Read Jenny Plague-Bringer: (Jenny Pox #4) for Free Online

low, narrow wooden stage, separated from the small dirt-floor
     audience pit by a wooden rail and a ragged curtain, which hadn’t yet opened for the
     evening.  Out in the tent, customers who’d paid a few pennies could see Alejandro
     the sword-swallower, Zsoka the tattooed lady, some creepy marionette puppets, a knife-throwing
     act, and Punchy Pete, the dancing, juggling dwarf.  For a few pennies more, they could
     step past the back curtain to view the star attraction of the freak show: Juliana
     Blight, The World’s Most Diseased Woman.
    She only thought of herself as “Juliana” now.  Her given name was Greek, and she’d
     been born in a squalid, crowded tenement in New York.  Because of her diseased nature,
     she was rejected by everyone except a crazed aunt, who repeatedly bathed her with
     lye and called her “daughter of Hell.”  She’d run away when she was seven years old
     and spent much of her life scrounging and stealing, protected from everyone by the
     demon plague within her.  Here and there, she’d left men dead in the gutter when they’d
     tried assaulting her.
    She was nineteen now, and she’d been with the carnival five years. 
    “Right this way, right this way, come see the most jaw-dropping female on Earth, the
     most diseased woman in the world!  Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, she’s not contagious...unless
     you touch her!  You, sir, would you care to see this princess of pestilence unveiled,
     laid bare for your education?  I thought so, sir, I can see you are man with a healthy
     interest in science!”
    The curtain opened.  Radu, the sideshow talker responsible for herding the customers,
     led in the first group of nine or ten gawkers, the usual mix of red-faced farmers
     and drooling, wide-eyed children.  Men and kids seemed most attracted to her show. 
     Missouri was no different from anywhere else.
    Juliana stood, still wrapped in the quilt she wore between shows, and approached the
     wooden rail at the front of her stage.  Dirty upturned faces blinked at her in the
     low light. 
    “Juliana Blight,” Radu continued. “Bitten by a swarm of rare giant African mosquitoes,
     Juliana carries all forms of disease within her flesh...from Egyptian mummy pox to
     Arabian leprosy, and the mysterious Chinese worm virus...stay back from the railing,
     sir, or you risk infection!”
    “She don’t look too sick to me,” one man said, leaning on the railing.
    “Prepare to be dazzled and horrified, sir!” the barker replied. “By the wonders of
     medical science.”
    Juliana shrugged off the quilt and let it fall to the stage.  Underneath, she wore
     only white cotton underpants and a silk scarf, which hung loose around her neck to
     conceal her breasts.  The crowd was free to inspect the rest of her body.
    She held out her arms.  Dark, bloody sores ripped open along them, from her shoulders
     all the way to her fingertips.  The crowd gasped and drew back—the man who’d leaned
     on the rail nearly tripped over his shoes in his hurry to get away from her.  A small,
     freckled boy screamed until his slightly older sister slapped and hushed him.
    Juliana turned slowly, letting the crowd gasp and whisper at the sight of boils erupting
     up her back, blisters blooming along her thighs and calves.  When she faced them again,
     a rash of bloody abscesses, cysts, and tumors broke open in a wave from her ankles
     to her hips, then across her stomach and chest.  Her face became a horror-show mask,
     and her eyes darkened with diseased blood the color of bile.
    As usual, the little crowd screamed and ran away through the curtain.  Radu winked
     at her—he loved that “first scare” of the night, the one that was sure to draw plenty
     of curious lookers with coins to spend. 
    She wrapped herself in the quilt and sat down in the plain wooden chair at the back
     of her stage, reading a dime novel about pirates, and Radu left to round up the next
     audience.
    She