by JL Bryan
“If we do, it'll come over the police band and we'll let you know directly,” Nolan said. “Now, seeing as how this is mostly a case of theft and vandalism, do y'all mind if we scoop these folks up and get them back in the fridge? There's a City Council member lives in this neighborhood, and it's best to keep things tidy.”
Schwartzman glanced at Heather, and she shrugged.
“It doesn't seem like we're needed here,” Heather said. “Do what you need to do.”
As they walked away, Schwartzman whispered to Heather, “I guess your ass is covered. Not the event you were expecting, but nobody's going to complain about the National Guard being put on alert now.”
“Who cares about my ass?” Heather asked. “This thing gets weirder and weirder. I still think we need to find Jenny Morton.”
“The cops already have an APB for her,” Schwartzman said. “And the Guardsmen are rolling in. This city will be locked up tight. We'll find her.”
“I hope you're right,” Heather said. “The idea of Jenny running wild out there scares the hell out of me.”
Darcy dozed on the nice comfy bed, waiting for the angels to return, until she heard the sudden pounding on the door. Her eyes drifted open, and she turned her head toward the racket.
“I’m sleepin’,” she whispered.
A keycard thunked into the lock and the door popped open. A man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a seersucker suit with a brass name plate at the lapel, stepped into the room, accompanied by a large black man in gray coveralls and a work belt full of tools.
“Excuse me,” the mustached man said. “Are you the only one here?”
“Me?” Darcy asked.
“Yes, you, thank you.”
“It’s just me. Until the angels come back.”
The two men shared a worried look.
“Ma’am,” the man said. “I am Pervical Daughtrey, the manager of The Mandrake House.”
“Hi,” Darcy said. She gave him a warm smile. She was still feeling so good from when the angel touched her.
“Yes,” he said. “This is extremely unfortunate news, but it seems this room has been charged to a stolen credit card.”
“Oh,” Darcy said. “Really?”
“Yes,” the manager said. “Really, ma’am. It was recently reported stolen by its owner, whose credit card provider then forwarded the information to us, as you can imagine. Now, if you would be so kind as to surrender Mr. Morris Metcalf’s credit card to me, and then I will need you to vacate this room immediately, I’m afraid.”
“Morris Metcalf’s my dad,” Darcy said.
“Oh, I see.” His forehead wrinkled briefly. “Would you mind showing me some identification?”
“It’s in my purse.” Darcy sat up and pointed at the empty chair. “Wait. It was right there.”
The hotel manager looked at the empty chair. “Where, ma’am?”
“Oh. Shoot.” Darcy looked around the room, but she didn’t see it anywhere. “I think that Mexican angel might have taken it.”
“A Mexican angel took your purse?” the maintenance guy asked.
“Yeah. But they’re coming back. They’ve only been gone a minute. Or maybe an hour. I forget. They’ll be back, though.”
“Ma’am, if you cannot provide identification, I’m very sorry to say that you must come down to my office, where you can wait for the police,” the hotel manager said.
“Police?” Darcy was getting worried now. This sounded serious. The golden fog over her mind began to lift. “Wait. My purse has to be somewhere.” Darcy heaved herself to her feet and looked around the room. She checked under the bed, and in the bathroom. “It has to be.”
“There is also the matter of the quite sizable bill you’ve accumulated,” the hotel manager said. “Upwards of nineteen hundred dollars. Given the circumstances, I am afraid my employers would require me to accept only cash.”
“I don’t have money like that!”
“Then perhaps you should not have chosen The Mandrake House for accommodations in Charleston. I must insist you come now and wait for the police.”
Darcy moved to gather her things, but she didn’t seem to have any. No purse, no suitcase. And how had she ended up in Charleston, anywho? Where were those people who claimed to be angels?
Darcy didn’t understand what was going on, but clearly she was in big bunches of trouble.
Ashleigh held tight to Tommy as his bike roared up I-26, the fastest route out of Charleston and away from the whole mess. A convoy of green trucks, the National Guard, flowed into the city on the inbound lanes of the interstate.
She felt exhilarated. Seth had escaped a bit faster than she’d wanted, but besides that, the night had gone extremely well. She knew how Jenny would react once she got cornered. Ashleigh just hoped the scientists got her captured before the soldiers caught up with her. They could keep Jenny locked up and out of Ashleigh’s way for years and years, maybe for the rest of this lifetime, if she was lucky.
And poor little Seth would be all alone, too. Ashleigh wished she really had killed him, but it just hadn’t been in the cards tonight.
Best of all, any trouble would stick to Darcy Metcalf, not to her. She was just Esmeralda Medina Rios, the lovely girl from California who’d stayed in the background and kept her hands clean of everything.
And Tommy wasn’t so bad. He was very acceptably attractive, and she understood how to use him. He was frustrating because he could resist her power. But he wasn’t the brightest bulb, and she had fragments of several lifetimes of memories over him. She could press buttons he didn’t even know he had.
His power made him extremely useful, and it even amplified her own. They had conquered empires together, here and there across space and time.
She held him tighter. It was good to be alive again, without all the hassle of gestation and birth and infancy. She had a nice new body she actually enjoyed, a new identity, and the whole future ahead of her.
Ashleigh began to think over her options.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Alexander drove only a mile and a half before parking outside a small airport with only one runway. He lifted her from the car to carry her in his arms again. He left the keys dangling in the ignition and the doors unlocked.
He opened a spiked wrought-iron gate with a keycard, and then carried her inside, toward the long hangar building.
“I think I’d rather walk now,” she said.
“As you like.” Alexander set her down.
“Where are you really taking me?”
“I have a place down in Mexico,” he said. “Near the beach. Good spot to lay low for a while, let your trail get cold. Let them run out of steam.”
“For how long?”
“Weeks. Months. It’s the only safe choice.” He opened a small door at the end of the hangar with the keycard.
“I can’t do that. My dad…”
“He’s going to be fine. I told you.”
“But I have to let him know I’m okay. And Seth. Well, maybe not Seth, but at least my dad.”
“You can send him a postcard,” Alexander said. “Tell him you’re in Chicago, or Seattle. I can have somebody mail it for you. But that’s it. You’ve got Homeland Security all over you right now.”
“Okay…” Jenny started walking again. He waited to walk alongside her.
“It’ll be nice,” he said. “You like the beach, right?”
“There’s too many people.”
“Not at my place. There’s nobody we don’t invite.”
He led her inside the hangar, toward one of several small aircraft. “This is us.”
Jenny stared at it. “What is that?”
“A Cessna Corvalis. A little banged up, but it’ll get us there.”
“I didn’t mean…we’re taking a plane? To Mexico?” She took her hand back from him. “Who’s going to fly it?”
He smirked and opened the plane’s right-hand door. “Come on. I’ll give you a boost.” He h
eld out his hand.
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“What? These things are easy,” he said. “You should have seen my first plane. Didn’t even have an enclosed cockpit. Pilot’s chair was just a splintery board.”
“How old are you?”
“In this lifetime, or adding them all up?”
“Do you remember other lives?” Jenny asked. “Besides Greece?”
“I remember them all.” He pointed inside the plane. “We have to go. You’re the one in a rush, not me. Nobody’s looking for me, not on this side of the border.”
“Okay.” Jenny looked at him carefully. It made sense that the Tommy guy could give a whole crowd a panic, and clearly Alexander’s power lay in another direction. He had come to save her. He didn’t seemed concerned about Seth at all—but Jenny wasn’t too concerned, either. He seemed to be doing pretty well for himself.
She knew from her dreams that Alexander had been good to her in the past, and that he understood her. It was thrilling to discover another person she could touch, but it also meant she had no real power over him. If he was taking her into a trap, it wouldn’t be easy to escape him. Especially when all her major bones felt like broken glass.
“We have a good doctor there,” Alexander said. “He’ll take care of your injuries.”
“I usually heal up pretty good,” Jenny said. “Never needed a doctor.”
“You took a pretty bad beating.”
“When will you bring me back home?” she asked.
“When it’s safe.”
“Who decides when it’s safe?”
“You and me.” He smiled. “Jenny, you can trust me. We’ve known each other a long time, and you know that.” He touched her cheek again. She did like how that felt, but it was completely different from Seth. Seth’s touch soothed and calmed her. Alexander’s made her feel electrified and powerful.
“Okay.” She took his hand from her cheek and grasped it tight. “Help me up.”
He boosted her up into the cockpit and closed the door.
While the hangar door lifted in front of her, Jenny studied the interior of the plane. It was snug in here, almost like a car. Her palms sweated and her guts knotted up. She had never been in an airplane before, and the idea scared her now.
Alexander climbed into the seat to her left and closed the door.
“I think I saw some OxyContin in here.” Alexander opened a console between the seats and handed her a brown pill bottle.
“What are these?” Jenny asked.
“Painkillers.”
“Oh, awesome.” Jenny unscrewed the cap and tapped one of the red pills into her palm. She swallowed it, hesitated a moment, then took a second one. “Why do you have these?”
“I don’t know.” He started up the plane and eased it out the hangar door. “I share this plane with a few different friends. Somebody must have left it.”
Jenny leaned back in her seat and watched out the window as the plane crawled to the runway. The night was already too unreal, too scary—her dad, then Seth, then the riot…and now flying away with someone from her dreams.
“What’s it like?” Jenny asked.
“Mexico?”
“Flying.”
“It’s great. You’ll like it.” He took her hand for a moment, and she felt his power flow into her, as if he were intentionally pushing it. She grew much more confident, like she could do anything. And get away with it, too.
“Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s fly away to Mexico.”
“That’s my girl.” Alexander talked briefly with the control tower over his headset.
He steered it onto the runway, then held the brakes while firing up the engines. The craft rumbled around her, and Jenny clenched the armrests tight.
Then the plane surged forward along the runway, rapidly picking up speed, and Jenny felt pushed back into her seat. She was trembling, and her breaths came short and fast.
The plane jostled her up and down as it shot along the runway, and her teeth chattered together. Then the wheels left the ground and the ride became smooth, though it felt dangerously steep to her. Jenny’s heart kicked as she watched the ground drop away below. There was nothing holding them up now. It was like magic.
She watched out the window as the lights of Charleston dropped away on one side. She could see a lot of flickering blue lights there, and a column of National Guard unpacking from their trucks, but they were soon too small and distant to discern.
“Can we really just go to Mexico?” Jenny asked. “Don’t we have to show our passports or something?”
“That is the law,” Alexander said. “But there are plenty of ways around it, usually involving cash. Or a new black Denali, like the one I just left somebody as a gift.”
“Flying isn’t so bad.” Jenny gazed out over the moonlit ocean. “I think I liked the lift-off part, too.”
“It’s a perfect night for flying,” he said. “The Gulf’s calm, the moon’s out…”
She looked at him. “What else do you remember about the past?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Do you remember me?”
“I remember you more than anything. Hundreds of lifetimes together. We’re always drawn back to each other. Our powers do that.” He touched her arm through a huge gash the mob had torn in her sleeve, and she felt the dark sizzle of electricity between them. “We make each other stronger.”
“But Seth is my opposite,” Jenny said. She was feeling a little confused. Maybe the pain drugs were already kicking in. “Right? That’s how we always thought of it.”
“He is. And opposites create a powerful charge between them. But our connection is greater. Our powers are complementary.”
“What does that mean?”
“You enhance me. And I enhance you. We can only become the greatest, most godlike versions of ourselves when we’re together. And I sensed you had been born, somewhere, but I couldn’t find you until you flared up bright as the sun a few weeks ago. Then I knew where you were, and I came to find you.”
“To increase your power?”
“I have loved you across many lives.” He pulled his hand back, and she already missed his electrifying touch. “But we only just met, this time around. And you don’t have my curse of remembering.”
“You think it’s a curse?”
“Every lifetime has its share of suffering.” Alexander looked out the windshield at the galaxies of stars. “Forgetting is a gift.”
Jenny wasn’t sure what to say. She tried not to think of ancient Athens and the diseased bodies heaped everywhere, the smoldering funeral pyres outside the temples. The smell of misery and death. After a while, she asked, “What about me and Seth?”
“You’ve spent a few lifetimes together, just recently, but your oldest and deepest relationship is with me.” He laughed. “Well, that’s getting a little weird for the first hour of conversation. You asked, though.”
“I did ask.” Jenny bit her lip. “You sent me to destroy Athens.”
“It was a war. A long time ago.”
“And to kill Pericles.”
Alexander laughed and brushed his fingers along the back of her head, through her hair, and she felt that dark sizzle of energy again. Again, she felt disappointed when he drew his hand back.
“My strategy was foolish,” Alexander said. “Empire is always systemic, Jenny, but we pin it on individual men, all the blame and revulsion and glory. I made that mistake, too. His death only brought us Cleon and many more years of war.”
“But if that was Seth, then the Jenny pox wouldn’t have hurt him.”
“The Jenny pox?” He grinned, lighting up his dark, magnetic eyes. “You are so cute this lifetime.”
“But I’m right. And history says he died of the plague.”
“Or, just possibly, somebody poisoned him and made it look like plague. Pretty believable, when everyone else is dying of it, especially if you get the body to the pyre fast enough. Somebo
dy who wanted to clear the road for another politician. Someone ruthless and clever.”
“Ashleigh?” Jenny asked. “Ashleigh killed Seth to make way for Cleon?”
“That’s where I’m putting my bet. Sounds like her, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Of course, it’s all ancient history now,” Alexander said. “But the more you use your gift, the more you’ll remember.”
“It’s not a gift,” Jenny whispered. “And I don’t want to use it.”
It was colder inside the aircraft, now that they were thousands of feet in the air. Jenny folded her arms around herself. It was strange and scary how he’d stepped out from her dreams and into the world like this. Part of her felt safe and comfortable with him, even crazily attracted to him, but she didn’t know if she could trust that part. He seemed dangerous, with all his knowledge of the past.
And even if he’d been good to her twenty-five centuries ago, she didn’t know anything about what kind of person he’d become since then.
“How did you know to come protect me tonight?” she asked.
“I came to Fallen Oak to find you, but I then saw the fear-giver in town, and spied on him.” Alexander paused a moment, as if thinking something over. “He’s in league with my opposite, Esmeralda.”
“What’s the opposite of making zombies?”
He laughed. “She can only listen to the dead. I command them.”
“Why aren’t you interested in her? If she’s your opposite?”
“For one thing, she always hates me,” Alexander said. “She’s a part of their faction.”
“What faction?”
“The love-charmer, the fear-giver,” Alexander said. “Your enemies and mine. I came here for you only, Jenny. I have no interest in her.”
“Is anybody else on our side?” Jenny asked. “And what are the sides, anyway? Why do we have to fight?”
“We’ve always fought,” Alexander said. “That’s why we need to be together now, while you’re in danger. Your power and mine will be at their peak, if we need them.”
“I don’t ever want to use mine again,” Jenny said. “I can’t do any good for anyone. I’m just a monster.”
