Free The Shelter Cycle by Peter Rock Page B

moving at all and looking at us with her sharp eyes, without even blinking. She wore a pastel blue pantsuit and matching pumps, like she was going to a business meeting. Her dark hair puffed around her head, swooping down in back. The ten rings on her fingers glinted, shining on us. It was silent for at least a minute before she spoke.
    She told us that we were her children, that she was our mother, that she was our father’s mother and our mother’s mother. She used her own voice, not the echoing voices of the Ascended Masters. She did not raise her voice and it was already inside your head, like it didn’t travel through the air; it just appeared, a vibration in your mind. We listened. We hardly breathed.
    The Messenger often spoke to thousands of adults at once; she traveled in the higher planes and communicated directly with the Masters. She had decided to stay behind on earth and she had decided to come and talk to us, in our classroom. We knew when we saw her that she was not like us, and also that we could be Messengers if we worked hard, in our words and actions and decrees.
    Energy radiated from her, a vibration that wasn’t hot or cold, just a shiver in your blood circling in you with more electricity, the power growing. My body ached like I wanted to come out of my skin, and I glanced at my mom, to see if something might be wrong. The Messenger almost never came to Glastonbury, and it was always a surprise like this; there was no time to clean or prepare. Sometimes in the past Mom had fainted when decreeing, had been taken from her body. She was sensitive that way. Just being in the same room as the Messenger could do it, overload her system.
    The Messenger told us that her heart was great enough to burn up all the darknesses in our hearts. She said she’d been playing in a sandbox, when she was a girl, and the scene had shifted to another frequency and she had found herself playing in the sand along the Nile River in Egypt. The Messenger had lived as Nefertiti, and as Marie Antoinette, and Queen Guinevere. I felt her eyes travel across the skin of my face, a warm ray washing over me, sliding away. The Messenger then closed her eyes for a moment and turned her face farther away from me. I felt a dimness like a shade across a lamp, and then the light returned.
    She pointed at me, then, and she pointed at Colville. She told us that our paths were all intertwined. The two of you, she said. All intertwined. You must help each other in every way you can.

8
    F RANCINE DROVE SOUTH from Boise, through Mountain Home and Idaho Falls. At Pocatello, she angled north, past Rexburg and Ashton, St. Anthony. The jagged silhouettes of the Tetons rose on the right. She switched on the high beams and the darkness reflected back at her. She switched them all the way off for a moment, and the stars leapt up in the windshield, the sky blackening.
    Since she’d spoken with Colville in the motel, hours ago, she’d been imagining that she was being observed: an aerial view of the car in the darkness, her face staring through the windshield as she passed the exits, the dim glow of West Yellowstone, her profile unmoving as she continued up the narrow canyons, past the ski slopes, through the Gallatin Gateway. Past signs for Henry’s Lake, for Hebgen Lake. Bozeman was less than a hundred miles away.
    A semitrailer rattled past, startling her. She had to stay awake, to be more careful. She slowed, accelerated, felt in her pocket for the wooden heart, carved so long ago, sanded smooth.
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    There was a light on in the back of Maya’s house. Francine pulled into the yard, parked behind the truck. The baby shifted inside her as she stood up, crossed the driveway. When she rang the doorbell, another light came on inside the house, and then the porch light. Maya’s face peeked through the window. The door opened.
    â€œLittle sister!” Maya said, hugging her. “You’re