Same old, same old.
Junius watched quietly as the masked girl spanked the blond girl, against the blond’s pretended struggles and protests. The blond girl wriggled and screeched as her cheeks were smacked red, and then the masked girl reached between her legs and stroked her. The blond girl’s head turned toward Junius as she cried out in pleasure, real or pretended.
The blow came from nowhere, striking Junius just behind his left eye. He’d been kicked by a horse once, as a boy on his father’s farm, and the feeling was similar. This kick might have been from an invisible ghost horse, something from an old Indian tale.
After it hit him, the world dimmed and half his body turned numb. For a moment, all Junius could see was the preacher at the scrapwood mountain church he’d attended with his grandparents, a sweaty, bug-eyed man slapping the pulpit and shouting about fornication and hellfire. Then that faded, too, gone like a flash of lightning.
A thin, dark drop of blood crept out from his left nostril, making its gradual way toward his dry, wrinkled lips.
The esteemed gentleman from Tennessee slumped down in the divan, inch by inch. The candle-lit room grew darker and darker around him.
The two girls on the bed, caught up in their performance, didn’t notice anything strange until he toppled out of the divan and crumpled to the floor. The whiskey glass dropped from his hand, sloshing aged Scotch onto the 19th-century Khotan rug, followed by his burning cigar. He was vaguely aware of the sound of two shouting girls, and he wasn’t aware of much after that.
Chapter Four
Jenny was pregnant.
The little plastic stick from the home pregnancy test insisted it was true. Since this was the third kit she’d bought today, she was starting to believe them. They all came back the same: oui. Pregnant.
She looked at herself in the mirror. Pale little Jenny Mittens, murderer of hundreds. Thousands, if you counted past lives, and maybe it was more like tens of thousands. There was no way to know. She had slain an army or two, brought down cities, wiped out tribes to make way for empires. Her kind had always seen the human world as a kind of board game, like chess or Risk. Most humans were pawns, dumb as animals, to be conquered, killed, or ruled according to the turns of the game.
Jenny didn’t see things that way anymore, and neither did Seth. They’d learned from life after life of being human, feeling love and pain. They’d let the fleshly experience change their dark and ancient souls, something most of their kind chose to resist. For good reason, Jenny thought. Love and compassion opened entire new avenues of potential suffering.
She washed her hands in the big marble bowl sink, rubbing them again and again with a jasmine-scented ball of soap. She kept washing them long after any pee from the pregnancy test was obviously rinsed away. The steaming hot water provided a sensation strong enough to distract her from the thoughts spinning inside her mind.
“I can’t be pregnant,” Jenny said to her reflection. “Right?”
Her blue eyes stared back at her.
“We know we can’t do this,” Jenny said. She imagined herself speaking to that strange primordial part of herself, her own soul, that had incarnated as human again and again. “It won’t survive. There’s nothing we can do. So...no reason to tell Seth about it, right? This will just take care of itself, whether I want it to or not. Right?”
Her reflection offered no wisdom. It was just the image of a girl with a frightened face.
The sound of bells chimed through the apartment, announcing someone at the front door.
Jenny absolutely didn’t feel like speaking to anyone at this moment—she was in a state of shock, and she could feel the confused flood of emotions waiting to crash in on her.
Still, she left the bathroom, walked out through their sumptuous bedroom and expansive, sunlit living room with a picture window and a balcony overlooking the boulevard below. Her bare feet sounded oddly loud in her ears, slapping against the dark oak floor.
The doorbell rang again. Jenny looked through the peephole lens, but she didn’t recognize the girl outside. The apartment building had a full-time security staff, so the only way the girl could be inside the building was if she was a resident or an approved visitor. Jenny guessed the girl was visiting someone else, but had accidentally approached the wrong door.
Jenny stepped back. The girl would surely double-check the apartment number and realize her mistake. There were three other apartments on the same floor.
Jenny decided to return to the small extra bedroom she used as a studio, play a record, and resume her latest attempt at making art. Then she decided to wait until the strange girl left, since playing the record would make it obvious that she was home.