Messenger of Fear (Messenger of Fear 1)

“No offense,” Samantha echoed, and smiled a sickly smile and strained with all her will to keep her hands at her sides, not to touch.

All of them were looking at her now, the K-Mack crowd, staring at her, expectant, waiting on the signal to laugh at her.

“How’s your . . . um . . . book coming?” Kayla asked. The word book got the uplift this time, in a way that clearly cast doubt on the possibility that there was such a book.

“Okay, I guess. I have to get to class.”

“Aren’t you done writing it? You said in Mr. Briede’s class you were done.”

Samantha fought down a wave of anxiety. Mark Briede was the teacher who had most encouraged her to write. But she didn’t want to talk about the book, or think about the book, or think of how she wanted to touch her face. She had to begin the count again, had to make it three times. The book was just stupid. She would probably just be a huge failure—what were the odds of some sixteen-year-old girl publishing anything?

And if she did? She had revealed bits of herself in the story. One of the characters would be blindingly obvious as herself, as a prettier, cooler Samantha, an aspirational Samantha. She would make herself even more of a target, she would have painted a bull’s-eye. . . . No, a targeting map, like the military used—strike here and here and here to inflict maximum damage.

“I’ll see you guys later,” Samantha said, and fled, touching her bump. Touching it. Touching it again. Relief.

I looked at Kayla rather than Samantha now.

“Is she doing it on purpose? Does she know she’s being cruel?”

“Is that important?” Messenger asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Listen to her thoughts,” Messenger said.

And I heard them. Kayla’s thoughts. As clearly as if she was speaking. In fact, when I looked, I saw her lips moving. She was speaking but not to the others around her. It was more as if I’d given her a truth serum that caused her to explain herself honestly.

“I don’t like Samantha. She’s very smart, but so am I. And I’m prettier by a mile and also much more popular. I pick on her because she’s weak. It’s that simple. She’s obviously got problems, so anything I say can make

her freak out.”

It was bizarre the way Kayla spoke, unsettling even by dream standards. She wasn’t looking at me—she wasn’t looking at anyone—she was just voicing her thoughts, like I’d thrown a switch simply by wondering about her. She was Richard the Third in Shakespeare’s play, pausing for a moment to enlighten the audience as to motive and malice.

“Why shouldn’t I pick on Samantha? It’s fun for me and entertaining for my friends. It reminds my friends to be a little afraid of me, and that’s useful. It reminds them that they could be next if they disappoint me. Besides, I can’t stand that she—”

She stopped just like that, in midthought.

I laughed. Not because it was funny but because it had the ring of truth and I had not often heard truth spoken so bluntly and so utterly without self-justification.

I turned my laughing face to Messenger, who was watching me, waiting for my reaction. Judging me, I thought.

“If this is a dream, why aren’t we at my school?” I asked him. “I should dream about places I know. This place probably isn’t real.”

He must have heard the uncertainty in my voice. I did.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said sharply. “I want answers. I want to know what this is.” The panic came quick and strong, all at once, catching me by surprise. “This is real, isn’t it? This is real. Oh, God, this is real. This is real!”

“Bravo! Well done. She’s not nearly as thick as you were, Messenger.” A female voice. Not Kayla. Not Samantha, who was all the way down the hall now and entering a classroom.

Kayla’s little group broke up as the bell rang with startling urgency, and just as it did at my school when the bell rang, the hallway emptied out fast, the last stragglers rushing away with backpacks swinging.

The girl who had spoken, well, maybe she was a girl physically and chronologically but surely not psychologically. No girl could have carried herself this way. A woman, then. A young woman to look at but with no hint of youthful innocence.

She was as pale as Messenger and, like him, dressed in black. But this girl/woman had a great deal less clothing in total. She wore a thing that was a cross between a bustier and a leather jacket. Cutouts revealed her shoulders, the neckline plunged to her breastbone, and the whole garment was cut to a severe point in front, forming a V that hid her navel but left the sides of her waist and her lower back bare. She wore black tights that seemed more liquid than fabric, and swirled with black-on-black patterns that shifted and changed. Her boots went to her knees and were notably strange for suggesting that her feet were unnaturally small.

That detail bothered me, held my attention for a moment, as I could not see how she could stand on such tiny feet, particularly given the height of the heels.

If Kayla was the blond sun, this . . . this person . . . was midnight. Her eyes were black and large as if the pupils had expanded to consume all the iris. She had extravagant lashes and black hair, but it was her lips that drew my fascinated gaze. They were green. Not tinged with green, not a sickly green, but a flamboyant, defiant green. The green of jade. They matched a pendant around her neck that was an ornate object of jade and onyx, green and black, suggesting a face, a lewd, leering face.