Messenger (Guardian Trilogy Prequel 1) (12 page)

I was sent over hundreds of others’ heavens until reaching the woman I called mother while on earth.

When my movement ended, I found myself surrounded by snowy peaked mountains. I stood below them, on lush green grass with a wide lake behind me and a small villa directly ahead. It was draped in flowering vines and, without walls, was entirely open to the temperate warm air. The sky was a peach color that cast the same beautiful hue across everything I saw, including the woman standing on the porch gazing at the flowers she had created.

If it weren’t for the calm smile on her face, I’m not sure I could have moved from my spot in her heaven. It was serene, lending me some relief and allowing my appendages the ability to lift me into the air.

My ascent caught her attention and her smile turned to me.

She drew in a breath out of surprise.

When I landed she embraced me, harboring no ill will over what I had done to her.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her shoulder. “I’m so sorry…”

When she pulled away she was happy, something I couldn’t fathom. “I’m flattered you came,” she said earnestly.

My eyes widened. “Flattered? How could you be fla…”

Left stunned, I was unable to go on.
Didn’t she know what had just happened to her?

“You are Magdalene?” she asked. “A Messenger?”

I nodded and her smile deepened.

“How could I not be in awe?”

I felt myself gawk at her. My face felt numb, reactive, out of my control. “Do you know what I…” I swallowed. “Do you remember what I did?”

“Remember my last minutes in that life, you mean?”

My answer came out broken, filled with emotion. “Ye-es.”

“I do,” she said gently.

“I led them to you…and you forgive me?” I couldn’t understand how. The horror I had no doubt she had endured…

“A moment of pain for an eternity of this…” She swept her hand across the landscape. “I have no regrets, Magdalene. Not a single one.”

“But I caused you pain,” I argued.

“You didn’t,” she said firmly, in the way she had on earth. “They did.”

It didn’t feel that way.

“None of us regret it, Magdalene. Your sister, your brother, your father.”

Breathless now, I cried out, “Oh no, no…” None of them had survived…

I lowered my head and covered my face with my hands.

“Don’t waste time agonizing over us,” she counseled. “They are just as content as I am.” She paused. “Magdalene, look at me.” It was a struggle, but I did. “You are still a good girl, but now you are a different kind of good. You have a gift. Use it and be who you are meant to be. Don’t waste another moment of regret on us. Do you understand?”

Slowly, fighting the repressive feelings that had pinched my neck taut, I asked, “Did the Kohlers mention where they might go af-after?”

She gave me a stern look, the kind I saw so often on earth. “You won’t avenge me.”

It was a command, one that she wanted enforced.

I couldn’t seem to release the single word answer.

“Magdalene?” she pressed.

“No,” I said, irritated at what I was agreeing to. “I won’t avenge you.”

“They’ve gone west to the insurrections. One of them shouted it after…when they were finished.”

I nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

With a great amount of willpower, I extended my appendages wide. And she smiled. A single pump carried me upward, but I was stopped by her voice.

“Magdalene,” she called out and waited for me to turn around. “As a messenger, you have a strength that will protect you from them. Find it.”

That simple suggestion was what did it. It came to me in a flash, that understanding Eran had been seeking. He wanted to know what caused the pain between me and the Kohlers. My mind raced back to every time I’d felt it, ending at the climactic moment when they threatened my life.

And I understood then the mother I knew on earth had given me one last bit of wisdom. She was correct. I did have a particular strength that would keep me safe. Those feelings were my warning of approaching danger.

“When you awake, where will you be?” she asked.

“Home.”

She seemed pleased to know it. “When you do, look under my chair near the hearth.”

“I will. For what?”

“Something I’ve been making for you. Something that will keep you safe…because I will no longer be able to do it myself.” She lifted her head as she added, “It’s my finest work yet.”

I spent the remainder of the night visiting the rest of my family. They were just as she had mentioned, contentedly enjoying their return to the afterlife. The memory of what they had gone through was just that, a faded recollection. When I was yanked back to earth and found the sunlight slipping through the window, I felt thankful. That feeling was swept away the moment I saw the blood stains on the floor.

Picking myself up, I walked to the chair and peered underneath. There was only a sewing basket and a black bundle wrapped on top of it. I withdrew it and held it out. It unrolled and I found what the woman who had been my mother had done. She had made me a suit, a warrior’s tunic made of thick black fabric and loops to hold weapons.

My mouth fell open.

She knew that I was the messenger. She had known all along. Of course… Symon. He must have discovered it and told the only other person in our family who could keep a secret. I also knew with an unsettling doubt, as I held up the tunic, that she had heard about the Kohlers and their attack on me.

I took a sweeping gaze of the upturned place I had called home. I paid special attention to the details of my innocent life here. I had been sheltered, hearing only of the tragedies in life through the guests I delivered messages to and from. The brief clash with the Kohler triplets was the closest I’d come to danger. All that had changed now. The damage and remnants of the fight caught my eye and a rush of determination shook me.

As I slipped on the black tunic that feeling only grew more powerful. Soon I found myself marching through the home I was now preparing to leave. Once out the door, I didn’t glance back. I couldn’t allow it.

That determination carried me down the rutted gravel road and over the first hill. I wasn’t even shaken when a voice came up behind me.

“Are you all right?” Eran asked.

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t.

He appeared at my side looking unconvinced. Thankfully, he didn’t press the issue. “And where would you be going now, Messenger?”

“West.”

Undisturbed by it, he asked offhandedly, “And why in that direction?”

“Because it’s where the insurrections are taking place.” And where the Kohlers can be found. While I had every intention of abiding my mother’s request not to avenge her, I did need to determine firmly whether the Kohlers were involved in the messengers’ deaths.

“The insurrections, hmm?” Eran mused.

“Yes.”

“Doesn’t seem to be the safest place you could go,” he proposed.

I agreed with him, but that wasn’t going to deter me. “You should stay here,” I suggested a little too warmly to be genuine.

He chuckled under his breath. “Like you, I go where I am needed the most.”

I walked a few more paces before clarifying, “And where is that?”

His voice was thick with resolve as he answered. “Right beside you, Friedricha. I’m staying right beside you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN: PURSUIT

E
RAN’S PRESENCE WAS AN EFFICIENT DISTRACTION
from my thoughts, which kept sliding from one memory to the next. Images of my family’s blood on the floor were punctuated by my brief reunions with them in the afterlife, but it was Eran’s movements that kept bringing me back to the present.

As we walked, Eran made regular glances in my direction, giving me the impression he was picking up on my internal commotion.

Eventually, he asked, “Is there anything you want to tell me, Friedricha?”

I gritted my teeth before admitting it. “You-You were right.”

His head jerked back in shock. Apparently, he didn’t believe he’d ever hear those words from me.

“The Kohler triplets still pose a danger,” I said.

“Is that why we are here now?”

“Yes, it is.”

He nodded and released a heartbreaking sigh. “What did they do to them?”

“They,” I began, but my voice broke and I had to begin again. “They slit their throats.”

Again, he nodded, solemnly.

“How…did you know they had hurt my family?”

I thought his own family might have overheard the turmoil at my home and told him or that he might have seen the bodies, but I was wrong. His reasoning actually surprised me.

“Because in the short time I’ve spent with you I’ve formed an opinion of you, including the belief that you wouldn’t leave people in peril unless they were no longer
in
peril.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“Friedricha, you deliver messages to and from the deceased. You’re consistently helping those in peril.”

“Yes, so?”

“You do it at risk to yourself,” he added flatly.

“I see.” He considered me to already be behaving in that manner. I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Under different circumstances though, I would have been flattered. Right now, it all felt surreal, like I was walking through a dream.

“On a lighter note,” he said, thankfully interrupting my internal dialogue, “did you visit them in the afterlife?”

“Yes.”

“And are they doing well?”

“Yes.”

“Good, than you can stop blaming yourself for their deaths.”

“I wasn’t-,” I countered.

“Yes,” he grumbled, “you were.”

I hesitated but finally asked, “How do you know?”

“I told you,” he said pointedly, “I’ve been assessing you.”

We continued walking with neither of us choosing to elaborate on that topic. I was certainly finished talking about myself and turned the focus on someone else, three others in fact.

“You’re not at all concerned about the Kohlers, are you?”

“Oh yes, I am,” he replied bluntly.

“You’re not showing it.”

“What good would that do?” he asked genuinely curious.

A stifled, amazed laugh slipped from me.”You don’t put much stock in letting go of your emotions, do you?”

“I’ve never seen the point of emotions. They act contrary to the purpose of your actions.”

“Meaning what?”

“They make a person act sloppy.”

“Or they can be powerful motivators…”

He chuckled in disagreement. I was about to make my point when his arm swung up and blocked me from taking another step.

We had just crested a hill revealing a walled city on the other side. A steady stream of people shuffled in and out of the main gate and instinctively I searched them for bright white hair. While I didn’t see any, I knew what Eran was thinking.

“You’re worried the Kohlers might be here,” I deduced.

“They might be,” he said, spinning to face me. “And therefore you are going to need to stay hidden.”

His hands swiftly took the edge of my cloak’s hood and drew it over my head, but he remained there, with his fingers pinched around the seam. His translucent blue-green eyes drifted over my face from my nose to my cheeks to my lips, where they lingered.

A fire began in my stomach, spreading heat through my body, as he evaluated me and when his gaze swept up to meet mine, I was sure he could see what he was doing to me.

The briefest second passed before he suddenly stepped backwards, his fingers slipping from their grip and sinking to his sides. From a few feet away, he studied me again.

I had to swallow back the lump in my throat before assuming out loud, “You’re thinking that the disguise won’t work…”

“No,” he said, “I’m wondering how I could ever have mistaken you for a boy.”

A boy?
I thought. Then my mind rushed back to the first time we met, after we had fought on the dark roadside and finally exchanged words with each other. I’d had my hood pulled up then, too.

Eran laughed to himself deep in thought.

There was a thickness in his voice that intensified the heat in me. To subdue it, I started down the hill.

We didn’t speak the remainder of our walk toward the city or through the throng of people. Eran kept a diligent eye on those who moved around us and walked with a purpose telling me that he was ready for anyone to come through the crowd who might pose a threat. Only when we were a safe distance from the city did he relax.

This grew to be our habit as we came across the cities. I would hide beneath my hood and he would act as sentry. It worked well until the end of the day when another problem arose. Eran actually realized it before I did.