Jenny Plague-Bringer(119)

He hurried out, leaving the lights on behind him.





Chapter Thirty-Eight




Jenny tossed and turned, trying to sleep while terrified screams blasted at full volume into her cell. For days, they’d kept the volume of the screams maxed out, on and on without a break, while all Jenny could see were the huge glowing images of people she had killed. The light from the screen illuminated only the furniture from her old room.

She was sick and shivering, sweaty and unable to eat. The baby felt agitated inside her, day and night, probably because of the screaming and the lack of sleep.

She was desperate to see Seth, desperate to escape this place, desperate for just a few minutes of silence....She’d been studying her situation carefully, and she didn’t see how she could escape, especially when she couldn’t use the pox without harming the baby. She could easily get herself jolted or shot dead by a guard. If she was going to try anything, it would have to be after the baby was born.

Jenny lay on her side and pressed the thin hospital-style pillow down over her ear, trying to shut out the recorded screams.



* * *



Guards in gas masks came for Juliana in her cell, all of them faceless and anonymous behind their big glass eyes. They gagged her and fitted a leather noose around her throat, and then another one at each wrist. The leather loops were affixed to the ends of long poles so the guards could move her head and arms from a distance, as though she were a marionette puppet.

Strangely, they didn’t take her to the lab, but up a level to the residential halls near her old room. They carried her through a locked pair of double doors, into a corridor she’d never seen, and into a room that was neither a prison cell nor a dormitory room. It was lavish, like a suite at a grand hotel, with deeply cushioned furniture, art on the walls, candles, a rug so thick her feet sank into it. Juliana looked more than a little out of place here. Since they’d moved her down to the cell, her only clothes were prison wear—a drab gray dress with no buttons, zippers or ties, no underwear at all, and only thin, cheap slippers that hardly insulated her feet from the cold concrete floor.

“Whose room is this?” she asked, but none of the guards offered an answer. They departed, locking her inside. She wondered if this had to do with her being pregnant. Nobody had spoken to her about it since—there had only been guards, shoveling her food under her door twice a day. Evelina was her only real contact with other people, and they kept their conversations through the vents short and whispered, uncertain whether the guards could hear them.

Juliana stood in the middle of the room, crossed her arms, and waited. She summoned the plague inside her, preparing to lash out if attacked.

In time, the door opened again, and she gaped as Jonathan Barrett entered the room, grinning at her, his dark eyes already drawing her in. She froze where she was, wrapping her arms more tightly against herself, not sure why he was here or what he wanted.

“Juliana,” he said. “You’re even more beautiful than last time I saw you. How is that possible?”

Juliana doubted it. Her long hair was stringy and greasy, because the guards hadn’t hosed her down in a few days, which was the closest she got to a bath. Her breasts hung loose and floppy inside her shapeless dress, and her belly was starting get larger, though her pregnancy wasn’t obvious yet.

Juliana looked past him to the gas-masked guards, trying to figure out what was happening. Barrett gave them a nod and they closed the door, locking the two of them inside together.

“Mr. Barrett,” Juliana said. “You have to get us out of here. They won’t let us leave, we’re prisoners. I haven’t seen Sebastian in weeks. I don’t even know if he’s still here...or still alive...” She bit her lip and tried to not to sob. She forced herself to look calm. “You’ll take us back home, won’t you?”

“Sh.” Barrett took her hands, and his touch filled with her a throbbing, electric energy. She was surprised her hair didn’t stand up on her head. While Sebastian’s touch was warm and gentle, like afternoon sunlight, Barrett’s touch felt like needles of lightning. She gasped a little, still not used to touching anyone at all. “I came for you,” he whispered.

Juliana trembled, trying not to succumb to the confused whirl of feelings he brought up inside her. She couldn’t understand why she reacted so strongly to a man she knew so little.

“To free me?” she whispered.

“I’ve thought of you every night since you left,” Barrett said, his dark eyes burning into her. “The last glimpse I had of you, standing on the deck of the boat, so bright in the sun, your hair blown by the ocean wind...” He stroked her hair, then his fingers caressed the back of her head. She found herself gaping up at him, not sure whether to squirm away or give in to the urge to wrap her arms around him, bury her face in his neck and draw out all the comfort he had to offer.