raised a hand in a casual peace offering. A Rolex sparkled there.

“There is a great deal you do not know, but continue in this way, and eventually”—he looked grim—“you will.”

Even with the wall at my back and a table between us, I still felt threatened by him. Try as I might to take deep breaths or compose myself, I was unable to do so. His stare was eating a hole in my nerves, like a sound at the edges of the audible. The longer he stared, the more debilitating it was, motion sickness of the mind. Urgency grew in my breast, until all I wanted to do was hide.

Arthur had said there were Arhat who could make others obey. Could this man be one of them? If I knew he was, could I stop it?

“You really don’t make sense,” I gasped, and without intending to, held the drive up before my face.

“It’s detachment,” he said, in a surprisingly quiet voice. “We’re set apart, surrounded by it but unable to love it. There’s no joy, no happiness, just experience! Constant information with no purpose, because there is no purpose!” He turned and slowly walked along the table toward me. I cowered, terrified with no idea why. “There has to be another truth! There has to be a way of undoing this!”

“What”—I slid along the wall, around the opposite side of the table—“does it have to do with me?”

“In it, but not of it,” he whispered, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. He snarled and with superhuman speed, he appeared before me, reached out, and unceremoniously took hold of my wrist.

He almost wrenched my arm from the socket as he spun me toward the door. Thrown bodily, I let go of the drive and stumbled, catching the leg of a chair with my foot. It crashed to the floor and, unable to catch myself, I followed, skidded on my knees, and felt a sharp pain in my ankle. I rolled onto my back, prepared to kick and scream, but he was already leaning over me with that unnaturally vengeful leer. I froze beneath him, shivering as he reached out and unclipped the drive from the lanyard around my neck.

He leaned closer to me, until his mouth was beside my ear, the shiny white teeth beside my throbbing pulse point. “We began in the slime, came forth to dry land. We want you to begin on the land and take to the air. Carry us with you.”

The door opened above my head and my friend from the car stuck his head into the room.

“Take her to the cell,” my host growled.

“No!” I shrieked as he stood up and walked over me. I got to my knees, crawled after him, tried to regain my feet, and found my damaged ankle would not obey me. I limped out into the hallway and jerked my arm away from the guard as he reached for it. “I’m not the cure!”

He stopped in his tracks and turned to look at me in the dim light, reminding me uncannily of my first meeting with Arthur.

“Not yet.”

The guard reached for me again, but ended up supporting more than coercing me. I was “helped” back the way we had come to an elevator. It carried us down, far into the depths of the apparently massive compound, and deposited us in a sterile-looking metal corridor; an industrial intestine lined with doors, I was almost certain it digested people whole. Dim, yellow light played off the walls. Tiny windows set into the doors meant spectators could peep in, though I could tell from my captors’ lowered eyes that they had no desire to. They suddenly seemed to hunch and skulk past the cells, obviously unhappy with escorting me down this forgotten hall.

As I limped toward the first set of doors, the air became more and more oppressive. The metallic scent of blood carried on the air with shrieks of fear and moans of agony. A shudder wracked me as the noise grew in volume. Something splattered against the window at my left with such high velocity that it startled me. It was blood.

I jumped back and fell against the opposite door. My head collided with the window and, dizzy, I tried to steady myself. My eyes lifted to the portal and met a face that was almost unrecognizable as human. It had eye sockets, a nose, and even teeth, but it looked as if a wild animal had clawed at it, destroying the eyes. It oozed blood, and as its mandible dropped open, I realized it had bitten out its own tongue.

With a gasp, I lurched away from it and was caught by my escort. Shivering in his grasp, I was torn between revulsion and empathy. The grotesque visage remained in the window, leering at me with its empty eye sockets and soon, every window had a face in it too, all in various states of mutilation, all watching us.

“Wha . . . what’s wrong w . . . with them!”

His hands pushed me gently toward the last door on the right. It stood open. “They’re mad.”

I planted my feet as best I could. “Why? What happened to them? Who are they!”

He pushed again and sent me into the door frame. I resisted, grabbed hold of the jamb, my fingers clawing at it. He plucked at them, but I continued to fight.

“They are the ones who cannot withstand,” he said through gritted teeth, and with one last shove, hurled me through the door and slammed it behind me. I crashed into it, threw my weight behind my hands and punched futilely. His face appeared in the window, expressionless, but he reached up and removed his earpiece. “They are here for their protection.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried weakly.

“Withstand,” he said quietly and walked away.

I slid to the ground and wept until my eyes were so swollen I could not see and my throat burned. The wall beneath my face had warmed from the heat of my tears, my joints ached, and my ankle was stiff. Turning, I examined my cell and wondered just how long it would be mine.