With all of their kind currently dead, except for Seth and Esmeralda, the girl would not need the protection of her mother’s deadly powers...only protection from them. Jenny’s death would be the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the good of her child.
She pulled herself up and back, letting the world of the living grow dim and distant, as it did when she was between incarnations. She would rest, and she would wait.
There was one problem—it felt like a single, hair-thin thread, but stronger than steel or diamond, holding her to the earthly plane. Miriam, her little girl. She could hear Miriam crying. A part of her refused to leave the baby.
She let herself be drawn back toward the living for a moment. She looked into the baby’s face, currently gazing in awe at Seth’s chin. She looked at her own pale, lifeless body.
An insight arose in her, the result of a few lifetimes of struggling to hurt no one, as well as her intense desire to return to the only child she’d ever had in any of her lives.
Before, when moving into a developing human body still in the womb, she had spread her swarm-like soul through every cell in the body. She began to wonder now whether that was necessary. Perhaps she concentrate herself into a very small shape, hidden deep inside the core of her body until she needed the pox. It would leave her dangerously vulnerable to being attacked by others...but it would also free her to touch other living things without harming them, her deepest wish for several lifetimes now.
The plague-bringer focused herself, drawing herself inward until she was a tiny, extremely dense mass of energy. She floated down toward the unconscious body below, and she landed on Jenny Morton’s heart like a black snowflake. With a thought, she made her heart start beating again.
Jenny opened her eyes and took in a delicious breath of cool mountain air. She smiled up at Seth and the baby, feeling more at peace than she’d ever been.
Chapter Forty-Nine
In June of 1934, Jonathan Seth Barrett sat in his office in his Fallen Oak house, surrounded by the heads of of great beasts he’d killed, the African lion, the American buffalo. He stared at the telegram on his desk. Much had changed in the past year, not least the final death of Prohibition, which was why he now drank bourbon inside of Appalachian white lightning or whichever bottles of questionable, no-label rum happened to get smuggled up from the Bahamas.
Outside, the sun was white-hot, hot enough to broil shrimp on the roof. The high, narrow windows of his office were open, bringing the searing light into his study. His new electric fans churned the air but didn’t do much in the way of actually cooling the house. Only a stiff, cool breeze and a little cloud cover would accomplish that.
He struck a match printed with the name of one of his favorite speakeasies in Charleston—not a speakeasy anymore, he reminded himself, just a plain old nightclub. The world was changing, and he felt like all the adventure was draining out of it. He lit a cigar, tossing the match into the rhinoceros-foot ashtray he’d bought on his trip to Egypt years ago.
The telegram from Berlin didn’t say much, only vaguely stating that the project and all involved with it had been terminated, with a hint that further inquiries were not welcome. Many of Barrett’s long-time correspondents in the eugenics community were dropping contact as they drew behind the dark veil of Nazi secrecy. He didn’t give a holy damn. For all the money he’d donated, none of those scientists had figured out a single thing useful to him. Barrett had concluded that the eugenics folks really had no idea what the hell they were talking about.
He poured himself another tall glass of bourbon. He could read between the lines. He hadn’t needed the telegram, anyway. He’d felt it in the spring, like an earthquake shaking him from the other side of the world. Juliana was dead. The telegram, in its small way, was only a confirmation of what he knew deep inside.
He knew it because he’d begun to feel hopeless. Knowing she was in the world had expanded him, making him larger than he was, freeing him to dream bigger than he ever had before. He’d left her there out of anger, because she’d chosen the other one, the pretty blue-eyed boy with the healing touch. Her rejection had hurt him far more than he’d let on. He’d been certain that she shared his feelings, that they were truly meant for each other.
He’d assumed they would cross paths again, that fate would bring them together, but he’d been terribly, absolutely wrong. She was gone, and the world felt like a much smaller place without her.
From then on, Barrett would age much faster, and he would shrink into a bitter, hollow man with a heart like broken rock. His ambition retreated. He would settle into being a manager of his past investments, abandoning his run at becoming a global titan.