Megan Hart - Strangers of the Night

“Yes?”

Samantha shook her head, knowing she had to own up to it. “It’s the subject. He seems to have formed an...attachment.”

“Ah. Can you use it?”

Startled, she recoiled with a grimace. “What? No! Why would I?”

“If it was necessary to gain his cooperation, I would expect you to, especially if it was to help protect him.” Vadim shrugged, eyeing her.

“I fail to see how encouraging him to have a crush on me could help protect him.” The words came out too sharply. She sounded guilty.

Vadim gave her a narrow-eyed look. “The subject has been kept in near isolation since childhood. Before that, he’d been raised in horrific social conditions. Understandably, he could be expected to form an emotional or sexual attachment to an attractive caregiver. The records show you are likely not even the first...”

That made her feel all kinds of irritable. She’d read the reports, of course, about the nurse who’d been removed from duty when her relationship with Jed had become closer than the Wyrmwood executives decided was appropriate. That had been when he was little more than a kid, though. It wasn’t like what was between the two of them. It couldn’t be. She kept her expression smooth. “We don’t talk about it, of course. I do my job. I leave the room. I wait.”

“Ah, yes. The waiting. Well, we’re all waiting.”

“And why?” she demanded suddenly. “Why not just take him out of there now? There has to be a way!”

“If there was, don’t you think we’d have gotten him out of there long ago?” Vadim fixed her with a stern look. “Even with inside help, Wyrmwood is impossible to break into or out of.”

“Nothing is impossible. I thought that was the Crew’s motto or something like that.”

Vadim laughed without much humor, although his dark eyes did twinkle. “If we had a motto, I suspect it would be more like ‘nothing is improbable.’ As it is, you won’t have to wait much longer. All the signs are pointing to his imminent transfer. Be prepared to hear more as early as next week.”

“If you can tell they’re getting ready to transfer him,” she began, but stopped at the look on the older man’s face. She’d never made Vadim angry with her, and she wasn’t about to find out now what might happen to her if she did. As charming and paternal as Vadim could be, there was a darkness in him that Samantha recognized...and didn’t want to mess with.

“This connection you believe he’s begun. Is it something you reciprocate?”

“Of course not,” she said steadily, getting his gaze head-on as best she could through the computer screen. “He doesn’t deserve to be put down like a dog that’s lived past its use, that’s all.”

Vadim said nothing for a moment or so, studying her. Not for the first time, Samantha wondered what Vadim’s talents were. She wouldn’t have doubted that one of them was reading minds.

“Be ready,” he said finally.

Chapter 11

“How are we feeling today?” Dr. Ransom pushed his glasses up higher on his nose with one hand, tapping his pen against the desk with the other. “Nurse says you didn’t eat your breakfast.”

“Her name’s Patty,” Jed said mildly. Dr. Ransom never knew their names. Jed wouldn’t have been surprised if the doctor barely remembered Jed’s name. He certainly hardly ever used it.

“Was there something wrong with breakfast?”

“I didn’t feel like eating today. That’s all.” Jed used a small push, a tiny one, undetectable, to still the doctor’s tapping pen by making it microcosmically harder to move. Just enough to make the other man feel as though he didn’t want to make the effort, but nothing close to him feeling that he was being manipulated.

It had taken Jed a long, long time to refine that skill. Many hours of having to listen to the doctor’s relentless fidgeting.

“Not hungry? Not feeling well?”

“I don’t like pancakes,” Jed said.

Dr. Ransom looked confused. “No? Who doesn’t like pancakes?”

“Me. Never liked them.” Jed leaned back in the chair, one leg crossed over the other, with a grin. Blank and empty, stretching so wide it felt as though his teeth were the size of dominoes.

“Well. I suppose I can make sure the kitchen never sends you pancakes again.”

That wasn’t going to happen. If anything, now that he’d made his preference known, he’d be served pancakes three or four times a week, and that was because they liked to mess with him that way. The truth was, Jed preferred pancakes to eggs, but although he knew that lies were the devil speaking with his tongue, he didn’t care. He’d stopped caring about that a long, long time ago, about the same time he’d decided to stop playing by their rules. He was simply careful about how he went about it, that was all.

When Jed didn’t answer, Dr. Ransom looked concerned. “Nurse said you didn’t get out of bed at the usual time, as well.”

“Her name is Patty,” Jed repeated.

Dr. Ransom put the pen down completely and laced his fingers together. “Patty.”

“Samantha is the day nurse. Bryant and Carl are the orderlies. Stephen is the janitor.”

“You’ve never interacted with the custodial staff,” Dr. Ransom said.

And the janitor’s name was not really Stephen, but the doctor wouldn’t know that. Jed shrugged. He thought about using his talent to take up the pen and bury it point-deep into the wood of the desk, but didn’t want to give them the satisfaction or deal with the consequences.

“Is there a reason why you overslept today, Jed?”

The fact he’d been unable to sleep last night, tossing and turning after the interlude with Samantha. He wasn’t about to admit that to Dr. Ransom, though. As far as the doctor was concerned, Jed barely knew the nurse, and that was how he wanted it to stay.

When he was fourteen or so, there’d been another nurse. Miss Jean. That was how she’d referred to herself, and how Jed still thought of her. Miss Jean had worn the same uniform as all the other nurses, the same as it had been in all the years Jed had been in Wyrmwood. She’d had pale, short hair and wide green eyes and a smile that reminded him of his birth mother’s, when Mother had been happy. Miss Jean had never looked at him the way the others had sometimes. Afraid. No matter what he did or how he behaved, Miss Jean always stayed calm, friendly, kind. And because she never gave him reason to misbehave, slowly, slowly, Jed had stopped always trying to cause trouble.

When it had become apparent to the unseen—whoever was in charge, the ones he’d learned watched and judged, but never met with him in person—that Miss Jean’s influence was changing Jed from who they wanted him to be into something else, something less violent, well. Miss Jean went off shift one day and never came back.

That was when Jed had started training himself to unlearn all the things they’d taught him.

Eleven years later, and the daily testing had stopped. His sessions with Dr. Ransom had gone from five days a week to twice, each session only lasting thirty or so minutes, since there never seemed to be much to say anymore. It couldn’t be much longer, now, Jed thought. Until they either killed him, or let him go.

“Jed?”

“I was tired, I guess. Had a bad headache.” That part was true enough, though it wasn’t like his head didn’t always throb with the effort of holding himself back from giving them what they’d been after since he was five.

“Your medicine should prevent that. Your vitals haven’t changed. Your blood pressure is fine.”

Jed had learned to control that, too.

“Maybe it’s seasonal allergies,” Jed said, deadpan.

Dr. Ransom didn’t smile. He did, however, lift up the pen again to scratch a few notes on the pad in front of him. “I’m going to prescribe you something new. For anxiety.”