Читать книгу Strangers of the Night - Меган Харт - Страница 15

Chapter 6

Jed would have liked to really put down that guard who’d been harassing Samantha all the way to the ground, his lungs blowing up, heart bursting from his chest. He’d settled instead for squeezing the asshole from the inside out, just enough to get the guy to back off from Samantha, and even that effort had nearly put Jed onto his hands and knees. There wasn’t any blood, though. Whatever damage he’d done to the guard’s brain hadn’t been bad enough for that.

Ever since he was twelve years old, Jed had discovered the joys of hurting people, especially when the rewards bore merit—video games, chocolate cake, comic books. All he had to do was let Dr. Ransom open the window blinds into the other room and show him the man or the woman in the chair, then he’d have to think really hard and later, not quite as hard and then not hard at all, to make them scream and writhe in agony.

It had taken him only another year to understand that hurting people did not make him feel good. It left him with a sick stomach and an aching head, worse than finishing the puzzles or reading the word cards in the box or any of the other dozens of things they had him do. Hurting people took effort; getting them to behave like his puppet took even more. More than once it left his nose bleeding.

One terrible time, it left him blind.

His sight came back. So did the tests. So did his anger, bigger now than anything else. No more rewards for doing what they wanted. Now he suffered the punishments for refusing. Starvation. Electric shock therapy. When they realized he could no longer be controlled by any of those methods, the drugs began.

At seventeen, he killed a man, but not the one they wanted him to kill. After that, the people at Wyrmwood started to be afraid of him.

Now, at twenty-five, he should still be terrifying them, but he’d spent the last eight years doing his best to convince them that they had nothing to fear.

The testing tonight during his session with Dr. Ransom had been unexpectedly brutal. After years of proving to them he was no longer capable of doing what they wanted, years of taunting them into just disposing of him already, Jed had almost forgotten what it was like when the doctor was convinced he could get a reaction from his patient. Almost, but not quite. His body remembered, anyway, the sting and burn of electricity. The pungent horror of the chemicals they dripped into his veins to make him compliant. There’d been times over the years when it would’ve taken so little to tip him into death, but they’d pulled him back. So many times he’d have let them—but that had changed when Samantha started working there.

She was not the first person to look him in the eyes, but she was the first to at least try to connect with him as a human being. Small things, nothing that would get either of them in trouble. A gentle squeeze of his shoulder when she took his vitals. A smile. A compassionate laugh at his lame jokes.

He felt it when she left the hospital. If he tried a little harder, he’d be able to feel her wherever she went, but doing that would surely rip something inside his head, so he eased back the small tendrils of thought that had connected him to her in the first place. She’d be back tomorrow, he thought just before he passed out on the hard cot, her face the last coherent thought he had.