Messenger of Fear (Messenger of Fear 1)

“Can’t you just open my head up and see for yourself?” I snapped. “If I can do it, you can. You have, obviously. You’re the one keeping me from seeing my own memories.” I was becoming agitated, sickened by the terrible violation I had committed in stealing the memories of these two decent kids, kids my own age, not monsters, just kids who had made a very bad mistake.

And yet . . . and yet did I not want to see still more? Did I not still wish that I was myself experiencing their intensity of feeling? There was a hunger in me that might be fed by gorging on borrowed emotion.

Messenger said, “I can do many things, Mara. But you will learn nothing from my reading of your mind. To learn you must form your thoughts and emotions into expression. What. Of. The. Wrong?”

I threw up my hands, helpless. I looked pleadingly at Liam and Emma—my God, I knew them each better than I knew myself—as if they could somehow save me from my own guilt. But, of course, neither of them understood that I had just dined on their most intimate experiences.

“I guess,” I said, “they should . . . pay something. Be made to . . . They should . . .”

I could go no further. Messenger relented then and turned away from me to face the two frightened kids. “This wrong demands punishment,” he said. “I offer you a game. If you win, you will go free, unbothered by me or by my apprentice.”

“A game?” Liam echoed in obvious confusion.

“A game,” Messenger said. “If you win, you go free. If you lose, then you will face the thing you fear most.”

“What . . . what game?” Emma asked, with a nervous glance at Liam. “What’s the game?”

“We will consider,” Messenger said.

“Wait,” Liam protested. “We’re just supposed to sit here and wait, not knowing? I mean, what the hell, man?”

Emma was ready to jump in and also demand some kind of resolution, but whatever she had to say, I didn’t hear it then, for we were no longer with Emma and Liam. We were once again with Samantha Early.

9

IT WAS A SCHOOL LUNCHROOM. NOISY, CHAOTIC, smelling of grease and overcooked brussels sprouts. On the walls were posters exhorting the team to beat the Redwood Giants. There was a nutrition poster on the wall next to the food line. The tables were round six-tops with molded plastic chairs that made a scraping sound with each movement and laid a sort of uneven rhythm track beneath the babble of voices.

Samantha Early was at a table with three other girls. None of them were talking. Mason Crain, a pleasant-looking if not handsome kid who had not quite grown into his hands and feet, sat down across from her carrying a tray loaded with something brown, something green, and something red.

Samantha glanced up, then returned her gaze immediately to the laptop on which she was typing in between bites of turkey lasagna.

Two tables away sat Kayla and her friends. They were not all beauties, but even those who were of only average looks were well and expensively turned out, with better-than-Claire’s jewelry, outfits from A&F and Nordstrom, designer shoes and bags, and latest-generation cell phones.

“See who just sat down with Spazmantha?” Kayla asked.

All heads turned, noted the boy at Samantha Early’s table, and looked back to Kayla for guidance as to why, precisely, this was important.

“That’s Mason Crain,” Kayla said. “He’s acting all cool, but Samantha gave him a b.j. in his car up at the Headlands. In one of those pullouts where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.”

This in itself was not enough to elicit more than a few obligatory Eeeewwws.

“Oh, my God,” Kayla said in mock disbelief at their cluelessness. “Don’t you know who Mason Crain’s mother is?”

Publishing, I thought. His mother is in publishing. That fact must have come the same way so much came to me now, but for a moment I frowned, concentrating, trying to scroll back through my earlier encounter with Samantha’s world, and I did not recall the moment at which I had heard that name.

Blank stares from Kayla’s sycophants. Kayla waited for the suspense to build. “Mason Crain’s mother is Amber Crain. She’s a big deal, an editor or whatever they call them, at a big publisher.”

The dots were still not connecting. So Kayla laid the last piece out in front of them, speaking slowly, as if to little children. “That’s how she got her book published. Duh. Spazmantha sucked her way to success.”

And now every eye turned back again to Samantha, and to Mason, but returning to Samantha. And from her seat Samantha must have felt the eyes on her. She looked up and saw six eager, malicious, titillated sets of eyes.

They made eye contact, six on one, and there was a burst of giggling, unmistakably directed at Samantha. Samantha blushed, baffled by why exactly—why this time—she was being laughed at.

We moved again, in that seamless way that Messenger had of simply appearing where he wished to appear, and now we were with Samantha as she left school at the end of the day. She pulled out her cell phone and saw that her Twitter feed had lit up.

Twenty-nine tweets talking about her.

Some of them had a photo taken of her and Mason at lunch.