by JL Bryan
Now, here was the call, the one where she learned whether Tricia had any abnormal blood cells.
She answered before it could ring a second time.
“How is she?” Heather asked.
“We're moving on to a lymph node biopsy,” Liam said.
“Oh, God. What did he say?”
“It looks like...he said there's a very high probability...”
Heather nodded. Liam was avoiding the word leukemia.
“You might want to come home,” he said. “If your work's not too important.”
Heather felt her heart clench. She looked at her laptop, all the little folders containing medical histories and police reports. The threat of Jenny creating a massive outbreak, somewhere in the world. The investigation that led only to dead ends.
“No, my work's not important,” Heather whispered, seeing Tricia's face in her mind. She was already fighting the urge to cry, but she managed to hold her voice steady. “I'm coming home.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jenny and Kisa walked through a tianguis, an open-air market crowded with venders selling wares from rugs and tents. They were in Comitán de Domínguez, the closest city. Manuel had driven them more than two hours from Alexander's house, at high speed, barely touching the brakes the entire time they wove through the narrow, potholed mountain roads. Alexander himself was away in Tijuana, visiting with Papa Calderon himself, to give a report on their progress with the crop.
Over the past few weeks, Jenny and Alexander had traveled to one coca patch after another, to check on his zombies and to fire them up with Jenny Pox. They had greatly accelerated the harvest, and Alexander expected his boss to be pleased.
Jenny still struggled with her feelings about Alexander. She was deeply attracted to him, in a way that made her physically ache. Sometimes the thought of his dark eyes and his suntanned face kept her up at night. His hand on her skin intoxicated her. She managed to resist her feelings most of the time, though she'd broken down and kissed him more than once.
Though Alexander had been kind and taken good care of her, she found her emotions too overwhelming and dangerous. She still thought about Seth, how perfectly innocent and sweet their time together had seemed, until things went sour. She missed him, but she was angry at him.
Alexander was a lot of things, but innocent and sweet were not among them.
“Look!” Kisa said. She took Jenny's hand and drew her toward a shaded table where a man fried a pot of full of tamales. They smelled like chiles and saffron. “Are you hungry?”
Jenny's stomach was growling, so she nodded. “Good idea.”
Kisa spoke with the cook in Mayan, and he served them each a tamale. Jenny bit into the fried corn crust, and the spicy pork and salsa filling spilled into her mouth.
“Yum, that's so good!” Jenny said to Kisa. She nodded to the man who'd cooked them. “Muy buena.”
The Mayan cook scowled at her a little.
“Spanish is language of los conquistadors,” Kisa whispered. “I don't think he likes to hear it.”
“Oh!' Jenny said. “I mean, hatsutz. Very good.”
Now the man smiled again. He poured a cloudy fluid into two small porcelain cups and offered these to the girls.
“Yum botic,” Kisa said, thanking him. Then she held her cup toward Jenny and grinned. “Cheers.”
“Cheers!” Jenny clinked her glass against Kisa's, then drank from her cup. It tasted very sweet, with a strong alcoholic bite. “What is this?”
“Posh,” Kisa said. Her English vocabulary was slowly expanding, as was Jenny's knowledge of Mayan. They had plenty of time to teach each other, loafing around Alexander's estate. “From the sugar...” Kisa circled her thumb and fingers together and moved her hand in up and down strokes, to indicate a staff of sugar cane.
“From the sugar dick?” Jenny asked. Her head was swimming a little from the cane liquor.
“The sugar...” Kisa began to repeat, then she laughed and shrugged. “Sugar dick.”
Jenny snickered while she returned her cup to the tamale vendor, and Kisa paid him from the roll of pesos Alexander had provided.
“Ka xi’ik teech utsil,” the man said. Good luck to you. It was a way of saying goodbye.
“Béey xan teech,” Jenny replied. And to you.
The next stall sold a combination of local textiles and tourist trinkets, including a number of t-shirts. Many shirts featured a man in what looked like a black ski mask, with the letters “EZLN” printed in red. Other shirts featured a drawing of a young girl with long braids on either side of her head. A red triangle of cloth hid most of her face, except for her eyes. The letters “EZLN” were printed in black on the cloth. The words above her face were “Las Mujeres,” and the text beneath her face read “Con la Dignidad Rebelde.”
“What are these?” Jenny asked, pointing to the T-shirt.
“Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional,” Kisa told her. “The army of the revolution. Against the power in Mexico City.”
“Do you like them?” Jenny asked.
Kisa nodded quickly. “Good for our people.” She pointed to the text under the girl's face and translated slowly: “'Women with rebel dignity.'”
“Okay, I definitely like that,” Jenny said. “Should I buy one?”
The T-shirt vendor turned to them, after completing a transaction with a group of well-dressed Mexican tourists. He was a young man with dark sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. He wore jeans and one of the black Zapatista t-shirts with the masked man. When he saw Jenny, he pushed the STOP button on his boom box and removed the Spanish-language rap CD he'd been playing. He switched it out for another disc.
“For the pretty American girl,” he said. Cyndi Lauper played over the speakers, and Jenny laughed. She pointed to one of the Zapatista shirts featuring the little girl in her bandit-like mask, and the vendor quickly pushed it into her hands. Kisa paid for it. Alexander had entrusted her with the shopping money, since the locals were far less likely to overcharge a Mayan girl than a white tourist.
Jenny added her new shirt to the woven shopping bag she carried, which already held a pair of leather sandals and a mixture of Mayan and Western-style clothes she'd bought here in the open-air market. She wouldn't need to borrow Kisa's clothes anymore.
They moved on to another stall, where Kisa stopped to admire the amber jewelry. The old woman behind the table smiled, her eyes flicking over Jenny, possibly sensing a gringo tourist with money to burn.
Jenny looked back over her shoulder. Manuel was at a row of butchers' stalls, negotiating over some smoked meats.
“So nice,” Kisa said, looking over the yellow and red amber pieces crafted into beaded bracelets, earrings and necklaces.
“You can have one if you want.” Jenny reached for a bracelet of red amber pieces, and Kisa gasped and shook her head.
“Red is very...” She rubbed her fingers together.
“Expensive?”
“Very expensive.” Kisa nodded.
“Okay...what about this one?” Jenny picked up a necklace of yellow amber pieces, with one small red piece right at the front. She spread it across her palm—Jenny wore a pair of gloves Kisa had made for her with the bright colors and intricate geometric weaving of Mayan craft. They covered Jenny up to the elbow, when fully unrolled. A great gift.
Now Jenny held the amber necklace out to Kisa, who studied it with wide, admiring eyes.
“Is there enough money to buy this?” Jenny asked.
Kisa hesitated, then nodded.
“Then go ahead.”
Kisa paid the jeweler, and the old woman spoke a cheerful stream of mixed Mayan and Spanish, which Jenny didn't understand. Jenny put the amber necklace over Kisa's head and pulled it down to her shoulders. Kisa lifted the single piece of red in her fingers and gazed at it, and her eyes turned moist. Then she dropped the necklace and threw her arms around Jenny.
Jenny tilted her head back to avoid any contact that might kill her friend. Sh
e hugged Kisa back, cautiously, careful not to do any harm.
“Yum botic,” Kisa whispered. “'in yabitmech.”
“Mixba,” Jenny replied. She knew Kisa's first phrase meant thank you. She wasn't sure about the rest of it.
They followed the sound of drums to an area where street performers in traditional costume put on a dance. One of them was dressed as a deer, including a deer head mounted on top of his own like the stacked faces in a totem pole. Others in black and white body paint pursued him with spears. He leaped back and forth, more and more frantic as the hunters closed in around him and the drums and flute music accelerated in tempo.
Jenny heard a strangled cry and turned to see Kisa being dragged away into a closed tent of a vendor's stall. A young man had clapped a hand over her mouth and lay a knife across her throat. Kisa looked at Jenny with wide, terrified eyes, and then the tent flap fell shut and Jenny lost sight of her.
“Kisa!” Jenny cried. She ran into the tent after the girl.
The interior was dark, with only a little sunlight creeping in around the edges of the cloth roof. The tent was stocked with clay pots for sale, but nobody was manning the store—maybe the merchant was outside, watching the show.
The back of the tent parted for a moment, and Jenny saw the man drag Kisa outside.
“Let her go!” Jenny yelled. She ran out through the back flap of the tent, into a narrow cobblestone alley. The tent blocked the crowd's view of anything that happened here, and the drums drowned out the sound of Kisa's muffled cries. The man was dragging her along, ignoring her attempts to struggle free.
“Hey!” Jenny called out, and then someone grabbed her from behind, too. A man's hand covered her mouth, and his other arm seized her around the waist and lifted her from the pavement.
Jenny didn't hesitate: she sunk her teeth into the palm of his hand.
The man grunted and tried to let her go, but Jenny bit down and grabbed onto his wrist with her hands as he released her. She landed on her feet, still biting him, until he punched her in the side of the head with his other fist.
Jenny slammed into the stone wall behind her.
“Puta!” he shouted and he slapped her across the face. Jenny lost her balance and fell onto her knees. Her head was ringing with pain, and bright spots flicked across her field of vision.
He stopped to look at the pulsing, infected-looking bite wound she'd left in his hand. Jenny saw the other man holding his knife at Kisa's throat, yelling at his companion, clearly urging him to hurry. He was groping Kisa's chest as he held the girl back against him.
The man who'd attacked Jenny looked down at her. He was young, muscular and very tall, his head shaved, a nasty scar across his cheek. He licked his lips.
Jenny took her gloves off.
“Come on, motherfucker,” Jenny spat. She was ready.
With one hand, he seized Jenny around the throat and lifted her to her feet. Jenny grabbed at his hand with both of hers, as if trying to peel his fingers away, and he grinned.
Jenny could feel his skin blistering under her touch. She pushed as hard as she could, filling him with the pox.
Bloody skin sloughed off the man's palm as he let her go and pulled away from her neck. Huge sores bloomed along his arm, leaking pus, and his face blistered open along one side. He gaped as he watched the bite wound open into a black, dripping hole through his hand, big enough that Jenny could see his face through it.
Jenny turned to the man who was holding Kisa. The pox ruptured open a dozen festering holes in her face, and more in her arms and hands.
“Let her go,” Jenny said.
He looked at his friend, whose body was being consumed by a leprous disease. Then he shoved Kisa aside, raised his knife, and stabbed it at Jenny's throat.
Jenny ducked aside, but the blade slashed across her forearm. She swung her knee into the guy's crotch. He grunted and doubled over, and she lay her hands gently on the sides of his face. She pushed the infection into him, watching coolly as his eyes filled with dark green scum, blood ran from his nostrils, his teeth blackened and fell from his mouth.
Manuel stepped out through the back flap of the tent, waving his pistol. “Que paso? Que paso?”
“You're too late,” Jenny told him. The man with the knife toppled over onto the cobblestone, his necrotic flesh dribbling in lumps from his face.
The man who'd grabbed Jenny was leaning back against the stone wall whimpering as the pox ate his hand, leaving only a diseased and decaying stump of an arm.
Manuel put his gun to the man's head. “Finish him?” he asked Jenny.
“I'll do it.” Jenny ripped his shirt open, sending three buttons flying. They skipped and rolled away across the cobblestones.
The man shook his head, weeping, begging in Spanish while Jenny pushed her hand against his heart.
“Sorry, guy,” Jenny said. “But we can't have you running around attacking girls, can we?” The muscles of his chest turned to liquid mush under her fingers. His whole body turned rigid as his heart stopped, and then he fell to the cobblestones next to his dead friend.
“Kisa?” Jenny spotted the girl halfway down the alley, cowering against one wall.
Jenny wiped the blood from her hands on the shirt of the man who'd attacked her. Then she picked her gloves and walked toward Kisa as she put them on. She pulled the pox back inside her as much as she could, and she felt the sores in her face seal up.
“Bix yanilech?” Jenny asked. How are you?
“Okay,” Kisa said, staring at Jenny and trembling.
Jenny held up a hand and managed half a smile. “No touch.”
“No shit,” Kisa replied.
“Manuel, I think we're done shopping for today.”
Manuel nodded, looking at the diseased corpses.
Jenny turned and stepped into the pottery tent, picking up the bag of newly purchased clothes she'd dropped along the way. She held the flap open and gestured for them to follow. Manuel entered the tent and passed Jenny, while Kisa approached her slowly.
“Jenny,” Kisa said. “You are a powerful bruja. A powerful ah itz.”
Jenny nodded. “I'm kind of stuck with it.”
“Thank you,” Kisa said.
“Mixba,” Jenny replied with a grin. But Kisa was too shocked, or too horrified, to return her smile.
***
An hour before dawn, Jenny was awoken by a soft knock on her door.
“Hello?” Jenny whispered. She sat up on her elbows. “Kisa?”
The door cracked open. “It's Alexander. I drove all night when I heard what happened. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Jenny had bandaged the knife wound on her. She expected it to heal as quickly as all her injuries did. She seemed to heal even faster than usual when Alexander was around.
“I'll let you sleep,” he whispered.
“No, it's okay,” Jenny said. “You can come in.”
She watched Alexander in the moonlight as he sat down on the corner of her bed, near her feet.
“I killed two people,” Jenny said.
“I hope you got some good shopping in first.”
“I'm serious.”
“They attacked you, didn't they?”
“And Kisa.”
“So it's good you did,” Alexander said. “God knows what they might have done to you girls.”
“I promised myself I'd never use the pox again.”
“But you had to. You shouldn't feel guilty about it, Jenny. Not for a second.”
“I do feel guilty,” Jenny said. “And not just because I did it, but because...I kind of liked it, Alexander. Like I was dealing out justice. Like I had a right to kill people if I wanted.”
“You do have the right to deal justice. Somebody has to, and you're capable of it.”
“Yeah, I'm definitely capable...”
“Look, Jenny, you just killed a couple of assholes. You made the world a better place.”
“It doesn't really feel like it.”
<
br /> “It was just a small move, Jenny,” Alexander said. “But in the right direction. We have to accept what we are. We have to embrace it. It's the only choice.”
“But we could be different,” Jenny said. “There has to be some choice, somewhere.”
“Embrace it or fight it, that's the choice. It doesn't change who you are. It just makes your life more difficult and out of control if you fight it.”
“You said you're a builder, and Ashleigh's a vulture. Then what is Seth?”
“The healer?” Alexander frowned. “He's just a pawn of the love-charmer. Always has been.”
“But not lately,” Jenny said. “I think he's been pulling away from her, hasn't he?”
“He never could. If the healer got close to you, made you think he cared about you...just trust me, the charmer bitch is behind it.”
“Are you sure?”
“He might not even know it,” Alexander said. “It could be a multi-lifetime plot. You can forget your memories and your purpose when you're reborn in the flesh, but they will still be there, shaping your actions. The fear-giver is often her servant. My opposite, the dear little dead-speaker, is often her servant. The healer is always her servant, Jenny. You see why she's so dangerous? Her power can manipulate and control not only regular people, but our kind, too.”
“Except me,” Jenny said. “If she touches me, I'll kill her.”
“This makes you her most formidable enemy,” Alexander said. “The one she can never hope to control with her poisonous love. Unless...”
“Unless what?”
“Unless she takes your heart indirectly,” Alexander said. “By sending the healer to charm it from you. He can touch you, so he can get close to you. He can trick you into loving him, trusting him—especially when you're feeling so alone because you can touch no one...and then you meet one boy you can touch—”
“Okay, I get it,” Jenny said. “I don't need the whole psychoanalysis thing. So you don't think Seth really cares about me? Deep down, he's still serving Ashleigh?”
“I've seen him across a thousand lifetimes,” Alexander said. “He always serves her. He always will.”