“What? I’m fucking literate.”
“It’s got needs, this Manna?” I demand.
“I do,” the smoke answers from Mico.
“Do you need anything from Prentis?” I feel Tam tense up.
“Yes.” I hear the American accent of Mico come out. “But the Manna doesn’t take what isn’t offered.” Mico takes another drag and speaks fully with the smoke’s voice.
“Understand, liminal healer. You and mine are not natural enemies. Whether or not we become allies is entirely up to you.”
“Narayana,” Tamara says, picking the question from my brain. “That’s what you call that walking nightmare, right? What is he if not the definition of enemy?”
“True, he is your opposite number. An Alter,” Bandanna Boy says, losing his smile for the first time. “He is born of entropy. Designed to increase his parentage and lineage.”
“His kind are also natural enemies of the Manna,” Samantha adds.
“Narayana,” Mico speaks up, separating his voice from the Manna again, “is aiming toward redemption.”
“Right,” Tamara interrupts. “All this is well and good, but we’ve got family that’s MIA. Mr. and or Miss Smokey, Alter this or that—and I have no idea what you are, Mr. Six-shooter—if you can’t be of use, no harm, no foul, but we should probably bounce soon, feel me?”
“It was important you knew who was in the room so you could hear me when I say this,” Mico’s smoke chides. “We’ve pooled our resources—from the four winds, to the collected smokers, to the lovers of Samantha. None of them have seen hide nor hair of your sister.”
I sigh hard. Only one man could keep Prentis from this collection of power and weirdness. I hate saying his name out loud.
“Nordeen.”
Chapter Three
I need to sleep and eat. Growing my own body quickly is some of the most taxing bodywork I do. Combine that with the abyss that is that Narayana cat, not to mention the possibility of facing the old man, and all I want to do is close my eyes after an insane meal. But as soon as the peanut gallery leaves us, the teen that broke London starts in again.
“Bloody hell. That Mico looks familiar, yeah?”
“Sure you could see past the six-shooter?” I ask.
“Who now?”
“Latino with the six-shooters and the bandanna?” I say. Psychics don’t casually forget.
“No idea what you’re talking about.” We debrief the entire conversation only to find a perfect absence around the smirky Latino.
“Another question mark.” I pull gently on my eyelids.
“We leaving?”
“Assume everything we’ve got is compromised: no home, no bank accounts, burned passports. We need to stay off our beaten trails until we lay eyes on Prentis.” Sam damn near kicks down the dining hall doors with a massive tray of my favorite foods. The click of her three-inch candy-red heels betrays her mood.
“Yours is outside,” Samantha declares to Tamara, who instantly tries to levitate a clutch of grapes off the tray. Sam grabs them in mid-air. My daughter takes my head nod as permission to gain distance, but not before getting one last dig in. “No easy journeys to other realms, you two.”
I fix a plate of chicken, potatoes, steak pie, grapes, baked beans, and almonds, and a glass of red wine. I manage a quick thanks before I start my seven-minute race to the ends of the plate. My Ethiopian waits until I’m done to speak.
“I’d like you to take a walk with me.”
“This your idea or your smoke god’s? Or Mico’s?”
“You keep acting like I’ve wronged you, Taggert. What was my offense?” She’s trying to muffle her pheromones of rage and ire as she stands over me.
“You keep a secret this big from me and expect what? Thanks? I thought we were in this together.”
“You’re an idiot.” She turns to leave me. I think about stopping her, seizing up her calf muscles so she can’t move. But we’d never recover from that. So instead I follow.
Sam is halfway around the outside of the hotel, moving at a furious pace, by the time the early evening London air hits my lungs. Strangers gain tension watching me chase her, like they know our particulars. It aggravates me so much that I’m in a near fury when I catch up with my kind of part-time lover. “How the fuck am I an idiot?” I grab her arm.
“You’re so used to the world being against you, you can’t see a host of allies laid before your feet,” she snaps back, pulling her arm away. “That’s what makes you a fucking idiot.”
“Sorry for not recognizing a half-naked . . . what did you call him, Alter? . . . as an ally as he attacked my daughter.”
“You mean your half-crazy psychotic psychic of a daughter who hates me for no good reason? She’s lucky it was Narayana who found her as opposed to darker powers. I told you what would happen if you didn’t train her, Taggert,” she shouts.
“I was. I am. Both of them.”
“Training them to hide. To fight. To steal. To disappear in plain sight. To kill. I’m sure they’re both savage warriors. But neither of them knows how to live, you pathetic bastard. Now you’ve got one too powerful to sneeze without causing a telepathic citywide meltdown. The other—gods only know where she is. But I’m the one who has messed up?”
“What do you want? What the fuck do you all want?” I’m not talking to her.
It’s the encircling group of Eel Pie residents. Young and old. Indian, African, Saxon, able-bodied, crutched, wheelchair-bound.
“They’re just concerned for me,” Sam says. I know her pheromones’ effects on large groups of people. I’ve seen the near narcotic haze folks get into under her thrall. This isn’t that. Their eyes are clear. An older Rasta, bundled against the Thames night air in a dark wool pullover and sweats, nearly offers me a joint. Before I can refuse, he speaks.
“Nah Manna fa you, healer. Thy man nah properly prepared, zene? Just spliff fa ta ease tension, quicken thy thought.” He’s nearly suffused with the reek of the Manna.
“Respect, Bingy man,” Samantha says, swiping the joint from his outstretched hand. She takes an impossibly large hit and speaks with smoke issuing from her mouth. “Though I doubt the healer will know how to take such kindness.”
I take the offered joint from her hand and match her intake with all eyes on me. Even with my natural resistance to poisoning, I feel the sedative effect the instant it touches my lungs. The Bingy man smiles appreciatively, and I know this is his personal strain. He walks down the block just in front of us. I can’t think of a reason to stop him.
An older white woman with clay caked between her fingers offers us a place to sit by her house, underneath a yellow umbrella table. Half the assembled leave. A young Chinese man pours us tea from another house then walks away. All this happens in an unspoken, near liturgical precision. Like Mico and the car.
“The Manna?” I ask Sam.
“It helps with coordination of action.”
“It tells you what to do?”
“More like it suggests, shows possibilities. It takes a certain level of familiarity with Manna in order to be aware of its guidance and desires.”
I have to ask. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“I was given permission to bring you in one time. Just before your last confrontation with Nordeen, do you remember? You refused. You said you didn’t have time for my god, as though I were introducing you to my favorite band. After that, the Manna was silent regarding you.” And after a moment of silence. “And why didn’t you introduce me to Tamara and Prentis? We have separate lives.”
“Tamara has . . . mommy issues.” And then. “You didn’t tell me what your ‘god’ was.”
“When a four-billion-year-old sentient tuber fungus tells you to keep a secret, you listen,” she tells me after taking another hit. I nod, barely understanding. “I told you before that it was my god, the Manna, that secured my freedom from Nordeen. It made its presence known to me even before Mico. For years it wa
nted to meet you. Prentis and Tamara as well. But it has rules, boundaries it puts in place for what it calls ‘healthy growth.’ You grow toward the Manna, it doesn’t grow to you. You weren’t ready. Still aren’t, for all that it is . . . .”
“YES I!” Bingy man throws in from a nearby seat.
“But I pleaded with Mico to find Tamara when I felt her distress.”
“And I gave you shit for the help.” I sigh. “I don’t know how to apologize for this one.”
“Stay and speak with Mico,” Samantha asks, placing her hand on mine. I feel her flood of relief infect me. “He is a friend in need of someone like you; neither follower nor foe.”
“I’ve got to find Prentis.”
“You know where she is? Are you prepared to square off against the Razor Necks and him with your only child as your only backup?” Again with the logic. “Stay. Rest. Speak. This is the price of your unwarranted castigations.”
She stands, 5’3” max, gives Bingy man a pound, places her hand on her chest and talks toward the docks. Not thirty steps away, three young women surround her, rubbing Samantha’s back, holding her hand. I’m left with the Rasta.
“Righteous spliff.” I’m supremely tired.
“Respect, healer. I and I’s discretion is appreciated, zene?” he both asks and states.
“You one of them Rastas straight out of Ulverston?” I say more as an excuse to stare at him with my liminal eyes, looking for his ailment.
“Cha! Portmore born, Blue Mountain raise, ya nah test I man pedigree!” He unleashes his proud locks from his large knit hat. They frame his jawed face like a protective halo.
“No offense meant.” I try to smile, but the arrhythmia in his heart, the lower-than-normal oxygen count in his lungs, are distracting. On instinct I reach to heal him. But the Rasta’s dirt encrusted hands grab my arm. His eyes mist but don’t cry.
“Old growth make way for new shoots, yah?” Years ago I would have fought him over the idea, but I remember the tribe of poor Africans that told me a healer was a poison to the warrior spirit, and how that almost broke me. Now, after all I’ve seen, I know there’s worse than death.
“Will you ask your god for help?”
“Jah Manna need be asking fa no thing. Jah Manna provide all that’s needed.”
“Fucking Mico is Jah Puba!” Tamara barks, running up to the table from nowhere.
“Meaning what?” I ask, watching Bingy grin. Wide.
“Tag, Jah Puba is the DJ remix master to end all. He’s done everyone in every genre. You want a banger in the streets and the clubs, he’s the one you come to. He releases everything free. He’s the one Prentis is always talking about wanting to see. Come on! You can’t be this culturally deaf, can ya?”
“Ay, gal. Fay a want to see him lab tail yaself to I man,” Bingy announces, giving me a pound then walking back to the hotel.
“I don’t speak Jamaican . . .” Tam starts.
“He’s saying if you want to see Mico’s studio, follow him.” She’s wild, dangerous, and powerful. But she’s also eighteen, beautiful, deviously smart, determined, and the only part of her mother I have left. Seeing her excited, on the edge of happy, I can almost block out the sounds of the oncoming storm.
“Can I go?” Like I could stop her.
“The Rasta is okay, but play safe.”
“No play. All research.” She smiles, then launches herself after the Dread.
I make my way back to the hotel and find a spare room to crash in, with a wide brass bed frame and functional drapes. All the secrets of my past molest my dreams, as usual. I swear, if my body didn’t need sleep, I never would. I’d already been going for days on three hours of sleep when Prentis disappeared. Prentis.
If Tamara is my daughter of blood, Prentis is mine by choice. We both grew up unwanted and abandoned. Both of us were taken by the wrong type of family, abused and used for our power. Tamara may have dealt the killing blow to the insane illusionist who menaced Prentis, but it was my set-up. I offered Prentis safety, security, and our version of a healthy family. And I’m the one who promised I’d never let her go.
I wake to the Egyptian musical mother of protest, the Star of the East, Umm Kuhtlun, being supported by a bass-heavy Tamil beat. Even before I leave the room I feel the massive amounts of activity going on in the old ballroom directly across from the room Tam and I waited in earlier. Crack levels of dopamine highs tell me no one is in trouble, but that doesn’t dull the impact of opening the main doors of the ballroom and seeing every member of Mico’s Eel Pie collective in full party mode. It’s a Wednesday night.
Not like they care. From the poised supermodel to the awkward elderly, the ingénue to the infant, all are dancing, rolling, laughing like they’ve got something to prove and nothing to lose. I catch sight of Bingy man, who covertly flips a Manna joint to regular hash and hands it to me. I give thanks but am immediately assailed by four young half-dressed women; dancing like it’s their last night on Earth.
The music transitions to a dubstep version of a song I’ve heard Prentis play, by an American: “Our Paths Will Cross Again.” It’s a perfect hillbilly dirge, and unlike most girls this age, these girls’ moves aren’t about simulating sex on the dance floor. They are actually listening to the music, vibing out, loving it. I look past the three hundred hearts and hands to see Mico on a distant stage in a similar near-trance; only he has the presence of mind to throw a head nod my way. It’s only after a dulcimer-influenced version of Tricky’s “Ghetto Youth” gets in full swing that I can stop looking at all the bodies breathing, moving, and coordinating in silent syncopation, as a somatic firework display. Samantha sees my wonder and joins me.
“I’ve never seen you dance before,” she says softly, her lips brushing against my ear. “Does it take four nubiles to motivate you?”
“I’ve never heard music done like this before.” I didn’t even realize I was dancing.
“Not live. But you’ve heard Mico’s mixes coming from my speakers. You like?”
I nod and smile.
“Let’s hope Tamara feels the same.” I go cold. I scan the room. I know that girl’s bio-rhythms better than I know my own. She’s gone. Hide and seek. I push myself and scan the unique heartbeats of three-quarters of London. Gone. I run to the room I was sleeping in, registering what the music distracted me from earlier. A note posted outside the door. Written in Tamara’s chaotic scribble.
I know he scares you. I know you’re afraid of taking me into battle with him.
And I know you’d never let Prentis go. So I’m going after him solo. You’ve trained me well, Tag. Sit back and let me handle this. If I need help, I’ll call. But I can’t stand around and do nothing while Prentis is in his grip. You’ve done enough, Taggert.
Play back-up on this one. I’ll play it smart, promise.
Love you.
Chapter Four
“Razor Necks play murder tag for fun!” I shout at Sam as she stands in front of a small dock. There’s a boat on the other side of her that I’m meant to be on.
“I know. They used me as a toy for a while. I can’t go with you . . . ,” she says, trying to calm my fury.
“You know I’ve got to go.”
“And do what?” she demands with her eyes. “That whole crew plus Nordeen, you’re going to take them on by yourself?”
“Give me another option!”
“Fulfill your promise. Speak with Mico.”
“He’s not a fighter. He’s too busy spinning world beats for his rainbow coalition of sensitive mushroom smokers.”
“Mico would like to see you.” I almost flash on Narayana. Tamara is the only one that’s ever able to sneak up on me; only one with an actual heartbeat or a need to breathe, that is. But this Alter—still confused as to what that means, exactly—keeps getting the drop on me.
“And if I don’t want to see him?”
“I will go back and tell him so. Perhaps it will take that long for Nordeen’s forces to arra
nge your bones.” The killer shadow begins to walk back to the hotel.
“Wait!” I shout as I follow him with Sam by my side.
Another DJ is on the decks as I re-enter. The music is good enough but not the same. Not as . . . honest. It’s the difference between how Prentis lives and breathes for her music and how I hear a good tune every now and then and forget it. Prentis.
Behind the stage a small circular staircase takes us to a basement. My ears perk as we enter an oval hallway the length of the hotel. In the room at the end I can hear arguing. It’s the forgettable Latino and Mico.
“. . . he loses; you lose him, you lose Tamara, you lose Prentis.” The Latino is shouting.
“I don’t have them now!” Mico snaps back. “And if he wins then he’s allied with us. His debts become ours.”
“No. I’ve been doing this longer than you. The smoke was smart. You offered him sanctuary. Now—he wins, same sanctuary. It’s still their aggression if they move for him on your sacred ground, here.”
“And then what?” The DJ sounds exhausted. “We’re not ready for Nordeen, let alone his masters.”
“Nordeen doesn’t have masters,” I say, entering the exposed-brick room.
“You know better than that,” the Latino says in a way-too-familiar tone.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Seven years ago, a dock in South Africa. You waited until dawn for Nordeen. Two went into that storage container. One came out. The one that went in was an Alter like Narayana, only weak, early in its ‘life.’”
“You weren’t there.”
“You didn’t see me.” He offers his hand. “My name is A.C. I’m a child of the wind. I’m the reason you can’t find your keys one minute, then see them right in front of you the next. I’m the human-shaped flash in your peripheral vision that disappears as soon as you focus on it. I’m nowhere and just on the fringe of everywhere. Always.”
The Liminal War Page 3
