Messenger of Fear (Messenger of Fear 1)

But Manolo was in no condition anymore to hear. He was in a rage. He was pure, distilled fury. He swung the crowbar again, and this time the thick steel bar landed with a horrible crunch on Boots’s head.

Boots stopped trying to stand.

Manolo hit him again, and now blood was pouring down Boots’s face, and Manolo hit him again as the woman from the couple yelled, “Stop it, stop it, you’re killing him!”

And he was.

Manolo hit him three more times, sobbing as he did it, cursing, spitting down into the jellied mass that was his tormentor’s head.

I had no time to prepare or ward off the physical reaction that took hold of me, forcing me to bend over and vomit onto the pavement.

How can I explain that reaction except to say that I had never before witnessed anything as violent before. Samantha Early’s death had been awful beyond anything I had seen up to that moment, but I had known it was coming. I saw it coming. It had about it an air of stateliness, almost, of inevitability. I was prepared.

I had no preparation for the animal frenzy that had erupted before me. I had never heard the sound of steel thudding again and again onto meat and bone. And all of it had happened so very quickly that I had no time to shift my sympathies. For at first I was happy that Manolo had prevailed. Mere seconds passed from that emotion to the physical rejection of the brutality I saw following.

I heard a siren. I saw flashing lights.

Manolo searched the ground for his keys, but his eyes were filled with tears and his mind was deranged by the most desperate feelings of pain and anger, regret and savage triumph, all mixed together.

In the end he just leaned back against the car, panting, spent. I heard the crowbar clatter to the ground. I heard Sneakers whining and saying, “He broke my face, he broke my face,” over and over again.

“Tell me, Mara: What do you see here?”

I was still wiping my mouth and trying to gather my wits, trying to focus. Messenger’s cold-sounding question was hard at first even to comprehend. But I understood that this was some sort of test, and because I am ever the striver looking to excel, even when the object of the game is something I reject, I did my best to answer.

“He defended himself. Lost it. Oh, my God, killed that boy.” I took several deep breaths, tried vainly to slow the jackhammer insistence of my heart. “Is that the murder Manolo’s in jail for? He was defending himself!”

“Manolo’s fate is for human agency to determine. His doom will be pronounced by a jury and a court.”

I stared at Messenger in part because it was easier than watching the tragedy unfolding before us as Manolo was handcuffed, weeping, and Sneakers was taken away in an ambulance, his face swathed in bandages.

“We’re not here for Manolo?”

He shook his head.

Slowly it dawned on me. Manolo was in jail. Boots was dead. There was only one other.

“The other boy. The one in the sneakers.”

“The dead boy’s name is Charles,” Messenger said. “We are here for Derek. Derek Grady. Because as surely as Manolo, Derek is responsible for this death, yet he will not be arrested and he will not see any justice . . . but that which we deliver to him.”

16

WE TOOK A STROLL THROUGH DEREK GRADY’S life, much as we had done with Samantha. After an exhausting and dispiriting time of it, Messenger took us away to a place I’d never been but that I knew instinctively was important to my taciturn teacher.

My first thought was that Messenger had taken time travel to a whole new level. We were high atop a massive stone wall of such ancient creation that it was topped with crenellations and interrupted by slate gray–roofed conical towers.

Looking inward from the walls, I gazed across red-tile roofs, limestone walls, streets so narrow they could never have been meant for carriages, let alone cars. The wall curved far in both directions, enclosing this small village.

Gazing out from the wall, I saw a lazy river passing beneath an arched bridge of the same stone and vintage. But beyond that river was a much larger town, one

still very much marked by history, but with cars and buses visible as well as satellite dishes and the other usual indicators of the modern era.

I turned away from that and studied the village within the walls and saw that here, too, were the signs of modernity, though less obvious: people talking on cell phones, electric lights shining from within narrow windows, tourist souvenirs spilling from the low doorways onto tight streets.

“Carcassonne,” Messenger said. Then, seeing my blank expression, added, “France.”

“Why . . .”