Hunger (7 page)

Slowly, she loosened her death grip, relaxing her knees. The horse, to her extreme relief, rewarded her by smoothing out the ride. There in the sky, Lisa found her balance. Anxiety gradually bled into excitement. Lisa grinned. For the first time in her life, she was riding a horse. And not just any horse—she was atop a mighty steed, soaring beyond where eagles dared.

This
, she told herself,
is really freaking cool
.

The horse moved with liquid grace beneath her, and Lisa leaned forward, hugging the steed's powerful neck, feeling Midnight's muscles flowing beneath her body. As the horse carried her, Lisa's fear gave way to trust, and with that came a surge of confidence, a sense of pride so strong that it seared her chest—so very different from the acid pain of heartburn. This was satisfaction that was bone-deep, and it had nothing to do with food.

Her hair whipping in the wind, she let out a whoop of exhilaration, delighting in the sheer joy of the ride.

All too soon, their pace slowed. They galloped over an expanse of dust, the land parched and cracked, and Lisa looked down in dismay, knowing intuitively that once this had been a reservoir. Beyond the brown, they next passed a large body of water, its edge lined with trees—and again, Lisa looked down and despaired, sensing how those trees were stressed and dying, how the content of the water itself had shifted and now was too salty for many of the creatures that depended on it for life. She smelled the memory of brushfires, and the ghost of dust storms assaulted her nostrils. She swallowed, but the taste of eroded soil stayed on her tongue. She felt the echo of weather patterns past and understood that the climate had changed, wreaking havoc on the land. Here, drought reigned supreme.

Lisa's mouth went dry and her stomach cramped. Dizziness slammed into her, knocking her off balance. She gripped Midnight's mane and prayed for the sickness to pass. It didn't, but it became bearable somehow.

Soon they traveled past the wounded land, and Lisa worked saliva down her throat. God, she was so thirsty. All of her days—those endless days—in which she had refused to allow herself to eat were nothing compared to the overwhelming compulsion for her to drink. She had to slake her thirst—
had
to.

As if the horse sensed her distress, Midnight shifted slightly and then arced down. Soon they were over a city by the water: Lisa saw buildings and bridges and what she thought were islets, with trees dotting the landscape and boats peppering the water. And she saw people, yes—a flood of people, surging through land and sea, teeming with life.

Screaming with hunger.

They touched ground outside of a restaurant. Unlike back home, here it was daylight. Judging from the position of the sun and the crowd of people on the street, it was lunchtime.

Midnight knelt down, and Lisa leaned forward, then lifted her left leg over the horse's back so that both of her legs were on the steed's right side. Feet-first, she slid herself off the horse and onto the ground. Her knees were a bit wobbly, but all in all, she thought she dismounted all right—it was her first time, and no one had helped her. The thought made her grin.

She hugged Midnight's neck. "Thank you," she murmured.

The steed nickered softly, and again Lisa was struck by the emotion she saw in its white eyes.

Standing tall, she turned to face the doors of the restaurant. She had no idea what she was supposed to do, but the pang in her belly and discomfort in her throat told her that before anything else, she needed to drink.

Taking a deep breath, she walked up to the doors—walked
through
the doors as if she were a ghost.

Neat
, she thought, smiling.

Inside, the place was packed. Patrons sat and ate and talked, their mouths full of food and conversation, their stomachs content but their appetites demanding more. Lisa felt them all, their bodies becoming extensions of hers; she felt them stuff themselves far beyond what they required.

They bloated her, distorted her, and she was disgusted. But deeper than the disgust was the need to drink.

Water. Now, or she'd die.

Staggering from the weight of the diners, she picked her way to the nearest table and grabbed a water glass, then drank greedily, the liquid spilling down her chin and wetting her sweater. The couple seated at the table didn't notice her or the missing glass, but the woman suddenly felt dizzy and nearly pitched over in her seat.

"Luv," the man said as Lisa drank, "you look crook."

"Feel like I'm about to chuck," the woman rasped, her body dehydrated.

The man, also suddenly feeling ill, started to sweat. He gulped down his drink.

The woman bolted out of her seat and raced away, a hand covering her mouth.

The man desperately tried to flag down a waiter to get more to drink. He'd never been so thirsty in all his life.

Lisa liked their accents. Maybe British or Scottish or Australian; she couldn't tell. But definitely one of those places, where the words all rolled up and down hills and language turned into something sexy.

Her own thirst quenched, Lisa set down the glass and moved along the aisles of the restaurant. It seemed a well-to-do place, based on the table settings, the way the patrons were dressed, and the manner in which the food was presented on their plates. It was the sort of place where people spent a ton of money and gorged themselves with exotic-sounding meals laden with calories and fat. The Thin voice would have been flummoxed trying to calculate how much exercise time would be necessary to counteract even a single mouthful.

Frowning, Lisa stared at the expensive plates decorated with their expensive foods, at the people—thin and fat and healthy and sickly and all manners in between, all of them dressed to the nines—using the proper utensils to shovel in their salads, to slice their meats, to slather butter on their rolls. So very proper. So very excessive.

So very unlike her.

The stirrings of anger within her eroded her control, and soon the background voices of the world around her shifted, became prominent. Lisa didn't realize she was once again hearing the incessant hunger of life; it had been a subtle change, an undercurrent in her awareness that slowly altered her equilibrium. It was a steady throbbing in her head, a gnawing ache in her belly. She looked at the people around her, lunching.

And she was hungry.

God, she hated them for it. She hated these people who could sit here so easily and navigate their way through their meals so thoughtlessly. Her fists trembled. She looked at them, with their Piri Piri prawns and soft-shell mud crab and rock oysters, their cheese plates decorated with apricots and cucumbers and dates, the bouillabaisse and yuzu sauce. She watched them as they ate, with no concern other than gorging themselves. She listened to the sounds they made, slobbering, slurping, rooting around their plates like pigs and leaving their droppings for servers to trot away. They feasted, oblivious to Lisa's rage.

They ignored her, the same way her mother did.

Lisa narrowed her eyes. No, she wouldn't let them ignore her. She was here among them. She'd announce herself to them, make them see her, make them feel her.

The Scales burned in her mind, and once again the world drowned in blackness as Lisa unleashed the power of Famine. Lost to the darkness, she didn't see the food on the plates disintegrate, but she felt every entrée and appetizer and dessert transform into ash. She spread her arms and the hunger reached out, person by person, touching everyone in the restaurant, from the busboy trying to earn enough money to offset university costs and the assistant manager filling in yet again for the womanizing owner who was off with one of his three mistresses, to every single customer seated and standing and waiting for a table. Stomachs growled. Mouths dried. And tempers shortened.

No one at the restaurant knew what had happened to the food; surely, they must have eaten. But they were miserable, the whole lot of them—and they were utterly ravenous. Waiters pawed through breadbaskets, only to find them empty. In the kitchen, the chefs raided the refrigerators and the pantries, only to be screamed at by the harried assistant manager, who felt the stirrings of a sugar drop. In the dining room, customers began to complain: the portions had been too small; the food hadn't been cooked properly; they never received their orders, and so on. One server, already surly from dieting and loathe to think of the celery sticks and potted cheese that waited, snapped at the patron who was leaving without the courtesy of a tip.

Blood boiled. And soon, fists flew.

The evening news and all the dailies would report it, of course, as a "Food Fight." The net result would be three broken limbs, four concussions, twenty-three lawsuits, two broken chairs, one scathing food review, and the sacking of the assistant manager.

Standing away from the raging people who'd spilled out of the restaurant, witnessing the chaos and now the slowly impending order in the form of police and ambulances and television cameras, Lisa stared in mute horror. At first, after the power of Famine had rolled back inside of her and color had again filled the world, Lisa had been numb, safe in the null void she dwelled in most of the time, cocooned from emotions and consequences. (Even the Thin voice couldn't reach her in that state, one she found easily whenever she exercised herself to the point of exhaustion.) But the shouts and the cries and the incessant chatter of the people near her sent cracks along the edges of that void, and soon feelings leaked through.

There she stood, seeing the results of her handiwork. One of the people getting loaded into an ambulance was a girl younger than Lisa. A table had gotten pushed over, onto her, and had broken her leg. Lisa had felt it. And at the time, she hadn't cared—all that had mattered was showing everyone what it meant to be truly hungry. But now she heard the girl's whimpers and sobs, and she felt the anguish and impotent rage of the girl's parents.

Lisa had done that.

And God, even with the taste of foods too numerous to count somehow on her tongue, even in the face of all the horror she'd just caused, Lisa was hungry.

Her breath started coming too fast, and her throat was far too tight. She needed to climb on her bike and exercise away the guilt; she had to fast, to lock her hunger away. She shivered, colder now than ever before.

She was a monster—as ugly inside as she was outside.

Dizzy, she leaned against Midnight, praying once again for this to be a nightmare. "I can't do this," she whispered.

The horse nickered.

"Tell me," she said, tears stinging her eyes, "what am I supposed to do?"

Perhaps in answer to her plea, the air shifted, bringing with it a sharp smell that made Lisa grimace. It tasted like blood.

It tasted like fear.

"Ah, so
you're
the new one," a woman's voice said—cutting and cruel, a voice meant to stab and leave you bleeding.

Lisa whirled about to see a knight—a for-real
knight
, complete with armor—seated on a rust-colored horse. Sunlight gleamed off the naked sword in the knight's gauntleted fist.

Staring at that shining weapon, Lisa was suddenly very, very afraid.

"Hello, little girl," the knight said, and even though a helmet concealed the speaker's face, Lisa could sense the knight—the woman—grinning hugely. "I'm War."

The woman loomed like a metallic beast, gleaming in silver armor from head to toe. A plume peaked the helmet's top, scarlet as a cardinal's feathers. Her tapered breastplate sported an image of a blood-red sword, its point aimed high as if to challenge God to a duel. Bits of mesh flashed beneath the plates on her shoulders and elbows and knees, winking crimson. Her boots looked big enough to kick down brick walls, and her hands in their gauntlets—one gripping the horse's reins and the other wielding the mighty sword—would have made lumberjacks feel unmanly.

Staring up at the Horseman (Horsewoman? What was the proper gender acknowledgment for a Rider of the Apocalypse?) seated on the massive horse, Lisa swallowed thickly. Dear God, the woman was enormous! It had nothing to do with physical bulk, either, even though she clearly was no lightweight. No, it was the knight's sheer presence. She radiated power like a miniature sun.

It took Lisa several seconds to find her voice. When she finally spoke, the word came out as a breathy whisper. "War?"

"The Red Rider," the woman agreed. Lisa found herself wondering what she looked like beneath the face-covering helmet. "Death's handmaiden," she added with a wry chuckle. "Among other things."

Other...?

Oh!

Lisa thought of some of the things that James did with her when the mood struck him to be amorous—and really, he was a normal seventeen-year-old boy, so that mood happened quite a lot—and she then tried to picture Death doing those things with the armored female knight.

Okay, ew.

The thought of Death and this Junoesque woman doing ... well,
anything
together was enough to make Lisa want to shower. A lot. Death was sexy (and God, did she need therapy even for thinking something like that; she wasn't even Goth, for goodness' sake) and sort of nice when he wasn't being scary. But
this
woman, doing it with Death? That was just nasty. For one thing, she looked big enough to break Death's back. Wrapping those legs around Death's waist would crush him like a walnut.

Maybe Death liked it rough.

Lots of therapy
, Lisa decided. Perhaps War had alluded to her relationship with Death to make Lisa uneasy or jealous. All it did was squick her out. And that, strangely enough, made her feel less scared.

Not quite as intimidated, Lisa remembered her manners. She took a step forward, offering her hand. "Hi."

Midnight bumped Lisa's arm away a moment before the red horse snapped at the space where Lisa's hand had been. Yelping, Lisa jumped back as War's horse tried to bite her again. Midnight stood its ground, baring its teeth. Sharp teeth, Lisa saw, trembling—very, very sharp teeth.

Her horse was
defending
her. A wave of gratitude—unfamiliar and overwhelming—washed over her. Softly she whispered to her steed, "Thank you."