Jenny Pox (The Paranormals, Book 1) (46 page)

Ashleigh twisted and jerked, still trying to kick free.  Jenny squeezed her fingers through the mush of Ashleigh’s muscle and tendon, and she gripped the wet bones of Ashleigh’s ankle.

Ashleigh screamed and curled up at the waist, swinging her hands wildly toward Jenny.  Her fingertips had decayed, revealing points of bone, and now her fingernails loosened and flaked away.

Jenny had a glimpse of her face that she would always remember.  Ashleigh looked up at her, screaming her head off, long blond hair fanning out below her.  Her eyes and nose were just raw, empty red holes.  Her lips were gone.  Her remaining teeth dangled loose, attached only by their nerve fibers, and a fragment of her tongue wiggled at the back of her rotting throat.

Then Ashleigh fell back, and she kept struggling, even though it was hopeless.  All the soft tissue was now shriveling against her skeleton and turning black and crumbly, as if she had been dead and in the ground for months.  The skeletal Ashleigh gasped through her mummified face, and kept jerking against Jenny’s hand.

The Ashleigh pox ate its way through her bone marrow, and the ankle bones in Jenny’s hand turned brittle.  She dropped Ashleigh’s remains to the cobblestones below, where they shattered from skull to pelvis with a wet, splintering sound.  After a few seconds, Ashleigh’s remains stopped struggling.

Jenny stared at the broken pieces for a minute.  She had done it.  She had killed Ashleigh Goodling.

She felt the sense of a duty done, a purpose fulfilled.  It was a serene feeling, but a cold and bitter one.

Jenny turned back from the window.  Most of the girls had left the room, eager to escape the wretched smell and body heat.  The few that remained just stared at her.  They looked sick, but nowhere close to dying.  None of them seemed to be having any trouble with their unborn children, either, at least not right away.  Maybe she had been successful, attacking only the Ashleigh infection and nothing else.

Jenny hobbled through the room, keeping away from everyone.  She didn’t have the energy or the focus to make only Ashleigh pox right now.  Anyone who brushed against her would die of plain old Jenny pox.  Losing the dose of energy it would take to transmit that Jenny pox would kill Jenny.  She was teetering on the edge.

Fortunately, it was mutual, and nobody wanted to come close to her.  She saw herself in Ashleigh’s mirror, which was framed with real seashells.  She looked emaciated.  Her eyes were sunken, her cheeks sucked in and gaunt.  There were gray streaks in her hair.  She could see the shape of her teeth through her lips.  Where she’d been shot, the loose fat and muscle tissue had all been eaten up to fuel her power, and she could actually see her own ribs.  She looked like death.  She was death.

Jenny made her way past more girls in the hall.  The front steps were crowded, so she went down the back way, through the kitchen, onto the back terrace.  Everywhere she went were little knots of pregnant girls, whispering to each other, looking for food, looking for the way out, looking for answers.

She passed some more on the terrace, including Darcy Metcalf, who was taking a drag from freshman Veronica Guntley’s cigarette.

“Hey, Jenny,” Darcy said as she passed.  Jenny turned her head to look at her but didn’t say anything.  She felt nothing but pain, and the desire to crawl somewhere dark and let it end.

“
What happened?” Darcy asked. “What happened to us?”

“
Ashleigh Goodling put a spell on y’all,” Jenny said. “She was a witch.  I killed her.”

Jenny kept walking, off the terrace and into the sweet, cool grass, which soothed her blistered feet.

“Hey,” Darcy called after her. “What are you?”

Jenny stopped walking.  She looked back at Darcy.

“I don’t fucking know,” Jenny said. “But I guess I’m fixing to find out.”

Then she walked again, across the Goodling’s manicured lawn, and through an island of daffodils, leaving a trail of dying plants behind her.  She felt sad for them.  She normally got along pretty well with plants, as long as she wasn’t scared or excited.

She followed the gradual slope down to the centerpiece of the Goodlings’ back yard, the duck pond, which was big enough for a little fishing dock and deep enough to float a rowboat.

Jenny walked out along the dock and looked into the black water, where moonlight framed her death’s head reflection.  She didn’t have much time left.  She’d eaten herself up to get to Ashleigh.   

She jumped into the water.

Dirty black water flowed into her mouth and nose.  Her body fought against it, choking and thrashing, but she didn’t have much strength.  The water forced its way in.  She panicked, ready to change her mind, but it was too late now.

Her flooded body sank like a stone into the darkness.  She landed in cold, slimy mud and sharp underwater weeds.  And then Jenny died there, at the bottom of the pond.

She floated in darkness for a long time.  The pain was gone, and the cold, and the anger, and every other feeling.

In time, patterns of light glimmered somewhere below her.  She sank down to them, or they floated up to her.

She drew close to them.  She discovered that each bit of light was a memory, and each memory contained a cluster of memories, a lifetime of them.

She saw herself on a low square tower of stone and mud, in gloves and a coarse linen cloak made from flax.  She watched an army of men in copper helmets approach her walls.  She was planning to spread a plague among them in order to protect her city, which was mostly mud houses inside an earthen wall. 

She saw herself in a rough wool tunic, again with gloves, seated on a bench in the back of a galley rowed by fifty men, across salty, choppy, cold water.  She’d been sent to an enemy city on a mission to spread pestilence there.

She saw herself in the head and skin of a lioness, looking out through the eye holes.  She sat on a raised wooden throne inside a large, boxy building of simple clay bricks, on the bank of the Nile.  In war, she slew the king’s enemies.  In peace, those accused of injustice were brought before her for judgment, and sometimes execution.  She was worshiped and feared, and many tried to influence her with gifts.  They called her
Sekhmet
.

She saw herself a thousand years later, in fine woven cotton and gold jewelry, in a vast limestone temple complex devoted to the memory of her earlier incarnation, since elevated to a goddess.  There were hundreds of black granite statues of the lion-headed goddess
Sekhmet
, and a sacrifice was made to a different statue each day.

She saw herself with dreadlocks to her waist, deep in the Central African rainforest.  She led a band of rebels armed with spears and slings, determined to drive the invaders from their land.  She was fearsome in battle and her people loved her.  They called her
Nyabinghi.

There were hundreds of lives.  In most of them, she had warred ceaselessly against others of her kind.  For tens of thousands of years, through one incarnation after another, they had made their wars on each other.  Though they were born into humanity, humans were their pawns, the world their game board.  They delighted in destruction.

They had not been human souls, originally.  They had been wild, primordial spirits, wandering for eternities in darkness and desolation in the wastelands of the universe.  They found their way to this tiny, hot, bright pocket of life, and they learned the trick of incarnating as humans.  They found themselves with special powers when in human form, powers normal humans did not have.  And they found that power attracted great interest from other humans.

Their first wars were fought by clans of humans, grunting a simple language and wielding stone hand axes.  In time, these became spears, arrows, swords, cannons, ballistic missiles.  They hunted each other down the millennia, and their armies grew larger, the game more complex.  She saw that most of history was lost, there had been great civilizations and sprawling empires now long forgotten.

There were others out there, not just the three of them.  There might have been a hundred or more spirits of her kind who’d found their way to this world.  As spirits, they were immortal, but also invisible, voiceless, and powerless, with a very limited range of emotion and communication.  Incarnation gave them the richness of sensual experience and the power to act and speak.

When incarnated, they were so dazzled by the drama and spectacle of life they did not remember their true nature.  Discarnate, between lives, they could not help but remember their true selves, and they yearned to return to the warm pulse of flesh, the brilliant senses, the pleasures and pain, the storms of feelings, impressions, ideas.  The mental focus needed to enter human life left them with a near-total amnesia while alive, but the experience of being alive was worth that.  So she had decided, hundreds of times.

She’d grown more careful about trying to prepare her human mothers so that her birth was not fatal to them.  That could take years.  The most recent time, she’d been in a hurry to find a vessel, and gotten reckless.

She had known Seth and Ashleigh, or the spirits behind them, countless times.  She had a memory of killing Seth, when he was a bearded man in bear skins, by nailing him to a pile of logs and kindling with iron stakes, then setting the pyre ablaze.  She remembered killing Ashleigh, and being killed by Ashleigh, more times than she could count.

Through the ages, they had styled themselves as gods, demons, angels, holy men and women, magicians and witches, fae and djinn, according to whatever myths existed at their place and time of birth.  When they took on such roles, they truly believed in them.  When incarnate, such legend and folklore provided her kind with the only available explanation of their powers.  She had spent lifetimes genuinely believing she was a goddess.

Discarnate, she saw clearly and coldly.  Ashleigh’s soul had been eager to try the new weapons, the ones that could incinerate cities and annihilate millions.  It would be a new achievement for her, the largest number ever killed at a single stroke.

Ashleigh had tried to hide herself from the other spirits by getting born in a tiny out-of-the-way place.  She was normally attracted to the largest cities, where she could make the greatest use of her powers.  She wanted to get ahead of the game years before the others knew she had incarnated again.

The souls of Jenny and Seth had tracked her down and hurried to incarnate nearby, so they could keep watch on her and stop her before she gained access to the city-eater fire weapons.  They had succeeded.  Jenny had discarnated Ashleigh before she could unleash the death and destruction she craved.

Jenny had almost lost it, had totally forgotten her purpose in the overwhelming, hypnotic spectacle of being alive.  If she’d waited much longer, it might have become difficult to get close to Ashleigh.  Ashleigh had known instinctively that Jenny and Seth were her greatest threats, and taken great measures to neutralize Jenny and control Seth.  When they found each other, Jenny and Seth had begun to awaken.

There was another purpose to her life.  Only in life could she and Seth touch each other and experience their depth of feeling for each other.  They could engage each other in the passion and drama of being human.  As spirits, they were isolated within themselves.  As humans, they could be together.

Already, she ached to return to the nerve and sinew of flesh, to find a body and live again.  Incarnate, she forgot her true nature.  Discarnate, she could hardly imagine the terror and ecstasy of human emotions.  She needed to be alive to feel them.

There was a sense of loss.  After a lifetime of suffering, she had found him again, only to lose what they’d begun to yet another war with Ashleigh.  As Jenny and Seth, they had started to build a good life together.  Ashleigh, still playing the old game, had ruined it for them.

For a long moment, she was just a feeling of sorrow.  They could incarnate again, born into new little bodies, but there was the risk they would get lost and never find each other in their new lives.  As ever, the risk would be worth it, but she still felt cheated.  This time around, she’d had the long pain of being alone, then the delight of discovering him—which never got old—and then, after only very brief togetherness, the inevitable loss and death.  It was unfair.  She wished for a second chance.

She mourned for Jenny and for Seth, the lovely little people they had been, with their lives cut so short.

After an unknowable amount of time passed, she felt the vibration of a distant signal.  It was him, calling to her through the endless dark.  They could be aware of each other, but they could not talk or share themselves in a very meaningful way, if they were discarnate.  They could signal intent in a general way.

She signaled back, and moved toward him through the dark inverted space of the discarnated.

Sensation slammed into her from every side.  She felt cold, hunger, sickness and extreme pain all through the core of herself.  It was almost delicious.  It was glorious to be alive.

Then the pain really took over, blotting out her thoughts.  She coughed, and someone turned her on her side.  She puked dark water that tasted like duck crap.  She caught her breath, then coughed up more water.  Her lungs and stomach were competing to empty themselves out.