Michael Grant - Messenger of Fear

Kayla’s little group broke up as the bell rang with startling urgency, and, just like it was at my school when the bell rang, the hallway emptied out fast, the last stragglers rushing away with backpacks swinging.

The girl who had spoken, well, maybe she was a girl physically and chronologically but surely not psychologically. No girl could have carried herself this way. A woman, then. A young woman to look at but with no hint of youthful innocence.

She was as pale as Messenger and, like him, dressed in black. But this girl/woman had a great deal less clothing in total. She wore a thing that was a cross between a bustier and a leather jacket. Cutouts revealed her shoulders, the neckline plunged to her breastbone, and the whole garment was cut to a severe point in front, forming a V that hid her navel but left the sides of her waist and her lower back bare. She wore black tights that seemed more liquid than fabric and swirled with black-on-black patterns that shifted and changed. Her boots went to her knees and were notably strange for suggesting that her feet were unnaturally small.

That detail bothered me, held my attention for a moment, as I could not see how she could stand on such tiny feet, particularly given the height of the heels.

If Kayla was the blond sun, this . . . this person . . . was midnight. Her eyes were black and large, as if the pupils had expanded to consume all the iris. She had extravagant lashes and black hair, but it was her lips that drew my fascinated gaze. They were green. Not tinged with green, not a sickly green, but a flamboyant, defiant green. The green of jade. They matched a pendant around her neck that was an ornate object of jade and onyx, green and black, suggesting a face, a lewd, leering face.

There were other touches of green and black—earrings, a snake-pattern bracelet around her left wrist, fasteners down the front of her boots. And a ring on her left hand whose intricate design I could not make out.

Had Kayla seen this creature striding down the halls of her school, she would have curled into a little ball. For while Kayla was beautiful, and I liked to believe that I was at least pretty, this female creature had the beauty of cold, distant stars and silvery moonlight.

She was hypnotizing. Merely by existing, she redefined my ideas of beauty, for this was not mere physical perfection, this was seduction; this was the primordial, essential, eternal avatar of female sensuality walking nonchalantly down the empty hallway of a suburban high school.

She made me feel shrunken and small and ugly.

Her name was . . .

“Oriax,” Messenger said.

“Messenger,” Oriax said. She spoke with a voice full of silk, secrets, and slithering snakes. Like Messenger’s, her voice was too near, too intimate, but it thrilled me. I whimpered. I couldn’t help it. I had forgotten my panic, forgotten for the moment that I should not be in this place at all, that I had lost my memory, that I feared I was dead. All of that was submerged the moment I saw her. I wanted to worship her. I wanted to listen to any word that she cared to speak. I wanted to be her, to be a tiny fraction of her.

Oriax.

“Well, hello there . . .” she said to me, and then after a longish pause added, “you.”

I grunted. Like a farm animal. I could not make a more complex sound.

“She’s not bad-looking, really, eh, Messenger? Daniel has done well for you. He must be feeling sorry for you, poor, pining, lovelorn Messenger.”

Part of me was hearing her words, but a larger part of me was asking why Messenger hadn’t already thrown himself at her feet. Messenger was a beautiful boy, but this . . . Oriax . . .

“Let her go, Oriax.”

Oriax winked at me. “He wants me to let you go.” She moved close to me, so close I could feel the heat of her body, so close I could smell a perfume that . . . and then, she walked around behind me and I was paralyzed with something that was both fear and desperate, unfamiliar desire.

I felt her hair brush the nape of my neck. I felt her breath on my skin. Her lips brushed the side of my neck, and my eyes rolled up in my head, and the blood left my limbs and my knees gave way.

“Susceptible little thing, isn’t she?” Oriax said.

Messenger caught me as I fell. He put a hand under my back, and another hand reached for my shoulder but missed and instead slid over the fabric of my shirt to touch my arm.

For only a moment his skin and mine made contact.

And then I knew why I was not to touch Messenger, for in the few seconds of contact, flesh to flesh, I was assaulted by images I can barely bring myself to describe, for to describe them is to make the horrible real.

First, I saw a boy, maybe fifteen years old, stabbed though the belly with a sword.

Then a girl, perhaps fourteen, being lowered on the end of a chain, screaming, into a vat of foul, seething liquid.

A boy, a big kid who looked older than he probably was, with both hands and both feet gone, trying to run on stumps from a pack of wild dogs.

There were other images, less lurid, but I couldn’t begin to comprehend them while dealing with these visions of helplessness and agony and utter, shrieking terror.

I cried out in pain and staggered back. Oriax threw back her head and laughed with malicious delight, and I clutched my head as though to squeeze the memories out of my brain.

These were awful violations of human bodies and minds. Such pain. Such terrible sadness and loneliness.

“What are you?” I asked Messenger, my voice ragged.

“I thought he was a dream,” Oriax taunted me.

I gritted my teeth. Tears had started, blurring my vision, glistening, foolish emblems of my weakness. “I don’t have dreams like that. Those things . . . Those things are not in my head! ”

Messenger looked solemn, but I thought I saw some hurt there as well. He had revealed something and was hurt by my violent reaction. He looked at me, and I could not match his gaze and lowered my eyes.

“Someday you will see the darkness inside yourself, Mara,” he said in that too-near whisper of his.

“Oh, look, you’ve hurt Messenger’s feelings,” Oriax said. “Shall I comfort you, Messenger?” She moved closer to him. “Shall I, Messenger, my pretty boy?”

“Get away from me,” he said.

And without seeming to move, she was six feet away, laughing and sticking out her tongue. “He’s no fun, our Messenger,” Oriax said to me. “You’ll see. You’ll want him, but you won’t have him. You’ll crave him desperately, oh yes, you will.”

“He’s a demon!” I said, practically spitting the word, as the images of our brief contact still churned vilely in my memory. That word, demon , wasn’t in my thoughts until it came out of my mouth and I realized it was true. Or realized at least that I believed it.

“A demon?” Oriax repeated, disbelieving. “Our Messenger a demon? Don’t be ridiculous. No, no, no. He’s not a demon. I know a few demons, well, what you might call demons, and sadly our Messenger of Fear is no demon, unless demons mourn for their lost Ariadne.”

“Leave us, Oriax. You’ve had your fun.”

“Mmm, not yet, I haven’t,” she said. “But eventually.”

She was gone, and I was filled with fear and a deep disturbance that seemed to have a physical effect: I was trembling. Trembling all over, in every part of my body, from my knees to my heart to the muscles of my face, as though each individual cell was shaking.

“I am sorry I touched you, Mara,” Messenger said. “It would have been kinder to let you fall.”

I felt deeply unsettled. The vivid memories of that touch had begun to fade and I was glad of it. The memory of Oriax, too, seemed to lose some of its sharp detail, and for that I was sorry because I had never seen or imagined anyone quite like her. I wanted to hold that image in my mind until I had come to grips with it and decided just how . . .