Jenny Plague-Bringer(151)

She closed her eyes and imagined the pox, which she’d always seen as a swarm of tiny black flies infesting her body, crawling through her stomach and veins, waiting to strike at any living thing. She imagined the flies dividing themselves into smaller flies, which divided themselves again, becoming a much larger swarm of much smaller pox.

She took it as far as she could imagine, seeing them become microscopically small, then smaller than an atom, able to pass through any kind of matter at all. The pox had a strange charge to it, a speed and energy she’d never felt before.

Jenny opened her eyes, locked her gaze on Ward’s mask, and breathed out a black plume that felt like ultra-fine silk as it flowed from her mouth. The river of liquid black punched through the center of Ward’s armor, straight into his heart, then swarmed out along his limbs and up his face, turning momentarily into a teeming black mass with Ward’s features.

Her consciousness was in the pox, just as it had been when she’d died last time. She coursed through him, ripping his flesh to threads and rotting his bones. Ward’s body sagged to the ground, his liquified remains flowing out through the gaping hole in his chest armor, his mask brimming with dark fluid where his head had been.

Ward’s two assistants raised their assault rifles toward Jenny, and she reached the swarm of pox out in each direction, burrowing through their masks and into their skulls, instantly transforming their faces into unrecognizable clumps of ulcerated tumors.

Most of the Hale Security men, seeing that their armor was no protection, broke and ran to save their own lives. A couple of them remained and tried to shoot her, and Jenny ripped through them, leaving them with decayed remnants of flesh clinging to their bones. She had an incredibly precise control over the pox, as though every spore in the swarm responded directly to her mind, something she’d never felt before.

She realized her entire mind had transferred over to the swarm. Her body had fallen to the ground, vacant of any soul, and Seth had run over. He was trying to heal her with his touch, while Esmeralda was repeatedly calling her name.

In her strange state, in the gray area between life and death, she perceived something that, clearly, none of the others saw. From Ward’s body, a great, dark mass boiled upwards like the smoke from a burning city, blotting out the stars above. Within the gigantic shape, she saw wriggling, squirming movement, like hundreds of tentacles covered in large, unblinking eyes, each tentacle tipped with a long, sharp beak for prying and digging. Her ancient enemy, the seer, most recently incarnated as Kranzler and then as Ward.

The seer moved sluggishly, still disoriented from his recent sudden death. If she moved quickly, she thought, she might be able to finish her attack.

She poured her amorphous swarm-shape into him, chewing into him in thousands of places at once, ripping apart the fabric of the exotic dark matter from which he had formed, destroying one of the last fragments of the primordial chaos. She ripped him limb by limb by limb, scattering chunks of him all across the sky, like some ancient god carved to pieces and hurled into the depths above to form a constellation. The torn fragments of him were so dark to her that the night sky beyond it was a bright gloom by contrast.

She ate into the core of him, concentrating herself into a denser swarm and surrounding what remained of him. She felt the turbulence of his pain and surprise, and a final pulse of anger so intense it seemed to burn the sky from horizon to horizon.

Then he was gone, countless little threads of dissolving energy scattered as far as she could see. She had destroyed him down to the root. The seer would not be back for them, in this lifetime or any other.

She gathered herself together and turned her attention back to Seth and Esmeralda, still kneeling over Jenny’s fallen form, Seth still trying to revive her with his power. They were safe now—the baby was safe. Ward was dead, his project erupting in flames behind them. She watched the dark, hot smoke pour from the ventilation shafts inside the walls. The mountain rumbled as the entire yard collapsed, fire and embers shooting out through the vents, as if the endurance of the structure below had somehow been connected to the seer’s soul. Or maybe the burning helicopter fuel had simply weakened some essential structure, leading to the collapse of the underground base, leaving only a smoking, rubble-filled crater behind. She would never know. She only knew that Seth and her baby were safe.

She considered it best to leave her body where it lay. The doctors had determined that the baby, Miriam, had no immunity to the pox at all. None. As long as Jenny lived, she would be the greatest threat to her daughter’s young life. Stepping aside, not returning to her body, staying dead...that was the only way to keep the baby safe from her.