Jenny Plague-Bringer(9)

“You never know what the future may bring.” Mariella winked at her. “Thank you.” She took a long, unsettling look at Jenny’s gloves.

“Good luck to you.” Jenny was eager to close the door. The longer Mariella stood there, the more uncomfortable Jenny felt. Jenny worried Seth would show up at any moment, blowing Jenny’s lie.

“Perhaps we will meet again,” Mariella said. “Until then...” She gave a small wave as she walked toward the stairwell and elevator.

Jenny closed the door and locked it, her heart racing. The girl talking about how she’d “seen” Seth, but didn’t know his name, made her think of how she’d dreamed of Alexander for weeks before meeting him in the flesh. Of course, Mariella could have just been some psycho who’d followed Seth to see where he lived, but there was also the weird matter of the gloves, plus the intense uneasy feeling the girl had stirred in Jenny’s gut. Though it might be normal to feel concerned when a gorgeous and expensively dressed Italian girl showed up at her door, eager to find her boyfriend, this went a little deeper than that.

She didn’t think the girl was any kind of government agent, but she might be something worse...one of their kind, like Jenny and Seth, or like Ashleigh and Tommy. This was very bad. Besides Seth, Jenny had never met another one who didn’t bring her grief. Even Alexander had only pretended to love her in order to use her to enhance his own powers. Or maybe he really had felt whatever twisted thing passed for love inside him, but he’d tricked her and betrayed her. The last thing Jenny wanted was to meet another of their kind.

Mariella apparently lived in Paris, too, so this problem wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

Jenny hurried to hide the girl’s information, as well as the pregnancy tests, before Seth returned home.



* * *



“You okay? You look like you saw a ghost,” Seth said as he closed the front door behind him. “Not like a Casper-type ghost, either. More of a Headless Horseman kind.”

Jenny sat on the sofa in the living room, rereading a vampire book by Anne Rice that she’d loved as a kid. She’d always identified with Louis, the moody vampire who didn’t really want to kill anyone. Now she was staying in Paris, as Louis had for a while.

“I’m fine.” Jenny followed Seth into the kitchen, where he set his cloth grocery bag on the marble counter. He unloaded tomatoes, three kinds of cheese, and a long, crusty baguette, which had been baked very recently, judging by the delicious aroma that filled the apartment.

“You’re sure?” he asked. “Nothing happened today?”

“Sometimes you just have a bad day.”

“I’ll cook dinner, then. That’ll make you feel better.”

“Um...I doubt it. You should let me do it.” Jenny approached the stove.

“Are you questioning my cooking skills?” Seth asked. “Who poured you that awesome bowl of Chocos cereal yesterday? Tell me that.”

“You’re a master at adding milk.”

“As long you acknowledge that, I’ll let you cook. There’s pasta, there’s organic chicken...”

Jenny reached for the bottle of wine Seth had brought home, then hesitated. She could really use a glass just now, but the idea of drinking while pregnant bothered her. It was ridiculous. One night, she knew, she would wake up to find her thighs painted with blood and gore, and that would be the end of that. There was no reason to worry about the well-being of a fetus destined to die from the pox. Still, she resisted her desire for a drink.

“There’s really nothing wrong?” Seth twisted the corkscrew. “Something feels different today, doesn’t it?”

Jenny worried what he meant by that. Those of her kind who had powerful emotional bonds with each other, positive or negative, could sometimes sense and be drawn to each other. Alexander had become aware of Jenny’s location the night she flared up and killed the mob in Fallen Oak.

Now, this strange girl had found her way to Seth...and Seth might be feeling her energy, too.

“Just a regular, boring day,” Jenny said.

“Then tell me what’s on your mind.” He started to pour her a glass of wine, then gave her a puzzled look when she shook her head.

“I was just thinking about past lives,” Jenny told him. That was one topic guaranteed to lose Seth’s interest right away. He only had random fragments of past-life memories, and they were wicked enough that he didn’t want to learn more. He would usually change the subject immediately.

“What were you thinking about?” Seth asked. “Were we raping and pillaging our way across the ancient world or something?”