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There were other touches of green and black—earrings, a snake-pattern bracelet around her left wrist, fasteners down the front of her boots. And a ring on her left hand with an intricate design I could not make out.
Had Kayla seen this creature striding down the halls of her school, she would have curled into a little ball, for while Kayla was beautiful, and I liked to believe that I was at least pretty, this female creature had the beauty of cold, distant stars and silvery moonlight.
She was hypnotizing. Merely by existing, she redefined my ideas of beauty, for this was not mere physical perfection, this was seduction, this was the primordial, essential, eternal avatar of female sensuality walking nonchalantly down the empty hallway of a suburban high school.
She made me feel shrunken and small and ugly.
Her name was . . .
“Oriax,” Messenger said.
4
“MESSENGER,” ORIAX SAID. SHE SPOKE WITH A voice full of silk, secrets, and slithering snakes. Like Messenger’s, her voice was too near, too intimate, but it thrilled me. I whimpered. I couldn’t help it. I had forgotten my panic, forgotten for the moment that I should not be in this place at all, that I had lost my memory, that I feared I was dead. All of that was submerged the moment I saw her. I wanted to worship her. I wanted to listen to any word that she cared to speak. I wanted to be her, to be a tiny fraction of her.
Oriax.
“Well, hello there . . . ,” she said to me, and then after a longish pause, added, “You.”
I grunted. Like a farm animal. I could not make a more complex sound.
“She’s not bad-looking, really, eh, Messenger? Daniel has done well for you. He must be feeling sorry for you, poor, pining, lovelorn Messenger.”
Part of me was hearing her words, but a larger part of me was asking why Messenger hadn’t already thrown himself at her feet. Messenger was a beautiful boy, but this . . . Oriax . . .
“Let her go, Oriax.”
Oriax winked at me. “He wants me to let you go.” She moved close to me, so close I could feel the heat of her body, so close I could smell a perfume that . . . and then, she walked around behind me and I was paralyzed with something that was both fear and desperate, unfamiliar desire.
I felt her hair brush the nape of my neck. I felt her breath on my skin. Her lips brushed the side of my neck, and my eyes rolled up in my head, and the blood left my limbs and my knees gave way.
“Susceptible little thing, isn’t she?” Oriax said.
Messenger caught me as I fell. He put a hand under my back, and another hand reached for my shoulder but missed and instead slid over the fabric of my shirt to touch my arm.
For only a second his skin and mine made contact.
And then I knew why I was not to touch Messenger, for in the few seconds of contact, flesh to flesh, I was assaulted by images I can barely bring myself to describe, for to describe them is to make the horrible real.
First, I saw a boy, maybe fifteen years old, stabbed though the belly with a sword.
Then a girl, perhaps fourteen, being lowered on the end of a chain, screaming into a vat of foul, seething liquid.
A boy, a big kid who looked older than he probably was, with both hands and both feet gone, trying to run on stumps from a pack of wild dogs.
There were other images, less lurid, but I couldn’t begin to comprehend them while dealing with these visions of helplessness and agony and utter, shrieking terror.
I cried out in pain and staggered back. Oriax threw back her head and laughed with malicious delight, and I clutched my head as though to squeeze the memories out of my brain.
These were awful violations of human bodies and minds. Such pain. Such terrible sadness and loneliness.
“What are you?” I asked Messenger, my voice ragged.
“I thought he was a dream,” Oriax taunted me.
I gritted my teeth. Tears had started, blurring my vision, glistening, foolish emblems of my weakness. “I don’t have dreams like that. Those things . . . Those things are not in my head!”
Messenger looked solemn, but I thought I saw some hurt there as well. He had revealed something and was hurt by my violent reaction. He looked at me, and I could not match his gaze and lowered my eyes.
