The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

“Thank you, master,” I said with all the humility I could manage which, right at that moment, was not a lot.

I do learn. Yes, I do.

Hell yes.

I would have hugged him, but that would have ended badly.

“I am leaving you to learn more about Graciella,” Messenger said.

That shocked the smug self-satisfaction right out of me. “What?”

“I have another . . . something else to do. It is a simple matter: learn more of Graciella’s fate. Then return to your abode.”

“But . . .”

“Yes?”

“But I don’t know where to . . . when to . . .”

He nodded. “True, you do not have the sight from above, but you can follow her now. And you know how to speed ahead to reach the inflection points.”

“But . . .”

That second “but” was said to the air. He was gone. As was my brief period of self-confidence.

I looked in the direction Graciella had gone, and hurried after her. Before I knew it I had caught up to her. She wasn’t walking very fast, and I . . . well, I could move as fast as I liked.

She wandered the streets of Austin for a while. Occasionally she cried. Twice men tried to hit on her, but she told them to go away and when one man persisted she walked into a bright convenience store and waited until he was gone.

But she had obviously not created a Plan B. It had taken all her money and resources to get her to Austin to try and connect with Nicolet. Now she was lost.

It was after midnight when the skies opened up and poured down on her. It wasn’t rain, it was a deluge, water coming down in buckets not drops.

She had by this point wandered far from downtown and found herself on a road that crossed the freeway, I-35. She climbed over a guardrail and tried to make her way down to the freeway, but the slope was steep and the ground already wet, so she fell and slid, arriving at the bottom muddy and soaked.

She stood shivering beneath the freeway overpass, hugging her shoulders, as cars and trucks roared past, their headlights blinding, throwing up sheets of water.

She climbed up the concrete slope to the space just beneath the freeway. There was a flat area, a concrete bed where she lay with her face just inches beneath the roadway. Trucks rumbled overhead and screamed by below and the rain poured unabated. But the little crawl space was dry. Hard, loud, and chilly, but dry. She curled into a ball and cried herself to sleep.

I watched this, disheartened, worried for her. Somehow not having Messenger with me made me feel more vulnerable myself and I couldn’t easily shield myself from her pain. When Messenger was with me, I had his discipline to rely on. And I suppose in some way I could shift the blame for everything onto him.

But now, I stood alone, in the rain, but dry as the water simply slid past me, and knew that I could, if I chose, speak to Graciella. I could say, look, call the cops on your father—he’s not just as bad as you think, he’s worse and he’ll never stop being a monster. And go find a lawyer to represent you and go after Nicolet and her manager.

It would be useless, of course. Useless. I had already seen where Nicolet would end up. It was like watching a terrible car accident in slow motion. I saw and could do nothing. I could not save her any more than I could save Aimal.

This was my life, I thought, me, standing helpless, watching people’s lives be destroyed. I felt wetness on my cheeks and knew it was not the rain.

This was what Messenger meant me to experience. He wanted me to begin to grasp what it would be like when I was the Messenger of Fear and had no one else to lean on. It made me sad for him. He was, after all, not so different from me. He was a boy, a young man, a kid, suddenly thrust into a position of overwhelming responsibility, and such emotional torment that I was sure by the end of his service he would have suffered more than any of those who faced the Master of the Game.

“Well, this is cheerful.”

Oriax. She just popped up, standing off to the side, as indifferent as I was to the water coming from just about every direction. Her arrival seemed to turn down the ambient noise, the road sounds and the rushing of water. And the lights of oncoming cars dimmed.

She was dressed for the weather, in her own way. Tall boots, of course, but no peekaboo outfit, no bared midriff or back or legs. Instead she was covered entirely in a black second skin, as if she’d been shrink-wrapped in latex or patent leather. I didn’t know what to say to Oriax. The truth is, I was almost glad of her company. She must have sensed this because she moved closer, into a companionable range, arm’s reach. She gazed up at Graciella, looking like a street person, whic

h I supposed she was.

After a while I said, “What do you want, Oriax?”