[Anita Blake Collection] - Strange Candy

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Jasmine knew this, felt it. The therapy was working. And if Bernard C. ever got Dr. Cooper alone, he’d do worse than kill her. He wasn’t alone. If you asked most of the men in Clarkson Maximum Security Prison what they most desired in the whole world it was to have Dr. Cooper at their mercy.

  The Clarkson Prison had the highest rate of successful rehabilitation for violent criminals in the country, perhaps in the world. Some had found in their dreams the taste of other people’s tears, sympathy for others, at last. Other dreams held the taste of blood, the pulse of their own hearts dying.

  Distance is no protection against psychic ability. Dr. Cooper knew what their dreams tasted of; she could find them wherever they would go. Only death would free them from her, and some of them weren’t sure about that.

  Dr. Jasmine Cooper, empath/dream therapist, most hated and feared person in a building full of monsters, was at her desk doing paperwork when the phone rang. She ignored it, knowing the machine would pick up. It did. Her voice first and then, after the beep, a man’s voice, “Hello, Jasmine, this is Dr. Edward Bromley, again.” Silence, then, “Well, we have a problem at the school that requires your special touch. This is the fifth message I’ve left, Jasmine. Call me or a child’s going to die.”

  She picked up at the last moment. “Dr. Bromley.” Her voice was utterly neutral, a trick she’d picked up from some of her patients.

  “Ah, yes. Jasmine. I’m glad you picked up. Can we have a visual to go along with the voice?”

  She stared at the small credit-card-thin screen just above the phone. The screen was a blank silver-gray. “No,” she said. “What do you want, Dr. Bromley?”

  He sighed. “Jasmine, or should I call you Dr. Cooper?”

  “That would be fine. What do you want?”

  “I would really like to see your face when I tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “Damn it, Jasmine…Dr. Cooper. Do you know how hard it was for me to come to you with this?”

  “No,” she lied. His anxiety oozed over the lines, trembling with distance and electricity and a touch of fear. Something was very wrong.

  “Tell me what you want, Bromley. What needs my special touch?” Her voice held a bite, sarcasm leaking through her professionalism. She could feel her face crumbling. She didn’t dare let Bromley see her like this. She could feel the hate blazing through her eyes, trembling down her hands. He’d see it too. Even he wasn’t that blind.

  “There’s a problem at the school.” He hesitated, only his breathing still hissing through the line.

  “What sort of problem?”

  “Bad dreams, no, nightmares. Freaking, bloody, awful nightmares. We’ve had one attempted suicide.”

  “Student or teacher?”

  “Student, but he was an advanced student. He had training, but the dreams just ate him alive. He slit his wrists because he didn’t ever want to fall asleep again.”

  Jasmine smiled. “You’ve been doing this long enough, Bromley. You’ve got a powerful untrained dreamer in the school. Police yourself.”

  “We tried, Jas.”

  “No,” she said, “no one calls me that anymore.” The old nickname crept along her skin, raising the hairs on her arms.

  “Jasmine, then. Do you remember Nicky?”

  “He was a dreamer a few years older than I was.”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  She stared at the phone receiver wondering what Bromley’s face looked like right now, this minute. A trickle of sweat oozed down her forehead; she wiped it with the back of her hand. “What happened?”

  “He tried to take care of the nightmares. We think he linked up with our rogue dreamer and a blood vessel in his brain burst. An embolism.”

  Jasmine swallowed hard, hoped Bromley couldn’t hear it. “It happens.” Her voice was level, so bland she knew the strain showed.

  “Not to fully trained dreamers. Nicky was almost as good as you were. People with that kind of talent don’t burst their brains, not without help.”

  “It is impossible to truly kill someone during a dream session. A bad heart, well it happens. Nicky didn’t die in dream. He just died. Coincidence.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  “Read any textbook on psychic phenomena, Bromley. You wrote the standard: no one can kill another person by dreaming them to death.”

  “We both know that isn’t true.”

  “There is no record of it ever happening.”

  “Because I destroyed the record, Jasmine. You owe me.”

  There it was, bland and clear, and no ignoring it. “Are you recording this?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “You think I’d get you to admit something on tape and then blackmail you with it?”

  “Obligate me, maybe.”

  “I’m not recording this, Jasmine. Talk to me, please.”

  Maybe it was the please that did it, or perhaps the rushing sense of fear. “So you’ve got another dreamer that can kill during dream. Someone at least as powerful as I was.”

  “God, Jasmine, don’t ever say it like that again. If someone should overhear…”

  “You said talk, I’m talking. Do you know who it is?”

  “We think so. A student who just arrived two months ago. A ten-year-old girl named Lisbeth Pearson.”

  “Why do you think it’s her?”

  “We’ve only got one other dreamer in school right now. Malcolm hasn’t got the control. Lisbeth’s sucking him into everyone’s nightmares. We’re hiding all the sharp objects from Malcolm.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Ten and fourteen, you’re still a baby-raper, Bromley.”

  “The school did OK by you, Dr. Cooper. You’re the most respected dream therapist in this country. I saw on the news, you’ve set up two sister programs in different states. Did you get an invitation to do the same in, what was it, France?”

  “England.”

  “Without this school, you wouldn’t be where you are.”

  Jasmine almost laughed, but it wasn’t funny, it was pathetic. He was right. She was keeper of the monsters, thanks to Bromley and others like him. And she hated them all.

  He had asked her something, but she hadn’t heard.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Bromley, can you repeat that, please?”

  “When can you get here?”

  Her stomach tightened, palms sweating. “I swore I’d never go back, Bromley.”

  “I remember, Dr. Cooper, but this is an emergency. If you don’t come here and defuse the situation, I’ll have no choice.”

  “There are always choices, Bromley.”

  “Not here, not now, Jasmine. I write up my report and they’ll execute Lisbeth Pearson as a dangerous, uncontrollable psychic. Unless you can tame her, Lisbeth won’t see her eleventh birthday.”

  Using the child’s name twice in a row—manipulation, a tug at the heartstrings. It worked like it was supposed to.

  “I’ll come. It will take me a few hours to divide my patients between my fellow therapists, then I’ll be there.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Cooper.”

  “Send all the material you have on the child. I’ll give you my fax number. I’ll study it all on the trip and be ready to work when I arrive.”

  “It’ll be to you as soon as we hang up.”

  “One more thing. How do you know it’s the child?”

  “I told you we don’t have any other students that could do it.”

  Jasmine smiled, a bitter twist of lips. “What about a teacher, a trained dreamer that’s gone off the deep end?”

  “We screen our workers, Jasmine.”

  “I remember.”

  “Dr. Roberts was a fluke. It couldn’t happen again. We see to that.”

  “If you’ve got everything under such bloody good control, then what do you need me for?”

  “Jasmine…”

  “No, I don’t want to
hear any more. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She hung up the phone. Sweat was beading on her forehead despite the air-conditioned quiet of the room.

  Dr. Roberts had taken a butcher knife to two students, and Jasmine would always carry the scar where she had thrown up an arm to keep the doctor from slashing her face. A guard had shot Roberts then, and she had fallen forward on her knees, still whispering, “Evil, you are all evil.”

  Jasmine could control her dreams, but Roberts still accused her, questioned her at night before she could stop it. “You’re evil, aren’t you, Jasmine? You know you are.”

  “Yes, Dr. Roberts, I know I am.” But Jasmine knew that everyone was evil, down deep when you scrape the skin away. Inside their heads everyone hunted, everyone killed, everyone was a monster.

  The thought that Dr. Roberts couldn’t deal with was not the children’s evil, but her own. That morning when she woke she saw a monster looking back at her from the mirror. She had set out to kill the monster and gotten killed for it.

  Jasmine knew the truth. You couldn’t kill The Monster. It was always there just behind your eyes. You could kill a monster, though. Jasmine was a great believer in the death penalty. It was the ultimate therapy. It cured everything. The first stirrings of fear crawled in her belly, low and real. It would get worse. Jasmine knew that it would get worse.

  Dr. Cooper cradled her face on her arms, cheek pressed into the coolness of her desktop, and cried. The school, that was all it was ever called, it had no other name. A lot of secret government projects had no names.

  Thirty years ago, almost Jasmine’s lifetime, psychic phenomena became a proven scientific fact. In fact, there were so many psychics that scientists started making jokes about pod people. It didn’t stay funny for long. Most of the new breed were children. They had powers that were dependable and as testable as such phenomena ever would be. There were lots of theories as to why, suddenly, we had empaths and telepaths and dreamers coming out of the woodwork. The evolutionists said it was proof of their ideas; mankind was evolving. Others thought it was junk food, chemicals and preservatives in the American diet. The majority of talent did occur in industrialized nations. Maybe it was the pollution. Inoculations. The beginning of the Apocalypse. No one knew. Jasmine doubted anyone ever would.

  But a few of the children had been dangerous, their powers so far beyond the dreams of normality that their families couldn’t cope. In most cases the families were afraid of their children. Glad to give them up to someplace that would care for them.

  Jasmine’s family gave her up when she was five. Her mother cried and kissed her. Her older sister and brother hugged her dutifully. Her father said, “Be a good girl, Jas.”

  The smell of pipe tobacco could still bring back the memory of her tall, dark-haired father. A twinge of memory like a badly healed scar.

  What she remembered most of her mother was the cool sense of fear. That red lipsticked mouth kissing her, laughing, and wiping the lipstick smear off Jasmine’s cheek with a Kleenex. Laughing, golden hair, and the sick smell of fear. No perfume in the world could hide the stench from an empath.

  But then maybe Mommy didn’t know, maybe she didn’t understand, maybe she had done her best. Maybe.

  LISBETH Pearson was small for ten, with coppery red hair, almost dark enough to be auburn, but not quite. The hair fell in thick waves to her shoulders. Her face was that peaches-and-cream skin that some redheads have; no freckles, just creamy skin. Her eyes were a pale brown, almost amber. She wore a dress that seemed too young for her, with lace-topped white socks and patent leather shoes.

  She looked like she was dressed for Halloween, or like someone else had dressed her. She was playing alone with a dollhouse on the other side of a one-way mirror. Jasmine found that very funny. She remembered being on the other side of the glass. She had always known who was watching and what they were feeling. Always.

  Lisbeth looked up and stared directly at the mirror, and smiled. Jasmine smiled and nodded back.

  “Can she see us?” Dr. Bromley asked.

  “No.”

  “You acknowledged each other, I saw it.”

  “Did we?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Jasmine.”

  She turned to stare at the infamous Dr. Bromley, protector and tormentor of her childhood. He was five foot eight, but the weight he had gained made him seem smaller. His curly brown hair was fading back from a gleaming expanse of scalp. His hands, which had once looked strong, now resembled uncooked sausages. His face was blotched with red. Was he sick? She stared into his small eyes and thought, yes, maybe.

  Beth could have told Bromley if he was dying. She had had a feel for death. Beth was dead, had been for twenty years. Tall, laughing, gray-eyed Beth. She had been able to think people to death, a wasting illness. She hadn’t meant to kill people, just didn’t know how to stop it. Neither did anyone else. So they killed her.

  “Jasmine…Jasmine.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Bromley, I was thinking about something.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You don’t look well.”

  He fidgeted, glanced away, and knew that it wasn’t his eyes she could read. He laughed, abrupt and harsh. “No, I’m not well. It’s none of your damn business what’s wrong, Dr. Cooper. Let’s get back to Lisbeth. You’re here to save her, not me.”

  “Could I save you?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Bromley.” And Jasmine realized she really was sorry. She didn’t want to be sorry for him, to feel anything but hatred and contempt, and fear. Not sorrow, not for Dr. Bromley.

  “Tell me what you think about Lisbeth Pearson.”

  “I don’t think anything yet. I want to talk to her alone.” Jasmine smiled. “As alone as this place allows.”

  “We have to monitor the children. It’s part of the project.”

  “I remember the arguments, Dr. Bromley.”

  LISBETH was placing tiny gilt-edged chairs around a miniature dining room table when Jasmine entered. The child ignored her and continued to rearrange the furniture. She seemed completely absorbed in the task, but Jasmine felt the child’s interest, her power, glide over her skin like a cold breeze.

  “My name is Jasmine.”

  Lisbeth looked up at that, one small hand cradling a flower arrangement. “I’ve never met anyone named Jasmine before.”

  “And I’ve never met anyone named Lisbeth before.”

  The child grinned, perfect lips, eyes sparkling. “No, you’ve never met anyone like me.”

  Jasmine looked into those brown-amber eyes, shining with humor, and felt the threat. The words were subtle; the power that emanated from the child was not.

  The power climbed over Jasmine’s skin, raising the hair on her body, like insects crawling, or a faint buzz of electric current. You could breathe in Lisbeth’s power, choke on it.

  The child smiled, even white teeth flashing, but her eyes didn’t sparkle anymore. Games were over; Lisbeth didn’t have to pretend to be “normal,” so she didn’t try. Jasmine stared into her eyes and found—nothing. Inside her head was a great roaring silence.

  Jasmine had never met a sociopath at such a tender age. She knew that they were born broken, but to feel it, to feel that emptiness stretching inside this lovely little girl, to feel the void…was the most frightening thing she had ever felt.

  The child laughed, sweet and joyful. “You’re afraid of me, just like all the others.”

  Fear meant control. It meant Jasmine was controllable, so Lisbeth lowered her defenses; she allowed Jasmine to glimpse what was there. Or what wasn’t.

  Jasmine’s power eased through the girl, along her mind, and found other things missing. She was an empath; no empath could be a sociopath and bring harm to people, because they would feel that pain as their own. Unless they couldn’t feel anyone’s pain but their own.

  Lisbet
h was blind to positive emotions; she could only absorb the negative. As far as she was concerned, she alone felt joy, happiness, love. Everyone else was full of hate, fear, shame, or nothing. It was an empath’s version of hell. And the child had never known anything else.

  The curling auburn hair had little pink barrettes that picked up the small pink design in the dress. Perfectly matched. Perfect. If she hadn’t been a psychic, Lisbeth Pearson would have been the perfect daughter, the perfect student, the perfect worker, or wife, or mother, until the day that she broke. The day that The Monster came out.

  But The Monster was too close to the surface in Lisbeth; there was almost nothing else left.

  The child had gone back to her dollhouse, ignoring Jasmine. She no longer considered her a threat.

  Dr. Jasmine Cooper turned abruptly on her heel and walked out; the sound of her high heels was loud and echoing. She leaned against the door trying to breathe. She was shivering uncontrollably, fear soaking like frost into her bones. Jasmine tried to gain control of herself and knew that Lisbeth felt her falling to pieces. Knew that a closed door was no barrier at all.

  An echo of the child’s joy filtered through Jasmine’s nerves like distant, mocking laughter.

  JASMINE entered Bromley’s office all cool professionalism. No seams showed; she had swallowed the fear whole. Years of practice.

  Dr. Bromley was sitting behind his paper-strewn desk when Jasmine entered. His eyes looked tired, wary. “Well?”

  “Just being in the room with her raises the hairs on my arms. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.”

  “She’s evil,” he said.

  “If you’ve already made up your mind, Dr. Bromley, why did you bring me here?”

  He stared at her, without saying anything.

  “You want me to save her.”

  He nodded once up, once down.

  “Do you know what she is?”