Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) (31 page)

“
You’re glowing, Jenny,” Seth said. “You’re glowing blue.”

“
That’s just the moonlight.  Concentrate,” Jenny said. “Close your eyes, both of you. 
Imagine...imagine there’s a door right behind you.”

“
What kind of door?” Seth asked.

“
You tell me,” Jenny said. “What do you see?”

“
My door’s made of colored glass and crystal, and sunlight is glowing through it. 
It’s so beautiful,” Mariella sighed.

“
Good.  What about you, Seth?”

“
My door’s
awesome
.  Like a big castle door, with big spikes and torches all over it.”

“
Okay...This door leads to all your past-life memories,” Jenny said. “Imagine it slowly
opens, and through it, you see a long hallway of doors.  Each door on that hall opens
to one of your past lives.  Now, open your eyes, turn around, and step through into
the hall.”

“
Ooh!” Mariella gasped as she turned and opened her eyes. 

“
I can see it,” Seth said, looking at the long rows of standing stones that stretched
out of sight.  “I can see the doors!  Are there supposed to be ducks?”

“
Open the first door you see,” Jenny told them.

Seth and Mariella each took a step forward and touched one of the tall stones, which
now represented doors to them.

“
Oh, I see it!” Mariella told them. “I see both of you...and General Kranzler...and...”
Mariella’s chest hitched and she gave a loud sob. “Oh, Jenny...”

“
Barrett,” Seth said. “He betrayed us.  I
told
you I had the worst great-grandfather in history.”

“
Now imagine all the doors opening, all the way back to the beginning,” Jenny said.
“Don’t hold anything back.  Don’t hide anything from yourself.”

They kept walking, touching one stone after another as if looking into each door,
sometimes running away in horror, or laughing at some long-forgotten moment of happiness,
or crying at some tender memory.  She watched as they awoke to themselves, overpowered
by all that they’d forgotten.

“
Good,” Jenny said, though neither seemed to be listening to her anymore. “You’re doing
fine.  Just take it easy, don’t rush...”

“
A jester?” Seth laughed, shaking his head as he stared at the blank face of a standing
stone. “I was a court jester, can you believe that?”

“
Yep,” Jenny said, catching up to him.

Mariella cried out in horror as she stared at a tall stone ahead of them.

“
What’s wrong?” Jenny hurried to catch up with her, then hesitantly took her by the
arm.   “Mariella?  Tell me what you see.”

“
I...see...” Mariella’s face turned ashen. “Plague, suffering, war...”

“
Keep talking,” Jenny encouraged her. “Remember, it’s in the past, it’s not happening
now.”

“
There are men in armored masks, plates, chains, they have swords and hammers...”

“
Do you know where you are, or when?” Jenny asked.

“
It must be medieval Europe...” Mariella’s eyes closed. “I think those are the Alps
in the distance.  I serve a minor prince.  He’s going to war with his brother, who
has conquered a lot of territory and never been defeated in battle...I am his witch. 
I touch the prince I serve and see his future.” Mariella’s lips twisted in disgust.
“In the future, I see his armored men in rows for the battle.  His brother, the ruthless
war-maker, has his own witch, and she casts a spell.  My liege’s men begin to die
of the plague.  They rot on their feet, the tattered flesh dropping between the plates
of their armor, blood running out from the slits in their face visors...This witch,
I tell him, is the reason his brother has never lost.  He listens to me and sends
assassins to his brother’s camp the night before the battle, to kill the girl with
their crossbows.”

“
I remember,” Jenny said. “I was drinking a cup of wine, and the bolt hit me in the
throat.  I died fast.”

“
The next day, your prince tried to surrender to mine, because he couldn’t win without
you, Jenny,” Mariella said. “My prince defeated yours and carried his head on a pike
until it rotted.  His own brother.” Mariella looked sadly up and down the row of stones.
“So many lives, full of so much suffering and death, so little love.”

“
That’s true,” Jenny said, touching her arm. “It’s hard, but it’s better to know the
truth.  It’s up to us to make our lives different now.  Don’t let your past trap you.”

Mariella nodded and wandered toward the next stone, looking dazed, but Jenny had successfully
calmed her.  Far ahead, Seth let out a high scream, loud enough to wake the French
farmer on whose land they were trespassing.

“
Seth!  What’s wrong?” Jenny ran to catch up with him.  He was gripping one of the
standing stones and leaning against it, his eyes closed.  She took his hand. “Seth,
talk to me.”

“
You tortured me!” His eyes flew open, and his mouth curled into a snarl. “You tortured
me, Jenny.”

“
Can you be more specific?” Jenny asked, thinking of too many past lives that he might
be seeing. “Sorry.”

“
Egypt,” he said. “I was an Egyptian swordsman, the best in the kingdom.  I’d come
home from battle without a scratch, and so would the men around me.  But then you...and
Alexander
...invaded from Persia...”

“
Cambyses,” Jenny remembered. “That was Alexander’s name.  Son of Cyrus of Persia,
the king of kings.”

“
Cambyses and the famous ‘immortal’ swordsmen of Persia,” Seth said. “They were immortal
enough.  Undead.  Not very skilled at fighting, but relentless and almost impossible
to kill through their armor and shields.  Thousands of them came into Egypt with you
and Alexander.  He conquered and declared himself pharaoh, making all the Egyptians
worship him.”

“
That’s very Alexander,” Jenny said.

“
I didn’t know my touch would damage his zombies,” Seth said. “You and Alexander eventually
hunted me down.  You tortured me for months, letting me heal up each time, before
you finally killed me.  By then, I was begging to die.”

“
I’m sorry, Seth.” She touched his face, but he pulled away and continued on down the
row.

Mariella passed by, absorbed in her own vision.  Jenny watched both of them wander
ahead, absorbing their long line of past lives.

Something small and fast shot past Jenny’s eyes like a comet trailing smoke, and she
gasped, getting a lungful of cold gas.  It ricocheted from the stone beside her and
landed in the grass between her feet.  She had a quick glimpse of something like a
kid’s smoke bomb, and then the gas rolled up over her legs like a fog.

Jenny ran towards Seth, trying to hold her breath, but she’d already taken a lungful
of the stuff.  Mariella was lost in her trance, but Seth saw Jenny coming and started
toward her.

“
No...not this...not this way...” Jenny said, but she couldn’t speak above a whisper. 
She felt like she was trying to run in quicksand, her legs dragging, all her muscles
shutting down.  More of the smoke-bomb devices rained down around her and around Seth. 
They weren’t actually smoke bombs, because smoke bombs didn’t come loaded with powerful
tranquilizer gas.

A fog rose around Seth, and he staggered and slowed, then fell to one knee. 

“
Jennifer Morton,” a stern male voice said. “Don’t bother running.  We’ve got you.” 
Men approached from the shadows of the stones with electric devices crackling in their
hands, prepared to zap Jenny if the tranquilizer didn’t take her out.

Jenny tried to continue on toward Seth, but she lost her balance and toppled to the
ground.  As she lost consciousness, her last thought was a hope that the gas wouldn’t
harm the baby.

Ward walked the observation deck at midnight, alone.  The only lights were the dim
glow from computer screens, which reflected in the armored glass windows overlooking
the concrete bays of the laboratories below.  Soon, things would really start to heat
up around this old place.

He felt the sense of satisfaction that came with completing a difficult but necessary
task.  After he’d killed Senator Mayfield, it had only taken the shortest of talks
with Eddie Cordell from Hale Security to make the rest of the arrangements.  They’d
monitored Jenny and Seth in their Paris apartment, learned of their planned trip to
Brittany, and decided an ambush would run much more smoothly and quietly in the village
of Carnac than in the center of Paris.  Hale’s operatives had even helped in the capture
of Seth and Jenny.

Now Ward had them all here: Tommy, already cooperating.  Jenny and Seth, captured. 
As a bonus, he had a fourth paranormal, Mariella Visconti, who had the power to see
a person’s future, according to the conversations Ward had heard in Jenny and Seth’s
bugged apartment.  It was a sticky bonus, though, because her family was influential
in Italian politics.  The last thing Ward needed was a complaint about his activities
brought before some NATO panel by the Prime Minister of Italy.  He would have to keep
things quiet and work hard to gain Mariella’s cooperation.

They’d also captured Esmeralda Rios.  Ward had tried on his own to convince her to
join Tommy, but she’d refused, so they’d been forced to drug her and covertly transport
her to Germany.  Six  paranormals, including himself, were now together under this
roof, and it was time for his real work work to begin.

ASTRIA was not generally viewed as a desirable command.  While the agency’s mission
had been considered very serious between its founding in the early 50s and into the
1970s, it had become a dumping ground for dead-end careers by the end of the 1980s,
when not even Nancy Reagan’s astrologer was taking the idea of Soviet psychic spies
seriously anymore.  Ward had no trouble getting himself appointed head of the agency,
though it had required the small matter of also getting promoting to a lieutenant
general.  He could have used his unofficial, blackmail-based influence to gain himself
almost any command around the world, but he had chosen the neglected Cold War agency
instead.

Under his command, he’d been able to swell the funding from the Pentagon while giving
only the vaguest description of his intentions, enabling him to build the research
center of his dreams.  Ward had one goal: to study others like him, those with a paranormal
touch, in order to gain greater control and understanding of his own power without
having to put himself under the scientists’ microscopes and scalpels.  Whatever they
learned from the other five, he could determine for himself how it might apply to
him. 

At the same time, he might succeed in obtaining powerful new weapons.  He could imagine
sending Tommy into a city to cause a riot...or, better, sending Jenny in to kill everyone
in a targeted area.  Esmeralda could gather secrets from the dead, including enemy
spies and leaders.  Seth’s healing power would be extremely useful on dangerous missions,
to himself and others in his unit.  If Mariella could see the future, that would be
extremely valuable for gathering intelligence.

He could imagine using all of them, but it remained to be seen which of them might
cooperate.

Ward looked through the window at the lab he’d designed just for Jenny.  She was down
there in the dimness, asleep in a hospital bed, already connected to her monitors—the
computer screen in front of the window told him that her heartbeat, blood pressure
and breathing were normal, and her EEG showed delta waves, deep sleep.  When she awoke,
she would find herself trapped like a spider in a bottle.  It wasn’t the best way
to recruit a person, but after the mass death she’d caused in Fallen Oak, he wasn’t
taking any chances with her.  Surely, she would come to understand his logic.

Ward felt suddenly dizzy, and he pressed a hand on the window to steady himself. 
He felt a strange prickling sensation as goosebumps swelled all over his body and
the little hairs on his arms and neck spiked out.  He felt a crushing headache, and
then a feeling of vertigo, and he thought he might black out.  He closed his eyes
and clenched his jaw, trying to get hold of himself.

He felt like he was falling...and then he was walking along the same corridor, the
observation deck, but the computers were replaced by file cabinets and typewriters,
and there were many more people coming and going in this one room than Ward employed
at the entire complex.  The walls floor was bare concrete, instead of the white tiles
he’d added.

Everyone wore black, even the typists and secretaries in their slim black skirts and
jackets.  He also couldn’t help but notice, everywhere, the swastikas—on the arms
of men in black military-style uniforms, on lapel pins, on the flags that hung along
the hall.