The dream came back to me, the dream of the beach down by Santa Cruz, and I struggled to put it all in context. Samantha Early . . . Had she lived near me? Was I from northern California?
Oh, God. Did I know Samantha? Did I know Kayla?
The coffee machine sputtered its final drops and I poured the coffee into two cups, handing one to Messenger and looking for sugar for my own.
Messenger took a sip. It was the best confirmation I had yet had that whatever incredible powers he might have, he was in the end, human.
“Toast?”
“To what?”
“No, I mean I’m making toast. Want some?”
“Thank you, no,” he said.
I dropped two slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster. I took my time about fetching butter and jam because I wasn’t sure I was ready to face Messenger yet. I didn’t know how to relate to him in these circumstances. He might be human, was human, but he was like no human I had ever met.
I wondered whether he had a place, like this one, a refuge where he went at the end of a hard day of torturing people in the cause of justice. I wanted to ask him, but at the same time I feared doing so, first because I thought it likely he would shut me down with his usual taciturn non-response. But also because part of me feared he might open up, tell me more than I wanted to know about him, and thus confuse even further my emotional reaction to him.
The odd thing, the thing that made me smile a bit wistfully to myself, was the realization that had he not been who and what he was, but just been a boy with that face and those eyes, sitting here drinking my coffee, I would probably still have been t
ongue-tied. I remembered so little about my own story, but I was certain that whoever I was, I had never been very good at making small talk with boys.
And then, as I spread butter onto a piece of toast, I saw it.
“What is this?” I stared aghast at the ink, blue and red, yellow and green, on my right arm, just above the end of my blouse sleeve.
I had caught only a hint of color peeking out, and now, without setting down the butter knife, I pushed my sleeve up to see it fully.
It was a tattoo. There was no swelling, no sense that this represented something applied by the usual methods within the last few hours. It was there, complete, healed, indelible.
It showed a boy, tied to a stake, with flames roaring around him.
“What . . . What is this? What is this? What have you done to me?”
I spun around, dropped the knife from numb fingers, held my sleeve up so that he could see it, pushed it toward him. I was torn between rage and a sadness at what felt like defilement.
I looked again at the tattoo. It was vivid, not quite real but still so detailed that it would never be mistaken for anything whimsical. It was the tattoo a sadist, a sick person, might have chosen and even then come to regret.
“What have you done to me?” I demanded as anger won out over sadness.
“It is not my doing,” Messenger said. There was sympathy there but not much, and no surprise at all.
“How did it . . . When . . . Why? Why?”
“All Messengers of Fear are marked in that way,” he said.
“It’s sickening!” I cried.
“It is meant to be.”
“But why? What is the purpose?”
He took a deep breath and a slow sip of coffee. He stood up and I thought at first he meant to walk away. Instead he shrugged off his long coat and laid it over the back of his stool. Then carefully, taking his time, he began unfastening the buttons of his storm-cloud-gray shirt. When he had unfastened them all, he slid the shirt off.
He had a stronger chest than I expected. His stomach was flat and muscular. His arms were lean and if not gym-rat big, were nevertheless respectably powerful. But those were all observations I would make at a later time, for at this moment, when he stood naked from the waist up, I saw my own terrible fate.
He was covered in tattoos of pain and horror.