Tommy Nightmare (Jenny Pox #2) (37 page)

“He is. And opposites create a powerful
charge between them. But our connection is greater. Our powers are
complementary.”

“What does that mean?”

“You enhance me. And I enhance you. We can
only become the greatest, most godlike versions of ourselves when
we’re together. And I sensed you had been born, somewhere, but I
couldn’t find you until you flared up bright as the sun a few weeks
ago. Then I knew where you were, and I came to find you.”

“To increase your power?”

“I have loved you across many lives.” He
pulled his hand back, and she already missed his electrifying
touch. “But we only just met, this time around. And you don’t have
my curse of remembering.”

“You think it’s a curse?”

“Every lifetime has its share of suffering.”
Alexander looked out the windshield at the galaxies of stars.
“Forgetting is a gift.”

Jenny wasn’t sure what to say. She tried not
to think of ancient Athens and the diseased bodies heaped
everywhere, the smoldering funeral pyres outside the temples. The
smell of misery and death. After a while, she asked, “What about me
and Seth?”

“You’ve spent a few lifetimes together, just
recently, but your oldest and deepest relationship is with me.” He
laughed. “Well, that’s getting a little weird for the first hour of
conversation. You asked, though.”

“I did ask.” Jenny bit her lip. “You sent me
to destroy Athens.”

“It was a war. A long time ago.”

“And to kill Pericles.”

Alexander laughed and brushed his fingers
along the back of her head, through her hair, and she felt that
dark sizzle of energy again. Again, she felt disappointed when he
drew his hand back.

“My strategy was foolish,” Alexander said.
“Empire is always systemic, Jenny, but we pin it on individual men,
all the blame and revulsion and glory. I made that mistake, too.
His death only brought us Cleon and many more years of war.”

“But if that was Seth, then the Jenny pox
wouldn’t have hurt him.”

“The Jenny pox?” He grinned, lighting up his
dark, magnetic eyes. “You are so cute this lifetime.”

“But I’m right. And history says he died of
the plague.”

“Or, just possibly, somebody poisoned him and
made it look like plague. Pretty believable, when everyone else is
dying of it, especially if you get the body to the pyre fast
enough. Somebody who wanted to clear the road for another
politician. Someone ruthless and clever.”

“Ashleigh?” Jenny asked. “Ashleigh killed
Seth to make way for Cleon?”

“That’s where I’m putting my bet. Sounds like
her, doesn’t it?”

“It does.”

“Of course, it’s all ancient history now,”
Alexander said. “But the more you use your gift, the more you’ll
remember.”

“It’s not a gift,” Jenny whispered. “And I
don’t want to use it.”

It was colder inside the aircraft, now that
they were thousands of feet in the air. Jenny folded her arms
around herself. It was strange and scary how he’d stepped out from
her dreams and into the world like this. Part of her felt safe and
comfortable with him, even crazily attracted to him, but she didn’t
know if she could trust that part. He seemed dangerous, with all
his knowledge of the past.

And even if he’d been good to her twenty-five
centuries ago, she didn’t know anything about what kind of person
he’d become since then.

“How did you know to come protect me
tonight?” she asked.

“I came to Fallen Oak to find you, but I then
saw the fear-giver in town, and spied on him.” Alexander paused a
moment, as if thinking something over. “He’s in league with my
opposite, Esmeralda.”

“What’s the opposite of making zombies?”

He laughed. “She can only listen to the dead.
I command them.”

“Why aren’t you interested in her? If she’s
your opposite?”

“For one thing, she always hates me,”
Alexander said. “She’s a part of their faction.”

“What faction?”

“The love-charmer, the fear-giver,” Alexander
said. “Your enemies and mine. I came here for you only, Jenny. I
have no interest in her.”

“Is anybody else on our side?” Jenny asked.
“And what are the sides, anyway? Why do we have to fight?”

“We’ve always fought,” Alexander said.
“That’s why we need to be together now, while you’re in danger.
Your power and mine will be at their peak, if we need them.”

“I don’t ever want to use mine again,” Jenny
said. “I can’t do any good for anyone. I’m just a monster.”

“You’re my beautiful monster.” Alexander gave
her a smile. His eyes reflected the stars and the black night sky.
“And I love you for what you are.”

Jenny looked deep into the night, into the
vast darkness of the unknown.

THE END

1. J.L. Bryan
   studied English
   literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus
   on the English Renaissance and the Romantic period.  He also
   studied screenwriting at UCLA.  He is the author of five
   novels and one short-story collection.  He enjoys remixing
   elements of paranormal, supernatural, fantasy, horror and science
   fiction into new kinds of stories.  He lives in Atlanta with
   his wife Christina, as well as some dogs, cats, and domestic
   plants.
   

Visit his website:
http://jlbryanbooks.com/

1. The third book in the
   Jenny Pox
   series
   will be available in the fall of 2011.
   

Caspia Chastain is gifted (or plagued, if
you ask her) with the ability to draw the future, usually at the
worst possible times; everyday she watches her brother Logan fight
his cancer diagnosis. When an outsider named Ethan appears,
determined to protect Caspia and her brother from dangers he won’t
explain, she doesn’t know what to think. She’s seen him before: in
a drawing of a frightening future, surrounded by brilliant light,
dark wings, and violence. It’s a future she can only hope won’t
come true.

But when Caspia finds herself in the middle
of a supernatural war, she’s forced to turn to Ethan for help.
Together they uncover disturbing secrets about her hometown and
bloodline. In a town where Dark doesn't equal evil and Light isn't
always good, Caspia and Ethan find themselves making strange
alliances and even stranger sacrifices in order to protect those
they love.

Book I of the Gifted Blood Trilogy

by Vicki Keire

Chapter One:

An Assignment

The weather had just turned from unbearably
hot to cool with occasional gusts of frigid as I sat with my
sketchbook, trying to capture the change of seasons within its
pages. The gathering chill made the sky clearer than the muggy haze
of full summer; the warm palette of autumn leaves draped the trees
every shade of red from blush to blood. I gripped my chunk of
graphite, determined to get the assignment exactly right, and
looked out over the St. Clare River.

Autumn was the time of year when my brother
Logan and I pulled out long sleeves and boots for the first time
and tramped through the woods together, just as we did with our
parents before they died four years ago. The woods surrounding
Whitfield became our own private, living cathedral. We filled our
pockets with its offerings: quartz, oddly shaped pieces of wood, a
feather. We linked hands just before sunset and took turns talking
to our parents about our lives as we walked. Logan always said he
felt them more strongly in the woods than in the graveyard. Then
we’d rush home, racing the darkness, and drink hot chocolate and
fight over the remote until one of us fell over, dead asleep.

But not this fall. Things were different.
Darker. There was no time for long walks through the woods, and no
energy even if time could be found. At night, the stars were sharp
as paper cut outs in indigo parchment. The crickets and cicadas had
a spectacular backdrop against which to sing their last songs of
the year. With luck, I could snatch a few minutes to watch night
fall over Blind Springs Park as I sprinted from school to work to
home. This fall, I was a freshman at Andreas Academy of Fine Arts
with an almost full-time job at the coffee shop two buildings down
from our apartment. It didn’t cover all the bills, but it did help
keep us in health insurance. Things like insurance were actually
important to me now. I kept the local bookstore steadily supplied
with hand-painted tarot card decks for extra cash, and did all the
other things running a household required that Logan couldn’t.
Which was almost everything.

This fall, Logan had cancer. I watched it
leach his brown eyes and his tall, compact carpenter’s body of life
and vitality as surely as the approaching winter would rob the
forest of color and life.

My brother’s once strong, sure hands
trembled when he did something as simple as open a stubborn jar of
pickles. His kind brown eyes were constantly ringed with purplish
bruises. Logan, always so active, now had to sit down and rest
halfway up the stairs to our third floor apartment. The
chemotherapy affected his scent, somehow. I didn't really notice,
but our cat Abigail sure did. When Logan came home from a session,
she paced the floor and yowled, bewildered as to why he didn’t
look, smell, or act like her beloved person. That killed him.
Abigail was his baby.

Worst of all, there was nothing I could do
about any of it. I felt so powerless and angry most of the time.
Logan had been eighteen when our parents died. I had been fifteen.
We were barely old enough to live on our own, but we tried. We took
care of each other. Now I was doing my best to take care of
everything while inside, I was falling apart.

So when my “gift” decided this was the
perfect time to make its reappearance, I shouldn’t have been
surprised. Everything else was coming unglued. Why not my head,
too?

I was sitting on a wrought iron bench,
graphite in hand, overlooking the St. Clare River, when I sketched
a piece of my future. I’d been drawing the future for as long as I
could hold a crayon.

“It’s a gift of your blood, Caspia,” my
grandmother used to insist. She was the only one to speak to me
about it, this "gift of my blood," back before she died. My family
knew I had a strange ability, but no one else talked about its
origins. “You’ll see,” she always said, examining the symbols or
pictures that seemed to come from nowhere and always frightened me.
“You just drew a vision of your future, honey.”

She was right. Every single ‘vision’ came
true.

It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. It’s not
like I draw lottery numbers or predict world disasters. Sometimes,
it’s as mundane as a really bad grade. Sometimes it’s good things,
when I drew a picture of our neighbors, who thought they couldn’t
have children, with a pair of smiling twins.

But sometimes, I drew very dark things. Like
Grandmother’s death. The fire across the street that killed our
neighbor’s dogs. The happy family where things got broken and
people bruised behind closed doors. Some things I still don’t
understand. Either they haven’t come to pass, or they’re just
gibberish.

That autumn afternoon, when I drew a strange
and furious man less than a dozen feet away from me, I was hoping
for gibberish.

I was supposed to be sketching the river. I
kept staring at the lines of light and dark across its surface, at
the way it seemed to catch on boulders and drag itself around them
in great huge ripples like wrinkles in muddy silk. My eyes followed
the jagged contours of the distant limestone cliffs. The river
below me sheltered fish that leapt, glittering, out of its depths,
and nurtured the lush woodlands that were just now turning the
brilliant fiery colors of fall. Every so often, a storm swept
through, swelling the St. Clare River and making it angry enough to
flood homes or even drown a person.

Powerful. Calm. Sheltering. Beautiful. These
were the things I was supposed to be drawing, the things my Drawing
II teacher, Dr. Christian, had actually assigned to us. “Go draw
the St. Clare River in all its fall splendor,” the temperamental
Dr. Christian ordered us, shortly after taking roll. A few of the
girls actually made quiet sounds of disappointment. That’s how
drop-dead sexy Dr. Christian is. Even though he’d just given us the
day off, probably half the girls would have happily stayed just to
look at him.

I wasn’t one of them. I loved the weather,
and I loved the Riverwalk. I couldn’t wait to get started, couldn’t
wait to lose myself in the sheer joy of creating something out of
nothing on the blank page. I was the first one out the door, even
though my best friend Amberlyn yelled at me to wait. Despite my
freakish prophetic ability, or maybe because of it, I lived to draw
and paint. And with all that was going on in my life, I was
desperate for some physical and mental escape.

And yet I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t finish
a simple assignment like a landscape sketch. I got the basics done
quickly enough. Then I started to relax and focus in on the
details, like the massive oak on the far bank charred and split by
lightening. My fingers moved as if they had tiny minds of their
own, drawing the graphite smoothly, fooling my brain into thinking
that strange part of me, the part that had been creating prophetic
images for as long as I could remember, had gone to sleep or
something. But of course it hadn’t. It had been months since I’d
drawn one of my visions, and it had never happened in public
before. Ever. When I looked down at the sketch across my knees, an
incomplete but distinct figure that had no business being there
stared back at me.