by JL Bryan
“Sure, thanks,” Jenny said. “The thing is that Seth used to want to go to Clemson, where his grandfather went. And that would be totally fine, because it’s tiny and it’s in the middle of nowhere. I could cope with that. But his parents are really the ones who want him to go to Charleston, because his dad donated a bunch of money there, I think. And they say he’ll make more ‘connections’ in the city.”
“Meaning other rich kids,” Darcy said. “People his parents will like.”
“I guess.”
“But then that means…huh.” Darcy chewed on her lip and turned toward the TV.
“What?” Jenny asked.
“I kinda don’t want to say. Let’s skip it.”
“It’s okay. What are you thinking?”
“Well, you know,” Darcy said. “If he always ends up doing what his parents want, and his parents don’t want you together…”
Jenny thought about it. Seth’s dad did seem to have a lot of control over Seth’s choices. Seth and Jenny had been together for almost five months now, and he’d kept it secret from them. He’d even changed his mind about colleges when his dad told him to.
“I don’t think…” Jenny began, but she couldn’t finish the thought. Darcy might actually have a point.
“Plus all those other girls he’ll meet,” Darcy said. “I mean, tons of pretty girls, from richer families that his parents will like. You know?”
“Yeah, but…” Jenny knew she was right. Seth wasn’t just cute and nice, and even funny when you didn’t expect it. He also had his healing touch, the one that made everyone feel better when he touched them, erasing anything from a cold to cancer.
“The girls will be all over him, too,” Darcy said. “And I mean there’s gonna be thousands of them. Not like here.”
“But Seth can’t leave me. He’s the only one—” Jenny cut herself off. She had almost said, he’s the only one I can touch. She began to feel panicky. There wouldn’t be any other relationship options for her, but he could have any girl pretty easily. It hit her just how vulnerable and powerless she was in their relationship. He was really holding all the cards.
Her eyes stung, and she fought back tears. She didn’t want to think about losing Seth.
“Oh, crapsies,” Darcy said. “I’m such a dodo. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I was just thinking about how guys are.”
“No,” Jenny said. “It’s okay. You’re right. I need to figure out what I’m going to do. I just wish he wasn’t moving to such a big city.”
“Here, let’s do a toast.” Darcy raised her glass, which featured Joanie from Happy Days. Jenny’s mom had bought the whole set of commemorative Happy Days glasses at the flea market, not long before she died. “To guys. And how much they suck.”
Jenny laughed and raised her matching Richie Cunningham glass. The two girls clinked their glasses together, and they drank.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tommy stood in the giant kitchen at Ashleigh’s house, making preparations for a huge pot of chili. Esmeralda was shouting in Spanish over in the living room. She’d been on her cell phone for twenty minutes.
“My mother is giving me so much shit,” Esmeralda told him when she returned to the kitchen. “I told her I needed a break and I went to Mexico. Are you actually cooking?” She looked at the pinto and garbanzo beans, the beef he was browning in the skillet.
“One of my specialties.” He touched a small bowl holding chopped jalapeno and habanero peppers. “Think you can handle these?”
“Oh, please. You should try my mother's cooking.” Esmeralda unscrewed the small glass jar of habanero peppers. She lifted one out by the stem.
“Careful,” Tommy said. “Those can burn you. You don't want to get the juice in your eye.”
“You think you are so tough.” Esmeralda lifted out a second hot pepper and offered it to him. “I bet you won't eat this.”
Tommy took it by the stem and looked at it. “That's a lot to eat all at once.”
“Maybe for you.” Esmeralda put the entire pepper in her mouth and bit it off at the stem. She gave him a closed-mouth smile as she chewed.
“Okay,” Tommy said. He put the habanero in his mouth and chewed.
Fire spread across his tongue, up to his nose and down his throat. The pain filled his head, burning his nostrils, and he wanted to run to the sink and guzzle ten gallons of water. He didn't let her see any of this, though. He held it in and smiled back, though he was pretty sure his face was a scalding shade of crimson. If not purple.
“Very impressive,” Esmeralda said. “I almost believe you aren't in agony right now.”
“It's just a pepper.”
She moved closer to him. “How long do we have to stay with Ashleigh?”
“She says we have to stop Jenny before she kills more people.”
“And what happens after that? Can we leave?”
“You don't like Ashleigh?”
“She’s actually not so bad,” Esmeralda said. “I like her more as I spend time with her. But then, when I’m alone with you, I remember why I really came.”
“And I’m glad you did.” He slid an arm around her, avoiding the band of exposed brown skin between the hem of her short shirt and her low-slung jeans. She was dressing in Ashleigh’s old clothes.
“I know you use your power against me sometimes,” Esmeralda said. “But you don’t have to.”
“I can’t turn it off,” he said. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I want to be with you,” she said. “I hate my life. My job is nice, but my mother…and Pedro…” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t stay with you because you make me. I stay because I want to.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” She opened her beaded patchwork purse, which was hung over a kitchen chair. She rummaged inside it, then handed him a gold coin. “Do you remember this?”
Tommy looked at it. The head of an Indian chief, complete with headdress, was engraved on one side, an eagle on the other.
“I gave this to you,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t sold it.”
“It makes me think of you,” she said.
He looked at her. His heart skipped in his chest, the way it had when they were kids. She was looking up at him with beautiful brown eyes, her hand floating close to his waist.
“You really do remember me,” he whispered.
“I never told about the money,” Esmeralda said. “Even my mother. I told her I lost my power. It freed me from that horrible work.”
“You are sneaky.” He reached a hand toward her bare waist, but he didn’t want to touch her and fill her up with fear. He felt extremely frustrated.
“It is okay.” Esmeralda pressed his hand to the hot skin of her stomach. She shivered, and she sucked in a gasp of air through her teeth, but she kept his hand there.
“I fill people with fear,” Tommy said. “Whenever I touch them. I’ve shattered people’s minds, once or twice. And I didn’t even mean to.”
“I know,” she said. “I can feel it. But I…kind of like it.” She closed her eyes. “It makes me feel so alive.”
Tommy leaned down and kissed her. She tensed, then pushed her face against his. She shuddered as their tongues touched each other. She tasted like the habanero pepper, and her kiss burned his lips and tongue.
Tommy pulled her close and held her tight against him, and she kissed him harder. She slid both her hands to the back of his head and curled his dark hair in her fingers.
He realized he was going to take her right here, in the kitchen, against the counter, and he’d never wanted anything more in his life.
A high-pitched scream pierced his eardrum. The smoke detector, bleating its warning.
Tommy opened his eyes. Lost in each other’s lips and hands, they hadn’t noticed the ground beef turn to a charred black pile in the skillet, or the kitchen fill up with smoke around them.
“Fuck!” Tommy pushed the skillet onto a cold burner, then ran to the wall, ju
mped up, and slapped the smoke detector, which was mounted on the wall near the high ceiling. It gave a short beep as a parting shot, and then it shut up.
Esmeralda looked at the thoroughly burned meat. She smiled at him through the smoky air.
“This is your specialty cooking?” she asked.
“I got a little distracted.”
Esmeralda took another habanero from the jar. “Looks like it’s vegetarian chili tonight.”
Jenny woke to the sound of Darcy whispering.
“Huh?” Jenny said. She forced her heavy eyelids to open.
Darcy stood in the doorway of Jenny’s bedroom in the early morning light. Her purse was slung over her shoulder.
“Jenny,” Darcy whispered again. “I have to go home. My dad said I have to be home early or I’m in deep doo-doo.”
“Christ,” Jenny sighed. She looked at the clock. It was 6:34 a.m. on a Saturday.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name,” Darcy whispered.
Jenny stretched her arms. Darcy had said she didn’t like sleeping with other people, due to a certain cousin named Heywood who used to share her bed when he visited and always peed in his sleep. That was perfect for Jenny. She’d given Darcy blankets and pillows to use on the couch.
“Let me get my car keys.” Jenny yawned.
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Darcy said. “It’s only a mile or so if you go through the woods. And I feel like hiking in the woods for a while.”
“Okay.” Jenny knew what Darcy meant—there was nothing better than the solitude of those woods, away from everybody. She sat up.
“It’s cool, you don’t have to get up,” Darcy whispered. “I was just letting you know so you didn’t think I was a disappearing spaz or something. I left you The Return of the King, cause you don’t want to miss that one when you just saw the other two! No, seriously, don’t even get out of bed. I insist.”
“All right.” Jenny rubbed her eyes, feeling disoriented. She’d been lost in a terrible dream, one where all the people she’d killed were back for revenge, chasing her through a dark tunnel somewhere. “Um, see ya, Darcy. Thanks for coming over.”
“Thanks for inviting me,” Darcy said, though it had really been her idea. “God bless!”
When Darcy left, Jenny dropped back into bed and pulled the covers over her face to block the daylight. It was way too early.
Ashleigh clomped through the woods, cursing Darcy’s hefty body at every thudding step along the way. She felt like an elephant lumbering through the jungle. An elephant with an aching back.
She wasn’t really going back to Darcy Metcalf’s house—she intended to avoid that place as much as she could, without blowing her cover. So far, nobody seemed to have noticed the renewed activity at the Goodling house, which was tucked at the back of a cul-de-sac. The house to their left had never sold, and the one on their right had been foreclosed on and lay empty. The only other house on the cul-de-sac had belonged to Dick Baker, the realtor/lawyer whose face was all over town, and who had been put to a miserable death the night Jenny Mittens went psycho.
She arrived at her house red-faced and puffing for air, her socks squishy with sweat inside her tennis shoes. She trudged up the front steps, staggered inside, and locked the door behind her.
Exhausted, she crawled upstairs on her hands and knees. She felt the baby flip around inside her.
“Fuck you, baby,” she whispered.
She glanced into the guest room, where Esmeralda was staying, and a snarl came to her lips.
Esmeralda sure hadn’t run off. She lay in her bed, still deep asleep. Tommy lay beside her, one arm over her hips.
It looked like they’d done it. Tommy was wearing only his boxers, and Esmeralda wore Ashleigh’s favorite flannel pajama bottoms, which were polka-dotted with the Superman logo. They were too small for Ashleigh, now that she was stuck in Darcy’s fat, pregnant body.
Esmeralda wore a simple, thin gold chain they’d found in Ashleigh’s mother’s jewelry box. Tommy had taken one of the Ashleigh’s finger bones to the garage and drilled a hole in it, and now it hung around Esmeralda’s neck, on her chest between her bare tits.
Ashleigh looked up and down Esmeralda’s gorgeous dark body, and she felt a sharp sting of jealousy. Tommy was falling for her. But Tommy was Ashleigh’s opposite, her property.
And Esmeralda was Ashleigh’s doorway to the physical world. She had the power to kick Ashleigh right out of Darcy’s body at any moment, and then Ashleigh wouldn’t be able to do anything except try to get born again as an infant somewhere. Ashleigh would forget everything again, like she did each time she was born, and Jenny would have a long, peaceful, and possibly happy life.
But Jenny had killed Ashleigh, and Ashleigh wasn’t going to let her get away with that.
Besides, Jenny would be watching for Ashleigh now. She might track Ashleigh down when Ashleigh was still a small child and kill her all over again. Jenny had done that before, in India, maybe two thousand years ago.
Now, Ashleigh had to worry about Tommy and Esmeralda getting too close. A bond between them could lead, in time, to an alliance against Ashleigh. She needed their primary loyalties to her, not to each other. She would get to work on that, too.
Ashleigh went to the computer in her room and hopped on the Internet to gather up some information.
It was time to build a Jenny trap.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The same Saturday, Seth sat in a leather armchair in the library at his house, studying for his chemistry final. This basically meant trying to memorize some formulas and getting a reasonably good idea of where to plug them in, once you puzzled out the word problems. Hopefully, the information would stick for at least the next forty-eight hours.
He heard his dad approach and he looked up. Seth thought his dad looked unusually old today, a little more stooped, a little more gray in his hair.
“Seth,” he said. He raised his whiskey glass, and the single large ice cube clinked against the side as he drank.
“What’s up, Dad? How’s it going with the dye factory thing?”
“Not bad, really. The government paid the bank a ridiculous compensation for use of the old factory. They said we didn’t have to worry about EPA or anybody. Our insurers wanted to investigate the dye factory themselves, and the government even paid them to shut up and go away.”
“Well, that’s great!” Seth said. It meant Jenny was in the clear, he thought, if the government was burying the incident.
His dad looked at him, maybe a bit surprised by the excitement in Seth’s voice.
“I mean, right?” Seth asked. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Hell of a lot better than I expected,” he said. “Almost scary how well it’s going now. Although they’re full of horseshit. That dye factory’s been emptier than a politician’s heart as long as I can remember.”
“Well, if they want it to go away, and we want it go away…” Seth said.
“No, no, I’m satisfied. I could go for a walk. You want to go for a walk?”
“I have finals tomorrow.”
“Just take a minute.”
Seth didn’t like the sound of it. His dad was clearly in one of his melancholy, semi-drunken moods.
He followed his dad across the back lawn, through the blooming peach orchard where bees hummed their way from one sweet nectar snack to the next.
Seth’s dad kept walking, on and up the far slope. He was heading right for the family cemetery, up the staircase of big granite slabs, toward the wrought-iron gate in the old brick wall.
Seth trailed behind. The family cemetery was mostly the sign of his great-grandfather’s insanity, his master plan for his descendants. Like how the third floor of his house was a sign of Seth’s grandfather’s insanity. There was plenty of crazy to go around in this family.
Seth’s dad took out a key ring and unlocked the iron gate.
“Ted Burris at the bank says he’s seen you driving around town.” He pushed
open the gate. “Says you have Jenny Morton in your car.”
Seth sighed.
“You still dating her?” Seth’s dad stepped inside the high brick walls of the cemetery. Inside, rows of identical monuments marked the burial sites of Barretts past and future. His dad walked past the blank monuments of generations to come, back to where his grave and Seth’s had already been carved—Jonathan Seth Barretts III and IV, their birthdays already inscribed, years of death to be added as needed.
“This isn’t going to be that conversation about Jenny again, is it?” Seth asked. “And how much you hate her?”
“I don’t hate her. And this is not that conversation. I only have one thing to say about her: Use protection. Get her pregnant and you’ll never really shake her loose.”
“Dad!”
“I’m not kidding. You have your fun with the town girls if you want, just be careful. You’ll grow out of her once you meet some decent girls at school.”
“Whatever,” Seth said. “I really care about her. I don’t want to meet anyone else.”
“You’re young,” his dad said, in a dismissive tone.
They walked all the way to the back of the cemetery, to the megalith commemorating the first Jonathan S. Barrett. Seth’s great-grandfather had made the family extremely wealthy, but he’d been obsessed with death. He’d built this miniature necropolis and even disinterred his own ancestors to move their bodies here.
“I never told you the most important thing about your great-grandfather,” Seth’s dad said. “I never talked about it at all, even with my own father. He knew it, though, you can bet on that.”
“Knew what?” Seth asked.
“There’s a reason your grandfather believed that your great-grandfather’s ghost would haunt the family.”
“Didn’t Great-Grandpa threaten to do that?”
“That’s true. J.S. Barrett the First lived to be almost ninety, and he got meaner and crueler every year. He died before I was ten years old, but I can remember his screaming and his horrible laugh, and how he would threaten my father with every kind of thing. The monster on the third floor, that’s how I thought of him. He was shriveled and half-senile by then, or at least he acted that way. He had the coldest, darkest eyes, and you could feel him studying you….” Seth’s dad shuddered. “Those eyes were as dark as hell.”