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He cursed vilely, a machine-gun assault of abuse, a constant, sickening rant of filth and degradation. Then he knelt beside her, bringing his rage-transformed face down close to hers. “You don’t need school, you’re too stupid to learn anything. You know it’s true. You’re dumb as a brick, Graciella, and just as ugly. Now get your fat ass out of bed and take out the—”

“Okay, I’m coming, I—”

“Oh, please, don’t start blubbering, you look like an animal, like a baboon or something when you start in with that. I can barely look at you! Filthy little waste of br

eath!”

I turned to Messenger, struggling to maintain my own self-control, trying to be the cool, detached Messenger’s apprentice, but feeling all the while as if I would explode. “Is it always like this?”

In response Messenger waved a hand through the air, and from his fingers drifted bright silvery rectangles, each a tiny screen. And on each screen was a scene.

“Pig!”

“Worthless!”

“Fat!”

“Ugly!”

“Stupid!”

Dozens of these screens floated around me, each showing John, Graciella’s father, heaping the most wounding of insults on her. I have transcribed here all that I can bring myself to say, but there were others worse. And they would not end, the screens multiplied until they threatened to fill the room like a tornado of filth and contempt.

It battered me. It was not directed at me, but it was as if I was being buried alive beneath the sheer weight of the verbal violence. It was awful to witness from the outside, to have endured it day after day, week after week, as Graciella had, to be attacked, ridiculed, subjected to this raw, unshielded hatred . . .

“No!” I cried. “No. No. Enough, freeze this, freeze time!”

Time froze. Graciella was absolutely still. The ceiling fan stopped. The sprinklers outside no longer chattered. Everything stopped.

Except for John.

The father was still for a moment, almost as if he, too, were frozen, but then he turned his face to us. He squinted, tilted his head sideways a little. Then his eyes widened, and he saw.

A sound came from him. It was not a sound I had ever heard before, and not one I wish ever to hear again. It was a growl, the growl of a hyena guarding a dead prey. But there were layers within that animal growl, cries and shrieks, the sound of a lash on flesh, of bludgeon blows striking bone.

In the time I had been with Messenger, no one had ever seen us until we revealed ourselves. No one had ever moved when we froze time.

“Servants of Isthil,” John said in a grating voice dripping with contempt.

I shot a worried look at Messenger. Messenger stood stony-faced, unafraid, unsurprised. “I thought I sensed your kind,” he said.

John smiled and shrugged. “Well, aren’t you the clever one? A Messenger of Fear, I suppose. One of Isthil’s little busybodies. And what’s this,” he said, indicating me. “Your pet?”

Messenger did not answer.

John laughed. “Did you come to listen in? Did you enjoy it?” He turned back to the bed.

“Stop!” I cried. “Tell him!” But John did not stop, so I cried again, more insistently, “Stop him! Stop him!”

“He can’t, you little fool,” John snarled. “His kind have no power over mine.”

“I have one power over you,” Messenger said. It was said quietly, but if you imagine that he spoke without emotion, you would be wrong. I would never have believed so quiet a voice could carry so much fury. “Show yourself, incubus!”

“Oh, I see,” John said. “She’s a pupil, not a pet. You want her to learn, that’s it, isn’t it?” He focused on me, looked me up and down with a predatory intimacy.

“Show yourself!” Messenger snapped.

“As you wish, servant of Isthil.”