Tommy pulled onto the freeway and gunned the engine. He wasn't going to get out of her way at all. He knew well enough what Ashleigh was after, and where he would eventually find her. He even knew the fastest way from Los Angeles to South Carolina.
***
Alexander glanced out the side at the Great Plains sprawling below in vast green and tan squares. It was a clear day, great for flying.
Ashleigh was beside him, catching up on the newspapers she'd downloaded to her Kindle before takeoff. She was keeping tabs on Eddie Brazer's campaign. It looked like the love-charmer intended to make the congressman her pet and her stepping stone, and naturally she was doing a fine job of it. He hated the charmer, but he respected her. You had to respect her, or you could find yourself with a poisoned dagger in your back.
For that matter, the plague-bringer had stabbed Alexander in the back, too, after he'd gone to all the trouble of saving her life and then waking her up to her own past lives. That had been a complicated, multi-stage process, which required her to get in touch with her power, just when she'd decided to never use it again.
So, step one had been to make Jenny use the pox in self-defense. He'd arranged that by having Jenny and Kisa attacked in the city, by a couple of toughs who had been instructed to kidnap and rape the two girls. They'd been paid a lump of cash and told that the attack was meant to be a “message” to somebody. Alexander had assumed that nobody would get too far with trying that on Jenny. And it had worked.
Then, step two: have Jenny kill someone out of vengeance. That was easy enough. Alexander had Manuel kill Kisa and her brothers, and one of Manuel's people picked up a random man from the barrio to blame for the crime. Jenny had killed an innocent man, but the most important thing was that she'd done it out of anger instead of self-defense, putting her in closer touch with who she really was.
Step three: once she was loosened up, blow the doors off her mind with the psychedelics. The more memories she could access, the more like herself she could become.
Step four had been to have Jenny kill someone in cold blood. Unfortunately, the healer had acted with greater speed, intelligence, and resourcefulness than Alexander had predicted, so Alexander had attempted to combine step four with step five: have Jenny kill the healer.
If she'd done that, it would have severed Jenny and Seth's connection for this lifetime. More importantly, it would drive a wedge through the strange, eerily human relationship they'd been forming in their last few lives. They'd spent so long incarnating as humans that they were close to going native, letting their humanity overtake their ancient nature. They were like wolves who'd stalked the sheep until they believed they were sheep themselves.
Instead, she'd betrayed him and left with the healer. For that, he would have to make her suffer. Alexander smiled.
“What are you thinking about?” Ashleigh asked. She was giving him a coy, flirty smile, which he knew better than to trust. He kept his gloves on for a reason.
“How much I look forward to destroying those two,” Alexander said. “I like your ideas. We're going to use them.”
“See, I can be useful.” She leaned closer to him and laid her hand on his arm, her smile faltering a little when she realized it was completely covered by his jacket sleeve. “We would make a powerful alliance, wouldn't we, Alexander? The world would be ours.”
“We've tried it before, my sweet little charmer,” he said. “We always end up trying to kill each other.”
“We could try it again.” She gave him another coy smile, and now he felt a sudden surge of desire for her. He hated her. She fascinated him. He wanted to take her to bed, dominate the powerful little bitch, but he'd already made the mistake of trying that in past lives. Not this time.
“We'll see,” Alexander said, and she pulled back, frowning and staring at him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“This seems like such a bad idea,” Jenny said, as Seth parked Jenny's Lincoln on the street a few houses down from their destination, a two-story brick house surrounded by old-growth trees. They were in the Virginia Highlands, an upscale neighborhood in Atlanta not far from the CDC.
“She owes me,” Seth said. He turned off the car, but he didn't seem to be in a hurry to get out. “I told you about her daughter.”
“And that little girl is already healed, so this lady doesn't really have a reason to help you now.”
“Except gratitude.”
“That's a lot to hope for.”
“And I made her promise.”
“So everything depends on her keeping her promises,” Jenny said. “Great.”
“Let's see what she says.” Seth got out of the car, and Jenny followed.