by JL Bryan
“It's not so much national security. It's incompetence, death and a cover-up to hide their mistakes. I'm telling you, there's something to this story.”
“You're really attached to it.”
“I've just been looking for something you could use,” Ashleigh said. “This looks like a possibility to me. Lots of sloppiness and loose ends, on their part.”
“It sounds risky.”
“You just have someone look into it,” Ashleigh said. “If it looks like a good way to take a shot at the President, accuse him of corruption and lying to the public and all that, you can take it back to the Homeland Security oversight committee with you. Launch some hearings. You get to position yourself as a reformer uncovering abuse of power.” She kissed him, spiking him with more love. “If nothing else, you might scare somebody up there, and maybe they'll shovel you some money and political support in exchange for you shutting up about it.”
“You think this could work?” His eyes were glazed over as he looked at Ashleigh. He was like soft clay in her fingers.
“It really could,” Ashleigh said. She knew Brazer was on the House Homeland Security Committee, and his party controlled the House, though not the Senate or the White House. She was determined to use his position to help her figure out what had happened in Fallen Oak and in Charleston, and why Jenny kept getting away with her horrific crimes. She suspected it was just as she'd told Brazer—some very powerful people did not want the administration to look weak on security, not while the President only had a 35% approval rating and was in danger of losing the Senate in November.
“And who would I appoint to go investigate this for me?” Brazer asked. “It would have to be someone I can trust. The early part of the investigation needs to be low-key, well under the radar. If we hit trouble, we need to be able to close it down fast, run away, and forget all about it.”
“That's why I love you, Congressman,” Ashleigh said. “You're so smart.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Who are you really?” Jenny asked Alexander. It was nearly midnight, under a luminous full moon and a clear sky glowing with constellations. They sat on the beach below his house, a blanket insulating them from the wet volcanic sand. Jenny was puffing on a sizable spliff he'd rolled for them, to help settle her raw nerves.
“You know who I am better than anyone.” He leaned back on his elbows and looked out at the slow, deep waves of the Pacific.
“I mean in this life. You know. How did you end up down here, doing this? Where did you start out?”
“Where was I born?”
“Yeah. Stuff like that.”
“It's nothing special,” he said. “It's why it's not worth talking about. My dad's an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. Total douchebag. So is my stepmom. My real mom lives in New York, or she did the last time I heard from her.” Alexander took the joint from Jenny's fingers.
“What else?” Jenny asked. “What were you like in high school?”
He laughed. “Kind of a troublemaker. I already knew just about everything they had to teach, from my past life memories. Got into a lot of arguments with my history teachers. I was just bored.”
“Me, too. Well, the bored part, not the arguing part. I was really quiet.”
“That's so unlike you,” Alexander said.
“So your life sucked in high school, too,” Jenny said. “Then what?”
“A year at Stanford. The summer after my freshman year, I decided to go backpacking through Mexico. Nobody would come with me, because they were so scared of the drug war and the kidnappings and just the unknown. That's one problem with people these days—no courage. They just want to plug their brains into a TV or video game and escape. Nobody had the balls to take a risk.”
His words actually made her think of Seth, and how he always ended up under his parents' thumb.
“So,” Alexander said, “One morning, I staggered out of a bar with a brain full of tequila. Tiny little town in the Baja. I'd told some local guys I could make the dead walk, and ended up taking bets from all of them. They thought I was just some stupid drunk gringo, and they were pretty much right. There was a funeral in town that day, this poor old woman who'd been killed by a rattlesnake. And we went to that funeral, me and the four or five guys I'd been drinking with. And...well, like I said, I was just a drunken asshole.”
“What did you do?”
“I shouldn't have. I wouldn't have if I'd been sober. But I walk into this lady's funeral, and I touch her hand. And then I make her corpse jump right out of the casket and dance around in front of her family and the whole village.”
“That's terrible!”
“I told you it was terrible.” He shook his head. “I still feel bad about that one. Everyone was horrified, screaming, praying, and I was just full of tequila and laughing. I'm not even sure if I collected on my bets. It was practically a riot.”
“That was pretty mean.”
“Yeah, well, that's why you shouldn't drink tequila, kids. But that's how the Calderon people heard about me. Papa Calderon collects astrologers, psychics, shamans. He's got a dozen or more on the payroll. I think they're mostly frauds, but I'm one of them, so what do I know? And it turns out I fit right into his plans to grow coca in the Sierra Madre.”
“So you're happy being a drug dealer?”
“I'm not. I'm a farmer. And a public benefactor.”
“Right.”
“What about you, Jenny?” Alexander asked. “Any dark or boring secrets?”
“I killed a bunch of people in my hometown,” Jenny said. “I mean, they tried to kill me first, but still.”
“You shouldn't feel bad about defending yourself.”
“I started out just defending myself, but then it was like something else took over,” Jenny said. “Somebody who wanted to punish, not just survive.”
“You were waking up,” Alexander said. “I could feel it way down here in Mexico, like a psychic earthquake. I've been waiting for that all my life. Looking for you.”
“How do you remember all your past lives?”
Alexander shrugged. “Broke my arm when I was a kid. The anesthesia killed me for a minute. When I came back...” He tapped the side of his head. “I don't have full consciousness in all my lives, but I think I keep my memories much more often than most of us. Maybe because my power has so much to do with death.”
“Does your opposite remember her past lives, too?”
“The dead-speaker? No, Esmeralda refuses. I haven't even bothered speaking to her in several lifetimes, though it's worth knowing where your opposite is and what she's doing. Which is invariably nothing much, she has so little ambition. She usually insists there is no reincarnation, and if there is, it wouldn't be worth knowing about. She says only the present life matters. That's one philosophy she keeps, life after life.” He chuckled. “It doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't you want to know who you really are?”
“Because who I really am is a crazed murderer,” Jenny said.
“No, Jenny. That was your inner goddess coming to the fore. You're always involved in justice.”
“Like when I killed the whole city of Athens?”
“Protecting the world from their brutal empire. The Athens you destroyed was not the Athens of the great philosophers and scholars—that Athens had passed long before. The Athens you destroyed was dedicated only to power and conquest.”
Jenny thought about that. “But everybody in the city?”
“Our work is divine, Jenny. We shape history. We can't help but use our powers, so we must use them the way we think is best.”
“I feel a little sick,” Jenny said. “Do you have any more of those coca leaves?”
“Not on me.”
“Crap. I like that numb feeling they give me.”
“I do have a little of this.” Alexander lifted a drawstring pouch from his pocket, opened it, and took out a small silver spoon and a plastic baggie knotted at the top. The plastic was stuffed full of w
hite powder. “The final product.”
“What does that feel like?” Jenny eyed it with a mix of suspicion and desire. If it could lift her heavy feelings of despair, even for a minute...
“Like chewing the leaves, but ten thousand times better.” He untied the plastic, dipped the spoon inside and held it out to her. Jenny stared at the spoon—it looked like a heaping teaspoon of sugar.
“Won't I get addicted?” she asked.
“You have to do it, like, hundreds of times to get addicted.”
“Really?”
“Sure, it's not a big deal. Watch.” Alexander held the spoon up to his nostril. She watched him block his other nostril, then snort up half the powder. Then he switched nostrils and snorted up the rest. He tilted his head back and sighed.
“What are you feeling right now?” she asked.
He sniffed a few times, rubbing his nose as he looked back at her. “Awesome. Amazing. Like Jesus on a roller coaster.”
Jenny laughed. “Okay. Just a little. Don't let me take much.”
He dipped out a spoonful and gave it to her. Jenny copied what he'd done, putting the powder up to her left nostril and then pressing the other nostril closed with her fingertip. She hesitated.
“It's cool,” Alexander smiled. “I like it.”
Jenny sniffed.
The lump of powder scorched the inside of her nose and the soft tissue behind her left eye. She blinked rapidly, and her whole head and body quickly turned numb. She coughed, tasting the cocaine as it dripped in snotty lumps down the back of her throat.
“Ugh,” Jenny said.
“How do you feel?”
Jenny looked at him, then she gave a big smile. “I feel like I just ate a pillowcase full of Halloween candy.”
He laughed. “Do the other nostril. Your nose feels better once it's balanced.”
“My nose feels pretty awesome already.” Jenny thumped the tip of her nose with her fingertip. She could barely feel the impact. It was like she was incapable of feeling pain, and giddy and hyper, and eager for more of the drug. She snorted the rest of it up her other nostril, then dropped the spoon, covered her nose, and laughed.
“Not bad?” he asked.
“I just feel so good.” She took the smoldering roach of a joint back from him and puffed it. “It's like I want to do everything, right now. I wish we had our horses so we could ride them as fast as they can go down the beach. They're always clomping through the woods. I bet they'd love to just run out here. That would be fun. How long would it take to get the horses? It has to be before the coke wears off. This isn't wearing off already, is it?”
“You've got some time, Jenny.” He smiled, looking her over. “It's way too late to bother with the horses, though.”
“But what are we going to do?” Jenny jumped to her feet. Her long black hair streamed across her face in the salty breeze. “We have to do something. We can't just sit here.”
“Then let's explore.” Alexander jumped to his feet. “There's an old lighthouse down the beach. No light left, but we can go look at the ruins.”
“Okay.” Jenny let him take her hand as they walked down the beach. She could hear the cheerful buzz of a trillion insects singing in the night.
The beach became a volcanic maze, with jagged rock formations jutting up around them, between pits of soft, gray sand. Jenny heard her mouth rattling on, telling Alexander about how she liked to work in clay and how many great ideas she'd gotten from the pottery at the open-air market in Comitán.
“There it is.” Alexander lay an arm around her and pointed. Following his index finger, Jenny saw a square clay tower, no more than three stories high, perched on the cliff overhead. In the moonlight, she could see the empty holes of its windows. “That's my property, now, too. I'm calling it the great lighthouse of Alexander. It used to warn sailors not to come crash on my beach.”
“And who warns them now?”
“I'm not sure. Maybe word just got around.” He led her toward a heap of boulders. “There are stairs up to it. They aren't much steeper than what you'd find on a Mayan temple.”
Jenny stared at the shell of the lighthouse, outlined against the stars. It looked scary to her, or maybe just depressing, darkness and emptiness where there had once been a source of light.
“I don't want to,” Jenny said. She pulled away from him, then took off her sandals and walked through the rocks on the edge of the surf. “Let's go swimming instead.”
“Not here. It's too rocky.”
“Are you scared?” Jenny asked. She pulled her bright, long-sleeved Mayan blouse over her head and lay it on the boulder next to her sandals. “Do you think we could go skinny dipping without you turning it into some kind of sexual thing?”
“I doubt it,” he said.
“Try your best.” Jenny tossed her jeans on the boulder. “Remember, I've killed bigger men than you.”
“I know you have.” Alexander began to undress. “Just keep your hands off me and we'll be fine.”
“Ha.” Jenny slipped out of her underwear and walked out into the water, until it was deep enough for her to dive in. She turned around and saw Alexander on the beach, his tall, muscular body bare in the moonlight. He strolled into the water and swam out to her.
“You're having a good time,” he said.
“It's nice.” She looked up at the stars. “Alexander, what are your real plans for this life? Build more pyramids? Conquer more empires?”
“No, the world's too old for that.” He tread water a couple of feet in front of her. He gave a smile that, for a moment, made him look very old, too. “All I want is to carve a nice, comfortable little kingdom out of southern Mexico. Nobody else is doing anything useful with it. I could modernize, beautify, carve my initials here.”
“And you think these people will let you rule them?”
“There are many ways to rule, both out front and behind the curtain.”
“Tell me about some things we did in our past lives,” Jenny said.
“Where do I start?”
“The beginning, maybe,” Jenny said.
“You really want to hear about five hundred lifetimes of mastodon hunts?”
“Skip to when it gets interesting, then.”
“The city of Megiddo,” he said. “Though it wasn't called that nine thousand years ago. You were born to a family of potters and craftsmen, me to a family of shepherds and raiders.” His eyes looked deep into her, and his smile was warm. “I can remember the first time I saw you in that life. Neither of us had our full memories, but I knew there was something about you. The intelligence and fearlessness in your eyes. Watching your bare hands covered in wet clay, shaping the most beautiful things out of mud.” He shook his head. “I feel that way every time we meet, every life. Life doesn't really begin until we meet each other.”
Jenny smiled. “So what did you do?”
“I kidnapped you from your family and made you my wife. Those were rougher days.”
“You're such a monster.”
“You liked it. Your parents had promised you to some other boy you hated.” He took her hands and drew her closer. “You married me again and again, life after life. You killed me a couple times, too. But that's marriage. Mostly, we've been happy. I don't want another lifetime without you.”
Alexander began treading water, and he pulled her against him. Jenny drowned in the wet, salty taste of his lips, the electric touch of his body...and then she opened her eyes and swam back from him.
“I told you, none of that right now,” she said.
“Then I guess you'll have to kill me.” He swam toward her. “You said that would be my punishment.”
Jenny held up both her hands. Dark lesions ripped open all over her palms and fingers. “Try me.”
He took her around the waist and pulled her to him again. He kissed her harder this time. Jenny's hands smeared blood and gore all over his face and neck as she kissed him back.
This time, she let him kiss he
r as long as she dared.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At Egleston Children's Hospital in Atlanta, Heather sat in the hospital room next to Tricia's bed. The four-year-old with the untameable brown hair was mercifully asleep for the moment. A bandage covered her tiny back, where the methotrexate had entered Tricia's spinal fluid through an intralumber injection.
A week of chemo had made the girl pale and gaunt. While Tricia had started acting tired before she was diagnosed, the chemo kept her sleeping all day. When awake, she only spoke in weak whispers.
Heather's phone buzzed again inside her purse, rattling against her sunglasses. Heather sighed and took it out. Her boss Schwartzman, for the fifth time in the past two hours. Heather walked to the window and called him back, looking out at the orange light of a late July afternoon. He answered halfway through the first ring.
“Heather,” he said, “How is she doing?”
“Sleeping,” Heather whispered.
“We have a bad situation.”
“I'm on family leave, David.”
“I know. And I'm sorry. But there's a small congressional investigation going on here. It's about Fallen Oak. And they want to talk to you in person.”
“Who wants to talk to me?”
“Investigators sent by the House Homeland Security Committee. It looks like Artleby doesn't have the lid screwed on as tight as he thought. They're asking a lot of questions about Fallen Oak, about Charleston—everything you've been doing.”
“They can read my reports.”
“I told them that, but nobody in Washington reads anymore,” Schwartzman said. “Nothing longer than a headline, anyway. They said they can do it here, or come to your home—”
“I'll come in,” Heather said quickly. “Is tomorrow okay?”
“It should be. They don't seem to have any intention of leaving soon. I'll let them know you're coming by in the morning. I'm so sorry to call you.”
“It's fine.”
“How are you holding up, Heather?”
Heather looked at her little girl, eaten up with cancer in the hospital bed, a stuffed Big Bird lying beside her. “I really don't know how to answer that, David.”
