Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (36 page)

“This doesn't make any sense,” Heather said.
“You'd need a truck to carry all these. There must be
witnesses.”

“There must be,” Nolan agreed. “But the
police are spread a little thin tonight, with all the crazy hippies
tearing up the city. Thank the Lord we have so many state and
federal folks here. Almost like somebody knew a big mess was
coming.”

Schwartzman looked at Heather with a slight
smile at the corner of his mouth.

“Do we have any more incidents like this?”
Heather asked.

“If we do, it'll come over the police band
and we'll let you know directly,” Nolan said. “Now, seeing as how
this is mostly a case of theft and vandalism, do y'all mind if we
scoop these folks up and get them back in the fridge? There's a
City Council member lives in this neighborhood, and it's best to
keep things tidy.”

Schwartzman glanced at Heather, and she
shrugged.

“It doesn't seem like we're needed here,”
Heather said. “Do what you need to do.”

As they walked away, Schwartzman whispered to
Heather, “I guess your ass is covered. Not the event you were
expecting, but nobody's going to complain about the National Guard
being put on alert now.”

“Who cares about my ass?” Heather asked.
“This thing gets weirder and weirder. I still think we need to find
Jenny Morton.”

“The cops already have an APB for her,”
Schwartzman said. “And the Guardsmen are rolling in. This city will
be locked up tight. We'll find her.”

“I hope you're right,” Heather said. “The
idea of Jenny running wild out there scares the hell out of
me.”

Darcy dozed on the nice comfy bed, waiting
for the angels to return, until she heard the sudden pounding on
the door. Her eyes drifted open, and she turned her head toward the
racket.

“I’m sleepin’,” she whispered.

A keycard thunked into the lock and the door
popped open. A man with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing a
seersucker suit with a brass name plate at the lapel, stepped into
the room, accompanied by a large black man in gray coveralls and a
work belt full of tools.

“Excuse me,” the mustached man said. “Are you
the only one here?”

“Me?” Darcy asked.

“Yes, you, thank you.”

“It’s just me. Until the angels come
back.”

The two men shared a worried look.

“Ma’am,” the man said. “I am Pervical
Daughtrey, the manager of The Mandrake House.”

“Hi,” Darcy said. She gave him a warm smile.
She was still feeling so good from when the angel touched her.

“Yes,” he said. “This is extremely
unfortunate news, but it seems this room has been charged to a
stolen credit card.”

“Oh,” Darcy said. “Really?”

“Yes,” the manager said. “Really, ma’am. It
was recently reported stolen by its owner, whose credit card
provider then forwarded the information to us, as you can imagine.
Now, if you would be so kind as to surrender Mr. Morris Metcalf’s
credit card to me, and then I will need you to vacate this room
immediately, I’m afraid.”

“Morris Metcalf’s my dad,” Darcy said.

“Oh, I see.” His forehead wrinkled briefly.
“Would you mind showing me some identification?”

“It’s in my purse.” Darcy sat up and pointed
at the empty chair. “Wait. It was right there.”

The hotel manager looked at the empty chair.
“Where, ma’am?”

“Oh. Shoot.” Darcy looked around the room,
but she didn’t see it anywhere. “I think that Mexican angel might
have taken it.”

“A Mexican angel took your purse?” the
maintenance guy asked.

“Yeah. But they’re coming back. They’ve only
been gone a minute. Or maybe an hour. I forget. They’ll be back,
though.”

“Ma’am, if you cannot provide identification,
I’m very sorry to say that you must come down to my office, where
you can wait for the police,” the hotel manager said.

“Police?” Darcy was getting worried now. This
sounded serious. The golden fog over her mind began to lift. “Wait.
My purse has to be somewhere.” Darcy heaved herself to her feet and
looked around the room. She checked under the bed, and in the
bathroom. “It has to be.”

“There is also the matter of the quite
sizable bill you’ve accumulated,” the hotel manager said. “Upwards
of nineteen hundred dollars. Given the circumstances, I am afraid
my employers would require me to accept only cash.”

“I don’t have money like that!”

“Then perhaps you should not have chosen The
Mandrake House for accommodations in Charleston. I must insist you
come now and wait for the police.”

Darcy moved to gather her things, but she
didn’t seem to have any. No purse, no suitcase. And how had she
ended up in Charleston, anywho? Where were those people who claimed
to be angels?

Darcy didn’t understand what was going on,
but clearly she was in big bunches of trouble.

Ashleigh held tight to Tommy as his bike
roared up I-26, the fastest route out of Charleston and away from
the whole mess. A convoy of green trucks, the National Guard,
flowed into the city on the inbound lanes of the interstate.

She felt exhilarated. Seth had escaped a bit
faster than she’d wanted, but besides that, the night had gone
extremely well. She knew how Jenny would react once she got
cornered. Ashleigh just hoped the scientists got her captured
before the soldiers caught up with her. They could keep Jenny
locked up and out of Ashleigh’s way for years and years, maybe for
the rest of this lifetime, if she was lucky.

And poor little Seth would be all alone, too.
Ashleigh wished she really had killed him, but it just hadn’t been
in the cards tonight.

Best of all, any trouble would stick to Darcy
Metcalf, not to her. She was just Esmeralda Medina Rios, the lovely
girl from California who’d stayed in the background and kept her
hands clean of everything.

And Tommy wasn’t so bad. He was very
acceptably attractive, and she understood how to use him. He was
frustrating because he could resist her power. But he wasn’t the
brightest bulb, and she had fragments of several lifetimes of
memories over him. She could press buttons he didn’t even know he
had.

His power made him extremely useful, and it
even amplified her own. They had conquered empires together, here
and there across space and time.

She held him tighter. It was good to be alive
again, without all the hassle of gestation and birth and infancy.
She had a nice new body she actually enjoyed, a new identity, and
the whole future ahead of her.

Ashleigh began to think over her options.

Alexander drove only a mile and a half before
parking outside a small airport with only one runway. He lifted her
from the car to carry her in his arms again. He left the keys
dangling in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

He opened a spiked wrought-iron gate with a
keycard, and then carried her inside, toward the long hangar
building.

“I think I’d rather walk now,” she said.

“As you like.” Alexander set her down.

“Where are you really taking me?”

“I have a place down in Mexico,” he said.
“Near the beach. Good spot to lay low for a while, let your trail
get cold. Let them run out of steam.”

“For how long?”

“Weeks. Months. It’s the only safe choice.”
He opened a small door at the end of the hangar with the
keycard.

“I can’t do that. My dad…”

“He’s going to be fine. I told you.”

“But I have to let him know I’m okay. And
Seth. Well, maybe not Seth, but at least my dad.”

“You can send him a postcard,” Alexander
said. “Tell him you’re in Chicago, or Seattle. I can have somebody
mail it for you. But that’s it. You’ve got Homeland Security all
over you right now.”

“Okay…” Jenny started walking again. He
waited to walk alongside her.

“It’ll be nice,” he said. “You like the
beach, right?”

“There’s too many people.”

“Not at my place. There’s nobody we don’t
invite.”

He led her inside the hangar, toward one of
several small aircraft. “This is us.”

Jenny stared at it. “What is that?”

“A Cessna Corvalis. A little banged up, but
it’ll get us there.”

“I didn’t mean…we’re taking a plane? To
Mexico?” She took her hand back from him. “Who’s going to fly
it?”

He smirked and opened the plane’s right-hand
door. “Come on. I’ll give you a boost.” He held out his hand.

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“What? These things are easy,” he said. “You
should have seen my first plane. Didn’t even have an enclosed
cockpit. Pilot’s chair was just a splintery board.”

“How old are you?”

“In this lifetime, or adding them all
up?”

“Do you remember other lives?” Jenny asked.
“Besides Greece?”

“I remember them all.” He pointed inside the
plane. “We have to go. You’re the one in a rush, not me. Nobody’s
looking for me, not on this side of the border.”

“Okay.” Jenny looked at him carefully. It
made sense that the Tommy guy could give a whole crowd a panic, and
clearly Alexander’s power lay in another direction. He had come to
save her. He didn’t seemed concerned about Seth at all—but Jenny
wasn’t too concerned, either. He seemed to be doing pretty well for
himself.

She knew from her dreams that Alexander had
been good to her in the past, and that he understood her. It was
thrilling to discover another person she could touch, but it also
meant she had no real power over him. If he was taking her into a
trap, it wouldn’t be easy to escape him. Especially when all her
major bones felt like broken glass.

“We have a good doctor there,” Alexander
said. “He’ll take care of your injuries.”

“I usually heal up pretty good,” Jenny said.
“Never needed a doctor.”

“You took a pretty bad beating.”

“When will you bring me back home?” she
asked.

“When it’s safe.”

“Who decides when it’s safe?”

“You and me.” He smiled. “Jenny, you can
trust me. We’ve known each other a long time, and you know that.”
He touched her cheek again. She did like how that felt, but it was
completely different from Seth. Seth’s touch soothed and calmed
her. Alexander’s made her feel electrified and powerful.

“Okay.” She took his hand from her cheek and
grasped it tight. “Help me up.”

He boosted her up into the cockpit and closed
the door.

While the hangar door lifted in front of her,
Jenny studied the interior of the plane. It was snug in here,
almost like a car. Her palms sweated and her guts knotted up. She
had never been in an airplane before, and the idea scared her
now.

Alexander climbed into the seat to her left
and closed the door.

“I think I saw some OxyContin in here.”
Alexander opened a console between the seats and handed her a brown
pill bottle.

“What are these?” Jenny asked.

“Painkillers.”

“Oh, awesome.” Jenny unscrewed the cap and
tapped one of the red pills into her palm. She swallowed it,
hesitated a moment, then took a second one. “Why do you have
these?”

“I don’t know.” He started up the plane and
eased it out the hangar door. “I share this plane with a few
different friends. Somebody must have left it.”

Jenny leaned back in her seat and watched out
the window as the plane crawled to the runway. The night was
already too unreal, too scary—her dad, then Seth, then the riot…and
now flying away with someone from her dreams.

“What’s it like?” Jenny asked.

“Mexico?”

“Flying.”

“It’s great. You’ll like it.” He took her
hand for a moment, and she felt his power flow into her, as if he
were intentionally pushing it. She grew much more confident, like
she could do anything. And get away with it, too.

“Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s fly away to
Mexico.”

“That’s my girl.” Alexander talked briefly
with the control tower over his headset.

He steered it onto the runway, then held the
brakes while firing up the engines. The craft rumbled around her,
and Jenny clenched the armrests tight.

Then the plane surged forward along the
runway, rapidly picking up speed, and Jenny felt pushed back into
her seat. She was trembling, and her breaths came short and
fast.

The plane jostled her up and down as it shot
along the runway, and her teeth chattered together. Then the wheels
left the ground and the ride became smooth, though it felt
dangerously steep to her. Jenny’s heart kicked as she watched the
ground drop away below. There was nothing holding them up now. It
was like magic.

She watched out the window as the lights of
Charleston dropped away on one side. She could see a lot of
flickering blue lights there, and a column of National Guard
unpacking from their trucks, but they were soon too small and
distant to discern.

“Can we really just go to Mexico?” Jenny
asked. “Don’t we have to show our passports or something?”

“That is the law,” Alexander said. “But there
are plenty of ways around it, usually involving cash. Or a new
black Denali, like the one I just left somebody as a gift.”

“Flying isn’t so bad.” Jenny gazed out over
the moonlit ocean. “I think I liked the lift-off part, too.”

“It’s a perfect night for flying,” he said.
“The Gulf’s calm, the moon’s out…”

She looked at him. “What else do you remember
about the past?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Do you remember me?”

“I remember you more than anything. Hundreds
of lifetimes together. We’re always drawn back to each other. Our
powers do that.” He touched her arm through a huge gash the mob had
torn in her sleeve, and she felt the dark sizzle of electricity
between them. “We make each other stronger.”

“But Seth is my opposite,” Jenny said. She
was feeling a little confused. Maybe the pain drugs were already
kicking in. “Right? That’s how we always thought of it.”