The Messengers Read Online Free Page B

killed him.”
    “No,” Peter said. “It was his time, that’s all. I’m just a messenger. The messages come to me,” he said, gesturing at a new postcard that he had on his desk.
    I tried to control my breathing. I tried to tell myself this was all lies. Fantastical rubbish. But I was angry about the way he was making me feel. I looked around the room for something to smash. My gaze rested on the postcard. From where I was standing, I couldn’t make out exactly what he had painted, but — if I was to believe this man — on that postcard were the details of somebody’s death.
    Somebody’s life.
    Peter Kennedy started talking again, but I’d stopped listening. The wind screeched through the gaps in the wooden panels, and I could hear the sea, like a broken telly. There was one inside lock on the door. Peter was mumbling about gifts and prophecies.
    I snatched the postcard from the desk, unlocked the door, and sprinted into the noise of the world. Peter got up from his chair and tried to grab me, but I was away.
    I ran across the path, nearly knocking over an old bloke with two walking canes, and skipped quickly down the steps in the seawall. It wasn’t until I got onto the beach that I began to slow down. I was wearing canvas trainers, and the stones pressed through the soles. The sea had made ridges of pebbles, like dunes, and I tumbled over them. Peter was gaining on me and shouting, but I wasn’t listening. There was fear in his voice, a panic I hadn’t expected.
    The paint on the postcard was tacky on my fingers, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.
    He was closing in. The stones were wet, and I could feel the sea spray on my face, but the sea was going out, being sucked away from me. After what I’d witnessed that day, there was a part of me that truly believed I was saving someone’s life. And the part of me that didn’t believe it had no problem with the idea of dumping a postcard in the water. But I still had a way to go until I made it to the first waves. I slowed down to look back, and Peter was coming after me. He seemed to glide across the beach stones. I tried to run again, but I tripped. He tackled me, and the postcard fell out of my grasp. Peter had me by the ankles, and then the hips. I felt the raw strength of him coming through his hands. My blood thumped.
    That end of the beach was pretty much deserted, but I could see a man walking his dog in the distance. “Help!” I screamed. “I’m being attacked!” The man didn’t hear, but it was enough to make Peter release his grip. I stood and retrieved the postcard.
    The waves came in, and I staggered toward them. Peter was still on the ground. “Please!” he shouted, and there was such terror in his voice that I turned around to face him.
    He got to his knees. “I’m begging you, Frances,” he said.
    I looked down at the postcard. I was stunned, again, by the photographic perfection of the painting, which showed a man in a suit slumped between two chairs, his eyes rolled back and his hand across his chest. I looked away sharply. “If what you’re telling me is true,” I said, “then I have to save this man. I can’t let what happened this morning happen again. I can’t let you deliver this. It’s too . . . It’s horrible.”
    “But you don’t understand,” he said. “If I don’t deliver the message, my family will . . . they’ll suffer.”
    I frowned, trying to stay inside his logic, crazy as it seemed. “Well, this man has a family too,” I said. “And Samuel Newman had a family. What about
their
lives? Why should I care about your family more than them?”
    “It was his time,” he said.
    That wasn’t a good-enough answer. The white sea foam sidled between my feet and sent sparks of cold up my legs. My toes went numb. I turned toward the sea and prepared to drop the postcard.
    “I have a son,” he said.
    I stopped and looked out at the patches of color and steely light on the water.
    “A boy,” he said.