Kitabı oku: «The Tattooed Heart: A Messenger of Fear Novel»

Parts of this book are inspired by Aitzaz Hassan Bangash, who died saving his school from a suicide bomber. I’ve changed names, locations, and details to serve my story.

For Katherine, Jake, and Julia.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Acknowledgments

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Also by Michael Grant

1

From childhood I suffered from occasional nightmares featuring the most vivid monsters and the most intense of emotions. A constant theme was helplessness. I was often paralyzed in my dreams. Or, if I could move, it was in slow motion while everything and everyone around me moved at normal speed. I would often wake myself by screaming. Deliberately, you see. In the throes of the horror I would tell myself to scream, to scream until I was awake.

When my father died, my dreams changed and became bittersweet. I had one terrible dream in which I saw him dead. After that he was never dead, just far away. I never saw him in his casket, nor did my unconscious mind conjure the moment when an enemy’s bullet took his life. He was always alive and his eyes shone not with fear but with regret and love. I would savor those dreams and seek to prolong them. And when at last, reluctant, I woke, I would find my pillow wet.

I think maybe dreams provide a type of balance. When life is good, dreams remind you that fear still lives out there in the world. When life is bad, dreams offer hope.

I am Mara. I am sixteen years old. And my dreams now are most often of my home, my school, my friends, past pets, objects I hold dear, and my mother and my ever-absent, ever-present father. They are dreams of loss and alienation, but not nightmares.

Life is my nightmare now, and paradoxically, my dreams have become escapes.

So, in the seconds before my eyes fluttered open, I was at my friend Suzee’s pool party for her thirteenth birthday. The sun was shining, but not hot—it seldom gets really hot in Marin County, California. The pool in the dream was overflowing, lapping around the legs of my chaise longue. My flip-flops were floating away. But in compensation the water was carrying a bag of blue corn tortilla chips toward me and in the dream I thought, Well, that’s a fair trade. I waited patiently for the flip-flops and the snacks to pass each other, indifferent to the fact that a current cannot flow in opposite directions at once.

In reality, after that pool party, after that lovely, languorous day, I had a terrible nightmare in which the water kept rising until, immobilized, I began to drown.

Now my subconscious mind goes back to that pool party as a pleasant antidote to the traumas I endure daily. The mind strives for balance, doesn’t it?

Balance has become a very important thing to me. Balance is the explanation for the indignities and cruelties I must inflict on the Messenger’s targets. I justify myself with that concept, hoping it is not an illusion or a lie, hoping that I am doing good and not evil.

I no longer live in the land of suburban pool parties, I live in . . . well, it’s hard to summarize the nature of my existence for the simple reason that I do not yet fully understand it myself.

What I do understand is that there are things at work in this dull world that are more vivid, more bizarre, and more awful than rational people can easily accept. Everything about this life I now lead spells dream, and yet it is terribly real.

I have moved through solid objects.

Understand this: I do not mean that I have imagined doing so, or that we’re still in dreamland, or that some spectral projection of me has done this. I mean that I have moved through solid objects.

I have been transported effortlessly through time and space. I’ve been to a past I never experienced and to a future that is not mine.

I have caused the world to rewind, to advance at half speed, to accelerate as though reality itself was just Netflix on my laptop.

I have dived deep into the tortured unconscious minds of people I did not previously know.

These are not my powers, but power granted to me by gods older than any known to mortal man. It is the gods who labor to keep the world balanced on the edge of nonexistence so that it should not fall into oblivion.

Balance, you see, always balance.

Yes, it is the gods who right the wobbly balance of justice, and their instruments are Messengers of Fear. And I, as punishment for my own terrible sins, have been made the apprentice of one such messenger.

I know him only by that name: Messenger. And I know the day is coming when my name, too, shall be only, Messenger.

He was in the kitchen when I woke and stumbled in in search of coffee and breakfast. Please note that I do not say “my” kitchen. There is nothing about this place I inhabit that is truly mine. It is a place, or perhaps just a cunning and convincing illusion of a place, where I sleep and eat and recuperate in between following Messenger on his duties.

But were I to open the front door I would not see the suburban neighborhood that should be this abode’s native habitat. Rather I would see the mist, the soul-crushing yellow mist that surrounds this place. And yet through the kitchen window I could see the sun-blanched leaves of a tree. A real tree? I very much doubt it, but whoever or whatever created this space had some concern for my well-being and must have known I’d go slowly mad if I never saw sunlight.

“Did you rest well?” Messenger asked.

“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory of trading flip-flops for corn chips.

“I took the liberty of making coffee.”

I could smell it. I poured myself a cup and took a sip. I’d always taken coffee sweetened and with milk before. I took it black now. The bitterness no longer seemed significant to me. Indeed there was something reassuring about it.

“Are we traveling?” I asked him.

“Yes. We have a complex situation.”

I don’t think he’d ever referred to one of our missions in quite that way before. I might have asked him what he meant, but the Messenger of Fear is not easily questioned. He speaks or does not, as he chooses.

He is a boy, not yet a man, though as with everything now I’m never sure if what I’m seeing is really him. He is tall, thin, and has long very dark hair and eyes the blue of sunlit tropical ocean.

He is beautiful, Messenger is. I am perhaps pretty, or maybe just cute, but Messenger is beautiful.

He wears the same thing each time I see him: a long black coat that goes down to midcalf. A steel-gray shirt, black pants, and tall black boots. Yes, that almost completes the outfit. I say almost, because there are details, like the buttons of his coat, which are small, silver skulls. And the two rings he wears.

The ring on his right hand is Isthil, goddess of wickedness and justice. She is stern, magisterial, and shown on the ring carrying a sword.

The other ring is a face. It’s a young face, contorted by unendurable terror.

“Let me get dressed,” I said. I popped a strudel in the toaster and went to shower and dress. There’s a closet with several rather dull outfits, all perfectly sized, none really mine.

When I got back Messenger was sitting on a stool and doing nothing at all. He’s good at that. In a world where no one who owns a phone can ever be without some diversion, he is diversion free. He is patient, and that patience is slowly beginning to be mine as well, simply because there is no point in impatience.

By the time I was ready, the toaster strudel was cooked and cooling in the toaster. I wrapped it in a paper towel and began to take careful bites even as we were out of the house and—without a flash, a sound, or even a sense of movement—instantly somewhere else.

We stood on gravel and loose stone beside a road that had once been paved but had since fallen into disrepair, so that the gray of pavement was like a series of scabs over the richer soil beneath. Grass poked up here and there but seemed to lack sufficient moisture to thrive.

Across the road were cultivated, irrigated fields, and there the crop grew. It was a rich green, neat rows of what looked like tall grass that bent over at the top. Beyond that, in the distance, a vast field of pink flowers. This field was being worked by men bent low with bags slung from their shoulders. Other men with automatic rifles patrolled the edges of the field and appeared to be supervising or protecting or controlling, or some combination of the three.

Beyond the lovely but sinister flowers the land rose into terraced hills and, still farther, far off in the distance, the gray and white suggestion of snowcapped mountains.

Between the road and the fields was a small, off-white building. It was not an impressive sight. It was roughly square, a single ill-proportioned story in height, whitewashed brick on the sides, stuccoed brick in the front. There were three doors, all in a line, too many obviously for such a small structure, with the two flanking doors smaller than the central one, which was itself only tall enough to allow a six-footer to scrape beneath the top of the casing. The doors were painted green, a darker green than the Dr Seuss-like tree that provided a comically small patch of shade.

The only feature of note was a small tower, just twice the height of the building itself and narrow, like a blunt, brick rocket. It leaned just a little to one side.

But my eye was drawn away from the building by the sight of a group of people walking slowly up the road toward us. A dozen people, perhaps, it was hard to be sure, but certainly no more than that number. The men were dressed in what looked like long shirts over loose-fitting pants, all of unadorned cotton. The women wore voluminous black with only their faces and hands showing.

Four of the men carried something, and I could already guess, from the muted crying, from the downcast eyes, from the slumped shoulders, from the way some supported others, that this was a funeral procession.

The body came into view as the mourners neared. It was wrapped in white cotton. A red rope tied the top of the shroud just above the head, a second rope gathered the shroud just beneath the soles of the feet. Two more such ropes were wrapped around the body’s midsection, keeping the shroud in place. It had the unmistakable gravity of sacred ritual.

The body was large and at first I thought it was too large to be that of a child, but then I noticed that some of the men were of large size as well, so perhaps it was a family trait.

As the procession reached us more men came from the small brick building and joined silently in.

“Their mosque,” Messenger said, nodding slightly toward the building.

“It isn’t very impressive,” I said. I suppose I had images from news stories of the huge mosque that protects the Kaaba in Mecca, or even of the overwhelming Hagia Sophia.

We were, of course, invisible and inaudible to the mourners. Had we wished to we could have walked right through them. But death and grief impose limits, even on those with great power. We kept our distance. I finished my pastry, feeling foolish and disrespectful but needing food and having no better plan.

“This is a poor, rural area,” Messenger said. “Farmers and shepherds. Their mosque is humble.”

“Why are we here?” I asked. “This is a very long way from home. Does your duty extend this far?”

“This is the victim, or one of them,” Messenger said. “Our business is with the ones responsible.”

“But how did . . .” I let it drop for two reasons. First, Messenger showed what he wanted to show, when he wanted, and in whatever order he thought necessary for me to understand.

Secondly, there was a new person with the mourners, a person who clearly did not belong since her eyes tracked us as she approached.

She was dressed all in black: loose trousers beneath a flowing robe, with her head covered in a black hijab. Black but not dull or even quite monochrome, because as she drew close I saw that the fabric swirled with woven patterns which, unless my eyes deceived me, moved and changed in subtle and fascinating ways.

Her clothing was unadorned, but she wore rings, and I knew instinctively that they were of Isthil and the Shrieking Face.

“She’s a messenger,” I said.

Messenger’s silence was confirmation.

The procession passed by, the young woman in black joined us. She was quite beautiful, with dark skin, unusually large eyes, and a quirk in her mouth that spoke of humor.

“Messenger,” she said.

“Messenger,” he acknowledged with a nod. “This is my apprentice.”

No names. I was disappointed. I was certain that Messenger had a name, at least had had a name once upon a time, but evidently I would not learn it here and now. Even my name was dropped from the introduction.

I stuck out a hand, an instinctive offer of a handshake, a gesture this new Messenger declined with a wry smile.

“You must be new not to know that a messenger is not to be touched,” she said in accented but easily understood English.

“Sorry,” I apologized.

“Thank you for allowing this intrusion,” Messenger—my messenger—said.

“We serve the balance,” the woman said. Then, “It makes no difference, but he was a good boy. Fifteen years old. Brave. Kind. He burned fiercely for justice.”

Without a word being spoken by either my mentor or his counterpart, we three were half a mile down the road, past a village that was really little more than a cluster of a dozen brick and plaster buildings, none even so grand as the humble mosque. We stood in a dusty field marked with twenty or thirty stones, some cut to rectangles, others obviously just hauled here in their natural rough state.

It was the placement of these stones that told the tale, for they were evenly spaced, six feet from left to right, in approximated rows. It lacked the carefully manicured grass, or the cut flowers, or the chiseled limestone markers and grandiose marble obelisks I recalled from my own sad travels to cemeteries, but cemetery it was.

A hole had been dug, long enough and wide enough for a body, deep enough to discourage whatever wild creatures roamed this strange and unfamiliar landscape.

Now the mourners stood praying in three rows. Men stood in front, closest to the grave. Women behind them. Children in the row farthest away.

A woman’s knees buckled and she released a small, despairing cry. She was held standing by women on either side. It was beyond doubt that here was the mother.

The shrouded body was placed on its side in the hole.

“Facing Mecca,” our new companion explained.

“How did he die?” I asked.

The female messenger nodded and the three of us began to walk away. But as we did the world scrolled backward around us. We walked at what seemed a normal speed, but the dead body leaped from the grave and was once again on a stretcher being carried backward down the road.

Faster and faster the scene moved past us, though there was no sense that we were moving at anything but a leisurely pace.

The funeral procession passed backward by the tiny mosque, down the road, to a village somewhat larger than the one we’d passed through earlier. This village was clustered around a trickle of a stream that barely moistened the rocks and seemed at any moment that it might be drunk up entirely by the parched earth.

We watched silently as the body was placed on a wooden table in one simple home with low ceilings and a scattering of thin mattresses. The walls had once been painted a cheerful turquoise, but earlier colors of paint and bare brick showed through.

Now only men were in the room and in reverse motion they untied the ropes, and unwound the shroud, and revealed a body. The boy was heavy and dark-skinned. And he had a bullet hole in his chest, another in his neck, a third in his arm that had very nearly severed it so that just above the elbow was nothing but strings of gristle still attached to the lower part.

A fourth bullet in his face had removed half of his head.

I had never seen anything like that wound. It was . . . what word would suffice? How can I describe the damage? How am I to explain without resorting to horror movie clichés?

His face, from the hairline, down to the bridge of his nose, down to the place on his mouth where the lips dimple a little in the middle, and from there down to the bare white bone of his jaw, was no longer there.

It was all too easy to see what he must have looked like if I simply duplicated and reversed the remainder of his face. But no sane person can see such a thing and calmly reconstitute what is no longer there. The outrage is too great. The anger that wells up inside you is too powerful. There is no looking at such a thing and reasoning, there is only the most profound sense of wrongness, of an unspeakable sin.

Tears filled my eyes. Not because I knew the boy, I didn’t, not even because I could see the pain and sadness on the faces of those who had undertaken the heartrending job of wrapping him for burial, though I could. I cried because it was wrong. I cried because it should not be, should never be.

Messenger did not cry, neither did his female counterpart. They both looked on with the clenched, stony resolve of those who are past crying but not yet past feeling.

“What was his name?”

“Aimal,” the female answered. “His name was Aimal.”

The reality around me had slowed to a stop. Now all the men were as frozen as the boy on the table. His shroud was gone and the men were held motionless in the act of cleaning the body with damp rags.

Motionless tears hung on the cheeks of a man I took to be Aimal’s father. But as if he had read my mind—and he may well have—Messenger said, “That is not the father, that is Aimal’s uncle. The father is in America. As are those we must deal with.”

“The ones who killed Aimal?”

Messenger shook his head. “The men who killed Aimal are not our concern.”

“Then why are we here?” I asked. Was this soul-searing display unnecessary? Had I been burdened with yet another gruesome memory for no good reason?

“The wickedness we pursue is not murder, but murder’s source,” Messenger said. “It is hatred we pursue. Hatred.”

2

We did not bid the female messenger good-bye. One second she was there and the next she was gone. And a second after that, we, too, were gone.

There was a brick marker that read Theodore Roosevelt on a limestone banner and beneath it the words High School. I somehow knew we were in Iowa.

The same combination of red brick and limestone comprised the school itself. The central portion was three stories tall, three generous stories, so that the structure was taller and more impressive than the simple number of floors might indicate. The wings extended to left and right and were of just two floors each. There were architectural details rendered in stone—window framing, a stone railing across the roofline—that gave the school a slightly ornate look, an almost Old World look. It very nearly evoked Downton Abbey.

Just before the front door was a tall flagpole. The Stars and Stripes snapped in a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the mature hardwood and fir trees that flanked the entrance and which were dotted haphazardly across the lawn.

It looked like the very model of a high school—what a traditional high school ought to be.

As usual, I had questions. As usual, I didn’t ask. It’s not that Messenger will never answer a question, but he prefers not to, and for whatever reason, I don’t want to nag at him. He’s the master, I’m the apprentice. I’ve accepted that. More or less. And as the teacher he gets to choose how and when to tell me things.

Frustrating? Extremely.

We walked at a normal pace across the lawn. Kids were pouring from buses that had pulled up in the parking lot. At the same time freshmen and sophomores and juniors were piling from their parents’ cars, and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.

The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind of photo booth effect.

Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.

Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.

We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There was nothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.

Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing an abaya of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.

It was the abaya that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.

“Hey!” the girl yelled, and tried to put the scarf back in place.

“See, she does have hair under there!” This from the smallest of the three boys, a short, cute kid with longish brown hair.

“Drop dead,” the girl snapped.

“Just playin’ with your towel, towel-head.” This was not said in a playful tone, and it came from the boy in the middle. He was tall, powerfully built, with short blond hair. He was wearing sunglasses so I could not see the color of his eyes.

A second girl, just arriving on the scene, saw what was going on and said, “It’s called an abaya, moron. And leave her alone, Trent.”

This second girl was not in Muslim dress. She was in the navy blue and white uniform of a cheerleader.

“Wasn’t me,” Trent said, faux innocent. “It was Pete. Wasn’t it, Pete? See, Pete thought maybe she had horns under there and that’s why she’s always wearing that towel.”

“Idiot,” the cheerleader said, and rolled her eyes.

The bell rang and everyone went hurrying away.

The Muslim girl looked shaken and angry, but she said nothing more and the incident appeared to be over.

Messenger and I now stood in an empty hallway, ringing with the muted sounds of lessons filtering through a long row of closed doors.

“This is connected to the dead boy, Aimal,” I said, careful not to give it a questioning inflection. But Messenger was not enticed into answering my non-question question.

I did not know where we were, exactly, nor where Aimal had been, but I was pretty sure there were thousands of miles separating the two locations. But in Messenger’s world, space and time are a bit . . . different.

I did not believe we were there because one jerk kid had harassed one girl in one school. The penalties Messenger imposes can be . . . Well, they are the fuel of my nightmares.

“Where should we follow the story next?” Messenger asked.

“What?” The question was so out of the blue I wasn’t sure how to answer. Since when did Messenger consult me? And, anyway, didn’t he already know all the answers? Didn’t he know exactly how this story—whatever it was really about—would end up?

But he was still waiting for an answer, so I had no real choice but to attempt one. “We either follow Trent—he’s the ringleader—or the girl.”

“As you wish.”

“Well . . . which one?”

“Both.”

And then something extraordinary happened. Extraordinary even by the standards of the extraordinary reality into which I have entered. The world around me split in two.

We stood, Messenger and I, in a void, blackness ahead and behind and above, and far more disturbing, black emptiness below as well. I saw no floor or ground beneath my feet, but I was not weightless, either.

But this void was as narrow as a footpath, and to either side of this void was the world. Two worlds. Or two iterations of the same world. The effect was as if we had been standing in a darkened room and two enormous movie screens had been set up, one to our left, the other to our right, each infinitely tall and long and wide.

Two real worlds. I had only to turn my head or even just move my eyes to see one, then the other. Both at once if I stared straight ahead.

But, as hard as it is to imagine, and despite my suggestion, you must not think these were movie screens. They each were real, each happening, each completely three-dimensional. I knew that I could step into either, so that they were less like screens than like living dioramas.

To our left, the girl. To our right, Trent. We could hear both. I could smell the lamb stew the girl was heating in the microwave of her kitchen.

The girl’s phone dinged an incoming text. Without thinking I stepped into her world, hoping to read it over her shoulder. Instantly a wall closed between me and Messenger. I saw neither him, nor Trent.

Frightened, I stepped back into the newly appeared wall, passed through it, and was with Messenger again.

This made me feel foolish. Obviously Messenger understood all this better than I, but that didn’t mean I wanted to seem like some kind of newbie.

That in itself struck me as absurd and I laughed.

Messenger shot me an inquiring look.

“Just . . . takes getting used to,” I explained lamely and stepped back into the girl’s world. Her name was Samira. I saw it on her text. The person she was texting was named Zarqa.

Zarqa: Heard u were hassled. RU OK?

Samira: It was nothing. Just jerks.

Zarqa: What happened?

Samira: They pulled off my abaya. NBD.

Zarqa: It is a big deal. U shd tell sum1. Bullying.

Samira: No.

Zarqa: Grl we have to stand together.

The microwave rang and Samira cut the conversation off with a quick GTG and a heart emoticon.

Samira set her phone aside and removed her meal.

I stepped back to Messenger. “Her name is Samira. I think that was another Muslim girl texting her.”

“All right, I admit it: I’m mystified.”

The words were what I was feeling, but they did not come from me.

Oriax had appeared.

Oriax is a female. She’s a female in much the same way that a billion is a number, or a Porsche is a car, or a twenty megaton nuclear bomb going off is fireworks.

Age? Whatever age she wants you to see. She may be eighteen. She may be older than human civilization.

I knew enough of her to know that she is sadistic, cruel, evil, and not really human, and incredibly beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes, an outfit of scraps of leather melded seamlessly to form a dominatrix look that fits her like it was painted on—and might well be. Her boots were extreme high heels but minus the heel, a look only possible when you have hooves.

“Well, hello there, mini-Messenger. What was your name again? Pawn? Puppet?”

She had a throaty purr that sounded like an intimate whisper. The illusion is so real that when she punctuates the p sound in puppet I swear I can feel her breath on my ear, and it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Mara,” I said. “My name is Mara.”

She moved like a tiger, sinuous, precise, dangerous. She was beside me and though I’m straight I felt my throat tighten and my breathing become labored, such is her animal appeal.

“You know, Mara, you don’t have to dress like a schoolgirl. I could arrange for something a bit more . . . well, let’s just say something that would make it harder for Messenger.” She laughed wickedly at that, then with a wink, added, “I mean harder for Messenger to ignore you so completely. As a young woman.”

“I’m not . . .” I began, and then realized there was no safe way for me to conclude that sentence. Instead I blushed and fell silent.

“I don’t think he’s even really noticed the way you look at him sometimes, or the way your heart speeds up when he comes close or—”

“What is it you want, Oriax?” Messenger asked wearily.

“Oh, you, Messenger. Always. You’re just so very delicious. I could eat you up.” She licked her lips, which today were glowing mauve, and leered, but for a chilling moment it occurred to me to wonder if she might not mean that literally.

I had stood by helplessly while she had tricked a boy into accepting a punishment that left him shattered as a human being. She had laughed and sung a grim little song as he was made to experience being burned alive. Was there anything too foul for her? Was there any sort of limit? I doubted it.

“I’m fine,” I said, responding way too late to her offer to improve my appearance.

“Why this girl?” Oriax gestured at Samira, who had gone on eating, disregarding the three of us. “Because someone pulled her silly scarf?”

“Don’t pretend to be blind to the connection, Oriax,” Messenger said. “Hatred grows like a cancer, spreading ever outward from its source. It’s a poison in the human bloodstream that spreads far beyond its origin. ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Isthil teaches that no one who does evil can ever be blameless for the consequences.”

“Oh, well then,” Oriax said, dripping sarcasm, “if Isthil said it—”

And just like that, without a word from Messenger, without any sort of warning, we were back in that void between two realities.

On our left, still within Samira’s reality, an irritated Oriax realized we’d given her the slip. She seemed not quite able to find us, though we could still see her.

On the other side of the void, Trent was with Pete. The third boy was no longer with them and in fact I never saw him again. I hoped he’d seen the malice in his friends and chosen a better path for himself.

Trent and Pete were sitting on swings at a park playground. Trent glared and frightened off the younger children who approached.

“Have you heard from your dad?” Pete asked.

Trent shook his head angrily. “He’s gone. Up in North Dakota, looking for work.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Hey. Douche nozzle. You think I want to talk about my dad? He’s gone. Maybe he’ll come back, maybe not. Okay? We done?”

Pete swung a little, a short arc, with his feet dragging the ground. “Okay, man.”

“Probably just drinking,” Trent muttered. “Up there drinking and not giving a damn about anything.”

“He used to be kind of cool before he lost his job,” Pete observed.

“Yeah, well, he did lose it. So that’s that, right? They gave it to some Mexican.” At that point his talk turned scatological and racist and I won’t attempt to repeat it.

There was a depth of barely contained anger in Trent. His friend, Pete, seemed like a more balanced person, but one who was under the sway of his larger companion. “My dad’s okay,” Pete said. “He still—”

“Do I give a damn?” Trent asked with weary mockery.

Pete was taken aback but forced a sickly smile and said, “No, man, even I’m not really interested in my dad.”

“He’s got a job anyway.”

“Yeah, but he kind of hates it because—”

“But he’s got a job. Right? So he’s not off somewhere all messed up from being out of work. Right? So shut up.”

Pete shut up.

I’ve often wondered about people like Pete. I have never understood why angry thugs like Trent seem able to attract more normal followers.

But then I winced, remembering. I had been a bad person. I had done a terrible thing. And yes, I’d had friends and acolytes the whole time.

Self-righteousness rises in me sometimes, and then I remind myself that I do not have the right to look down my nose at others. I am the apprentice to the Messenger of Fear, and as such I deliver a measure of justice. But it had begun when I accepted the truth of my own weakness. My position as apprentice was not an entitlement, it was a punishment.

“Oriax can’t see us?” I asked, mostly just to distract myself from painful memories.

“Eventually, but not immediately. Her powers are different. Very great, but different. But she will find us in time.”

“Then let’s use the time to figure this out,” I said.

“The time?” He cocked his head, waiting.

It took me a few seconds to grasp the hint. “Yes, the time. But I don’t think I want to see more of Trent. I want to understand the connections. I want to see what led to the death of that poor boy with his face blown away.”

Just like that, one-half of this split-screen reality replaced Trent and Pete with the solemn scene of the far-distant funeral.

Messenger seemed accepting of my initiative, even approving. “Proceed.”

“What?”

“Don’t be timid, Mara,” he chided. “You’ve seen that we can travel through time. So do it.”

I glanced back along the void. Would going backward take us backward in time? This was not how we’d previously done it. Messenger had always just made it happen.

But of course this was the simple version. This was Time Travel 101, an introduction before greater secrets and techniques could be learned.

I turned and walked with far more confidence than I felt, back along the narrow black bridge between facing realities. And yes, to my satisfaction, time went into reverse.

On her side Samira spit her food into her bowl, placed the stew in the microwave, took it out and put it in the freezer, walked backward from the kitchen.

Far more disturbing, the shrouded body of Aimal once again leaped from its grave and landed on the stretcher, which was then borne away.

I walked faster, faster, and time reeled backward at a geometrically quicker rate. Now Samira was back at school being harassed, and Aimal’s body was being ritually washed by his male relatives, and Samira was in class, and Aimal was quite suddenly alive. I noticed that the time lines were not synchronized, not matched up. I sensed that Aimal’s was the more recent event.

Distracted by that realization, I saw that I had moved too quickly. I reversed my direction and slowed my pace.

Aimal now was in the dirt yard of a bare, one-room cinderblock schoolhouse. There was a single tree providing scant shade from a blistering sun. There were other kids, younger, older, many kicking a soccer ball. Others read. Others just sat in small groups, chatting.

If you ignored the opium poppy fields and the distant but intimidatingly sharp-edged mountains, and the poverty of the school, it could be any school.

A pickup truck came barreling down the semi-paved road, kicking up a plume of dust. There was one man in the cabin, two more in the back.

The kids in the yard didn’t notice. But Aimal did. He rose slowly to his feet, the biggest of the boys. He shaded his eyes and watched the truck and peered closely at something particular.

Without even realizing what I was doing I stepped into his frame and peered as though through his eyes. I saw the thing he focused on.

It was the upraised barrel of an assault rifle.

3

Aimal began yelling. It was not English, of course, but I understood it nevertheless.

“Hide! Hide!” he yelled. “All the girls must hide!”

But by the time his shouts were noticed and conversation had fallen silent and all heads had turned toward the truck, the two men were already leaping from the back and both were armed with assault rifles.

“Run! Run!” Aimal shouted.

Some of the girls responded now. There were only six of them, ranging in age from ten to perhaps fifteen. But now they saw what Aimal saw and understood what Aimal understood, so they ran.

POP! POP POP POP!

That’s what it sounded like, the gunfire.

One of the girls fell facedown in the dirt. A cloud of dust rose from the impact.

A second girl ran to the fallen one and a piece of her shoulder blew away, a twirling chunk of bone and meat, trailing blood.

Now everyone, boy and girl, was screaming, screaming, but only Aimal was running the wrong way. Not away from the guns. Toward them.

He waved his arms and shouted no, stop, stop, this is against Islam, this is against God, you must stop.

He ran until he was between the gunmen and the girls, some of whom kept running. But two of them seemed to have collapsed in sheer terror.

“Get out of the way!” a gunman yelled, and waved his rifle at Aimal. “It’s not you we want.”

Aimal shook his head, almost a spasm it was so quick and violent, like he could not control his bodily movement. He was terrified. He was terrified and barely able to keep his knees from buckling.

He saw what would happen.

He saw and knew and understood what would happen and still he did not back away.

“Go away! Leave us be!” he shouted at the gunmen.

“We are only here for the girls, get out of the way!”

He shook his head again, slower this time, slower, knowing . . . knowing that—

POP! POP POP! POP POP POP POP!

The two men standing, and one still in the truck, opened fire.

The high-powered rounds did not simply strike Aimal’s body, they dismantled it. Before he could fall his right arm was hanging by a spurting artery and his spine had exploded through his back like a bony red alien, and the side of his face was obliterated, turned to red mist and flying chunks of meat and bone.

He fell and now the two girls who had been unable to move cowered and screamed and died, their bodies jerking and jerking and jerking as the gunmen emptied their magazines into them.

One of the gunmen ran into the tiny schoolhouse and came out with a man so undone by fear that he had stained his clothing. The teacher was forced to his knees.

“School is not for girls,” a gunman said, and fired two rounds into the teacher’s groin. The teacher howled in pain and writhed on the ground.

“And since you are a girl now, it is no place for you, either.”

They executed the teacher with bullets in his head and neck.

Someone, Messenger or maybe even me, froze the scene then.

Shocked boys stood staring. One surviving girl lay slumped over her dead classmate. In the distance another girl was frozen in midstep, running. Aimal lay in dirt turned to mud by his blood.

I felt as frozen as the scene around me. I knew I was panting and yet did not feel I was getting air. The very skin on my body seemed to reverberate with the concussion of those gunshots.

We’ve all seen movies and games with shooting. Sometimes it’s in slow motion, sometimes it’s played for laughs, sometimes it’s shown as tragic and awful, but nothing in media prepared me for the real thing. For murder.

It’s always been an ugly word, murder, but still we manage to sanitize it. We jokingly say we’ll murder someone. I’ve said it. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to speak that word lightly again. When you see it, in reality, right there in front of you, actual murder, you want to cry and tear your hair and claw at your own face and fall down on the ground and demand to know why such a filthy thing could happen.

Why would you shoot a fleeing child in the back?

What could possibly justify that?

What kind of god could ever sanction such a thing?

The murderers were two older men and one younger, so young he might be no older than me. What poison had been poured into that young man’s soul that he could do such a thing?

“Are we here for him?” I asked.

“No,” Messenger said. “A different justice awaits them. No, we have business elsewhere.”

He was looking at me with something very like concern.

“If you’re going to tell me it gets easier, please don’t,” I said.

“I don’t know if it gets easier over time,” he said. “But whatever time has passed for me, it has not been enough to make it less terrible.”

He let time flow again, and now I watched as the killers drove away. And I watched as the stunned and shattered survivors lifted themselves up off the ground and rushed to the dead. They cried. They wailed. They sobbed that God is great, and maybe he is, but he wasn’t there on that day.

Something happened to me then, a spinning feeling, a feeling of being sucked down into the earth. But I suppose it was nothing that supernatural. In fact, I just fainted.

I woke with a start.

My first feeling was confusion. Just where was I?

I was no longer at the blood-soaked school yard.

I was lying on cold stone. Beside me on my left was a large rectangular pool with greenish water. On my right was an outdoor café with umbrellas shielding round wooden tables and canvas directors’ chairs. Many of those chairs were occupied by people dressed for tropical weather drinking cups of espresso or mineral water or tiny bottles of unfamiliar sodas.

I sat up, self-conscious at being passed out in a strange place with people chatting not five feet away. The language being spoken was not one I recognized. The people were a mix of white and black and a few who were Asian, like me.

Of course they could not see me. At least I hoped they couldn’t as I wiped away a trickle of sleep drool. Then I raised my eyes above the tables that had preoccupied me and was stunned to find myself in the courtyard of what looked like a white limestone palace. There were pillars and arches all around me. And at one end of the courtyard a sort of open tower rose. Beyond that moldering tower, great trees pressed close all around, almost menacing in their insistence. And farther still, above the immediate foliage, rose vivid green mountains that soared up into mist.

Not the sinister yellow mist that so often appeared in the demimonde I now occupied, but a genuine mist, the steam of low-flying clouds.

“I’ve been here before,” I said, searching for Messenger. But no, that wasn’t quite true, was it? There was familiarity to the location, but it was not a memory of my own experience, rather it was a memory of . . . of a video.

It took me a few minutes to clear my confused thoughts and put my finger on it. A music video. An old one. Something I’d come across on YouTube. Snoop! That was it, Snoop and Pharrell.

And the song was . . . “Beautiful.”

I was probably more proud of myself than I should have been for a simple feat of memory, but this world I now inhabited is strange at the best of times, and it is very easy to lose your way when not only space but time can be rearranged according to Messenger’s whim.

I did not know what the place was called. But I knew it was in Brazil.

I closed my eyes and saw the school yard. I saw, as if it was on a loop, the bullets tear into helpless children. I wanted to be sick but fought the urge. My feelings were unimportant, my emotions secondary: I had witnessed terrible evil. It had made me sick. But how small were my emotions when weighed against what I had seen?

I stood up and had the passing thought that I was a very long way from home with no airline ticket, no passport . . . It takes a while to adjust to this new reality—I’d lived sixteen years in a world where airplanes carried you across vast distances and time could not be traversed except in one direction and at one speed.

At least I was not there in that school yard. I was in a green, humid place where people sat at ease drinking soda and laughing. Of course no scene is so innocent that it reassures me entirely. The world I now occupied seemed to demand a permanent state of readiness, a constant flinch.

I walked to the nearest table and waved my hand in front of a woman’s face. No reaction. I was still invisible to her. I breathed a sigh of relief at that. If I were visible I’d be questioned, and all my answers would be likely to suggest that I was insane.

Messenger had to be nearby, so I went in search of him, passing through an arched passage and out onto stone steps. From that elevation I looked out over what must be a park. There was a lawn and beyond it tall trees.

I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, pushed my hands down to press the palms against my thighs, holding myself there, feeling my own physical reality.

It is a cliché—one I’ve seen in many books—to say that you feel the earth spinning beneath you. But that is how I felt, as if the planet had wobbled a bit on its axis and its spin through space could be felt.

The world I had known was fraying, coming apart. My world now encompassed ancient gods, messengers who could move through time as easily as flip through a calendar app. My world now contained Oriax, Daniel, and the Master of the Game, and far more evil than I wanted to acknowledge.

What else existed unseen? What other disruptions and horrors would Messenger show me? What would be left of what I used to know?

I caught a glimpse of a dark figure moving through the trees and ran down the steps and across the lawn and paused, realizing that I did not need to run. I could simply decide to be there, beside that dark figure. I could do what Messenger could do, couldn’t I? At least I could when he told me to. Did I need his proximity to use my new powers?

The idea made me queasy. What if I did it wrong? What if I ended up in some entirely different place?

So I ran across a lawn so lush it was like running on a mattress. I found a wide and leafy trail through the trees and followed it, slowing my pace a little so as not to look like an anxious puppy in search of its master, or like a lost child looking for a parent.

Coming around a bend I spotted an old stone tower, something that might have been lifted from a medieval castle. And there below it stood Messenger.

He was not alone. He was in heated conversation with Daniel.

I don’t know what Daniel is. To all appearances he’s a casually dressed youngish man, not imposing in the least. But from Messenger’s hints, and more from Messenger’s obvious deference, I judged Daniel to be a powerful being, someone with a sort of supervisory role over Messenger and, by extension, me.

I stopped, stepped off the path into deeper shadow to be less visible, and shamelessly eavesdropped.

“I was not aware that I was never to stray, even for a few minutes, from the path of duty.” This was Messenger, and he did not sound deferential, he sounded defiant.

“It is not a rule,” Daniel said calmly. “You perform your duties well, Messenger, I have no complaints.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I am concerned for you,” Daniel said. Where Messenger was defiant, Daniel was understanding.

“I would have thought I’d earned some trust,” Messenger said, still huffy in a low-key sort of way.

Daniel put his hand on Messenger’s shoulder. “You have. And beyond that, you have earned some affection.”

Messenger slumped and the defiance was gone from his body language and his tone. “I know you think I’m obsessed.”

“Yes,” Daniel said, and smiled sadly. “I wish I could help you.”

“I know that you may not,” Messenger admitted. “And I know that my searches are in vain. I know, Daniel. I know the chances of seeing her, it’s just that . . .”

“The search has become an expression of faith,” Daniel said.

“My only faith is in Isthil. And, of course, in her servants.”

“Yes, Messenger, I know the correct answer. But the truth is otherwise. Isthil is only your second love. Ariadne is your first. You search for a glimpse of her, knowing how improbable it is, but the act of searching is, for you, an expression of love.”

Messenger had nothing to say to that. He hung his head and the two of them stood in silence until Messenger said, “She once told me there were a dozen places she wanted to see before she died. She loved old places, places that were unique, places that seemed to hold a mystique.”

“She sensed even then the presence of our world,” Daniel said. He emphasized the word our so that there was no doubt he was referring to whatever impossible dimension we occupied. Daniel looked around, saw me, let me know that he had seen me, and said, “She was not mistaken. This place has meaning to the gods.”

“But she is not here.”

“You know I cannot answer that.”

Silence again as Messenger absorbed that answer, and after a moment nodded his acquiescence.

“I do not forbid you, Messenger. Even you are allowed a life, pleasures, as you carry out your destiny. But as a friend, I wonder if you do yourself harm. I wonder if your already burdened heart only becomes heavier.”

“I can’t give up,” Messenger said with a note of helplessness. “That would be despair. That would do more than burden my heart, it would destroy me.”

Daniel nodded and smiled wistfully. “Love is a power to equal that of the gods. Your apprentice is with us.”

Messenger turned his gaze on me, not searching, knowing where I was. “She needed rest. She has seen terrible things.”

Without willing it, I was with them.

Daniel said, “You have begun to see the nature of your duty, and the pain it will cause you. But you have not broken.”

“I . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” I was about to say I had not meant to eavesdrop, but of course I had, and there is little point in lying to people who know instantly whether you are speaking truth. “I don’t understand why—”

“You are not my apprentice,” Daniel said, cutting me off. “I am not your master.”

With a nod to Messenger he was gone.

An uncomfortable silence stretched between me and Messenger. Then he took an audible breath and said, “This place is called Parque Lago Azul. It is in Brazil.”

“I recognized it.”

“Did you? Ah.”

I wanted to ask him about Ariadne. The shadow of Ariadne had been on him since our first encounter and at times his obvious devotion to this girl annoyed me. Oriax would no doubt have some snarky remark to offer on the subject, along with the rude suggestion that I was attracted to Messenger in a most un-apprentice-like way, and thus jealous.

Was I jealous of Ariadne for being the object of such love? How could I not be? Who does not want to be loved beyond all reason? Who does not want to be needed as Messenger needed his Ariadne?

For Messenger I felt sadness. He did not speak of his pain, but knowing some small part of what his life had been during his service as Messenger, having touched him for a fleeting second and thus felt viscerally some fraction of what he had felt, I could only be sad.

But another part of me was jealous in a different way, not of him as a boy in love with someone else, but of the fact that he had something to hold on to.

Did I?

Had I ever loved anyone in that way? Could I ever love someone that way?

Yes, I thought, in time. But the one I might someday come to love was not to be touched.

4

We were back at the Iowa school. It was time to see what was happening with Trent.

Trent was in the office of the school’s vice principal, along with Pete. The vice principal’s name—on her desktop nameplate—was Constance Conamarra.

“I’ve got a report of an incident between the two of you and a Muslim student yesterday,” she was saying.

Messenger and I stood in the corner of the cramped room, invisible, of course, inaudible. But I felt conspicuous just the same.

“That’s bull . . . um, not true at all,” Trent said. “Is it, Pete?”

“Totally not true. Whatever that chick said—”

“I never mentioned it was a girl,” Conamarra said.

That stopped Pete, but not Trent, who said, “Whatever. Okay, look, I was just playing around, no big deal.”

“Actually it is quite a big deal. It’s a three-day suspension big deal. And I’d be within my rights to make it much worse, believe me.”

Pete groaned, but Trent’s face turned sullen with rising fury.

“No way,” he said. “You can’t suspend me just for grabbing some towel-head’s scarf, that’s BS.”

“I can and I have,” Conamarra said.

“This is crap! Special treatment just because she’s some terrorist.”

“Samira Kharoti is a terrorist?” The vice principal’s voice dripped scorn.

“They’re all terrorists. Bunch of foreigners come over here and start getting treated like celebrities. She’s not special. She’s not some big thing.” He did a hand-waving gesture around that “big thing” that started off sarcastic and ended with a violent thrust. He practically spit when he did it.

“All you had to do was leave her alone, Trent. And this is not your first incident. Last month you—”

“Yeah, whatever,” Trent said, shoved his chair back, and stood up. Conamarra was a small woman, and between Trent and Pete they made an intimidating pair. “Everyone’s special, because they’re girls or black or Mexican or a towel-head or—”

“That. Is. Enough. You can come back to school on Monday. Until then, you are not to come on to school grounds.”

They left on a wave of muttered curse words and slammed the door behind them.

In the hallway Trent said, “I’m going to find that bitch and give her something to complain about!”

“What are you talking about?” Pete asked.

“That Samira bitch. I’m going to have a little talk with her.”

“Dude . . .”

“What?” Trent snapped.

Pete put up his hands defensively. “Hey, I’m already suspended, I don’t want—”

“Are you pussing out on me?”

“I’m not—”

“Are you seriously pussing out on me? A little bit of trouble with Conamarra and you turn into her puppy dog? Oh, oh, pet me on my little head, please pet me, waaaah.”

“Aw, man, it’s not like that.”

“That’s just what it’s like. Don’t you know what this is? All of them against us. Ni—ers, Jews, Mexicans, now we have to put up with camel-jockeys, too? They’re taking over, man, taking over. Taking. Over.”

“Dude, I just don’t want to get all into some big thing over this,” Pete pleaded. Then his eyes lit up with a crafty light. “Hey, how come it’s just the two of us? Why isn’t Marlon down here with us?”

“Conamarra probably got to him first, and he wimped out, just like you’re doing. That’s the game, man, they play us against each other. Make us weak.”

They had made it most of the way down the hallway when a security guard stepped in front of them and spoke into a walkie-talkie. “I got them both, right here. Yes, ma’am.”

To the boys the guard said, “You two need to get your stuff from your lockers—which are not down this hallway—and get off the school grounds.”

An argument followed, but in the end Trent and Pete, with their backpacks full, walked off the grounds to Pete’s car.

The car had no backseat in which Messenger and I might conveniently wedge ourselves, so we simply walked alongside the car. The fact that I accepted this rewriting of the laws of physics without much shock is, I suppose, a sign that I was adjusting to Messenger’s world. Then, too, I had seen this trick before.

We walked alongside the car as it accelerated to thirty and then forty miles an hour. Somehow we were ambling along at forty miles an hour, stopping at stop signs, then effortlessly accelerating despite the fact that when I looked down at my feet they were doing no more than walking. There was no stiff wind in our faces, we were not huffing and puffing, we were simply effortlessly keeping pace with a car moving several times faster than the fastest runner. The car still sounded like a car, and all the other sounds of the road roared in our ears, but I could hear the conversation in the car as clearly and as intimately as I always heard Messenger’s voice.

It was not a conversation I enjoyed hearing. Much of it was a string of angry expletives and racial slurs covering every ethnic group, but mostly focused on Muslims.

And the theme that grew from that obscene anger was one of revenge. Revenge for the suspension from school. But not revenge against the vice principal, no. No the talk was of getting them.

Them.

“Is there anything more exciting than a pair of angry fools with a them to pursue?”

Oriax.

She was beside us, walking along on her absurdly tall and impossibly pointed boots. As always she had a new outfit, not more revealing than the earlier one, but every bit as likely to cause a sudden cessation of conversation among those who appreciate female sensuality.

I did not resist the feeling. At that moment my brain was still reeling from the shooting of Aimal and the girls and the teacher. I would have preferred any thought to that memory.

Probably it was shameful that I was so desperate to push that horror aside. But I had already seen far too many things I’d give anything to purge from my memory. If this was to be my fate I would see many, many more. They would be tattooed on my flesh until all of me was covered. I knew my sanity would be at risk, was at risk.

And I had no Ariadne to hold on to.

“What do you think they’ll do?” Oriax asked, and clapped her hands in gleeful anticipation.

The answer was not long in coming. Trent pulled a bottle of peppermint schnapps from under his seat.

“Of course!” Oriax said. “I should have guessed. They’ll need that.”

Messenger ignored her as he usually did, as though his refusal to engage would discourage her. It was clear he had no power to make her go away. He could lose her sometimes in the swift movement through whatever impossible geography comprised our universe, but he could not forbid her to be present.

I decided on a different approach. If I was truly to become the messenger myself someday, then Oriax would become my problem to deal with.

And curiosity has always been my strength as well as my weakness.

“What do you get out of this, Oriax?” I demanded.

She smiled at me, parting her mauve lips to reveal white teeth that looked a bit sharper than teeth should be. “Excellent question, mini-Messenger. I will answer it if you’ll agree to answer one of mine.”

Messenger’s eyes flicked a warning, but I took Oriax’s challenge. “Okay. I agree.”

“Excellent,” she purred. “What I get out of this is the joy of seeing and helping to inflict pain. I savor human despair. I revel in human weakness. But equally, I take enjoyment from offering its opposite: pleasure.” She made a sort of philosophical sound, a worldly sigh, a commentary on life’s interesting vagaries. “It’s fortunate, really, because in a way it’s also my . . . job.” She spoke that word with evident distaste. “I am what I am, and I am what I do, and I enjoy what I do.”

She leaned toward me, very close, and I felt my heart race. It was not a rational thing, nor even strictly a sexual thing, it is something almost like gravity—invisible, inescapable, inevitable. Oriax does that and I could no more ignore it than I could ignore the heat of the sun or the pull of the earth’s core.

“And now, my question for you, mini-Messenger. It is this: Have you fantasized about our lovely, handsome Messenger? Have you imagined yourself in his arms? In his bed?”

I started to blurt an answer, but Oriax held up a cautioning hand. “If you lie, I will know it. And so will Messenger.”

My mind went instantly to a dream I’d had, one of my more unsettling, though not at all terrifying, dreams.

No one should be held responsible for their dreams.

“I never imagined Messenger having a bed,” I managed to say as a blush rose up my neck to burn my cheeks.

“Hah!” She seemed delighted with my pathetic evasion. She knew she had landed a blow. She knew she had made things awkward between Messenger and me. Awkward to say the least.

She was, as she’d said, reveling in human weakness.

Darkness had fallen completely by the time the car pulled into a cemetery that was much more opulent than the one we’d visited so far away. The car crept along manicured paths between stark marble testimonials to lost love. There were impressive marble crypts and small granite crosses. Here and there a Star of David.

“There!” a slurring Pete said, and pointed.

Trent stopped the car and the two boys stumbled out. The sun had gone down and the shadows were growing long.

We followed them onto the springy grass to a modest granite headstone. It read Mohammed Marwat, beloved husband, father, brother. And a fairly recent date of death. It was decorated with an engraved crescent and star.

“Yeah. Raghead,” Trent said.

Pete offered some expletives of support.

Then Trent kicked the headstone. His reward was pain that had him hopping and cursing. He limped back to Pete’s car and rummaged in the trunk until he found a tire iron and a can of red spray paint.

With the tire iron he began digging at the foundation of the stone, wedging the crowbar end beneath it and, finally, toppling it onto its back while Pete kept watch.

More loud cursing.

“And now, the paint,” Oriax said with a wink.

Trent shook the paint can, musing about his message. In the end he decided on his favorite word, Raghead, which he misspelled as Rag-hed. Then added an expletive. And finally the words, Go home.

“And there we have your basic grave desecration,” Oriax said with satisfaction. “Are we really all here for a little grave desecration? This is your mission, Messenger? Trivial.”

And then Trent urinated on the stone and Pete did likewise.

“Okay,” Oriax said with tolerant humor, “now, it’s an enhanced grave desecration. But really, Messenger, are you going to subject these two cretins to the full-on Messenger treatment? I’m surprised you’d want to show mini-Messenger the true pitiless savagery of your absurd goddess’s so-called justice.”

I expected Messenger to ignore her. But instead I found him looking at her very thoughtfully. And Oriax didn’t like it. She seemed to blanch, although that’s too strong an image for the very slight, barely noticeable pullback.

I wondered if she was frightened of Messenger. But no, in the times I’d seen them together she had never shown any fear. But she had just now winced—and again, that’s too strong an image for a change of expression that was so well concealed as to be almost unnoticeable.

Almost unnoticeable.

And yet I was sure that she had done something or said something she now regretted.

“Well, I have other, friendlier folk to see,” Oriax said lamely, and disappeared.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“Indeed. What was that about?” He repeated my question while, of course, offering no answer.

“Thanks for clearing that up,” I grumbled, just relieved to have something other than my fantasies, my alleged fantasies, as the main focus of conversation.

He sighed and relented. “Not all of us who live in this world beyond the normal have the same abilities and gifts,” Messenger said. “Oriax’s kind sometimes sees further than we are able.”

“Further? As in deeper into? Or as in further away?”

He shook his head very slightly. “Further ahead. Time, not space.”

In my mind I heard Pop Pop Pop. I saw brain and bone and blood. I sucked in air but seemed to be suffocating, as though the air held no oxygen. I realized I was trembling.

I realized as well that the murder of Aimal, and the girls, and their teacher, was yet to come. It was in the future, still. Right now, across the world, Aimal was alive.

Somehow this led to that, though the how of it was not yet clear to me. What was the Isthil gospel that Messenger had quoted to Oriax? ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Was this the pricked finger?

I did not want to show Messenger any more weakness, which is how I thought of my fainting at the school yard. If I was to be Watson to his Holmes, then I had to be able to hold my own. Keep up. I clenched my fists together behind my back and squeezed until deep crescents were pushed into my palms and my forearms ached. But I hid it. I pushed the murder sickness down inside.

“Well,” I said, “where are we off to next?”

He stood silent in deep thought, ignoring me. Finally he must have reached some kind of conclusion because he said, “That’s enough for now. You’ll be wanting food and rest.”

He was quite right, but I wondered whether he had gleaned that from an unwanted intrusion into my mind—he was certainly capable of that—or whether he was just noticing the sag of my shoulders and the unconcealable agitation on my face. Either way I found myself alone in my . . . I must find something to call the place where I ate and slept and showered. It seemed absurd to call it home, but it was all the home I had for now.

As always there was food in the kitchen: fresh fruit, cereal and milk, Flake bars—a habit I’d picked up during a childhood visit to the UK—and even a frozen pizza. All things I would ordinarily eat.

I made myself a dinner-breakfast of an egg, cheese, and English muffin sandwich and wished this place had come with internet, or at least TV. But this place existed outside of normal space and time, so the cable company did not exactly have its lines here.

There were books, however. Some were the sorts of books I normally read for pleasure, but there were some heavy, leather-bound tomes as well, that could not have been placed there by accident. There was a shelf of these just to the side of the fireplace.

Someone or something had arranged kindling, logs, and matches, and I took that as an invitation. Before there was computer-plus-internet to shine a light on our faces there was fire. I built a decent little blaze that crackled impressively and threw off the odd spark. I pulled cushions off the sofa and sat there within range of the comforting heat with a small pile of obscure books.

“Thesis and Antithesis: The Search for Balance,” I read aloud. “Wow, that sounds like the dullest book ever written.” As did a book simply titled Justice that weighed about as much as one might expect so portentously titled a book to weigh.

In the end I opened a large but not terribly thick book with a magnificently embossed blue leather cover.

“Isthil,” I read aloud.

Messenger had taken me to Shamanvold, that awe-inspiring pit where the names of all Messengers are inscribed alongside bas-reliefs of the Heptarchy, the Seven Gods, of which Isthil was one.

I opened the book and read.

In the beginning was the void.

Into the void came existence.

But existence was precarious,

Suspended above the void,

Surrounded by the void.

A guppy at the shark’s mouth.

A feather floating before the waterfall.

A pebble wobbling at the lip of a bottomless pit.

Ours is not the first existence.

Existence has occurred before.

And existence has failed.

It has fallen into the shark’s teeth.

It has been swept down into the rushing water.

It has tipped and fallen into the pit.

Existence blinks into being,

And in a blink is gone.

“Well, that’s cheerful,” I muttered to the fireplace.

Into existence came the Seven.

Summoned by the will of existence itself.

Summoned to serve existence.

Summoned to ensure that this time,

Existence should not fail.

Summoned to maintain the balance,

Of the guppy, the feather, and the pebble.

Summoned to extend the length of that blink.

And thus was Isthil born . . .

I read on, skimming past the long origin story, looking for the passage Messenger had quoted. And there, at last, amid a series of homilies and parables, I found it, though Messenger had slightly misquoted.

“The fool says, ‘I never intended to kill, I meant only to wound.’ But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet will love triumph.”

The message came from a strange god, not my God, but it was no different than the lesson of my own faith, and perhaps many other faiths as well. Whatever Isthil really was, divine or mortal, god or pretender, I thought her words wise.

I decided I must read further, but the warmth of the fire and the lingering horror of seeing children shot down as I watched helplessly took their toll.

I did not dream of Isthil or of the balance of the world. I dreamed of places I had known, and people: a mother. A father now lying in his honored grave. Teachers. Friends. All of them in my dream seemed to be on the other side of a pane of thick glass. I could hear their voices only as unintelligible murmurs. I saw their faces, but distorted by distance and the eternal yellow mist that in some way separated me from ordinary life.

And then, yes, I dreamed of Messenger. I saw him in my mind without his long black coat. Without the symbols of his office, the ring of horror and the ring of Isthil.

To my unfettered subconscious imagination he was the boy he was before becoming the Messenger of Fear, or at least how I imagined he must have been. Tall and beautiful as he was still, but sitting on a rock at the edge of the ocean, laughing as waves sent cold, salt spray to dampen his chest and shoulders, and the rope-gathered linen pants I had dressed him in.

Yes, I looked with more than casual interest at his chest and shoulders, at his long black hair as it blew behind him, at his compassionate eyes. Yes, Oriax, I confess.

But even in my dream I knew it was false, for I knew that Messenger’s body was covered in the tattoo-vivant marks of the horrors he had seen and made to happen.

I did not, in my dream, look at the single such terrible decoration that now marked my own body. I never looked at that, not in dreams, and only reluctantly in reality.

But in my dream Messenger did not look at me as I looked at him. Instead he whispered a single word. The crashing waves tore that word from his lips, but I knew in my heart that what he had said was, “Ariadne.”

Ariadne, not Mara. Nor could it ever be Mara.

I think I cried in my sleep then, though I remember no dream, for my pillow was damp upon waking.

“It’s time,” Messenger said, but he was no longer the laughing boy by the ocean. He was back, looming above me, the real Messenger of Fear, grim and relentless.

5

“Are we going after Trent and Pete?” I asked.

“Yes. But not yet. Later. For now we have a very different matter to address.”

I was on the point of asking him where we were about to suddenly appear next, but by the time I could form the question, we were already stood in a wrecked, abandoned room.

It took me a while to establish just where we were. Messenger, of course, did not volunteer to help, preferring, I suppose, that I use my own powers of observation. I don’t think I’d ever been particularly observant before, but I had changed and grown since becoming what Oriax liked to call “mini-Messenger” and I now paid a great deal more attention to my environment.

In this case the environment was an abandoned business of some sort. That it was abandoned was evident from the filth, the dust, the cobwebs, and spiderwebs, the lack of any light aside from the ghostly greenish-gray of streetlights filtering in through a grimy window and grimier glass door.

There was a waist-high counter that surely once held a cash register. Behind the counter a twisted mess of wire racks, a torn cardboard poster for Camel cigarettes. Strewn across the linoleum tile floor of the room were random bits of shelving, an upended round cooler splashed with the Pepsi logo, and a liberal scattering of trash—candy wrappers, empty chips bags, plastic cups, paper hot dog holders, empty water bottles, cigarette butts, and dried feces.

Against the back wall were empty spaces that would once have held refrigerated cases.

“It was a convenience store,” I announced proudly, as though I really was playing Watson to Messenger’s Sherlock.

Messenger was not wildly impressed by my powers of deduction.

The place stank of human and animal waste, of rotting garbage and dust. The room appeared empty. I heard a slight scratching sound, assumed it was a rat and carefully scanned the floor around me while wondering if there was a weapon at hand should the rat come my way.

Messenger moved to the back of the room, to the empty rectangles where the cold cases had once dispensed beer and soda and packs of salami and cheese. The glow of streetlights did not reach this far, but to my surprise the space was not entirely dark. There seemed to be a candle within, judging from the buttery light that flickered and at times disappeared entirely.

The scratching sound came again and something about it contradicted my assumption that it was an animal. It was too slow to be a rat. Too random.

I leaned into the void and saw the candle first, and the person lying near the candle second. I saw that it was a girl, a girl hard to place age-wise, though I guessed she might be seventeen or so. She had dark hair that looked as if she had made an effort to gather it all together with a scrunchie, but wisps and entire hanks of hair had escaped. Her face might be pretty. I wasn’t entirely sure, as it was both dirty and marked with too much makeup.

She was dressed like a bargain basement Oriax, but the net effect spoke not of supernatural allure but rather of vulnerability and despair.

I don’t know why it took me so long to notice the syringe in the crook of her elbow. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it.

It lay there, the needle still in the vein. A trickle of blood had started to dry. A leather belt lay loosened around her bicep. A tablespoon with a blackened bottom was on the floor beside the guttering candle.

“Her name is Graciella Jayne, though she has taken to calling herself Candy. She is seventeen.”

“Is?” I asked sharply, for I had leaped to the sad conclusion that she was dead.

“She lives still,” Messenger said. He cocked his head, as did I upon hearing a sound of footsteps and low conversation. From the direction of what must have been the store’s back door came a boy and a girl, both much the same age as Graciella.

Both looked to be in the same . . . business . . . as Graciella, the boy dressed in a skintight T-shirt that bared his lean midriff, while the girl wore the shortest of shorts and a top that would have doubled for a bathing suit.

“Candy!” the boy cried. They ran to Graciella and knelt beside her. The rush of bodies extinguished the flame and for a moment they were in near pitch-darkness. Then a lighter flared in the boy’s hand and the candle was relit.

“Oh, my God, she OD’d,” the girl said.

“Is that the stuff she got off Jenks?”

“Same stuff we’ve got, Mouse. Jesus.”

The two of them looked at each other and slowly the boy named Mouse pulled a small, rectangular packet of white powder from his pocket. A logo had been stamped on it. A pink pony.

“We have to call 911,” Mouse said.

“I have to boot up first,” the girl said.

“Are you crazy? You want to end up like her? That stuff is cut with something bad.”

“Maybe not, maybe it’s just real high-test, you know? Too pure will kill you. So I could just shoot half a spoon. Three-quarters, you know?”

Mouse stood up. “I’m calling 911.” He pulled out a cell phone and, shaking his head at the girl’s plaintive look, called in an overdose.

The girl began slapping Graciella’s face, saying, “Wake up, Candy, come on. Wake up.”

Graciella managed a low moan, but only one, and then she slid back into a coma.

“Okay, come on, Sue Lynn, we gotta get out of here before the EMTs show up,” Mouse said.

“This neighborhood, it’ll take them twenty minutes,” the girl said. “And don’t call me Sue Lynn. I’m Jessica now. And I have got to fix. It’s nighttime, Mouse, I’m getting sick.”

All the while I watched Graciella. Her breathing was shallow. Her skin was gray and covered in sweat. Gray even by the gentle amber light of the candle. It was all I could do to stop myself asking Messenger the question: Can’t we help her?

I knew the answer to that. The answer is always the same. We may not interfere. We are not there for the victims. We are there for the people who create victims.

Yet first we must understand what has been done, that is the rule, that is the way of the Messengers of Fear.

The EMTs arrived, as Jessica had predicted, after about twenty minutes. By then Mouse and Jessica were gone. Did they go to shoot up? Almost certainly. Would their lives end in tragedy? Probably.

Would I find myself someday looking down at the dead body of one or the other or both, wondering what wickedness I was there to punish? That was a grim thought that would bring feelings of hopelessness in its wake. I pushed the thought away.

The arrival of the EMTs gave me my first inkling of where we were. The patch on their shoulders indicated Nashville, Tennessee.

The EMTs, a man and a woman, moved with practiced efficiency, barely speaking because they had seen OD’d junkies before, many times. They hung a transparent bag of fluid and pushed a needle into Graciella’s arm. But the veins had been weakened to near collapse and the needle did not work. The EMT pulled it out, tried again. Again nothing. It took her six tries to find a vein that could handle the flow of fluids. The other EMT took her pulse, blood pressure, checked her eyes, and said, “Pinpoint. BP is seventy over thirty-five. Breathing shallow and irregular.”

“Naloxone?”

“Yep.”

A shot into the muscle of her thigh this time. They radioed in to the emergency room at Vanderbilt University Hospital.

“BP’s rising, ninety over forty.”

“She’ll live,” I said, as though I were part of their conversation and not invisible and inaudible.

We watched as they brought in a gurney, kicking trash aside to allow them to roll it. A third EMT arrived and helped them lift Graciella onto it and pass a strap over her waist.

Then, without warning, Messenger and I were outside the red brick hospital. Ambulances pulled up, but none were carrying Graciella; she was already inside. We walked through the doors, slid past nurses, technicians, doctors, and patients, and came upon Graciella in one of the beds. A young foreign doctor stood at the foot of her bed addressing half a dozen medical students.

“Heroin overdose. EMTs reported low BP, low pulse, nonresponsive, breathing shallow. They administered fluids and Naloxone. The workup indicated what we already knew: OD. When results come in I expect we’ll find she’s positive for at least one STD, and almost certainly positive for hepatitis. Malnourished, of course.”

“She looks young,” one medical student offered.

“I’d say fifteen, sixteen, give or take, younger than she looks,” the doctor said wearily. “She’s most likely a runaway turning tricks. She is still in a coma, but brain function appears normal.”

I turned away. She looked too vulnerable lying there being discussed by strangers as though she wasn’t even present. Of course, in a way she wasn’t present.

“She’s a junkie,” I said to Messenger, and perhaps my distaste was too obvious for he shot me a cold and disapproving look that I took as a rebuke.

I bristled at that. “It’s what happens to junkies,” I said harshly.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“People shouldn’t take drugs,” I said, coming off more self-righteous than I intended. “I mean, come on, who doesn’t know that heroin is dangerous?”

“And you want to look no further?” he asked.

“I guess I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who screw up their lives in some obviously stupid way. There’s people who have terrible things just happen to them. There are people being shot in the back in a school yard. That boy . . . those girls . . . and now this stupid girl, who nearly killed herself and may do so yet.”

“You spare no pity for the foolish.”

“I do have pity, it’s just . . . I mean, you can’t compare that brave boy standing up to gunmen and this girl here.”

He was silent, but it was a silence that carried the weight of disapproval.

The doctor and the medical students had moved on to another case. Graciella lay alone. All alone. A pretty but ragged girl with tubes in her arms and up her nose, scabs on her inner arms.

“Where are her parents, for God’s sake?” I snapped. “That’s who should be taking care of her.”

I should have known what would happen next—we stood outside a very nice, upscale suburban home in a location I could not guess at. There was a suggestion of impressive, pine-covered hills in the distance, the sky was threatening, and the air was chilly but not cold.

“Her home?”

“It was,” Messenger said. “And it is still, in this time.”

“You mean she’s in there right now?” Did my reluctance show? For I was strangely resistant to seeing her in a time before she became a disease-ridden drug addict. But I couldn’t fail in my duties. Messenger was deliberately waiting, patient as always, and I knew he was testing me.

I took a deep breath and walked straight up the sidewalk and through the front door into a tall entrance hall that revealed twin, curved staircases going up, with a formal dining room to the right and an equally formal living room, both furnished in a heavy, rather old-fashioned way, all dark wood and embroidered upholstery.

I heard laughter and the sound of running feet. A girl, no more than six years old, came running past, giggling, chased by an enthusiastic terrier.

It might be Graciella, I thought, but this child was a universe away from the scabbed junkie who lay in a Nashville hospital.

We walked on, heading back toward the kitchen where a woman with a blond ponytail stood slicing vegetables for a salad. She worked awkwardly due to a cast on her left arm.

“Her mother,” I said, and at that a man entered. He was a strikingly handsome man of perhaps thirty-five but with prematurely silvered hair. He came up quietly behind his wife and made to put his arms around her waist but at his touch she flinched and cried out, “No, please!”

It was more than a startled sound, there was something brittle and high-strung in it, a panicky sound. Something was going on between the two parents. The man’s face darkened in anger.

“I hate it when you do that,” he snapped.

“Do what?” the woman asked, trying to conceal her emotions. “You just startled me is all.”

“I haven’t had a drink in two days and you still treat me like . . . like, I don’t know. Like you hate me touching you.”

She turned and I saw naked fear on her face. It was so surprising that I took a step back.

“John, I didn’t mean . . . I mean, I was just startled.”

“Have I ever laid a hand on you when I was sober?” the man asked, his expression one of hurt and perhaps wounded pride. “I just want to give my beautiful wife a hug.”

“Of course,” she said, but it came out almost as a gasp.

He carefully, gently, raised her injured arm and seemed to be inspecting the cast.

She stood rigid.

“It was an accident,” he said firmly.

“I know, John, you didn’t mean to . . . It’s just that when you . . .” She looked into his eyes and looked away quickly.

“So, it’s like that, is it?” He seemed almost pleased in a spiteful way. “Make a mistake, pay forever, right? Well, you ever hear the phrase ‘might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb’?”

“I don’t . . . I . . .”

“I’m sorry,” he said with savage mockery. “Is that a little over your head? Let me explain it in words of a single syllable. It means if you’re going to blame me for what I haven’t done, I might as well go ahead and do it for real.”

He opened the door of their expensive refrigerator, drew out a bottle of beer, and rummaged in a drawer for a bottle opener.

“John, please.”

“Please, John. Please, John.” He popped the bottle top and drank half the bottle in a single long swig. “Please, John, please work like a dog to buy me this beautiful home, John. Please, John, buy me a nice new car. Please, John, pay for the country club and the private school.”

“Sweetheart, you know—”

“Shut the hell up. Just shut up.”

I saw Graciella, the six-year-old Graciella, standing at the edge of the room, framed in an arched doorway.

“What do you want, honey?” her mother asked.

Graciella shook her head.

“Then go up to your room and play. Or outside. But don’t bother Mommy and Daddy right now, okay, sweetie?”

“You’re scaring her, Alison. You don’t have to leave, Graciella. You can stay. Daddy’s all right.” He said “all right” in a way that elongated the vowels, sardonic, sullen. “Daddy just wanted a little affection. But I guess that’s too much to ask, isn’t it?”

Graciella knew something was wrong. Her face was serious, her eyes huge, looking from her mother to her father. I felt extremely uncomfortable but, I told myself, a difficult childhood is not a reason to become a junkie. I was pretty sure of that. After all, who doesn’t have some kind of problem with their parents?

Messenger turned away and headed up the magnificent staircase to the bedrooms upstairs. It had been day, now it was night. And I sensed that more time had passed.

Messenger hesitated at a door. “This may be difficult to watch.”

I almost laughed. Suddenly now Messenger was concerned for me? I’d already seen things that could haunt my dreams for a dozen lifetimes.

I nodded. But secretly I smiled. What was there left that could possibly be that awful?

We passed through the door and into a darkened bedroom. Graciella was asleep, but she was an older Graciella, perhaps nine or ten now. Her curls lay spread across her pillow. She breathed softly. A stuffed animal, a small white bear, lay beside her, its button eyes staring up in the dark. A ceiling fan turned and ruffled her hair just ever so slightly. From outside came the sound of sprinklers coming on.

It was a nice room, there were—

The door opened, briefly spilling light and silhouetting her father, John. He closed the door silently behind him and tiptoed to Graciella’s bed.

My father used to come and check on me like this, when I was little. I remember pretending to be asleep, and he would watch me for a while, and whisper increasingly silly jokes until I cracked up. Then he would say, “Night, sweetheart,” and—

Graciella’s father kicked the side rail of her bed, hard. Graciella’s eyes flew open.

“You didn’t take out the trash,” John yelled.

“I . . . I . . .” She tried to wipe the sleep from her eyes, blinking up at him. But it was not surprise I saw on her face, but mute dread: this was not the first time this had happened.

“I-I-I?” he mocked. “You stupid little pig. That’s why you don’t take out the trash, you’re a stupid, fat little piggy who loves garbage, aren’t you?”

“Dad, I need to sleep, I have school—” She cowered, pulling the covers around her, trying to hold the blanket while covering her ears.

He cursed vilely, a machine-gun assault of abuse, a constant, sickening rant of filth and degradation. Then he knelt beside her, bringing his rage-transformed face down close to hers. “You don’t need school, you’re too stupid to learn anything. You know it’s true. You’re dumb as a brick, Graciella, and just as ugly. Now get your fat ass out of bed and take out the—”

“Okay, I’m coming, I—”

“Oh, please, don’t start blubbering, you look like an animal, like a baboon or something when you start in with that. I can barely look at you! Filthy little waste of breath!”

I turned to Messenger, struggling to maintain my own self-control, trying to be the cool, detached Messenger’s apprentice, but feeling all the while as if I would explode. “Is it always like this?”

In response Messenger waved a hand through the air, and from his fingers drifted bright silvery rectangles, each a tiny screen. And on each screen was a scene.

“Pig!”

“Worthless!”

“Fat!”

“Ugly!”

“Stupid!”

Dozens of these screens floated around me, each showing John, Graciella’s father, heaping the most wounding of insults on her. I have transcribed here all that I can bring myself to say, but there were others worse. And they would not end, the screens multiplied until they threatened to fill the room like a tornado of filth and contempt.

It battered me. It was not directed at me, but it was as if I was being buried alive beneath the sheer weight of the verbal violence. It was awful to witness from the outside, to have endured it day after day, week after week, as Graciella had, to be attacked, ridiculed, subjected to this raw, unshielded hatred . . .

“No!” I cried. “No. No. Enough, freeze this, freeze time!”

Time froze. Graciella was absolutely still. The ceiling fan stopped. The sprinklers outside no longer chattered. Everything stopped.

Except for John.

The father was still for a moment, almost as if he, too, were frozen, but then he turned his face to us. He squinted, tilted his head sideways a little. Then his eyes widened, and he saw.

A sound came from him. It was not a sound I had ever heard before, and not one I wish ever to hear again. It was a growl, the growl of a hyena guarding a dead prey. But there were layers within that animal growl, cries and shrieks, the sound of a lash on flesh, of bludgeon blows striking bone.

In the time I had been with Messenger, no one had ever seen us until we revealed ourselves. No one had ever moved when we froze time.

“Servants of Isthil,” John said in a grating voice dripping with contempt.

I shot a worried look at Messenger. Messenger stood stony-faced, unafraid, unsurprised. “I thought I sensed your kind,” he said.

John smiled and shrugged. “Well, aren’t you the clever one? A Messenger of Fear, I suppose. One of Isthil’s little busybodies. And what’s this,” he said, indicating me. “Your pet?”

Messenger did not answer.

John laughed. “Did you come to listen in? Did you enjoy it?” He turned back to the bed.

“Stop!” I cried. “Tell him!” But John did not stop, so I cried again, more insistently, “Stop him! Stop him!”

“He can’t, you little fool,” John snarled. “His kind have no power over mine.”

“I have one power over you,” Messenger said. It was said quietly, but if you imagine that he spoke without emotion, you would be wrong. I would never have believed so quiet a voice could carry so much fury. “Show yourself, incubus!”

“Oh, I see,” John said. “She’s a pupil, not a pet. You want her to learn, that’s it, isn’t it?” He focused on me, looked me up and down with a predatory intimacy.

“Show yourself!” Messenger snapped.

“As you wish, servant of Isthil.”

John walked right up to me, swaggered really, and stopped within reach, facing me. He was proud of what he was about to reveal. He didn’t writhe or squirm as if he were being forced to do so, he was glad of the opportunity. He smiled and then stuck out his tongue. But the tongue began to change. The pink color turned black, and his tongue grew long, longer, until it was a two-headed black snake writhing between lips that had begun to change as well, turning a dark red.

The mouth was wide and lipless, more a gash than a mouth, and within I glimpsed rows of tiny sharp teeth, shark’s teeth. His eyes had migrated across his face, split apart into smaller pools, like spilled mercury. Two human eyes became six eyes that could only make me think of spiders. Not dead little doll eyes, but six active, searching, leering eyes.

His body was wiry rather than bulky, with something like skin that seemed too mobile, too . . .

My breath caught in my throat. His skin, his entire now-unclothed body was covered in barbs, like the stem of a fresh-cut rose. “Do you know what I would do to you?” he asked me. “With my tongue I would lick the flesh from you, flay you alive until you were nothing but raw, red flesh.” All the while the barbs that covered him quivered, and the two-headed tongue would quickly dart in and out between words, so fast that his speech was not interrupted. Heat came off him, as if he were packed with glowing charcoal.

“Get back,” I said in a voice much weaker than I intended.

“And once I had reduced you to a single vast island of pain, I would take you, I would take you!”

His tongue lashed out at me. His hands, claws now, swiped at me. He was furious. He was a single nexus of all the rage in the world. He hated me.

He hated me.

I couldn’t help it, I backed away, not even conscious of what I was doing. Not conscious of anything but the monster before me.

“This one cannot harm you,” Messenger said. “Nor can he physically harm Graciella. He can only pour his poison in her ears.”

The demon—what else to call such a creature—nodded agreement. “Oh, it’s true, sadly. But others—greater than myself—can take your precious immunity from you, little messenger girl. Oh yes, they can. And if it pleases them they can give you to me. They can give me your mind and body and your quivering soul, and then, oh the fun we would have.”

He moved closer, ever closer, and I felt the door behind me, my back pressed against it now, and panic, sheer terror possessed me.

“You want to see the demon?” he taunted me. He swung his arms wide and roared, “Here is the demon incubus!”

I panicked.

I fled.