The Tattooed Heart (Messenger of Fear 2)

That one lives, still, I said. He suffers, but he lives. And soon he will be free of his long penance, but he searches the world for you, Ariadne. His love has not faded.

Her emotions were mine, her pain so raw I could not avoid its echoes.

I can never see him, Ariadne said. His family . . . his mother, his father, his two sisters . . . all dead and him cursed to a life of sorrow and loneliness.

And guilt, I added. He suffers the same guilt as you. But he has earned his freedom, and he has earned a right to . . . to love you. Ariadne, decades have passed and still he searches for you, praying that you have escaped this torment and are back in the world of the living.

There is no freedom from the evil of your own heart.

There is no freedom in helpless self-pity and remorse, I said. But there is the freedom to fight.

To fight? The Nazis?

I laughed. No, we took care of them. The world is different, there are different evils to fight. Will you fight them, Ariadne? Will you spend your life fighting Malech and all his servants?

We rose, Ariadne and I. When I withdrew from the intimacy of the Piercing and opened my eyes, I saw that we were rising toward the diamond above us, rising toward the light.

“Forgive,” I said. “Forgive him and forgive yourself, Ariadne. And come back to the land of the living.”

22

THE NEXT DAY MESSENGER CAME FOR ME.

He was the Messenger I knew, the absurdly beautiful boy in black. But of course I now knew he was far, far older than he seemed. Even his love affair was older than me, older than my mother or father, older than my grandparents. My God, he had loved that girl for seven decades.

And for that time he had carried out the hard justice of Isthil and bore the vivid marks on his body.

“It is time for us to catch up with Trent,” Messenger said, sounding very businesslike. He waited until I nodded.

Needless to say, Messenger being Messenger, he did not whip out an iPad and show me a video of Trent. Instead, I simply went from being where I was, to a cold and slush-lined street.

Trent was in a motorized wheelchair. His carefully nurtured muscles were slack. His limbs were atrophied. He had a mouthpiece that allowed him to control the movements of his wheelchair.

But it was not moving. The battery had died.

He sat helpless, immobile, at a street corner bus stop in Des Moines. His exhalations were steam. His eyes were desperate.

A man walked down the street toward him, spotted him, looked left and right, and grew furtive. Across the street was a Caribou Coffee and past it a small shopping center. On Trent’s side of the street was a hospital and the usual cluster of medical buildings.

Trent was on his way to Caribou where his home health aide was to meet him.

The man approaching on foot did not feel himself to be observed except by indifferent motorists, passing on the four-lane road.

Without a word he began to rifle Trent’s pockets as Trent sat helpless, shivering, afraid.

The man stole twenty dollars he found in the inner pocket of Trent’s coat.

In a voice slurred by paralysis, Trent said, “Please don’t. Please don’t.”

The man pocketed the money, considered the helpless young man before him, and calmly tipped the wheelchair over.

Trent’s head lay in the snow. One wheel of the chair spun. And the thief walked away. Trent cried then, cried and his tears ran down to freeze in the snow.

It is terrible to see humiliation and despair, no matter how bad a person Trent was, no matter the damage he had done, or the life he had cost.

But I had more to see. Once again, curiosity was not my friend. And now I saw a shockingly older Trent. He had not aged well. He might perhaps be thirty years old, I supposed, but it was hard to tell. His body was shriveled doll limbs attached to a swollen upper body and a head with long hair.

Trent was marooned on the top floor of a shopping mall. The elevator before him had a sign that read, Sorry for the inconvenience: Maintenance.