“That’s cool,” he finally said. “Who wants a bunch of kids, anyway? I’d hate to bring some poor little Jonathan Seth Barrett the Fifth into the world. Screw my great-grandfather and his overused name. Screw Alexander. I mean, you did, right? You totally screwed my great-grandfather.”
“It’s so gross when you put it that way. He was reincarnated.”
“It’s gross any way you put it. Or anywhere you put it,” Seth added, raising his eyebrows a couple of times.
Jenny elbowed him in the stomach, and he countered by tickling her ribs until she stood up and escaped, squealing. He ran to catch her, spun her back, kissed her under a tall old linden tree, its heart-shaped leaves blazing with the fiery colors of their slow autumn death.
Things would settle now, Jenny knew. They would drop any talk of marriage and children, continue on into le Jardin des Plantes, a sprawling 28-acre botanical garden that had been carefully developed over the past four centuries. Jenny particularly loved the old labyrinth maze and the garden with hundreds of different breeds of roses. She liked to pass close to the garden of bees and birds, but she never walked through it out of fear that some friendly feathered creature would land on her and die.
As they walked through the rich colors of the park, Jenny felt unsettled and a little sick. No bacteria or virus could survive the pox long enough to make her ill, but the pox did nothing to protect her against worry, fear, and guilt. She could feel her stomach clenching.
The past year had been too good to believe, aside from the lack of any contact with her father. After she’d unleashed the pox on the mob in Fallen Oak, leaving hundreds dead, her father didn’t seem to want much contact with her, anyway.
She and Seth were young, flush with money and living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, drinking in art and culture every day. They had an apartment only blocks from the Seine, in a district full of theaters and nightclubs. They ate masterfully prepared French meals and drank the best wines.
Life in Paris hadn’t exactly turned Seth into a poet, but he had his hobbies. One of them was volunteering at hospitals around the city, particularly children’s hospitals, where he would spread his healing touch. He didn’t do any dramatic mass healing that would risk attention, but he helped them quietly. He’d touched thousands by now, making his anonymous, angelic way around Paris while she stayed in their apartment, played records, and tried to create art.
“Our life here is too good,” Jenny said. “It’s like riding a magic carpet.”
“What’s wrong with magic carpets?”
“There’s nothing holding them up. The magic could stop anytime...and then you fall.”
Chapter Three
Senator Junius Mayfield, of the great state of Tennessee, great-uncle of one officially dead boy named Jonathan Seth Barrett IV, smoked a cigar as he reclined in an antique Federal-style divan embellished with hand-tooled scrollwork and curving arms. The divan was from an age when Americans made things, Junius thought. The timber had probably been cut in Virginia and carved by a master craftsman, an American with the skill and industry to do more than drool in front of some computer screen all day.
The divan was like the senator: old, creaky, so far out of fashion as to be comical. Just waiting for the inevitable crack, the day it transformed from a valuable antique into scrap wood.
Junius smoked his cigar and sipped a glass of fifty-year-old Scotch in the candle-lit suite of a very exclusive hotel. “Hotel” wasn’t the proper word for this establishment, located in an old Greek Revival mansion just outside the District of Columbia, but that was the polite word for it.
A well-endowed young lady with blond hair, pretty as a fashion model, was handcuffed to one of the four high posters of the antique bed. She wore bits of white ribbon and lace in her hair, like a bride, and she had recently become topless. She knelt on the bed, still dressed in her lacy white panties and silk stockings. The straps of a leather scourge lashed across her backside, and she bounced forward against the poster and cried out.
The scourge was wielded by a dark-haired woman in a black mask that hid her eyes, black leather lingerie, and high stiletto heels. Their costumes clearly divided into them into good girl and bad girl, angel and devil.
“Please,” the blond girl in white lace begged. “Please, stop!”
The girl in the black mask gave her a cruel smile and lashed her again.
Junius himself would watch from the divan, too old to indulge himself like he used to. He was more of a watcher now. Junius would take in this little tableau, then straighten his tie and attend yet another fundraiser dinner, eating gray chicken while pumping defense contractors for extra campaign cash. From one whorehouse to another, but Junius would be switching roles.