Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4)

by J. Bryan

  Jenny didn’t see things that way anymore, and neither did Seth. They’d learned from life after life of being human, feeling love and pain. They’d let the fleshly experience change their dark and ancient souls, something most of their kind chose to resist. For good reason, Jenny thought. Love and compassion opened entire new avenues of potential suffering.

  She washed her hands in the big marble bowl sink, rubbing them again and again with a jasmine-scented ball of soap. She kept washing them long after any pee from the pregnancy test was obviously rinsed away. The steaming hot water provided a sensation strong enough to distract her from the thoughts spinning inside her mind.

  “I can’t be pregnant,” Jenny said to her reflection. “Right?”

  Her blue eyes stared back at her.

  “We know we can’t do this,” Jenny said. She imagined herself speaking to that strange primordial part of herself, her own soul, that had incarnated as human again and again. “It won’t survive. There’s nothing we can do. So...no reason to tell Seth about it, right? This will just take care of itself, whether I want it to or not. Right?”

  Her reflection offered no wisdom. It was just the image of a girl with a frightened face.

  The sound of bells chimed through the apartment, announcing someone at the front door.

  Jenny absolutely didn’t feel like speaking to anyone at this moment—she was in a state of shock, and she could feel the confused flood of emotions waiting to crash in on her.

  Still, she left the bathroom, walked out through their sumptuous bedroom and expansive, sunlit living room with a picture window and a balcony overlooking the boulevard below. Her bare feet sounded oddly loud in her ears, slapping against the dark oak floor.

  The doorbell rang again. Jenny looked through the peephole lens, but she didn’t recognize the girl outside. The apartment building had a full-time security staff, so the only way the girl could be inside the building was if she was a resident or an approved visitor. Jenny guessed the girl was visiting someone else, but had accidentally approached the wrong door.

  Jenny stepped back. The girl would surely double-check the apartment number and realize her mistake. There were three other apartments on the same floor.

  Jenny decided to return to the small extra bedroom she used as a studio, play a record, and resume her latest attempt at making art. Then she decided to wait until the strange girl left, since playing the record would make it obvious that she was home.

  The doorbell rang a third time. Jenny looked out again, feeling suspicious—though officially dead, she and Seth were actually on the run from the United States government. It was always possible someone had discovered they were alive and living in Paris.

  The girl didn’t look like any kind of police or law enforcement, though. She looked no older than Jenny, with dark Mediterranean skin, deep auburn hair and sea-green eyes. Unlike most law enforcement officers, she wore a short choker dress with vivid purple designs. The bright dress was damped down by the long black coat she wore over it.

  Despite her revealing dress, the girl also wore purple lace gloves that reached well up her forearms.

  She rang the doorbell a fourth time, still not figuring out she was at the wrong apartment. She was probably just some random pretty airhead, Jenny decided, who couldn’t be bothered to read the door number.

  Jenny pulled on her own gloves and opened the door, but not too far. The girl was in heels, too. She probably wasn’t here to capture Jenny. Jenny looked out at her, but didn’t say anything.

  A bright smile had bloomed on the girl’s face as the door opened, but now it died. The girl’s mouth dropped open in confusion. That’s right, genius, Jenny thought. You’ve been annoying the wrong apartment.

  “Bon jour,” the girl said, uncertainly.

  “Bon jour,” Jenny replied.

  The girl looked at her for a moment, then continued, hesitantly, speaking in French, but not with a native accent. “I am sorry. I am looking for a young man.”

  A second possibility flared into Jenny’s mind, hot and angry. Maybe the girl didn’t have the wrong apartment. Maybe she did know Seth, and she was the kind of friend that Seth chose to keep secret from Jenny...

  “What sort of young man?” Jenny asked.

  “He is this tall or so.” The girl held a hand above her head. Jenny looked again at the lacy purple glove clinging to her fingers. “Blond, handsome, shoulders like this, a muscular build. Eyes are blue, like...” The girl gazed at Jenny’s eyes. “You must know him.”

  Jenny shook her head. “You have the wrong address.”

  “No, I am certain...” The girl pushed Jenny’s door open—quite rudely, Jenny thought—and took in their apartment with her strange, intense green eyes. “Yes. This is just as I have seen it.”

  “Seen it when?” Jenny asked.

  “It would make no sense to explain.” The girl shook her head. “I do not understand. Perhaps I am too early.”

  “Too early for what?”

  The girl studied Jenny again. “Do you have any plans to move out? Is someone else moving here in the future?”

  “I have no real plans either way,” Jenny said. “When have you seen my apartment before?”

  “You live here alone? There is no boy as I described?”

  “If there were a boy like that here, I would be too busy to answer the door,” Jenny told her, and the girl laughed.

  Then the girl looked off into the distance, down the short hall to the elevator. Her eyes seemed to cloud over.

  “I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “Everything keeps changing.”

  “Maybe you should visit a doctor,” Jenny suggested.

  The young woman’s eyes cleared, and she made an effort to smile. “I think I may be too early. Should you see someone as I described, perhaps sometime in the future, will you tell him to contact me?”

  “I suppose,” Jenny said. “What’s his name?”

  “I have only seen his face. I do not know his name.”

  Okay, it’s a creepy stalker lady, Jenny thought. “How did you get into my building?”

  The girl’s smile seemed more genuine now. “That is easy. Watch for an older man, chat with him as he walks inside, as if you are his guest.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You can add the trick to your repertoire, if you like.”

  “What makes you think I have a repertoire of tricks?” Jenny asked.

  “Every woman should have one.” From her purse, she brought out a pen and a paperback by someone called Giuseppe di Lampedusa. She wrote on a mostly-blank page of the book, then ripped it out and passed it to Jenny. They gave each other a look as the torn page passed from one gloved hand to another, but neither commented on the fact that they’d both chosen to wear long gloves on a warm day.

  “There is my mobile number and my home address. I’m at school most days, so evenings are better,” the girl said.

  “School?”

  “Art history. The Pantheon-Sorbonne. Do you attend university?”

  “Not at the moment,” Jenny said. On the scrap of paper, the girl’s handwriting looked like some kind of advanced calligraphy, which was a little odd. Her name was Mariella Visconti, so Jenny supposed her accent was Italian. Jenny folded the page. “I’ll keep it just in case, but I don’t believe anybody like that lives here. You must have the wrong apartment building.”

  “You never know what the future may bring.” Mariella winked at her. “Thank you.” She took a long, unsettling look at Jenny’s gloves.

  “Good luck to you.” Jenny was eager to close the door. The longer Mariella stood there, the more uncomfortable Jenny felt. Jenny worried Seth would show up at any moment, blowing Jenny’s lie.

  “Perhaps we will meet again,” Mariella said. “Until then...” She gave a small wave as she walked toward the stairwell and elevator.

  Jenny closed the door and locked it, her heart racing. The girl talking about how she’d “seen” Seth, but didn’t
know his name, made her think of how she’d dreamed of Alexander for weeks before meeting him in the flesh. Of course, Mariella could have just been some psycho who’d followed Seth to see where he lived, but there was also the weird matter of the gloves, plus the intense uneasy feeling the girl had stirred in Jenny’s gut. Though it might be normal to feel concerned when a gorgeous and expensively dressed Italian girl showed up at her door, eager to find her boyfriend, this went a little deeper than that.

  She didn’t think the girl was any kind of government agent, but she might be something worse...one of their kind, like Jenny and Seth, or like Ashleigh and Tommy. This was very bad. Besides Seth, Jenny had never met another one who didn’t bring her grief. Even Alexander had only pretended to love her in order to use her to enhance his own powers. Or maybe he really had felt whatever twisted thing passed for love inside him, but he’d tricked her and betrayed her. The last thing Jenny wanted was to meet another of their kind.

  Mariella apparently lived in Paris, too, so this problem wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

  Jenny hurried to hide the girl’s information, as well as the pregnancy tests, before Seth returned home.

  * * *

  “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost,” Seth said as he closed the front door behind him. “Not like a Casper-type ghost, either. More of a Headless Horseman kind.”

  Jenny sat on the sofa in the living room, rereading a vampire book by Anne Rice that she’d loved as a kid. She’d always identified with Louis, the moody vampire who didn’t really want to kill anyone. Now she was staying in Paris, as Louis had for a while.

  “I’m fine.” Jenny followed Seth into the kitchen, where he set his cloth grocery bag on the marble counter. He unloaded tomatoes, three kinds of cheese, and a long, crusty baguette, which had been baked very recently, judging by the delicious aroma that filled the apartment.

  “You’re sure?” he asked. “Nothing happened today?”

  “Sometimes you just have a bad day.”

  “I’ll cook dinner, then. That’ll make you feel better.”

  “Um...I doubt it. You should let me do it.” Jenny approached the stove.

  “Are you questioning my cooking skills?” Seth asked. “Who poured you that awesome bowl of Chocos cereal yesterday? Tell me that.”

  “You’re a master at adding milk.”

  “As long you acknowledge that, I’ll let you cook. There’s pasta, there’s organic chicken...”

  Jenny reached for the bottle of wine Seth had brought home, then hesitated. She could really use a glass just now, but the idea of drinking while pregnant bothered her. It was ridiculous. One night, she knew, she would wake up to find her thighs painted with blood and gore, and that would be the end of that. There was no reason to worry about the well-being of a fetus destined to die from the pox. Still, she resisted her desire for a drink.

  “There’s really nothing wrong?” Seth twisted the corkscrew. “Something feels different today, doesn’t it?”

  Jenny worried what he meant by that. Those of her kind who had powerful emotional bonds with each other, positive or negative, could sometimes sense and be drawn to each other. Alexander had become aware of Jenny’s location the night she flared up and killed the mob in Fallen Oak.

  Now, this strange girl had found her way to Seth...and Seth might be feeling her energy, too.

  “Just a regular, boring day,” Jenny said.

  “Then tell me what’s on your mind.” He started to pour her a glass of wine, then gave her a puzzled look when she shook her head.

  “I was just thinking about past lives,” Jenny told him. That was one topic guaranteed to lose Seth’s interest right away. He only had random fragments of past-life memories, and they were wicked enough that he didn’t want to learn more. He would usually change the subject immediately.

  “What were you thinking about?” Seth asked. “Were we raping and pillaging our way across the ancient world or something?”

  “No...we weren’t really together until our last couple of lives, actually. We were enemies before that.”

  “So tell me.” He leaned against the counter, sipping wine. “Tell me about our last life.”

  “Seriously?” Jenny hadn’t expected that. Again, she worried he could sense the girl who’d been searching for him...and maybe his sudden interest in the past had more to do with her than with Jenny, even if he didn’t consciously realize any of it.

  “Why not?” Seth asked. “We never talk about it. I think I’m ready to learn about our past.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You keep thinking about it, I want to hear about it. I bet I was a cowboy, right?”

  Jenny took a deep breath. “It was the Great Depression.”

  “That figures. We wouldn’t want to miss a time of worldwide misery, would we?” Seth said. He refreshed his wine glass.

  Jenny placed a ripe tomato on the wooden cutting board. As she sliced it, she began to tell him.

  “I was in the carnival,” she said. “I had a stage name, in the carnival. Juliana Blight.”

  Seth spat wine as he laughed. “Were you a stripper?”

  “Do you want to hear the story or not?”

  “Oh, I’m listening. This already sounds good.”

  Chapter Five

  Juliana waited on the low, narrow wooden stage, separated from the small dirt-floor audience pit by a wooden rail and a ragged curtain, which hadn’t yet opened for the evening. Out in the tent, customers who’d paid a few pennies could see Alejandro the sword-swallower, Zsoka the tattooed lady, some creepy marionette puppets, a knife-throwing act, and Punchy Pete, the dancing, juggling dwarf. For a few pennies more, they could step past the back curtain to view the star attraction of the freak show: Juliana Blight, The World’s Most Diseased Woman.

  She only thought of herself as “Juliana” now. Her given name was Greek, and she’d been born in a squalid, crowded tenement in New York. Because of her diseased nature, she was rejected by everyone except a crazed aunt, who repeatedly bathed her with lye and called her “daughter of Hell.” She’d run away when she was seven years old and spent much of her life scrounging and stealing, protected from everyone by the demon plague within her. Here and there, she’d left men dead in the gutter when they’d tried assaulting her.

  She was nineteen now, and she’d been with the carnival five years.

  “Right this way, right this way, come see the most jaw-dropping female on Earth, the most diseased woman in the world! Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, she’s not contagious...unless you touch her! You, sir, would you care to see this princess of pestilence unveiled, laid bare for your education? I thought so, sir, I can see you are man with a healthy interest in science!”

  The curtain opened. Radu, the sideshow talker responsible for herding the customers, led in the first group of nine or ten gawkers, the usual mix of red-faced farmers and drooling, wide-eyed children. Men and kids seemed most attracted to her show. Missouri was no different from anywhere else.

  Juliana stood, still wrapped in the quilt she wore between shows, and approached the wooden rail at the front of her stage. Dirty upturned faces blinked at her in the low light.

  “Juliana Blight,” Radu continued. “Bitten by a swarm of rare giant African mosquitoes, Juliana carries all forms of disease within her flesh...from Egyptian mummy pox to Arabian leprosy, and the mysterious Chinese worm virus...stay back from the railing, sir, or you risk infection!”

  “She don’t look too sick to me,” one man said, leaning on the railing.

  “Prepare to be dazzled and horrified, sir!” the barker replied. “By the wonders of medical science.”

  Juliana shrugged off the quilt and let it fall to the stage. Underneath, she wore only white cotton underpants and a silk scarf, which hung loose around her neck to conceal her breasts. The crowd was free to inspect the rest of her body.

  She held out her arms. Dark, bloody sores ripped open along them, from her shoulders
all the way to her fingertips. The crowd gasped and drew back—the man who’d leaned on the rail nearly tripped over his shoes in his hurry to get away from her. A small, freckled boy screamed until his slightly older sister slapped and hushed him.

  Juliana turned slowly, letting the crowd gasp and whisper at the sight of boils erupting up her back, blisters blooming along her thighs and calves. When she faced them again, a rash of bloody abscesses, cysts, and tumors broke open in a wave from her ankles to her hips, then across her stomach and chest. Her face became a horror-show mask, and her eyes darkened with diseased blood the color of bile.

  As usual, the little crowd screamed and ran away through the curtain. Radu winked at her—he loved that “first scare” of the night, the one that was sure to draw plenty of curious lookers with coins to spend.

  She wrapped herself in the quilt and sat down in the plain wooden chair at the back of her stage, reading a dime novel about pirates, and Radu left to round up the next audience.

  She usually held back, but tonight she was really letting the plague out, giving them an extra-gory display. The others at the carnival didn’t know it yet, but this would be her last night as the World’s Most Diseased Woman, if things turned out as she hoped.

  The next little group was ushered in, much quieter than the first, eager to see whatever had sent the first group running in terror.

  She gave them a good show.

  * * *

  The next day was a Sunday, and local officials had made it clear that the carnival had to stay closed, lest it distract people from church. Many of the carnies had prepared for the day off with heavy drinking the night before, so the dusty midway was cold and silent in the morning as she left her tent and walked the dirt avenue between the booths. The smell of traveling carnival still hung in the air: popcorn, fried chicken, cotton candy, horse shit from the Wild West show.