Page 74

But not as bleak as the future I had created for Samantha Early, or as lost as poor, brave Aimal’s future. And not as sad as what likely awaited Graciella.

Oriax was evil. She had sung and celebrated as Derek Grady burned. She had reveled in his destruction. She had wanted Trent for purposes that I could not guess, but I knew that it was his hatred that attracted her attention.

“Come, Mara,” Oriax purred. “Let us seal the deal with a kiss.”

Did I want to know what her lips felt like? Did I crave the pleasure that I knew would suffuse me?

Desperately.

Desperately.

And her mouth, her now-red and full lips were millimeters from mine.

I closed my eyes and parted my lips.

Yes, I was lonely, and yes in my isolation and sadness I longed for love.

But not hers. The one I longed for was not to be touched.

It was with more than a trace of bitterness that I said those despised words to Oriax: “I am not to be touched.”

18

ORIAX AND HAARM AND OLIVER WERE ALL gone. Messenger and I remained, with Nicolet. We stood there in silence, the boy in black, and the girl who loved him.

Instantly I tried to push that thought back into some dark corner of my mind lest Messenger sense it. My cheeks burned and I could not look at him. It wasn’t true, I told myself, it was absurd. I barely knew him. I didn’t even know his real name. I was just stressed, traumatized, lonely, and afraid, so of course I would be attracted to him.

And yet I knew that in his heart he was compassionate. I knew that he was loyal. I knew that he was strong; no one could long survive as a Messenger of Fear without some source of inner strength. Did it matter that I didn’t know his favorite color, or what music he liked, or any of the superficial things I’d known about other boys?

Didn’t I know what really mattered?

Yes, but I knew as well that he loved another. Ariadne, whose name was becoming almost a curse to me. Her memory cast its shadow over me, and it would never go away so long as he held on to hope.

The Shoals, I thought. The Shoals. The truth might lie there.

I could go there. I could know.

I covered for my blushing and agitated looking away by saying, “Messenger, shall I?”

Had he in fact read my mind and known my deepest thoughts he might well have misinterpreted that. But he was blind, or perhaps deliberately blind, to my internal turmoil.

“Do,” he said.

So, I did. I wanted the words to sound suitably solemn, but I cannot deny that there was a quaver in my voice as I intoned, “I summon the Hooded Wraiths to carry out the sentence.”

And that’s when the last of Nicolet’s arrogance abruptly disappeared. She was allowed to speak again, maybe only so that she could scream.

“What the hell?” Nicolet asked, and asked again and again, each repetition louder and higher and faster until the sound of her fear was an almost continuous scream.

Almost a scream. The actual scream came when the Hooded Wraiths stepped from the mist.

They are tall, the wraiths, perhaps a foot taller than the tallest men. They were clothed in black hoods that fell from a point to cover them entirely and sweep the floor. They were a parody of ancient monks, a mockery of druidic fantasies. I saw no face, not even an opening where a face might be, in the darkness of their hoods.

But understand that it is not th

e size or the robe or the suggestion of physical horrors beneath that robe that is the greatest cause of the fear that flows from them. No, there is something deeper, something visceral, a feeling, a tingling of nerves, a tightening of sphincters, a heaviness in heart and soul that comes not from what is seen or even imagined, but some vastly deeper well of primitive dread.

They carry fear with them like some swift contagion, and it twists your thoughts and crushes your defenses.