The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

Messenger’s mouth opened and closed like a beached trout. “You astonish me.”

“Well,” I said breezily, “I’m a very astonishing girl.”

“Yes. At times you are.” Then, he looked at me. As if he had never really seen me before. And my heart jumped.

“But a tired girl as well, I think. This day has included an encounter with a demon. That is enough. You need rest and food.”

“Don’t you?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked that. It was impertinent, and Messenger never seemed to want me to acknowledge that he was, after all, as human as I was. Or at least I believed he was.

“Yes,” he said, surprising me.

He looked weary. There were times when he seemed almost to be made of something stronger than flesh, when he would look invulnerable. But this was not one of those times. His pale skin looked like fine, bone china, translucent and fragile. He always stood strong and erect, never slumped, and I had come to unconsciously mimic that pose. But within that rigidity were gradations, subtle hints of shoulders not quite square, of breaths only half breathed, of a head carried like a balanced weight that might topple to the side.

The silence had lengthened and I knew he was seeing things not there in the room with us. He carried a burden, and though he never complained, it was painful for him. The fact that this burden was in large degree to do with the mysterious Ariadne, and that the sadness that was so much a part of him was all about lost love, did bother me, I won’t deny it. Was I jealous of the invisible and thus eternally perfect Ariadne?

Hopeless, I told myself. Don’t go down that path. Don’t have those thoughts.

I am not to be touched.

That had been his warning to me, and when I had inadvertently touched him I had been flooded wi

th a terrible highlights reel of his life as a messenger. I had seen things that . . .

I froze.

Those memories . . . I had pushed them away in self-defense. But they were still buried in my brain, weren’t they? If I chose I could summon them and go through them. Couldn’t I?

But why would I? Just to better understand the enigmatic boy in black? Would I endure that psychic pain just to know Messenger?

He was, at the moment, the only other person in my life. Somewhere in time or space my mother and my friends were there, living their lives, as I drifted through time, forward and backward. Someday I hoped, believed, told myself, I would be back to that life. This would all end someday, and with the power to move through time I should be able to reinsert myself right where I left off. Like picking up a book you’ve put down.

That was my hope, what I told myself, but I did not know. Nor did I ask. I rationalized that questions to Messenger are seldom answered and therefore futile, but the truth was that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I did not want to believe that I was “missing” from the real world, that the people who loved me were suffering, worrying about me. My burden was already too great, my control over myself too tenuous. I am insatiably curious, and cannot help but wonder, yet I must, at the same time, do what I can to preserve my sanity.

Of course, in any event, I wouldn’t be the same person, would I? My God, what would I even have to say to my old friends? How would I be my mother’s daughter when I had known such terrors and used such power?

Part of me wanted to stay and finish with Trent now. But Messenger’s instincts were right: I was starving and sad and in need of a break. Trent would be there when we returned.

“Yes, I wouldn’t mind going . . . I don’t know what to call it. It’s not my home.” That word, home, that word started the flow of tears that filled but did not spill from my eyes.

“It is your abode,” Messenger said. “For now.”

And suddenly we were there, Messenger and I. Would he immediately disappear off to whatever his “abode” was? Yet he stood in my living room, seeming still distracted. I suspected that the earlier encounter with Daniel in Brazil, and my overhearing of same, had left him feeling awkward with me. And even Messenger had to have been affected by the encounter with the incubus.

“Would you like something to eat?” I asked him. You know how sometimes you just speak without thinking? It just seemed polite. He was a visitor to my . . . abode. He was a guest. You offer guests food and drink.

He looked down at the floor and I was braced for a dismissive remark followed by the usual disappearing act. But when he looked up he said, “What have you got?”

“I was going to have a PB and J.”

I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what that was. But he nodded, and I began to assemble sandwiches. “I have mixed berry preserves and apricot jam.”

“I have no fixed opinions on the matter,” he said cautiously.

I made him a PB and J with mixed berry. We stood awkwardly in the kitchen, eating. On his first bite his eyebrows shot up. He sniffed at it. Took a second bite and nodded to himself.

I poured him some milk. Because let’s face it, peanut butter and jelly and cold milk is perfection, really.

It was as he was drinking milk that I said, “You have some jelly on your shirt, right . . .” and pointed, which he must have thought was an effort to touch him, which caused him to recoil and in the process pour half a glass of 2 percent down his front.