Free The Messenger: Mortal Beloved Time Travel Romance, #1 by Pamela DuMond

fix that. If you are to be a warrior one day, you must first learn to become a Messenger. And if you are to be a Messenger, you must gain knowledge of the differences between pains that steal lives, and those that are merely irritating.”
    Why did Angeni think I would want to be a warrior one day? The only warriors I’d be doing would be yoga poses. The only messengers I knew were those people who earned twenty bucks an hour plus tips, weaving their bicycles through the Loop’s traffic to deliver documents, fruit baskets, or bad news. No way I’d ever be a messenger.
    “I know for a fact you have been through far worse than this, Abigail,” Angeni said. She dipped her fingers into the crock filled with her concoction, and smoothed it on my cut.
    It stung and I cringed.
    “This will help you heal,” she said. “You will have a small scar, but every Messenger needs a marking. Otherwise, how would other Messengers recognize her?” She smiled.
    My heart had calmed down, and my head did feel better. “I don’t think I’m a messenger. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” I confided. “My name’s not Abigail. I don’t even know who she is.”
    “Fascinating. You and Abigail look so much alike, that you could be sisters,” Angeni said. “Tell me more.”
    “I haven’t met anyone from here until a couple of days ago,” I said. “And no one will even tell me where I am.”
    She frowned. “You look like Abigail. But you do not talk or act like her. Share with me your real name and where you are from.”
    Angeni got it. Someone in my dream got it. I felt so relieved. “My name is Madeline Blackford and I’m from Chicago, Illinois,” I said.
    “How old are you?”
    “I’m sixteen.”
    “Just like Abigail,” she said. “Maybe you are long lost relatives. You lived miles away and never met.”
    “The problem is, Angeni, I’m from Chicago, probably hundreds of years after this time.” Whenever this time was , I wondered. “We don’t wear the kinds of clothes people wear here. We don’t live in little huts, or houses with wooden forts around them,” I said. “And we don’t wake up to find everyone around us bloody and dead, unless we are in the military, or there’s been a terrible, natural disaster or a terrorist attack.”
    I stood up and paced, agitated, around her hut, all twelve feet of it. “Which, thankfully, doesn’t happen all that often, and has never happened to me before,” I said. “Until now.”
    “This never happened to you before?”
    “No. I’ve had my share of bad dreams, but nothing like this. Everyone’s treating me like I’m an idiot,” I said. “They think I just hit my head, or that some Reverend needs to pray over me.”
    “Hmm. There is a metal rod on the ground close to you. Find it and stir the fire for me, please.”
    “Sure.” I’d stirred fires before. Like, well, some time in my life. I found the rod, picked it up, and poked the fire.
    “The fire is not your enemy. You do not need to attack it,” Angeni said. “Just move the wood a little so the fire can find the driest parts of the branches, and burn them more easily.”
    “Okay,” I grumbled and swooshed the rod around the branches and logs a little less violently.
    “Do you want me to call you Abigail, or Madeline?” she asked.
    “Call me Madeline!” I said, thrilled. “Would you tell me where I am?”
    She sighed. “You are in a province in the Americas called Rhode Island. You were rescued from the Endicott settlement that was brutally attacked during a war. You do not remember any of this, Madeline?” she asked.
    I shook my head. “I live in the United States of America. We have fifty states and one’s called Rhode Island, but I’ve never been there.” Think , I said to myself. Colonial outfits. A War. People who talk funny. “Am I in the Revolutionary War?”
    Angeni shook her head. “No. You live in King Philip’s War. People on both sides are very upset and have old