by J. Bryan
“I understand about all your bad dreams from childhood,” Esmeralda said. “That’s why you must let the fear rest. It stirs up these things.”
“You don’t understand anything. What else can I do? Your cousin won’t even talk to me anymore. He calls me an embarrassment to his reputation, whatever that means.”
“It means he can’t vouch for you as a good worker. You’re always late and hung over.”
“Nobody at the bar cares if I’m hung over,” Tommy said. “It’s a good job for me.”
“It’s too dangerous. And it doesn’t pay enough...” Esmeralda bit her lip.
“You want more money, is that it?” Tommy snarled, leaning towards her. His breath was full of smoke and bad whiskey. “I can get more money. Anyone out there on the street, I can walk right up, grab them—” Tommy seized her arm, and shivers of fear shot through her body, terrifying and deliciously exciting at the same time. “They’ll give me anything I want. That’s how I always made my living before. Now I have to stick with your stupid rules.”
“They’re not stupid,” Esmeralda said, her voice shivering with the intense feelings he stirred up inside her. “I just don’t want to see you burn in Hell.”
“Come on, you don’t believe in that.” His face loomed closer through the shadowy smoke.
“I believe we can burn in Hell while we are still alive. We build the fire around ourselves, and we damn ourselves. If we are not careful.”
“You won’t see me in Hell unless you’re there with me.” He seized her other arm and pulled her closer. Esmeralda trembled. His paranormal touch filled her with conflicting desires to run away screaming and to wrap her legs around him and fuck him until dawn. He drove her crazy, and she hated him for it. Deep down, she knew her mother was right about this boy.
“I’m already there with you,” Esmeralda whispered, and he kissed her. It felt like an electrical jolt, filling her body with dark energy. Her fingers clawed into his back, nails digging into his muscles through his stained, flimsy t-shirt.
Tommy reached for his bottle again, but she caught his hand and stopped him. He snarled again, threw her back on the bed and climbed on top of her.
Esmeralda couldn’t get her blouse off fast enough. Tommy ripped open her bra and sank his teeth into her left breast, and she cried out in pain and pleasure. She couldn’t get enough of him, and he couldn’t move fast enough to satisfy her. She shoved down her slacks and her panties together.
When he was inside her, the fear and the pleasure swept her away on the most powerful wave of feelings she’d ever known. His long, unwashed hair hung in her face, and she couldn’t get enough of his foul reek. Nothing else in the world mattered, just the glorious sweaty, heat igniting her body.
Later, he slept beside her, and she watched the smog-tinted orange sunlight burn away out the window. The boy was pure poison, she knew. Addictive poison.
She entertained her daily urge to leave the apartment and never look back, never tell Tommy where to come and find her, but that was a useless fantasy.
She closed her eyes.
Chapter Two
Jenny and Seth drank coffee in a small indoor garden on the Rue de l'Hôtel de ville, on the Right Bank of the Seine. It was a short walk from Notre Dame cathedral, but hidden enough that tourists were rare. Currently, the only other customers were a few elderly pensioners. The place had gourmet fair-trade coffee from all over Africa, and the price of one cup would have given Jenny’s father sticker shock. Even after a year of living in Paris, with a plentiful stash of money from Seth’s family, Jenny hadn’t fully adjusted to her new life. Happily, the city was so full of eccentrics and artists that the sight of Jenny wearing gloves and scarves in the summertime attracted no particular attention.
Now it was fall, and she had plenty of coats and hats. The colder the weather, the more fully she could wrap herself against the constant danger of touching others.
“What are we in for today?” Seth asked. “Another art gallery? Another play? Touring another old palace?”
“You sound burned out, Seth.” Jenny sipped her organic coffee from Sierra Leone. It was so delicious she couldn’t help sighing.
“Maybe if I had a better idea of what was happening at those things.” Seth said. His French was still shaky...and that was a generous description. Jenny was fluent, owing more to her past lives than her high school French lessons, though sometimes people would give her an odd look if she used an archaic word or expression.
“You should listen harder when I try to teach you,” she told him.
“I do try. But you’re so sexy when you speak French, how am I supposed to learn anything? My teacher’s too hot, that’s the problem.”
Jenny blushed slightly. Their French lessons did have a way of straying to other activities that, while still quite French in nature, weren’t entirely focused on building vocabulary.
“Only you could get tired of French wine, truffles, and palaces,” Jenny said.
“And the electro-techno-whatever music,” Seth added. “Please, God, make it stop.”
“Come on, we’ve seen some great shows. We just saw Pink at the Bercy.”
“Want to get cheesecake?” Seth glanced over the dessert menu.
“For breakfast?”
“How many times are we going to have this conversation?”
Jenny had a second coffee while Seth ordered his cake. He had a great system for burning off calories. He could eat cake for breakfast, then find an excuse to brush past an elderly or handicapped person on the crowded sidewalk, offloading the extra energy as a touch of healing. Jenny couldn’t touch anyone, but her appetite was usually small and her metabolism left her scrawny, as if she suffered from a deadly wasting disease.
They stepped out into the mid-morning sun and strolled along the Seine. The trees had turned their autumn colors, tender reds and golds softening the regal but austere Second Empire architecture. Jenny had mixed feelings about the magnificent and symmetrical look of the city. On the one hand, it was breathtaking to see an entire city remade as a single work of art. On the other, she missed the chaotic, twisting streets of the Paris she’d known centuries earlier. There was something disturbing about the idea of smashing and rebuilding a city where people lived, of a single vision imposed on so many individuals, thousands of whom had their homes razed to make way for Napoleon III’s dream city.
Jenny slowed as they entered the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, a vast outdoor sculpture garden tucked alongside the river. She loved this park. Jenny had plenty of time to work on her pottery and clay sculpting, and even intended to take some informal classes, but she was rethinking her ideas about what sculpture could be.
Here, many of the large sculptures were abstract, depicting ideas and emotions rather than trying to look like copies of objects in the real world. Some of them were low, dark masses of granite, reminding her of the enormous graveyard behind Seth’s house in Fallen Oak. Others looked like colorful totem poles or twisted metals reaching toward the sky. In the galleries of Paris, Jenny had seen sculptures that included all kinds of materials and found objects, and sometimes unusual lighting arrangements or glowing images and words cast from a projector or television screen, multidimensional art.
Jenny was getting ideas for new kinds of sculptures, things that would express the love, guilt, and horror inside her.
Seth sidled up next to Jenny and took her silk-gloved hand nervously. It was an odd move for him. They’d been intimate too long for him to be so uncomfortable approaching her.
“Look,” he whispered.
Jenny followed his eyes to a tiered, sunken semicircle of concrete right on the river, which offered three levels of seating. Teenagers were using it to practice leaps with their skateboards. Two of them, a boy and girl, sat apart from the others, much more interested in kissing than in streets sports.
“How old do you bet they are?” Seth whispered.
“Sixteen, seventeen.” Jenny shrugged. �
��Just kids.”
“We were kids like that, a long time ago.”
“Now we’ve reached the ancient age of twenty,” Jenny said. “Better make our reservations at the nursing home.”
“I was thinking...” He squeezed her hand tight, which worried her a little. “Maybe we should get married, Jenny.”
His unexpected words were like an electric shock to her heart. She looked at him in surprise, but finally she laughed. “Seth! We can’t get married.”
“Why not?”
“For one, people who are officially dead don’t usually have weddings,” Jenny pointed out.
“That could be our theme. A zombie wedding, Day of the Dead stuff everywhere...”
“Now you sound like Alexander.” Jenny heard herself say it, but immediately regretted it. Seth’s face hardened.
“Don’t ever say that.”
“I just meant, that was his decorating scheme...”
“Don’t ever say ‘Alexander’ to me.”
“What if I’m talking about Alexander the Great? Or Alexandre Dumas?” Jenny tried a smile to lighten things up.
“I ask you to marry me and you immediately mention him? You don’t want to get married?”
“We can’t, Seth. I mean, if we did that, we might as well send an invitation to the Department of Homeland Security.”
“I’m not stupid, I know we couldn’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t be that kind of wedding.”
“What kind would it be? Our fake identities getting married?” Jenny’s passport claimed she was from Alsace. Since nobody believed Seth could pass as French, he carried a Canadian passport instead.
“I just think we should,” Seth said. “I wasn’t thinking about paperwork or anything.”
“It’s sweet of you, Seth. The bond we have is so much more than marriage, though, isn’t it? Lifetime after lifetime, we can be together. Even death won’t do us part. We don’t need some piece of paper from other people acknowledging that.”
“I’m not thinking about ‘lifetime after lifetime,’” Seth replied. “I don’t have all these tons of crazy past-life memories like you. For me, it’s just this life and who we are today.”
“That’s all that matters, Seth.” She embraced him, resting her cheek against his warm chest and looking up at him. “But we can’t have that normal life, with marriage. Or children.”
“Children? Why not?”
Jenny felt like she’d been slapped. She couldn’t believe he was even asking. He didn’t have all the past-life memories she did, but this one should have been obvious. She felt herself crumple as she answered the question.
“Because I can’t. The pox. The baby will miscarry, or it will die on the way out...just like I killed my own mother, on the way out. The babies are never immune.” In her mind, a collection of extremely painful past-life memories sprung up, and she shoved them back. She felt heartsick. “Seth, you’re lucky you don’t remember much before this lifetime.”
“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I should have known. I really haven’t thought about kids one way or the other, so—”
“There’s only one way to think about them. We can’t, ever.”
Seth took this in, looking out at the river again. Jenny could see a mix of disappointment and confusion on his face.
“That’s cool,” he finally said. “Who wants a bunch of kids, anyway? I’d hate to bring some poor little Jonathan Seth Barrett the Fifth into the world. Screw my great-grandfather and his overused name. Screw Alexander. I mean, you did, right? You totally screwed my great-grandfather.”
“It’s so gross when you put it that way. He was reincarnated.”
“It’s gross any way you put it. Or anywhere you put it,” Seth added, raising his eyebrows a couple of times.
Jenny elbowed him in the stomach, and he countered by tickling her ribs until she stood up and escaped, squealing. He ran to catch her, spun her back, kissed her under a tall old linden tree, its heart-shaped leaves blazing with the fiery colors of their slow autumn death.
Things would settle now, Jenny knew. They would drop any talk of marriage and children, continue on into le Jardin des Plantes, a sprawling 28-acre botanical garden that had been carefully developed over the past four centuries. Jenny particularly loved the old labyrinth maze and the garden with hundreds of different breeds of roses. She liked to pass close to the garden of bees and birds, but she never walked through it out of fear that some friendly feathered creature would land on her and die.
As they walked through the rich colors of the park, Jenny felt unsettled and a little sick. No bacteria or virus could survive the pox long enough to make her ill, but the pox did nothing to protect her against worry, fear, and guilt. She could feel her stomach clenching.
The past year had been too good to believe, aside from the lack of any contact with her father. After she’d unleashed the pox on the mob in Fallen Oak, leaving hundreds dead, her father didn’t seem to want much contact with her, anyway.
She and Seth were young, flush with money and living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, drinking in art and culture every day. They had an apartment only blocks from the Seine, in a district full of theaters and nightclubs. They ate masterfully prepared French meals and drank the best wines.
Life in Paris hadn’t exactly turned Seth into a poet, but he had his hobbies. One of them was volunteering at hospitals around the city, particularly children’s hospitals, where he would spread his healing touch. He didn’t do any dramatic mass healing that would risk attention, but he helped them quietly. He’d touched thousands by now, making his anonymous, angelic way around Paris while she stayed in their apartment, played records, and tried to create art.
“Our life here is too good,” Jenny said. “It’s like riding a magic carpet.”
“What’s wrong with magic carpets?”
“There’s nothing holding them up. The magic could stop anytime...and then you fall.”
Chapter Three
Senator Junius Mayfield, of the great state of Tennessee, great-uncle of one officially dead boy named Jonathan Seth Barrett IV, smoked a cigar as he reclined in an antique Federal-style divan embellished with hand-tooled scrollwork and curving arms. The divan was from an age when Americans made things, Junius thought. The timber had probably been cut in Virginia and carved by a master craftsman, an American with the skill and industry to do more than drool in front of some computer screen all day.
The divan was like the senator: old, creaky, so far out of fashion as to be comical. Just waiting for the inevitable crack, the day it transformed from a valuable antique into scrap wood.
Junius smoked his cigar and sipped a glass of fifty-year-old Scotch in the candle-lit suite of a very exclusive hotel. “Hotel” wasn’t the proper word for this establishment, located in an old Greek Revival mansion just outside the District of Columbia, but that was the polite word for it.
A well-endowed young lady with blond hair, pretty as a fashion model, was handcuffed to one of the four high posters of the antique bed. She wore bits of white ribbon and lace in her hair, like a bride, and she had recently become topless. She knelt on the bed, still dressed in her lacy white panties and silk stockings. The straps of a leather scourge lashed across her backside, and she bounced forward against the poster and cried out.
The scourge was wielded by a dark-haired woman in a black mask that hid her eyes, black leather lingerie, and high stiletto heels. Their costumes clearly divided into them into good girl and bad girl, angel and devil.
“Please,” the blond girl in white lace begged. “Please, stop!”
The girl in the black mask gave her a cruel smile and lashed her again.
Junius himself would watch from the divan, too old to indulge himself like he used to. He was more of a watcher now. Junius would take in this little tableau, then straighten his tie and attend yet another fundraiser dinner, eating gray chicken while pumping defense contractors for extra campaign
cash. From one whorehouse to another, but Junius would be switching roles.
Same old, same old.
Junius watched quietly as the masked girl spanked the blond girl, against the blond’s pretended struggles and protests. The blond girl wriggled and screeched as her cheeks were smacked red, and then the masked girl reached between her legs and stroked her. The blond girl’s head turned toward Junius as she cried out in pleasure, real or pretended.
The blow came from nowhere, striking Junius just behind his left eye. He’d been kicked by a horse once, as a boy on his father’s farm, and the feeling was similar. This kick might have been from an invisible ghost horse, something from an old Indian tale.
After it hit him, the world dimmed and half his body turned numb. For a moment, all Junius could see was the preacher at the scrapwood mountain church he’d attended with his grandparents, a sweaty, bug-eyed man slapping the pulpit and shouting about fornication and hellfire. Then that faded, too, gone like a flash of lightning.
A thin, dark drop of blood crept out from his left nostril, making its gradual way toward his dry, wrinkled lips.
The esteemed gentleman from Tennessee slumped down in the divan, inch by inch. The candle-lit room grew darker and darker around him.
The two girls on the bed, caught up in their performance, didn’t notice anything strange until he toppled out of the divan and crumpled to the floor. The whiskey glass dropped from his hand, sloshing aged Scotch onto the 19th-century Khotan rug, followed by his burning cigar. He was vaguely aware of the sound of two shouting girls, and he wasn’t aware of much after that.
Chapter Four
Jenny was pregnant.
The little plastic stick from the home pregnancy test insisted it was true. Since this was the third kit she’d bought today, she was starting to believe them. They all came back the same: oui. Pregnant.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Pale little Jenny Mittens, murderer of hundreds. Thousands, if you counted past lives, and maybe it was more like tens of thousands. There was no way to know. She had slain an army or two, brought down cities, wiped out tribes to make way for empires. Her kind had always seen the human world as a kind of board game, like chess or Risk. Most humans were pawns, dumb as animals, to be conquered, killed, or ruled according to the turns of the game.