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

Her reflection offered no wisdom.  It was just the image of a girl with a frightened
face.

The sound of bells chimed through the apartment, announcing someone at the front door.

Jenny absolutely didn’t feel like speaking to anyone at this moment—she was in a state
of shock, and she could feel the confused flood of emotions waiting to crash in on
her. 

Still, she left the bathroom, walked out through their sumptuous bedroom and expansive,
sunlit living room with a picture window and a balcony overlooking the boulevard below. 
Her bare feet sounded oddly loud in her ears, slapping against the dark oak floor.

The doorbell rang again.  Jenny looked through the peephole lens, but she didn’t recognize
the girl outside.  The apartment building had a full-time security staff, so the only
way the girl could be inside the building was if she was a resident or an approved
visitor.  Jenny guessed the girl was visiting someone else, but had accidentally approached
the wrong door.

Jenny stepped back.  The girl would surely double-check the apartment number and realize
her mistake.  There were three other apartments on the same floor.

Jenny decided to return to the small extra bedroom she used as a studio, play a record,
and resume her latest attempt at making art.  Then she decided to wait until the strange
girl left, since playing the record would make it obvious that she was home.

The doorbell rang a third time.  Jenny looked out again, feeling suspicious—though
officially dead, she and Seth were actually on the run from the United States government. 
It was always possible  someone had discovered they were alive and living in Paris. 

The girl didn’t look like any kind of police or law enforcement, though.  She looked
no older than Jenny, with dark Mediterranean skin, deep auburn hair and sea-green
eyes.  Unlike most law enforcement officers, she wore a short choker dress with vivid
purple designs.  The bright dress was damped down by the long black coat she wore
over it. 

Despite her revealing dress, the girl also wore purple lace gloves that reached well
up her forearms.

She rang the doorbell a fourth time, still not figuring out she was at the wrong apartment. 
She was probably just some random pretty airhead, Jenny decided, who couldn’t be bothered
to read the door number.

Jenny pulled on her own gloves and opened the door, but not too far.  The girl was
in heels, too.  She probably wasn’t here to capture Jenny.  Jenny looked out at her,
but didn’t say anything.

A bright smile had bloomed on the girl’s face as the door opened, but now it died. 
The girl’s mouth dropped open in confusion.
That’s right, genius,
Jenny thought.
You’ve been annoying the wrong apartment.

“
Bon jour
,” the girl said, uncertainly.

“
Bon jour
,” Jenny replied.

The girl looked at her for a moment, then continued, hesitantly, speaking in French,
but not with a native accent. “I am sorry.  I am looking for a young man.”

A second possibility flared into Jenny’s mind, hot and angry.  Maybe the girl didn’t
have the wrong apartment.  Maybe she did know Seth, and she was the kind of friend
that Seth chose to keep secret from Jenny...

“What sort of young man?” Jenny asked.

“He is this tall or so.” The girl held a hand above her head.  Jenny looked again
at the lacy purple glove clinging to her fingers. “Blond, handsome, shoulders like
this, a muscular build.  Eyes are blue, like...” The girl gazed at Jenny’s eyes. “You
must know him.”

Jenny shook her head. “You have the wrong address.”

“No, I am certain...” The girl pushed Jenny’s door open—quite rudely, Jenny thought—and
took in their apartment with her strange, intense green eyes. “Yes.  This is just
as I have seen it.”

“Seen it when?” Jenny asked.

“It would make no sense to explain.”  The girl shook her head. “I do not understand. 
Perhaps I am too early.”

“Too early for what?”

The girl studied Jenny again. “Do you have any plans to move out?  Is someone else
moving here in the future?”

“I have no real plans either way,” Jenny said. “When have you seen my apartment before?”

“You live here alone?  There is no boy as I described?”

“If there were a boy like that here, I would be too busy to answer the door,” Jenny
told her, and the girl laughed.

Then the girl looked off into the distance, down the short hall to the elevator. 
Her eyes seemed to cloud over.

“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “Everything keeps changing.”

“Maybe you should visit a doctor,” Jenny suggested.

The young woman’s eyes cleared, and she made an effort to smile. “I think I may be
too early.  Should you see someone as I described, perhaps sometime in the future,
will you tell him to contact me?”

“I suppose,” Jenny said. “What’s his name?”

“I have only seen his face.  I do not know his name.”

Okay
,
it’s a creepy stalker lady
, Jenny thought. “How did you get into my building?”

The girl’s smile seemed more genuine now. “That is easy.  Watch for an older man,
chat with him as he walks inside, as if you are his guest.”

“That’s it?”

“You can add the trick to your repertoire, if you like.”

“What makes you think I have a repertoire of tricks?” Jenny asked.

“Every woman should have one.” From her purse, she brought out a pen and a paperback
by someone called Giuseppe di Lampedusa.  She wrote on a mostly-blank page of the
book, then ripped it out and passed it to Jenny.  They gave each other a look as the
torn page passed from one gloved hand to another, but neither commented on the fact
that they’d both chosen to wear long gloves on a warm day.

“There is my mobile number and my home address.  I’m at school most days, so evenings
are better,” the girl said.

“School?”

“Art history.  The Pan
t
heon-Sorbonne.  Do you attend university?”

“Not at the moment,” Jenny said.  On the scrap of paper, the girl’s handwriting looked
like some kind of advanced calligraphy, which was a little odd.  Her name was Mariella
Visconti, so Jenny supposed her accent was Italian.  Jenny folded the page. “I’ll
keep it just in case, but I don’t believe anybody like that lives here.  You must
have the wrong apartment building.”

“You never know what the future may bring.” Mariella winked at her. “Thank you.” 
She took a long, unsettling look at Jenny’s gloves.

“Good luck to you.” Jenny was eager to close the door.  The longer Mariella stood
there, the more uncomfortable Jenny felt. Jenny worried Seth would show up at any
moment, blowing Jenny’s lie.

“Perhaps we will meet again,” Mariella said. “Until then...” She gave a small wave
as she walked toward the stairwell and elevator.

Jenny closed the door and locked it, her heart racing.  The girl talking about how
she’d “seen” Seth, but didn’t know his name, made her think of how she’d dreamed of
Alexander for weeks before meeting him in the flesh.  Of course, Mariella could have
just been some psycho who’d followed Seth to see where he lived, but there was also
the weird matter of the gloves, plus the intense uneasy feeling the girl had stirred
in Jenny’s gut.  Though it might be normal to feel concerned when a gorgeous and expensively
dressed Italian girl showed up at her door, eager to find her boyfriend, this went
a little deeper than that.

She didn’t think the girl was any kind of government agent, but she might be something
worse...one of their kind, like Jenny and Seth, or like Ashleigh and Tommy.  This
was very bad.  Besides Seth, Jenny had never met another one who didn’t bring her
grief.  Even Alexander had only pretended to love her in order to use her to enhance
his own powers.  Or maybe he really had felt whatever twisted thing passed for love
inside him, but he’d tricked her and betrayed her.  The last thing Jenny wanted was
to meet another of their kind.

Mariella apparently lived in Paris, too, so this problem wasn’t going to disappear
anytime soon.

Jenny hurried to hide the girl’s information, as well as the pregnancy tests, before
Seth returned home.

* * *

“You okay?  You look like you saw a ghost,” Seth said as he closed the front door
behind him. “Not like a Casper-type ghost, either.  More of a Headless Horseman kind.”

Jenny sat on the sofa in the living room, rereading a vampire book by Anne Rice that
she’d loved as a kid.  She’d always identified with Louis, the moody vampire who didn’t
really want to kill anyone.  Now she was staying in Paris, as Louis had for a while.

“I’m fine.” Jenny followed Seth into the kitchen, where he set his cloth grocery bag
on the marble counter.  He unloaded tomatoes, three kinds of cheese, and a long, crusty
baguette, which had been baked very recently, judging by the delicious aroma that
filled the apartment.

“You’re sure?” he asked. “Nothing happened today?”

“Sometimes you just have a bad day.”

“I’ll cook dinner, then.  That’ll make you feel better.”

“Um...I doubt it.  You should let me do it.” Jenny approached the stove.

“Are you questioning my cooking skills?” Seth asked. “Who poured you that awesome
bowl of Chocos cereal yesterday?  Tell me that.”

“You’re a master at adding milk.”

“As long you acknowledge that, I’ll let you cook.  There’s pasta, there’s organic
chicken...”

Jenny reached for the bottle of wine Seth had brought home, then hesitated.  She could
really use a glass just now, but the idea of drinking while pregnant bothered her. 
It was ridiculous.  One night, she knew, she would wake up to find her thighs painted
with blood and gore, and that would be the end of that.  There was no reason to worry
about the well-being of a fetus destined to die from the pox.  Still, she resisted
her desire for a drink.

“There’s really nothing wrong?” Seth twisted the corkscrew. “Something feels different
today, doesn’t it?”

Jenny worried what he meant by that.  Those of her kind who had powerful emotional
bonds with each other, positive or negative, could sometimes sense and be drawn to
each other.  Alexander had become aware of Jenny’s location the night she flared up
and killed the mob in Fallen Oak.

Now, this strange girl had found her way to Seth...and Seth might be feeling her energy,
too.

“Just a regular, boring day,” Jenny said.

“Then tell me what’s on your mind.” He started to pour her a glass of wine, then gave
her a puzzled look when she shook her head.

“I was just thinking about past lives,” Jenny told him.  That was one topic guaranteed
to lose Seth’s interest right away.  He only had random fragments of past-life memories,
and they were wicked enough that he didn’t want to learn more.  He would usually change
the subject immediately.

“What were you thinking about?” Seth asked. “Were we raping and pillaging our way
across the ancient world or something?”

“No...we weren’t really together until our last couple of lives, actually.  We were
enemies before that.”

“So tell me.” He leaned against the counter, sipping wine. “Tell me about our last
life.”

“Seriously?” Jenny hadn’t expected that.  Again, she worried he could sense the girl
who’d been searching for him...and maybe his sudden interest in the past had more
to do with her than with Jenny, even if he didn’t consciously realize any of it. 

“Why not?” Seth asked. “We never talk about it.  I think I’m ready to learn about
our past.”

“You’re sure?”

“You keep thinking about it, I want to hear about it.  I bet I was a cowboy, right?”

Jenny took a deep breath. “It was the Great Depression.”

“That figures.  We wouldn’t want to miss a time of worldwide misery, would we?” Seth
said.  He refreshed his wine glass.

Jenny placed a ripe tomato on the wooden cutting board.  As she sliced it, she began
to tell him.

“I was in the carnival,” she said. “I had a stage name, in the carnival.  Juliana
Blight.”

Seth spat wine as he laughed. “Were you a stripper?”

“Do you want to hear the story or not?”

“Oh, I’m listening.  This already sounds good.”

Juliana waited on the low, narrow wooden stage, separated from the small dirt-floor
audience pit by a wooden rail and a ragged curtain, which hadn’t yet opened for the
evening.  Out in the tent, customers who’d paid a few pennies could see Alejandro
the sword-swallower, Zsoka the tattooed lady, some creepy marionette puppets, a knife-throwing
act, and Punchy Pete, the dancing, juggling dwarf.  For a few pennies more, they could
step past the back curtain to view the star attraction of the freak show: Juliana
Blight, The World’s Most Diseased Woman.