Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (18 page)

“It is not the same thing! You either came
here for me, or for her.”

Tommy looked at her, not sure what to say. He
hadn’t really thought very deeply about any of this.

Esmeralda sighed. “Take me to the body. I’ll
do it. But then take me home.”

“If that’s what you want.” Tommy opened the
saddlebag on the side of the bag, and he brought out the backpack
with flowers and hearts sewn into it.

“What’s that?” Esmeralda asked.

“The body.” He unzipped the backpack and
brought out the muddy wad of the dress. He unrolled it across the
rocky sand, revealing a third of Ashleigh’s skull and a pile of
bone fragments, with black crust flaking off them.

“Gross!” Esmeralda said. “That’s been right
there the whole time?”

“This is all that’s left of her.”

“It won’t work,” she said. “It’s too old and
broken up. Usually I do it soon after they’re dead.”

“It’s not actually old,” Tommy said. “Just
wrecked.”

Esmeralda sighed. “I can try it, but I don’t
promise anything.”

“Go ahead.”

She knelt on the sand next to the desiccated
bones. She took a breath, then picked up the broken hunk of
Ashleigh’s skull.

She closed her eyes.

Tommy watched her, feeling very nervous. If
this didn’t work, he didn’t know what else he could do.

Esmeralda began to hum—not a song, but a
drawn-out, tuneless noise.

Her eyes flew open, and she was staring right
at Tommy.

“Finally!” she shouted. “Why did you wait so
long?”

“What?” Tommy asked.

“I’ve been screaming at you day and night.
‘Get out of that prison and come get me!’ It took you forever!”

“What are you talking about?”

“God damn it, I hate being between
incarnations,” she said. “Nobody sees you, nobody hears you, your
powers are worthless…I missed the flesh.” She looked down at
herself. She squeezed her own breast with her hand. “This isn’t a
bad body, either! Not as pretty as my last one, but I’ll take it.
Too bad she’s Mexican, though. And no money. Yuck.”

Tommy just stared at her until she looked
back. Her eyes seemed a little different—as if their deep, rich
brown color had turned a very dark shade of gray.

“Oh, guess you want a reward,” she said. With
the hand that wasn’t holding Ashleigh’s skull, Esmeralda began
unbuttoning her white blouse. She wore a flimsy, lacy bra
underneath, and he could see the dark circles of her nipples. “Do
you want to screw her body?”

“What?”

“Come on.” She stepped close to Tommy.
Everything was different—her posture was taller and straighter, and
she had a commanding tone to her voice. She hooked her fingers into
Tommy’s belt. “It’s been a long time. I wanted to keep up the whole
unattainable virgin thing in my last life, and there wasn’t a boy
in Fallen Oak who wouldn’t have bragged about fucking me. So I went
that whole lifetime without doing it.”

“Are you…Ashleigh Goodling?” Tommy asked.

“How are you this dumb again? You get dumber
every time you’re born. It takes forever to train you.”

“I still have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

She sighed. “Okay. I am Ashleigh Goodling, or
that was my name in my most recent life. But I didn’t remember my
past lives then. I didn’t remember what I really was. And if I
wanted to come back, I had to go through the whole process of being
born and being a baby and forgetting everything again. And I can’t
let Jenny and Seth win like that.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “Past lives?”

Ashleigh rolled her eyes. “Do we have to do
this now?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to get your pants off.” Ashleigh
tugged at his belt buckle but couldn’t pry it open with one hand.
She used two fingers of her other hand, the one holding the broken
piece of skull. The skull slipped out and fell to the ground.

“Fuck that!” she screamed. She let go of his
belt and scrambled back from Tommy. “What are you doing?” She
looked down, saw her shirt hanging open, and hurried to cover
herself. “What are you doing to me?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Tommy said. “You
started taking off your clothes.”

“It wasn’t me. It was
her.
” Esmeralda
shuddered. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The soul is
supposed to be gone. It’s like she was still there, just waiting
to…” She scowled at Tommy. “You planned this, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know that would happen.”

“But
she
knew,” Esmeralda said. “She
was waiting. She jumped right into me. I didn’t even know that
could happen.”

“Is it because she’s like us?”

“How would I know?”

“She talked about past lives. Like
reincarnation,” Tommy said.

“I don’t believe in that.” Esmeralda’s dark
amber eyes smoldered with anger. “I did what you wanted. Now take
me home.”

“You have to let me talk to her again.”

“No.” Esmeralda’s voice grew quiet. “She
scares me.”

“I thought you liked being scared.”

She glared at him. “I’m not letting her take
control of me again.”

“I have to talk with her.” Tommy reached for
Esmeralda’s arm.

She walked backwards towards the road,
keeping her distance from him, watching his reaching hand
warily.

“Esmeralda, wait—” Tommy said.

“I said no!” Esmeralda turned to run, tripped
over a stone, and sprawled in the road.

“Let me help you.” Tommy shed his other glove
and reached for her with both hands.

“No! Don’t touch me! Don’t…”

He seized her arms and pushed fear into her,
the way he had with the prison guards. She shook hard in his
grasp.

“You will do as I say,” Tommy told her. “Pick
up the skull.”

“No,” she whispered, though she was shaking
in fright. “Find someone else.”

“There is no one else.”

Mentally, he pushed harder, and she cried
out.

“Then find someone else…who will be possessed
by her,” Esmeralda whispered. “I’ll put her in someone else. But I
would rather die than let her inside me again.”

Tommy was impressed by her ability to resist
him. Maybe it was because she had a power of her own, he thought.
Or maybe she was just incredibly stubborn.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “But then you have to
come with me.”

“Yes,” she whispered, close to tears now.
“Whatever you want.”

“That’s right,” Tommy said. “Whatever I
want.”

When Alexander stepped up into the rear of
the box truck, the two men with machine guns stopped talking with
each other and watched him warily, their hands tight on their
weapons.

In this part of Mexico, people knew Alexander
as
El Brujo
, the sorcerer. His hair and eyes were dark, his
skin a deep bronze from life in the sun. He wore a black Egyptian
cotton t-shirt and dark, mirrored sunglasses. From a distance, it
would be hard to guess that he was a gringo from Brentwood, a
recent Stanford drop-out pursuing an interesting opportunity south
of the border.

Inside the truck, three dead bodies lay in a
puddle on the floor, flies already crawling on them as they rotted
in the heat. The fourth
bandito
, the one that was still
alive, knelt with his hands roped behind him. One eye was swollen
shut, and he bled from both nostrils, but he kept his spine upright
like a well-trained soldier.

The survivor was tough and wouldn’t speak,
and this was why Papa Calderòn had sent in
El Brujo
.

“Hello, Carlos.” Alexander spoke to him in
Spanish. Alexander had known both English and Spanish from the
moment he was born, along with hundreds of other languages, most of
them dead. “My friends tell me you aren’t cooperating. They say you
refuse to speak. This is very rude of you, Carlos.”

Carlos glared defiantly at Alexander and said
nothing.

“Who sent you, Carlos?” Alexander asked. “If
you don’t tell us, we will unleash the greatest horror you have
ever seen. The remainder of your life will be a long waking
nightmare, if you do not speak now.”

Carlos did not speak.

“I don’t want to be here, Carlos,” Alexander
said. “I should be on a plane right now. I have important business
in the north. Don’t slow me down, Carlos. I don’t have time to
play.”

Carlos didn’t answer.

“You killed our driver,” Alexander said. “And
his bodyguard. You stole our shipment. Now the situation is simple,
no? You tell us where to find our missing product—you tell us who
has it now—and you live. If not…” He gestured to the three
bullet-riddled bodies on the floor. “Who sent you? Was it
Toscano?”

“Nobody sent us,” Carlos said. “We are
independent.”

“Independent?” Alexander laughed. “You want
to say you moved against Papa Calderòn, in this state, with the
blessing of no one? I am to believe you are that stupid?”

Carlos just stared at him.

“We do not believe you are that stupid.”
Alexander knelt in the pool of three dead men’s blood, paying no
mind to the damage done to his Armani jeans. He grabbed the hair of
a dead man lying face down in the congealed blood.

“Leave him alone,” Carlos said.

Alexander lifted the dead man’s face from the
blood. The man had a bristly moustache and thick jowls. His mouth
hung open. “This guy, your friend,” Alexander said. “I believe
he
is that stupid. He has a stupid face.” Alexander slammed
the dead man’s face into the floor of the truck, and Carlos
jumped.

“Or this guy.” Alexander touched the second
corpse, and then the third. “Or him. They all look like stupid
little men.”

Carlos snarled, just a little. Alexander was
getting to him.

Alexander smiled as he stood. He gave one of
the bodies a hard kick for good measure. “Your friends, stupid. But
you do not look stupid.” Alexander approached Carlos. “You look
disciplined. Smart. Maybe ex-military, no? Or a former
federale
?”

Carlos gave a hard stare, his eyes full of
anger.

“Anyway,” Alexander said, “You are a man who
follows orders. We only want to know whose.” He paused to give
Carlos an opportunity to speak, which Carlos didn’t take.

Alexander walked in a slow circle around
Carlos.

“We know that Toscano and his friends do not
like what Papa Calderòn is doing,” Alexander said. “But Papa
Calderòn has ended his past relationship with Toscano. That won’t
change. We are…what did you call yourself? We are independent of
Toscano’s organization now. And if Toscano doesn’t want to do
business on our terms, this is fine. But he must leave our men and
our shipments alone. Do you understand?”

Alexander knelt beside Carlos and spoke
directly into the man’s bloody, bullet-nipped ear.

“I will tell you a secret thing,” Alexander
said in a lower voice. “We do not need your confession. Papa
Calderòn knows who sent you. He simply wants you to deliver a
message back to your boss. Can you do this?”

Carlos looked back at him, but didn’t
answer.

Alexander held out a hand toward the three
dead men.

They began to rock side to side in their own
blood.

Carlos watched them with wide eyes.

“You know what name they call me, don’t
you?”

“El Brujo,” Carlos whispered. “Papa
Calderòn’s witch.”

“They call me this for a reason.” Alexander
lifted his hand a few inches, and the dead men rose to their knees.
“It is because I am a high priest of the devil. A necromancer, and
a wielder of black magic.” Alexander lifted his hand higher, and
the three dead men stood, swaying like palms in the wind, unsteady
on their feet. Alexander backed away from Carlos.

The three corpses shuffled around, bumping
into each other as if drunk, until they all managed to turn and
face Carlos.

Alexander crooked his fingers, and the
bullet-riddled corpses advanced on Carlos, one sluggish dragging
step at a time, heads lolling and limp, eyes blank, mouths open and
drooling.

Carlos began to whisper a prayer to the
Virgin Mary, and the two machine-gun men, Papa Calderòn’s foot
soldiers, crossed themselves.

“And so, Carlos, here is the message,”
Alexander said. “If the raids against Papa Calderòn do not stop, I
will unleash horrors on Toscano and all his friends. I will send an
army of demons to their homes to eat their families.”

The reanimated corpses closed in around
Carlos, grabbing and clawing him, biting at his face. Carlos
screamed.

“Tell your boss that God has been banished
from this land, and the Devil walks among us,” Alexander said.

Carlos cried out as the corpses of his
friends bit and tore at his flesh.

“You tell him I am here, and I will come for
him.” Alexander snapped his fingers. The three corpses fell to the
ground like rag dolls.

Carlos remained on the blood-spattered truck
floor, curled in a fetal position, weeping softly, bleeding from
bite marks all over his body.

“Release him,” Alexander said to the men with
machine guns. “Let him go back to his boss, and don’t cut his
tongue out. We want him free to talk.”

Alexander stepped down from the truck.
Outside, a scorching wind blew through the arid Mexican
countryside. The box truck was parked inside a weathered old barn
that was missing much of its roof.

Alexander walked to his own car, a black
Mercedes convertible, parked in the huge empty doorway of the
barn.

He was running late. There was a girl up
north he needed to find, if he was going to do what Papa Calderòn
wanted him to do. Alexander had been waiting his entire life to
meet her.

The rural highway took him through vast open
pastures with sparse grass and skinny cattle. The hot, dry pastoral
landscape was broken only by an occasional farmhouse or old church,
with a graveyard full of huge pastel sculptures.