Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (22 page)

“Maybe for you.” Esmeralda put the entire
pepper in her mouth and bit it off at the stem. She gave him a
closed-mouth smile as she chewed.

“Okay,” Tommy said. He put the habanero in
his mouth and chewed.

Fire spread across his tongue, up to his nose
and down his throat. The pain filled his head, burning his
nostrils, and he wanted to run to the sink and guzzle ten gallons
of water. He didn't let her see any of this, though. He held it in
and smiled back, though he was pretty sure his face was a scalding
shade of crimson. If not purple.

“Very impressive,” Esmeralda said. “I almost
believe you aren't in agony right now.”

“It's just a pepper.”

She moved closer to him. “How long do we have
to stay with Ashleigh?”

“She says we have to stop Jenny before she
kills more people.”

“And what happens after that? Can we
leave?”

“You don't like Ashleigh?”

“She’s actually not so bad,” Esmeralda said.
“I like her more as I spend time with her. But then, when I’m alone
with you, I remember why I really came.”

“And I’m glad you did.” He slid an arm around
her, avoiding the band of exposed brown skin between the hem of her
short shirt and her low-slung jeans. She was dressing in Ashleigh’s
old clothes.

“I know you use your power against me
sometimes,” Esmeralda said. “But you don’t have to.”

“I can’t turn it off,” he said. “I don’t have
a choice.”

“I want to be with you,” she said. “I hate my
life. My job is nice, but my mother…and Pedro…” She rolled her
eyes. “I don’t stay with you because you make me. I stay because I
want to.”

“You do?”

“Yes.” She opened her beaded patchwork purse,
which was hung over a kitchen chair. She rummaged inside it, then
handed him a gold coin. “Do you remember this?”

Tommy looked at it. The head of an Indian
chief, complete with headdress, was engraved on one side, an eagle
on the other.

“I gave this to you,” he said. “I’m surprised
you haven’t sold it.”

“It makes me think of you,” she said.

He looked at her. His heart skipped in his
chest, the way it had when they were kids. She was looking up at
him with beautiful brown eyes, her hand floating close to his
waist.

“You really do remember me,” he
whispered.

“I never told about the money,” Esmeralda
said. “Even my mother. I told her I lost my power. It freed me from
that horrible work.”

“You are sneaky.” He reached a hand toward
her bare waist, but he didn’t want to touch her and fill her up
with fear. He felt extremely frustrated.

“It is okay.” Esmeralda pressed his hand to
the hot skin of her stomach. She shivered, and she sucked in a gasp
of air through her teeth, but she kept his hand there.

“I fill people with fear,” Tommy said.
“Whenever I touch them. I’ve shattered people’s minds, once or
twice. And I didn’t even mean to.”

“I know,” she said. “I can feel it. But
I…kind of like it.” She closed her eyes. “It makes me feel so
alive
.”

Tommy leaned down and kissed her. She tensed,
then pushed her face against his. She shuddered as their tongues
touched each other. She tasted like the habanero pepper, and her
kiss burned his lips and tongue.

Tommy pulled her close and held her tight
against him, and she kissed him harder. She slid both her hands to
the back of his head and curled his dark hair in her fingers.

He realized he was going to take her right
here, in the kitchen, against the counter, and he’d never wanted
anything more in his life.

A high-pitched scream pierced his eardrum.
The smoke detector, bleating its warning.

Tommy opened his eyes. Lost in each other’s
lips and hands, they hadn’t noticed the ground beef turn to a
charred black pile in the skillet, or the kitchen fill up with
smoke around them.

“Fuck!” Tommy pushed the skillet onto a cold
burner, then ran to the wall, jumped up, and slapped the smoke
detector, which was mounted on the wall near the high ceiling. It
gave a short beep as a parting shot, and then it shut up.

Esmeralda looked at the thoroughly burned
meat. She smiled at him through the smoky air.

“This is your specialty cooking?” she
asked.

“I got a little distracted.”

Esmeralda took another habanero from the jar.
“Looks like it’s vegetarian chili tonight.”

Jenny woke to the sound of Darcy
whispering.

“Huh?” Jenny said. She forced her heavy
eyelids to open.

Darcy stood in the doorway of Jenny’s bedroom
in the early morning light. Her purse was slung over her
shoulder.

“Jenny,” Darcy whispered again. “I have to go
home. My dad said I have to be home early or I’m in deep
doo-doo.”

“Christ,” Jenny sighed. She looked at the
clock. It was 6:34 a.m. on a Saturday.

“Don’t take the Lord’s name,” Darcy
whispered.

Jenny stretched her arms. Darcy had said she
didn’t like sleeping with other people, due to a certain cousin
named Heywood who used to share her bed when he visited and always
peed in his sleep. That was perfect for Jenny. She’d given Darcy
blankets and pillows to use on the couch.

“Let me get my car keys.” Jenny yawned.

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Darcy said. “It’s only
a mile or so if you go through the woods. And I feel like hiking in
the woods for a while.”

“Okay.” Jenny knew what Darcy meant—there was
nothing better than the solitude of those woods, away from
everybody. She sat up.

“It’s cool, you don’t have to get up,” Darcy
whispered. “I was just letting you know so you didn’t think I was a
disappearing spaz or something. I left you
The Return of the
King
, cause you don’t want to miss that one when you just saw
the other two! No, seriously, don’t even get out of bed. I
insist.”

“All right.” Jenny rubbed her eyes, feeling
disoriented. She’d been lost in a terrible dream, one where all the
people she’d killed were back for revenge, chasing her through a
dark tunnel somewhere. “Um, see ya, Darcy. Thanks for coming
over.”

“Thanks for inviting me,” Darcy said, though
it had really been her idea. “God bless!”

When Darcy left, Jenny dropped back into bed
and pulled the covers over her face to block the daylight. It was
way too early.

Ashleigh clomped through the woods, cursing
Darcy’s hefty body at every thudding step along the way. She felt
like an elephant lumbering through the jungle. An elephant with an
aching back.

She wasn’t really going back to Darcy
Metcalf’s house—she intended to avoid that place as much as she
could, without blowing her cover. So far, nobody seemed to have
noticed the renewed activity at the Goodling house, which was
tucked at the back of a cul-de-sac. The house to their left had
never sold, and the one on their right had been foreclosed on and
lay empty. The only other house on the cul-de-sac had belonged to
Dick Baker, the realtor/lawyer whose face was all over town, and
who had been put to a miserable death the night Jenny Mittens went
psycho.

She arrived at her house red-faced and
puffing for air, her socks squishy with sweat inside her tennis
shoes. She trudged up the front steps, staggered inside, and locked
the door behind her.

Exhausted, she crawled upstairs on her hands
and knees. She felt the baby flip around inside her.

“Fuck you, baby,” she whispered.

She glanced into the guest room, where
Esmeralda was staying, and a snarl came to her lips.

Esmeralda sure hadn’t run off. She lay in her
bed, still deep asleep. Tommy lay beside her, one arm over her
hips.

It looked like they’d done it. Tommy was
wearing only his boxers, and Esmeralda wore Ashleigh’s favorite
flannel pajama bottoms, which were polka-dotted with the Superman
logo. They were too small for Ashleigh, now that she was stuck in
Darcy’s fat, pregnant body.

Esmeralda wore a simple, thin gold chain
they’d found in Ashleigh’s mother’s jewelry box. Tommy had taken
one of the Ashleigh’s finger bones to the garage and drilled a hole
in it, and now it hung around Esmeralda’s neck, on her chest
between her bare tits.

Ashleigh looked up and down Esmeralda’s
gorgeous dark body, and she felt a sharp sting of jealousy. Tommy
was falling for her. But Tommy was Ashleigh’s opposite, her
property.

And Esmeralda was Ashleigh’s doorway to the
physical world. She had the power to kick Ashleigh right out of
Darcy’s body at any moment, and then Ashleigh wouldn’t be able to
do anything except try to get born again as an infant somewhere.
Ashleigh would forget everything again, like she did each time she
was born, and Jenny would have a long, peaceful, and possibly happy
life.

But Jenny had killed Ashleigh, and Ashleigh
wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

Besides, Jenny would be watching for Ashleigh
now. She might track Ashleigh down when Ashleigh was still a small
child and kill her all over again. Jenny had done that before, in
India, maybe two thousand years ago.

Now, Ashleigh had to worry about Tommy and
Esmeralda getting too close. A bond between them could lead, in
time, to an alliance against Ashleigh. She needed their primary
loyalties to her, not to each other. She would get to work on that,
too.

Ashleigh went to the computer in her room and
hopped on the Internet to gather up some information.

It was time to build a Jenny trap.

The same Saturday, Seth sat in a leather
armchair in the library at his house, studying for his chemistry
final. This basically meant trying to memorize some formulas and
getting a reasonably good idea of where to plug them in, once you
puzzled out the word problems. Hopefully, the information would
stick for at least the next forty-eight hours.

He heard his dad approach and he looked up.
Seth thought his dad looked unusually old today, a little more
stooped, a little more gray in his hair.

“Seth,” he said. He raised his whiskey glass,
and the single large ice cube clinked against the side as he
drank.

“What’s up, Dad? How’s it going with the dye
factory thing?”

“Not bad, really. The government paid the
bank a ridiculous compensation for use of the old factory. They
said we didn’t have to worry about EPA or anybody. Our insurers
wanted to investigate the dye factory themselves, and the
government even paid them to shut up and go away.”

“Well, that’s great!” Seth said. It meant
Jenny was in the clear, he thought, if the government was burying
the incident.

His dad looked at him, maybe a bit surprised
by the excitement in Seth’s voice.

“I mean, right?” Seth asked. “Isn’t that what
you wanted?”

“Hell of a lot better than I expected,” he
said. “Almost scary how well it’s going now. Although they’re full
of horseshit. That dye factory’s been emptier than a politician’s
heart as long as I can remember.”

“Well, if they want it to go away, and we
want it go away…” Seth said.

“No, no, I’m satisfied. I could go for a
walk. You want to go for a walk?”

“I have finals tomorrow.”

“Just take a minute.”

Seth didn’t like the sound of it. His dad was
clearly in one of his melancholy, semi-drunken moods.

He followed his dad across the back lawn,
through the blooming peach orchard where bees hummed their way from
one sweet nectar snack to the next.

Seth’s dad kept walking, on and up the far
slope. He was heading right for the family cemetery, up the
staircase of big granite slabs, toward the wrought-iron gate in the
old brick wall.

Seth trailed behind. The family cemetery was
mostly the sign of his great-grandfather’s insanity, his master
plan for his descendants. Like how the third floor of his house was
a sign of Seth’s grandfather’s insanity. There was plenty of crazy
to go around in this family.

Seth’s dad took out a key ring and unlocked
the iron gate.

“Ted Burris at the bank says he’s seen you
driving around town.” He pushed open the gate. “Says you have Jenny
Morton in your car.”

Seth sighed.

“You still dating her?” Seth’s dad stepped
inside the high brick walls of the cemetery. Inside, rows of
identical monuments marked the burial sites of Barretts past and
future. His dad walked past the blank monuments of generations to
come, back to where his grave and Seth’s had already been
carved—Jonathan Seth Barretts III and IV, their birthdays already
inscribed, years of death to be added as needed.

“This isn’t going to be that conversation
about Jenny again, is it?” Seth asked. “And how much you hate
her?”

“I don’t hate her. And this is not that
conversation. I only have one thing to say about her: Use
protection. Get her pregnant and you’ll never really shake her
loose.”

“Dad!”

“I’m not kidding. You have your fun with the
town girls if you want, just be careful. You’ll grow out of her
once you meet some decent girls at school.”

“Whatever,” Seth said. “I really care about
her. I don’t want to meet anyone else.”

“You’re young,” his dad said, in a dismissive
tone.

They walked all the way to the back of the
cemetery, to the megalith commemorating the first Jonathan S.
Barrett. Seth’s great-grandfather had made the family extremely
wealthy, but he’d been obsessed with death. He’d built this
miniature necropolis and even disinterred his own ancestors to move
their bodies here.

“I never told you the most important thing
about your great-grandfather,” Seth’s dad said. “I never talked
about it at all, even with my own father. He knew it, though, you
can bet on that.”

“Knew what?” Seth asked.

“There’s a reason your grandfather believed
that your great-grandfather’s ghost would haunt the family.”