Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (12 page)

She wolfed down her food, to the disgust of two women at the next table, and then
hurried out.

When Mariella emerged from the front door of the building, Jenny just happened to
be strolling slowly along the sidewalk, and she just happened to glance up and make
eye contact with Mariella.  A look of recognition flashed across Mariella’s face,
followed by excitement.  Jenny acted surprised to see her, then wrinkled her brow
as if trying to remember who Mariella was.

“Have you seen him?” Mariella asked, looking up and down the street.  Mariella wore
gloves, a long jacket, and a scarf, and most of her hair was gathered into a soft
cloth hat.  Like Jenny, Mariella bundled up before going out in public.

“I’m sorry, who?” Jenny replied.

“The boy.  Do you not remember me?”

Jenny looked at her for a few seconds. “Aren’t you that girl who came by my apartment? 
Looking for some guy?”

“That is me.” Mariella’s smile faded as she realized Jenny hadn’t come to tell her
she’d found Seth. “How did you find me here?”

“I was just having lunch.” Jenny pointed across the street. “I was walking by, and
I had a feeling that I should stop here.  So I did.” Jenny shrugged.

“Do you get strange feelings sometimes?” Mariella’s voice dropped to a whisper, and
she glanced over her shoulder, as if afraid a student or teacher would hear her. “About
the future?”

“I get strange feelings about everything,” Jenny said, and Mariella surprised her
by laughing. “Can you see the future?” Jenny asked. “Does it happen when you touch
people?”

“How could you know this?” Mariella’s eyes widened, and she looked at Jenny’s hands,
gloved in powder-blue silk. “We should walk away from the school.”

They went south down Boulevard de l’Hopital, along a broad sidewalk decorated with
stands of trees gone skeletal in late November.  The baroque and Art Noveau architecture
gave the entire evening a dreamlike atmosphere as the glowing spheres of the streetlamps
came to life.

“Tell me what you know,” Mariella whispered.

“About what?”

“About anything.  About all of it.”

Jenny looked at the girl’s earnest face and almost felt sorry for her.

“You tell me,” Jenny said. “You touch someone, you can see the future?”

“Just the future of that person, which keeps things fuzzy,” Mariella told her. “And
the future can change if you tell them about it, but it rarely does.  I see their
futures whether they want me to or not.  Even if I don’t want to see—that’s why I
wrap myself up in public.  If I don’t, I’m overwhelmed with glimpses of everyone’s
future.  And that can be very sad and depressing.  But here, I’ll show you.” Mariella
took off a glove and reached for Jenny’s hand.

“No!” Jenny pulled back quickly.

“I’m sorry.” Mariella smiled. “Not everyone wants to know their future.”

“Well...that’s true,” Jenny said, taking advantage of the excuse Mariella had just
provided for her. “I don’t think I’d want to know.” The exact opposite was true. 
Jenny was eager to know what lay ahead, especially for the baby.  “Can you see your
own future?”

“That’s the most difficult,” Mariella said. “Because, when you see your own future,
you react to it in the present, and that changes the future.  Over and over.  My own
is almost entirely a blur.  Only a few things stand out clear and strong.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Like the boy I told you about.” She gave a glowing smile at the thought of Seth,
which did not make Jenny very happy at all. “I can see him in my future.  I knew I
would meet him in Paris.  This is why I came to school in France.”

“What...kinds of things do you see?”

“It is more of a sensation.  An aching here...” Mariella touched her chest. “Almost
like being  lovesick.  It is ridiculous, but...do you believe in reincarnation?”

Jenny, who could remember lifetime after lifetime stretching back tens of thousands
of years, shrugged. “I suppose anything is possible.”

“What if he is my soulmate?” Mariella asked. “Maybe that’s why I have such...passionate
dreams about him.” The girl blushed and giggled, and Jenny resisted the urge to smack
her across the face, pox and all. “I just wish I could find him.  I know that when
I do, my life will finally start to make sense.”

Jenny didn’t have much to say about that.  They approached
Place d'Italie
, a ring of parks centered on a fountain.  Jenny could hop onto the Metro and escape
here.  She wasn’t sure she was ready to hear more about Mariella’s passionate dreams
of Seth.

“What about you?” Mariella asked. “What’s your secret?”

“Who says I have one?”

“You can tell me.” Mariella bumped her arm and snickered, almost as if they were friends.
“You know about me.  What can you do?  There’s something in your touch, too, isn’t
there?” She reached for Jenny’s hand again.

“Don’t.” Jenny tucked her hand in her jacket pocket.

“What happens to you when someone touches you?” Mariella asked.

“Nothing,” Jenny said. “Nothing happens to me at all.”

“Am I misunderstanding something?” Mariella frowned at her.  Her full lower lip made
a cute little pout when she frowned, which made Jenny want to upgrade from smacking
her to scratching her. “You seemed to know me.  I thought...”  A sad look crept into
her bright green eyes, and she looked away.

“What did you think?”

“I thought you were someone like me.  How did you know so much?”

“I’m not like you,” Jenny said.

“Did you once know someone like me?  Is that it?” Mariella looked hopeful. “Maybe
you have seen the boy I need?”

“There is no boy.”

“I have to go,” Mariella said, checking the time on her phone. “Can we talk again? 
Over a nice bottle of wine, maybe?  I would like to hear more of your thoughts.  Although
you must think I am out of my mind now.” She gave a small, awkward smile.

Jenny looked over the pretty Mediterranean girl in the pricey high-fashion clothes. 
Part of her already hated Mariella for her interest in Seth.  Another part of her
felt bad for the girl, who’d clearly stumbled through life without meeting anyone
like herself, something Jenny fully understood.  Now Mariella was trying to reach
out to her own kind—unfortunately for her, most of their kind tended to be wicked,
ruthless, and deceptive.  Jenny herself had always been a powerful evil force.  She
was working her hardest to change that, but very few of her past-life memories gave
any guidance on how to live with the pox and still be a good person.

Yet another part of Jenny recognized that the girl could be tricking her in any number
of ways.  Maybe she was another Ashleigh, capable of charming people while plotting
to ruin them.  Jenny decided to listen to that part of her, the one that said to trust
no one and avoid contact with others as much as possible.  It was how she’d survived
her life so far.

“Do you want to give me your mobile number?” Mariella asked as Jenny approached the
escalator that would take her underground to the Metro station.  Mariella had a look
in her eyes that bordered on desperation. 

Jenny’s heart almost went out to her, but she stopped herself.  The only safe choice
was to run the girl off forever.  Jenny glanced around to make sure no one was looking
at them, and she peeled off her gloves.

“Do you know what my touch does?” Jenny asked her, stepping on the escalator. “It
brings pain and death.  That’s all I’ve ever been to anyone.”

Jenny held up her bare hands.  For a moment, she unleashed the pox, her hands and
face rippling with gory disease.  A look of terror filled Mariella’s face as Jenny
descended out of sight.

Jenny drew the pox back inside her and turned to face forward down the escalator. 
She heard the girl scream, and she smiled.  Her past-life memories
did
provide plenty of tricks for striking fear into people.  She’d always been good at
that.

With any luck, she’d scared Mariella all the way back to Italy.

* * *

The bed in Jenny and Seth’s apartment was a rococo-style antique with curving posters
at the foot.  The high headboard was carved with intricate little grapevines and cupids
armed with love arrows., and the mattress was stuffed with goose down.  Jenny had
never slept in a more comfortable bed in her life, but lately she was having trouble
sleeping at all.

She looked at Seth, who dreamed the night away beside her, his bare chest painted
silver by the moonlight, a crooked, happy smile on his lips.  What did he have to
worry about?  He didn’t know she was pregnant, or that the baby was doomed.  He didn’t
know that another one of their kind was trying to track him down.

She was fighting panic.  Mariella claimed to see the future, and in that future, she
saw herself and Seth together.  Jenny wondered if it was true.  How would Seth react
if she told him she was pregnant, and then the pregnancy reached its inevitable, bloody
end?  How would he feel about her?  He claimed not to care about having children,
but he was still young.  His mind could change, especially if he learned he’d fathered
a child, and it had died.

Jenny regretted how she’d threatened Mariella, remembering from previous lives that
the more she used the pox, the more likely she was to miscarry.  Her moment of trying
to scare the girl could have cost the baby’s life.  But the baby had no future anyway,
so why should she worry about that?

Her thoughts kept swirling and pounding against the inside of her skull.  She could
sense everything going wrong, the magic carpet tearing beneath them.

Seth’s eyes drifted open.

“What’s wrong?” he mumbled.

More than I can tell you
, Jenny thought.

“Nothing,” she whispered. “Bad dreams.”

“Sucks,” he said.  His eyes were barely open, and his blond hair stuck out in every
direction.  He put an arm around her.

Jenny had been having bad dreams, too.  Telling Seth about their most recent life
had stirred up those memories like angry hornets, and they kept intruding on her waking
thoughts as well as her dreams.  Alexander had purposely tried to block her memories
of her most recent lives, while restoring hundreds of others.  He’d wanted the old,
evil Jenny back, not the new, slightly-less-evil version she’d become as she spent
her recent lifetimes with the healer, Seth, instead of the dead-raiser, Alexander.

“There’s more I didn’t tell you about our last life,” Jenny said. “The more I tell
you, the more I remember.”

“I thought we ran off with the circus and lived happily ever after.”

“If ‘happily ever after’ lasts only a few weeks.”

“It’s over now.  Long time ago.”  He turned away from her, leaving Jenny to stare
up at the ceiling.  She couldn’t stop thinking about that life, which wasn’t surprising,
considering the specific things she was dealing with in the present.  It seemed immediate
to her, as if none of the problems from their previous life had been resolved, and
they were all waiting to come back and haunt her.

Jenny closed her eyes, but she couldn’t sleep.

Juliana stripped away her robe for the eight men who’d crowded into the back of the
sideshow tent, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey from paper cups.  They shouted
and whistled as she bared herself—all of them except one.  He stood watchfully in
the back corner, his fedora pulled low, arms folded.  He wore a suit instead of the
frayed overalls and work shirts of the other men, and he wasn’t drinking.

Juliana did not try to make her show alluring—the carnival had a special “model show”
tent for that, where men could leer through a thin, gauzy curtain at women wearing
little or no clothing.  Still, on occasion, there would be a man who came back to
her show day after day until the carnival left town, eyes hungry to see Juliana’s
pale, exposed body turn rotten with disease.

She did her best to avoid those men, who sometimes waited around outside the tent
wanting to talk to her.  She did not want to talk to them.  This man was most likely
one of those.  He’d now come to see her three days in a row, ever since the carnival
had arrived at the busy fairgrounds in Anderson County, South Carolina.

She gave the man no special notice at all as she slowly turned, letting the weeping,
pus-dripping sores bloom slowly all over her.  The drunken men shouted and jostled
each other, impressed by the apparent circus trick.

The man in the corner didn’t join in the drunken laughter and applause.  He had a
shaggy beard and sharp eyes, and the squarish bearing of a police officer, which troubled
her.  Carnies always had to watch out for cops and usually had to pay “patch money”
under the table to avoid being harassed.  It wasn’t normal for local cops to hit up
individual performers for bribes, but anything was possible.

Juliana finished her show, and Radu ushered the men out.  She sighed and let her aching
legs rest a moment, then changed into a light dress made of cheap, lumpy cotton, and
she tied her hair back with a scarf.  She slipped out through the back of the tent
and circled around behind game booths, emerging far down the midway, in case her obsessed
fan in the fedora was looking for her.