[Anita Blake Collection] - Strange Candy

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  He rubbed his fingertips over his eyes. “She’s a sociopath. She’s an empath that can only feel negative emotions.”

  Jasmine didn’t try to keep the surprise off her face. “If you know, why is she still alive?”

  “Because, Dr. Cooper, I’m tired of killing children. So many of them come through with talents we can’t begin to understand. They can do things that make Lisbeth look safe. But most of the time we just don’t understand them enough to help them. We destroy them because we don’t know what else to do. But Lisbeth is like you were, in some ways; I hoped you could help her, understand her. Keep her alive.”

  “And if I can’t help her? If I think she’s too dangerous?”

  He shrugged. “I fill out a form, submit it to my superiors, and in a month she’ll be dead.”

  “Just like that,” Jasmine said.

  “Just like that,” he said.

  She stared at the doctor, tried to feel what he felt. Sorrow, an almost unending sorrow. The school had eaten him alive, just as it had the children. There was nothing left of him but sadness, fear, and a dogged sense of duty. A fragile wish for hope, for meaning. He was looking for peace.

  “I can’t give you absolution, Bromley.”

  He flinched. “Is that what I want?”

  Jasmine nodded. “You’re wondering if you played God, or were just a murderer.”

  He gave a weak laugh. “You are merciless.”

  “I had good teachers.”

  He nodded. “All right, no absolution for me. Can you save this child?”

  Jasmine knew she should say, “Kill her.” Lisbeth Pearson was too dangerous for words. But she looked into Bromley’s tired, sick eyes, and said, “Maybe.”

  JASMINE was walking to her room, down the familiar empty corridors. No matter how many children were in the school, there were never people in the hallways. Always there was the feeling of abandonment, emptiness. She walked the halls alone, tracked by the blinking red lights of cameras.

  A woman came from around the corner; long yellow hair swept nearly to her knees. She had the height for the hair, slender and graceful. The face was dominated by pale blue eyes. Jasmine stopped and waited for the woman to come to her. A feeling of horrible déjà vu swept over her. An almost claustrophobic sense of time spinning backward. “Vanessa?” It came out a question, though it wasn’t meant to be.

  The woman smiled, and held out her hands. “Jasmine, it is you.” Vanessa hugged her tight, and Jasmine fought the urge to pull away. She relaxed into the arms of her best friend from childhood, and one of the most powerful telepaths the school had ever had.

  When she could, Jasmine pulled back, and said, “Are you visiting?”

  Vanessa turned away. She hid her eyes, and her mind was as tight and closed as a locked door. She stepped back from Jasmine. “No, I’m an instructor.” Her voice made it bright, cheerful.

  “An instructor. For how long?”

  “Since high school.”

  “You went away to college, just like I did. We rode to the airport together.” Jasmine felt panic like a cold weight at the pit of her gut.

  Vanessa paced back and forth, then whirled, smiling. “I didn’t finish college. They needed me here to help with all the little telepaths.”

  Jasmine worked very hard at keeping her own mind locked tight. No empath’s control can match a telepath, but she tried. Her face was absolutely blank, pleasantly so, practice, years of practice. “Do you enjoy…teaching?”

  “Oh, yes, I really feel like I make a difference—you?”

  Jasmine nodded.

  “You’ve done really well. My best friend, the famous doctor.” Vanessa laughed and hugged her again.

  Best friend—they hadn’t seen or talked to each other in ten years. Jasmine found herself crying, hugging the tall stranger who used to be her friend, and crying.

  “Hey,” Vanessa said, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  She pulled away and shook her head. What could she say that wouldn’t hurt Vanessa? You betrayed our dreams. You gave up and came back here to hide. We swore an oath that we would never come here to hide, better death than this tomb. Jasmine wanted to scream it all out. To find out why Vanessa had failed, the ultimate failure, she had come back here. Once you came back, you never left. No one ever left a second time. The words echoed in her head, and the walls seemed to be closing around her, narrow. Jasmine hadn’t noticed how narrow the halls were. The roof was close enough to touch. The school was crowding her, crowding.

  “Jasmine, what’s wrong?”

  She drew a deep, shaking breath. “Panic attack.”

  “Do you still get those?”

  “First one in…” Breathe deep and even, breathe. “Twelve years.”

  “Open your mind to me. Jasmine, I can help. Remember.” Jasmine backed away until she hit the wall. She pressed against it. Vanessa took a step forward, reaching.

  “No!”

  “Let me help you.”

  Her breathing was beginning to slow, pulse going down. The corridor was still hot and too close, but it was going to be all right. It was going to be all right. “I’ll be all right, Vanessa.”

  “I can help you with whatever is wrong. Telepaths are great counselors.”

  Jasmine stared into her eyes. “You wouldn’t like what I was thinking.”

  Vanessa froze, hands still outstretched, smile sliding away from her face. It was one of those moments when you don’t need empathy. When truth stretches between two people. Truth could be violent, could strip you of dignity and hope just as quickly as a gun.

  It was one of those moments when you can look in someone else’s eyes and see your own reflection so sharp and true that it slices like glass.

  Vanessa turned away first and began to walk down the hall, then to run. Her footsteps thundered against the narrow walls.

  Jasmine stared up into the watching monitor, red light blinking. She spoke to it. “The monitor in my room better be disabled before I get there, Bromley. If it’s not, I’m going to tear it out of the wall.” She took a deep shaking breath. “You should have told me Vanessa was here. What else haven’t you told me?”

  There was no answer from the whirring monitor. She hadn’t expected one. If Bromley had answered, she wouldn’t have believed him anyway.

  THE room was like all the other rooms. It was rectangular with pale blue walls. A single bed was against the right-hand wall, white sheets, brown blanket. When Jasmine was a child, she had longed for colored sheets. The kind with animals and clowns on them. In her house were bright-colored sheets, and none of the rooms were painted blue.

  There was a white bureau with mirror against the left wall, and a closet in the far wall. That was all. Small or not, the rooms always seemed empty.

  There was a monitor up in one corner. The red recording light was off, no whirring, no moving to scan the room. Bromley had turned it off; supposedly that meant that Jasmine was alone, unobserved.

  Jasmine pressed her palms on top of the perfectly clean bureau top. She leaned forward until she was almost touching her own reflection. The old litany came back, “This is not the whole world. You will get out. You will make it on the outside. You can do it. This isn’t forever.” How many nights had she told her reflection that? How many years?

  This wasn’t the whole world. She had gotten out. She had made it on the outside. She could do it. It hadn’t been forever. And now she was back. To save another little girl. The thought came, But does she deserve saving?

  Jasmine answered aloud, “I save monsters all the time.” Fear had settled in the pit of her stomach, hard and thick. This place pressed so many of her buttons, so much shit to wade through here. And the child, that frightening, beautiful child. Why was so much evil pleasant, pretty on the outside, like poisoned candy? Most mass murderers were the nicest people.

  Lisbeth Pearson was already in bed. It was an hour past dark. She would be out there in the dream network, hunting. For the first time someone wou
ld be hunting Lisbeth. Did the child suspect? No. There was one other trait of the serial killer that Lisbeth shared: arrogance. The predator never expects to be hunted.

  Jasmine had never been hunted either. It would be a night of firsts.

  That night Jasmine dreamed. Her own dreams first. Nothing pleasant; fears about the school, Lisbeth, Bromley, childhood nightmares, she brushed them away. Then the sensation that her skull evaporated and her mind eased outward like mist. She floated through one dream at a time. She could touch more than one mind at a time, bringing other people into the same dream, but they had to share a single dream. Multiple minds, but not multiple fantasies. No one was sure why that particular restriction. It was just the way it worked.

  Jasmine swam through the colors of other people’s dreams, searching. A boy played catch with his dead father, sorrow, things left unsaid; a woman held a stranger in her arms, naked, unafraid, private, lust flowed warm and felt like anger; Bromley dreamed of flowers surrounding a coffin, rage, hate. Jasmine moved on before she could see who was inside the coffin. She could have wandered all night from dream to dream like a butterfly in a field of fantastic flowers, but something burned through her mind, screamed along her nerves: terror.

  Jasmine followed it like a beacon. The silent rush of fear called her as surely as a scream for help. She appeared in the dream with an almost physical jolt. She had rushed, hadn’t taken her time; the reality of the nightmare was concrete, touchable, breathable, visible, real. A boy stood with his back to her. He was tall, slender, hair neatly buzzed next to his scalp, skin the color of dark coffee. He was struggling to lock the door to a dingy room. Windows leaked gray daylight through dirty glass. Wallpaper fell in strips from yellowed walls. The place reeked of damp, rot, urine.

  The bolt slid home and he turned, leaning against the door, relieved. His eyes flew wide. “Who are you?” His voice hadn’t caught up to his tall, leggy body; it sounded like a child’s voice.

  “I’m Jasmine. I’ve come to help.”

  “You’re that new dream teacher.”

  Jasmine started to explain that she was not a teacher, was not a part of the school, but standing there soaking up Malcolm’s terror, she let it go. “Yes.”

  The smell was growing worse, a choking outhouse stench that was filling the room, coming from under the door. Malcolm backed away from the door, until he bumped into Jasmine. He jumped and she gripped his shoulders. He didn’t pull away. His breathing was coming in short gasps. The whole dream focused on that door. Jasmine could feel the pull of it. Fear. Fear forced down their throat until more than anything in the whole world you didn’t want that door to open. You didn’t want IT to come through and get you. And you knew that that was exactly what was going to happen, and there was nothing you could do about it. The helplessness of nightmare, but Jasmine could do something about it. Nightmares were her specialty.

  The girl’s focus was strong and pure. Jasmine could not look away from the door. The sound of heavy footsteps scraped outside; the smell of rotting corpses, sweet and putrid, filled the room.

  Jasmine concentrated, willing the walls to dissolve, the dream to end. Nothing happened. She took a deep breath and choked on the stinking air.

  Malcolm’s voice was thin with fear. “Do something!”

  She tried. Manipulating dreams was just a matter of will and concentration. Jasmine knew this wasn’t real; if you knew that, you could change it. But she had never been inside the dream of someone who matched her powers so exactly.

  “I can’t break the dream.”

  Malcolm made a small sound low in his throat. He sagged against her. “Oh, God,” he said, “oh, God.”

  Jasmine swallowed the first rush of real fear, not Lisbeth’s creation but her very own fear. She was as trapped as the boy. Trapped in the mind of a sociopathic child.

  Then things began to melt from the walls. Hands, arms reached outward; rotted flesh falling away from white bone, rags of clothes. Things long dead crawled out of the rotting walls and began to drag themselves closer.

  One man had half his face blown away; his tongue rolled between bone and raw meat, a large fat worm twisted round the corpse’s tongue.

  Malcolm screamed, one high shriek after another, as four of the things shambled toward them.

  The faces were recognizable; a man, woman, two teenage children. They had been black; now they were the colors of old death.

  Jasmine grabbed Malcolm’s hand; his fingernails dug into her palm. His screams became words. “My father, my father! Noooo!”

  Of course, the dead things were Malcolm’s family. They were horrible, paralyzingly so to the boy, because this nightmare was designed with him in mind, not Jasmine. The dead things were slow; little pieces of them fell away as they walked, slow.

  Jasmine dragged Malcolm toward the door. He fought her, the dead things turned toward them, but Jasmine was at the door with the boy screaming, tugging at her hand, trying to get free, to run, but there was nowhere to run.

  Jasmine couldn’t break the dream, but maybe she could manipulate it. She unlocked the door and flung it open. The dream lurched; the dead things wavered. There was nothing on the other side of the door. Sloppy, Lisbeth, Jasmine thought. There was a sensation of vertigo, then Jasmine filling the emptiness with a stairway, leading down.

  She dragged Malcolm onto the stairs and shut and locked the door behind them, with a thought. Malcolm was running now, still gripping her hand as if afraid she would vanish and abandon him. They clattered down the stairs; suddenly there were walls on either side. The stairs led downward, but now there were walls to hold them, rotting yellow walls.

  Hands grew out of the wall, pale arms, they fluttered, hands wringing. A hand grabbed Jasmine’s wrist. The flesh was too soft, doughy, rubbery, but strong.

  Malcolm screamed as hands grabbed his shirt.

  Jasmine needed to be free of the hand; she thought of a sword. It levitated over the hand, and sliced downward in a glittering arc. The arm flopped, spraying warm blood into her face. The hand still clung to her wrist, but she pulled Malcolm free of the bloated hands, and they ran.

  Jasmine sprayed the walls with blood from the sword as it sliced the hands in front of them like a thrasher, cutting wheat. The stairs were littered with pale hands that twitched and bled.

  The stairs spilled onto a landing, and the walls closed in, dead end. Jasmine had been concentrating too much on the sword and the hands to maintain the stairs. The smell of rotting corpses began to fill the air.

  “Malcolm, is this the same dream every time?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything that is the same every time?”

  “My family, she always kills my family.” Both of his hands dug into her arm. His fear was nearly choking her. Her fear was nearly a cold heat on her skin. The bloated hand had fallen off in the running. She and Malcolm stood alone on the landing, as the stench became stronger. The dead things were coming.

  Malcolm’s family, turned into rotting corpses that would tear the boy apart, maybe eat parts of him alive while he watched.

  Yes, that would be what Jasmine would do, if she really wanted to terrify. To horrify. If she really hated someone.

  That was it: hatred. Jasmine called out, “Lisbeth, I know why you hate Malcolm. I know.”

  The first rotted corpse began to pull itself from the wall. “You’re jealous of his family. Malcolm’s family loves him. They love him, Lisbeth. Malcolm’s father loves him. His mother loves him. His sister loves him. His brother loves him.”

  The corpses had pulled free of the wall and were reaching for them, but the smell was fading. “You’re family hates you, Lisbeth. Your mother is afraid of you, Lisbeth. I read your file. Your father tried to kill you, and you punished him for it. Didn’t you? Didn’t you!”

  The dead things began to melt. There was the sensation of something large sliding through the nightmare, like a whale swimming next to you in the dark. Lisbeth’s power.

&n
bsp; “No one loves you. They hate you, Lisbeth. Everyone hates you. Even your own family.”

  Silence, not of the ear, but sensation of feeling, silence more profound than soundlessness.

  The dream broke and Jasmine was spilled back to wakefulness. She sat up in bed, heart hammering in her chest. That was it. Lisbeth had never been loved, not by anyone, ever. Even sociopaths need the illusion of acceptance from someone. Lisbeth needed to be loved.

  THAT morning Jasmine went to Malcolm. They met for the first time in the flesh. She promised him that Lisbeth would never hurt him again. One way or another Jasmine meant to keep that promise.

  LISBETH was playing with a nearly life-size doll when Jasmine walked through the door. She knew that Bromley was on the other side of the one-way glass. She no longer cared.

  “Nice doll,” Jasmine said.

  “My mommy sent it to me.”

  “Why?”

  Lisbeth frowned up at her. “Why what?”

  “Why did your mommy send the doll to you?”

  “What do you mean?” Lisbeth asked. The lovely, golden-haired doll lay very still in the child’s lap.

  “Why did your mother send you a doll? Why would she send you anything? Most parents never contact their children once they come to the school.”

  Lisbeth gave a lovely smile, eyes shining. “Because she loves me,” she said, very matter-of-fact, very sweet, and as soon as she said it, Lisbeth knew it had been a mistake.

  Jasmine laughed, then the laughter died. She stared down at the child, met her brown eyes, and did not look away. “No one loves you, Lisbeth; you and I both know that.”

  “I hate you,” Lisbeth said, voice quiet and precise.

  “I know,” Jasmine said. “Why did you kill Nicky?”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Why, Lisbeth?”

  “Why what?” the child said, voice sulky.

  “Why did you kill Nicky?”

  “I could have killed you last night.”

  “Then why didn’t you?”

  “Get out! Get out!” She stood, screaming. Lisbeth began to beat the doll against the floor. Bits of plastic began to shatter onto the floor. One blue eye lay winking to itself, naked against the floor.