Alexander Death (The Paranormals, Book 3) (27 page)

“Bitch!” he snapped.

Ashleigh grabbed the lamp on Esmeralda’s bedside table. She swung it around, cracking the ceramic base into the side of Tommy's face. Then she drew it back and slammed it into his nose, breaking off a chunk of the lamp's base. She hit him again and again, staying close while he tried to back away. When the base of the lamp was completely broken, she swung the lamp like a baseball bat, denting the aluminum tube of its body against Tommy's jaw.

He knocked the lamp aside, grabbed the front of her shirt and raised his fist.

“Don't hurt me, Tommy!” Ashleigh screamed, in what she hoped sounded like Esmeralda's voice.

Tommy hesitated. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth, and one of his eyes was swelling up. Ashleigh knew he would be feeling conflicted, between his desire to punish Ashleigh and his affection for Esmeralda.

“If you hurt me, Esmeralda will stop loving you,” Ashleigh said in a low, calm voice. “You know she will.”

Tommy let go of her and lowered his fist. He sank to the bed. “I just want her back. And I want you gone.”

“Aren't you a sweetheart?” Ashleigh picked up the box of clothes again. “You're going to get half your wish right now.”

She turned her back on him and walked out of the bedroom. Esmeralda's mother was hurriedly cleaning the kitchen. She ran up to Ashleigh.

“You must get that evil boy out of here,” she said to Ashleigh, in Spanish. “It is like living with the devil.”

“Too bad,” Ashleigh said. She nudged the older woman aside, and she walked out the front door.

Jenny watched as Alexander's men assembled the row of wood and cloth dummies near the crumbling back wall of the compound, towards the ocean.

“I haven't used these modern guns before,” Alexander said, nodding to the row of zombies with AK-47s at their feet. “They say these AKs are the easiest machine guns to use.”

“So easy a zombie could do it?” Jenny asked.

“I hope so.” He touched her hand. “When your power is feeding mine, I could probably get them to dance a ballet, if I wanted to.”

“That would just be grotesque,” Jenny said.

“I thought you liked grotesque,” he said, and Jenny smiled.

It had been about two months since her awakening. She understood how much she and Alexander belonged together, how many lifetimes they had spent as companions and lovers since learning to incarnate in human flesh. Her recent attachment to the healer was almost certainly a trick by the love-charmer. The healer had served the charmer since their earliest incarnations among the primates of this world.

Her recent time with Alexander had been the most delightful in this entire incarnation. She had cast aside the mask of poor little Jenny Morton and become her true, ancient self, to whom human life was just an amusing game. Her senses seemed sharper, her ability to experience pleasure greatly enhanced. They had attended concerts and plays in San Cristobal, a beautiful city with several centuries' worth of European-style architecture and a population of expatriate artists and dilettantes from around the world. She no longer feared cities at all—it was others who needed to fear her, after all. Jenny was learning to enjoy life without fear.

She'd also ditched the jeans-and-sneakers look, insisting on fashions imported from Italy and France, and jewelry to match. Alexander was happy to indulge her resurrected sense of taste and style, honed over the millennia.

“Let's give them a try,” Alexander said. He clasped his hand tight around hers, and Jenny felt the dark energy flowing from her into him.

Ten zombies stepped forward, picked up their AK-47s, and fired at the wooden dummies. Some of them were firing wild, their bullets chipping at the rock wall or sailing away over the ocean. Alexander looked at each one in turn, making them adjust their stances and grips until they were shooting at the targets. The bullets sliced the dummies to pieces.

Alexander raised a hand, and they all stopped firing, their dead eyes expressionless.

“What do you think?” Jenny asked.

“Much better than muskets,” Alexander said. “Imagine trying to get them all to clean, reload, add powder. This is just point and shoot.”

“How many can you control at once?”

“I could do thousands of them, with a little practice. And calories, lots and lots of calories. Are you hungry yet?”

“We just ate an hour ago. How far do you plan to conquer this time?”

“Conquest is slippery in the modern world. A mass of soldiers can be bombed from the sky. We will construct our empire with bribery, diplomacy and deception, as well as fear and force. Our immortals will only be one part of the strategy.”

“And what great monument to your vanity will you leave behind?”

Alexander smiled. “Perhaps it will be a great monument to your beauty.”

“Beauty is not my strong point in this lifetime.”

“I disagree.” He drew her close and kissed her.

“
Alejandro
,” a man said. “We must talk.”

Jenny saw Ernesto Calderon, the big boss's nephew, crossing the lawn, his usual entourage of gunmen in tow. Ernesto, she'd learned, was the regular contact between Alexander in Chiapas and Papa Calderon in Tijuana, hundreds of miles away.

Alexander released Jenny. “Then let's talk.”

“Privately.” Ernesto glanced at Jenny.

“One second, Jenny.” Alexander kissed her again before going into the house with Ernesto.

Ernesto's gunmen lingered behind, looking at the corpses holding their AK-47s, and then at the shattered targets.

“Where did you get these men?” one of them whispered to Jenny. “They look...strange.”

“They look strange because they are dead,” Jenny said. “The bodies are swept up from the streets of Juarez.”

“How do you make them walk?” he asked.

Jenny held up a hand. Bloody lesions opened all over her fingers and palm. “Come closer, and I will make you into one of them. Then you will understand.”

One of the men crossed himself, and all three backed away toward the main house.

“Come on,” Jenny said. She stalked toward them, letting more blisters open on her face and throat. “Doesn't anyone want to try?”

The men ran inside the house, whispering the word
bruja
to each other, and Jenny laughed at the terrified looks on their faces.

***

In his office, Alexander poured a small glass of local mezcal for Ernesto, then another for himself. They sat on facing couches.

“How was your trip from Ciudad de Mexico?” Alexander asked.

“I am always traveling.” Ernesto shook his head and sipped his mezcal. “It seems the whole country is full of people I must see.”

“That's why I like it down here. Summer all year, the beach, not many people around.”

“Except for the dead.”

“The dead never make problems. Nice and quiet.”

“The girl? Does she seem trustworthy?”

“She is. We could not accomplish so much without her.”

“And my uncle is pleased with the size and speed of the harvest,” Ernesto said. “He wanted me to convey this.”

“Is that the reason for your visit today?”

“No.” Ernesto sipped mezcal again. “This is good.”

“It's made about twenty miles from here.”

“There is a man you must meet,” Ernesto said. “Felix Arellano Francisco.”

“And he is...?”

“Among many things, an agent with CISEN.”

Alexander raised his eyebrows. The Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, or CISEN, was the country's intelligence agency, the Mexican equivalent of the CIA. “Is he investigating us?”

Ernesto laughed. “He is an important friend. He keeps several units of the Mexican military friendly to us.”

“He hands out bribes for us.”

Ernesto smiled. “We wish to keep him as a close friend.”

“Then what does he want with me?”

“Only to speak.”

“About what?”

“He says it is personal.”

“I've never heard of him before,” Alexander said. “How can it be personal?”

“You will have to ask him yourself. Do not upset him.”

“But you're certain we can trust him?”

“I am not certain of that with anyone. Least of all government agents. Or sorcerers who use the witchcraft to raise the dead. But we all do what we must.”

Alexander nodded. “Tell me where to meet him.”

Seth rode in Heather's car all the way to Atlanta. If he hadn't been groggy, tired and more than a little hung over, he might have driven separately, but he was already struggling to keep his eyes open.

He didn't trust the doctor, but she had showed him pictures of her daughter Tricia, including a couple of cell phone pictures of the tiny girl wasting away in the hospital. Heather did seem desperate. If this was a trap, they'd put it together very well.

He'd already asked if Heather knew where to find Jenny, but Heather claimed nobody knew.

Seth watched the mile markers and cow pastures whip by—Heather was really pressing the gas pedal. She didn't speak much, just stared at the road. Her radio was tuned to NPR, which had a very long report about a struggling sweater factory in New Hampshire.

“What's it like?” Heather asked, after a long period of silence.

“What's what like?” Seth opened his eyes.

“Healing people.”

“It's draining,” Seth said. “I get hungry and tired.”

“But how does it feel, knowing you can do that?”

“It feels like I'm a freak.”

“That's all?”

“No, it's not all!” he snapped. “I have to worry about people finding out.”

“Would that be so bad? You could heal lots of people—”

“—until someone like you comes along and wants to lock me up somewhere so you can study me. Then I couldn't help anyone.”

Heather was quiet for a minute. “And what about Jenny killing those people in your town? How do you feel about that? You think that's okay?”

“You weren't there,” Seth said. “It was a lynch mob. They were trying to kill her. They killed me.”

Heather looked at him.

“I got better,” Seth said. That was Jenny's usual comment, when she talked about how she and Seth had died and come back the night of Easter. “They didn't kill me enough. I was able to heal. Then I had to heal her, because she was dead by then.”

“You brought her back from the dead? Like your friend at the hospital, with the zombies?”

“Not exactly. And he's not a friend. I have no idea who he is.” Seth was only lying a little bit. He suspected the zombie master was the reincarnation of his own great-grandfather, a scary and evil man. “There are others like us, you know. And you may think we're evil, but they're truly evil.”

“What others?”

“There's a guy whose touch makes you feel fear,” Seth said. “I think he might have started the riot in Charleston. And there's a girl who can make people feel love. She's the one who sent the mob against Jenny—she had the town in the palm of her hand since she was a kid. The preacher's daughter.”

“One who can make you feel love?” Heather's eyes grew distant, as if she were thinking of something. “Do you mean love, or lust?”

“That depends on how high she turns it up.”

“What's her name?”

“It doesn't matter. She's not using it anymore.”

“What does she look like?”

“She's...” Seth thought of Ashleigh, but Ashleigh's old body was dead, destroyed by the Jenny pox. Somehow, her spirit had possessed Darcy Metcalf, but now Ashleigh had left Darcy to pick up the wreckage of her life. Ashleigh might still be out there, in another body, but Seth wouldn't know what that one looked like. “I don't know,” he said.

“Are you trying to protect her, too?”

“Hell, no,” Seth said. “You can put her in a lab cage if you find her. I don't care.”

“What are you, exactly?” Heather asked.

“I'm a freshman at Charleston, a pledge at Sigma Alpha Theta, an endless source of disappointment to my parents—”

“You know what I mean.”

“I only got a glimpse of that when I was dead,” he said. “And it's hard to remember the pieces I saw. Your mind kind of works differently when it's not attached to a brain.”

Heather just stared at him.

“I can't answer the question,” Seth said. “We're born with these abilities. We reincarnate.”

Heather shook her head. Seth closed his eyes, leaned back, and listened to the NPR reporters interview the children of laid-off sweater makers.

***

Heather's daughter was at a children's hospital in Atlanta, called Egleston. She didn't say a word as they walked down the hall of the cancer ward. Seth looked into some of the rooms they passed, seeing pale, sick children slowly wasting in their beds. He felt terribly sad at the sight of them.