Killer

Trigger warning: childhood abuse

“What is it you’re doing here again?” 

Layla Cross was not having it. She hadn’t been taken from her already congealing five am breakfast to sit across from this woman who looked pained and drawn, like Layla was doing something to her instead of the other way around. 

“I just want to ask you some things. Get to know you a little. It’s part of the process.”

“What process is that?”

“I think I can help you.”

She barked out a laugh. “What are you, a lawyer or something? You’re about ten years too late.”

The woman was blonde and young, younger than Layla- she thought. Though there was a quality, something about the lines under her eyes and by her mouth, like she could have been fifty and just kept herself real well. When she placed her hands on the table, Layla could see that they were shaking. She smirked a little, flexing her wrists in her lap, and waited. The slight jangle of her cuffs made Corrections Officer DeBlume look her way. He’d been staring at the newcomer for a while now, Like most men, he was stupid, and it didn’t take a genius to know he had no idea what her visitor was on about either. And yet, somehow it’s important enough to keep me from going back to sleep. Her fingers itched for a cigarette. 

“Miss…?”

“Jess. Just call me Jess. At the association, we try not to use last names. We’ve had people try and track us to our homes, you see.”

DeBlume grunted. He did not see. To be fair, neither did Layla. The association sounded like some Secret Service bullshit, yet this Barbie-dreamhouse looking woman hadn’t come in with a briefcase or sunglasses or even a tape recorder. 

---

“You a magazine? News? I thought you’d have all you need by now.”

The young woman across from her was dusky-skinned, her dark hair a mess, cascading in snarls over one shoulder. Her file said she was only thirty-four, Jess’s own true age, though she looked older. Prison probably did that to a person. 

She was already feeling it. When Officer DeBlume had led her through the doors, out of the light of the relentlessly bright spring day, she’d immediately felt trapped. 

There was hurt here, and anger, and fear, and settling over it all that thick dead-weight she’d only been able to call wrongness. If she’d believed in such things, she would have said evil. Inmates had watched her with eyes hungry or dead or cunning, as the corrections officer who’d let her in guided her to this brightly lit room, white walls glaring. It was hard not to think she was being enclosed in a tomb of her own making.

Because no one else had told her to go, had they? No, it had been the opposite. Ann shaking her head disapprovingly when she’d pitched the idea, even threatening her with termination.

“Lives are at stake if you fail,” she’d said, “This is outside of even our range of influence.”

After, Matt cornering her in the stairwell, his eyes glowing with concern.

“Jess, you can’t do this. It’s suicide.”

“It would be worth it,” she’d said, taking his hand off of her shoulder. “It would be worth it to know, don’t you think?”

“She’s a killer. We can’t heal what doesn’t hurt.”

“I know what I felt.”

It was the last thing she’d said to him, to any of them, and now she found herself sitting across from Layla Cross, the youngest serial murderer of their day and age, looking into her flat, dark eyes and doubting everything but the pain. She couldn’t doubt that, because she could feel it. It flowed off of Layla like the warm air coming up from a vent, pushing ripples through the air between them.

From the day of her birth Jess had been like this, overwhelmed by large crowds of people, having a hard time just existing in a room with a bunch of strangers, their needs and hurts pounding at the outside of her mind like a battering ram on a flimsy castle door. She’d never known what it was that caused her to be this way, to always feel so much so strongly. All she’d known is that she would rather not, especially when most of the time she could do nothing to help. 

That was before Ann found her, showed her what she really was. What she could do, if she put her mind and energy to it. If she was willing to sacrifice.

---

“I’m not with the news,” the blonde woman said softly. Her lips were painted some neutral shade of pink that made Layla think why even bother. She turned to DeBlume. “Can you give us some privacy?”

The big man frowned. “That’s against pol-”

“Please?”

They looked at one another for a while, until the wrinkle slowly disappeared from between his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yes, I can do that.”

Layla raised her eyebrows as he walked out and quietly shut the door. Had she just seen some weird kind of hypnosis at work? Though she didn’t want to admit it, it almost made her like Barbie a little better. When the woman turned back to her, there was a strange light in her eyes that disappeared as quickly as it’d been. 

“Now,” she said, smiling that tremulous smile of hers. “I am here to offer you help.”

“I already told you, I’m on the execution block in two days. The time for that shit is past, and to be honest? I don’t care.”

“The time for my kind of help never expires,” Jess said, steadily holding her eyes with her own clear gray ones. 

Ookay. 

“So what have you got? You gonna give me a new identity? Strip me of my crimes?”

“You killed five innocent women by poisoning.”

“Yes.” Layla held her eyes, challenging. She had long given up explaining the need, the darkness that burned at the core of her. 

“Do you not regret them?”

Jess looked almost confused. Layla had to laugh. 

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I only regret…” she raised her cuffed hands from her lap and shook them, “getting caught.” 

It was a lie. Layla could see that this woman- there was definitely something spooky about her- knew this. But she probably didn’t know how. Because Layla hadn’t regretted the deaths of those women, watching them slowly decline, thrashing on the sheets or reaching out for people who weren’t there in their final throes. But getting caught- that fateful night when she’d stood on someone else’s dew-soaked lawn, lights flashing around her, hands half-heartedly up- there had been a feeling almost like relief. That dark burning trapped, with nowhere to go; she no longer had a choice other than to let it eat her insides. They were right to cuff her. If she was to be freed right now, she might forgo the poison and go right for Barbie girl’s throat, just to wipe that knowing look off her face. She was, ironically, the type Layla normally went for. Pretty, college-educated women with their boyfriends and their dogs and their blooming careers. Women the cops showed up for. Good, good girls no one would never point a finger at and say, evil. 

Evil girls get only bad things. 

Look what you do to me. You’re poison.

“I’m going to put my hands on yours,” Jess said, and before Layla could pull her own back, she had done so. Her hands were warm and soft; lying atop Layla’s callused, big-knuckled ones they looked out of place. Her eyes dropped shut. Layla waited, feeling absurd, like she was in the middle of some weird kind of seance. She kept her eyes open, and watched as Jess’s face grew scrunched, her brow creasing. A small whimper escaped the other woman’s lips. Layla felt nothing. She wondered if she was supposed to. 

When it was over- whatever it was- Jess was paler than she’d been before, and panting slightly. Tears filled her eyes. Layla wondered if it was the wrong time to ask if she could go finish her breakfast now, maybe get some last time in the exercise yard, hands free to slam a half-deflated ball into the wall as hard as she could, over and over and-

“Okay,” Jess said, like she was ending a long conversation they’d just been having. “Okay,” she said again, this time seemingly to herself. She got up. “Come with me.”

---

When Jess got back to her hotel room, it was nearly midnight. She’d walked past the concierge in the lobby and his superficial concern with no explanation, and took the elevator to her floor. She didn’t think she could make the stairs. Stumbling across the hall, her vision blurred slightly as she jammed her card key in the door and entered her room, going immediately to the mirror lit up over the sink in the bathroom. She’d forgotten to turn it off- that or they’d traced her, decided she was a threat after all. Ann or whoever had been here looking for her. The thought had no ability to frighten her anymore. She’d done the deed.

The woman driving the Uber on her way back had kept stealing glances at her in the rearview mirror, and now she knew why. 

The face staring back at her from the mirror was grey, almost ashen, the lips giving off a weird pallor even underneath the minimal makeup she’d put on that morning. She gave herself a wry smile. 

You can’t heal what doesn’t hurt, Matt’s voice came back to her, echoing in her head. But there had been hurt. A world of it. Most of the cells she passed were chillingly blank, but Layla Cross… her soul had almost assaulted Jess with how loudly it cried, even over the waves of the television. Even on a rerun of an old court case. Something stuck.

The Empathic Science Commission disapproved of the word ‘magic.’ But there was no denying its members had a very unique gift. They had started their organization merely as a way to study their own talents in a safe environment, though over the years they had begun to lend their services out, mostly in schools and therapeutic offices. The kid who had a complete turnaround after years of bad behavior, the grown man who found his depression absent suddenly overnight… these things might have seemed like miracles, but Jess knew the truth: Empathic Science was involved. There’d been risk to each one of those procedures, and if the next day the teacher seemed drained, or the therapist suddenly closed up shop, no one thought too hard about it.

You isolate the catalyst in the brain, and you tweak it, Ann said in her mind, and she shut her eyes, lying exhausted on the bed, letting the memory wash over her.

You get inside, as only you can, and you fix what is broken.

What if, she’d said one day, after years of the same type of work, what if we took this to the prisons? I know some of them are blanks, but a lot of them aren’t? What if we could turn someone around even if they were a killer? On death row even? 

Jess, Ann said, you’re always thinking above and beyond, and I admire that, but this is too much. A failure on your part would be a threat to society. There’s quite a difference between a misbehaving child with a moldable brain or a patient whose suffering is self-inflicted. And even if it all went well… it would take so much from you. It could…

Jess knew what it could do. She was forty years old in real time but her body was more like sixty-five in terms of stamina and health. Older, now. To conduct the sort of ritual she’d just undertaken took sacrifice, and that was the tragedy of empaths. They didn’t know how to help without eating away at themselves in the process.

But there were things Ann didn’t know. She didn’t know how when Jess was only twelve, her own eighteen-year-old brother had been put to death, how the imagery of his smiling face holding her warred constantly with the angry boy she later only knew for seconds at a time, as he blew in and out of the house, breaking things, stealing. And eventually his crimes had gotten much worse. When her mother said, he was always like that, simply a blank, she had tried to understand and couldn’t. She wanted to. 

Ann didn’t know that when Jess had seen Layla Cross’s face come up on a television special on sick crimes by women, she’d gotten an electric shock to her senses. Her focus, which had gone drifting to sea for the past couple weeks, went taut. They weren’t all blanks. There was hurt in some of them. She had felt it in her brother too, though no one else had. 

Ann didn’t know just how ambitious Jess was, how deeply idealistic she was even in the hot bed of idealists where she worked. What good was their talent if they weren’t exercising it to its max capacity?

And last of all, Ann did not know about the mass in Jess’s uterus, the thing that had grown rapidly over the past six months, the thing that might not even allow her six more, even if she weren’t to take extraordinary risks.

She felt herself start to drift off, the bathroom light still buzzing pleasantly in the background. Idly, she tried to move her foot and couldn’t. The edge of oblivion was rising to meet her. It was easy to let go.

Your move, Layla.

---

Creak, creak, creak.

She shut her eyes in the darkness, listening to the sounds of his boots approaching the door, now his hand on the knob, turning. 

He entered the room and stalked to the bed beside hers, the young girl shivering in it. She could have been asleep, but she wouldn’t be for long. 

I need to help, she thought, as the sounds of the girl’s muffled crying reached her ears. I need to make it stop. 

But she found she couldn’t move, paralyzed by fear…no, something stronger.

It’s a dream.

The man straightened up to his full height again from where he’d been leaning over the other girl’s bed. His tight whisper was like a growl as he said, “you be quiet. Evil girls get only bad things. If you were good, this wouldn’t have to happen.”

If it’s a dream, I can wake up.

He was already at the door, his voice soft and almost soulful in its mock sadness. “The things you drive me to, Layla,” he said.

Darkness, then light as she forced her eyes open on her slumbering room.

---

“I had a sister,” she says.

The woman sitting across from her, the one who introduced herself as Ann Something-or-Other, raises her eyebrows.

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Leah Cousins says. “In some kind of foster home. Her father…our father? Abused her. He did terrible things.”

The woman named Ann blinked at her, her pen still poised above her pad. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “I keep having a dream, but it’s not a dream. It’s a memory.” 

“…Leah,” Ann says, like she has to take a moment to remember her name, “Sometimes with the type of accident you’ve had, when you’re getting back your memory, its easy to mistake a dream for-”

“It wasn’t a dream.” There’s a note of steel in her voice this time.

Ann swallows, nodding. “What happened to her? Your sister?”

She thinks. She wants to remember the whole thing, or convince this woman she does anyway, so she doesn’t have to have these meetings anymore.

“I think she died,” she says finally, and is surprised to find it feels very true. A dark rage, a bitter sadness rise in her chest. “She didn’t make it out.”

It’s silent for a moment. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“I don’t,” Leah says. “But I think she did. Blame herself, I mean. I think she let it fester inside and it killed her. She didn’t understand, it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. Her. Fault.”

When she walks out on the street, already lighting the cigarette she’s shaken into her hand, a crowd of girls from the prep school across the way moves past her, talking and laughing, tossing their pretty sun-bleached hair. A sea of emotions- not hers, theirs, she realizes- hits her like a brick wall and she stops, choking, almost nauseous. 

In all of them, even those who look nothing like the dark-haired little girl in the bed, she sees her lost sister. There’s a swelling in her chest that twines with the darkness. She can move now, regardless of how many months she spent in her coma. She will do for them what the system will not. 

She will protect them all.