Page 3 of Soul Sucker

She looked him right in the eye. “You’re not crazy. What you saw was real. I’m going to make sure that the thing you saw is captured and sent back where it belongs.”

“You’re crazy too, then. Right?”

She smiled at him. “In this job, it sure helps.”

His pulse steadied and for the first time he stopped shaking. “I’m not sure if you telling me what I saw was real makes it better or worse. I’m going to be scared to pull up a fucking weed in my yard or buy my girlfriend a bunch of flowers now.”

She laughed and he reluctantly smiled back at her. Without fear consuming him he was quite an attractive guy. “Look, can you bear to go through what happened one more time for me?”

His faint color fled. “Do I have to?”

“It would help me pinpoint exactly where I have to go to find this…anomaly.”

“Sunflower, you mean.”

“Well, it uses the flower as camouflage. It’s skilled at hiding in anything.”

He held her gaze. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I sure am. Now would you mind closing your eyes while you tell me what happened? It will help you visualize the scene.”

It would also help her identify exactly what had attacked him and then erase it from his memory. One of her class tutors had likened using empath power on the human mind to erasing a song from a cassette tape or an image from a VCR and, even though it was old-school, she kind of liked that idea. It was also why she always told the victim the truth about what they’d seen before she erased the memories. It seemed to help them recover more quickly without leaving a lingering suspicion that they were going nuts.

Mr. Knight sighed and closed his eyes. She closed hers too and concentrated on extracting the images from his head.

“Okay, I was taking a shortcut through the park near the Japanese Tea Gardens when I thought I heard someone call my name. I had my ear buds in, so I took them out and looked around.” He swallowed convulsively. “I walked toward one of the flowerbeds and something tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and there was this weirdfacestaring out at me from the center of this huge fucking sunflower.”

“Did you try to run away?”

“No, I just stood there like an idiot staring at this thing and then it smiled and it had hundreds of tiny pointed teeth like a shark.”

She saw the image in his head and drew it into her mind. “Then what happened?”

“I tried to back off, but the thing wrapped its leaves around me and they were getting tighter and the more I struggled, the tighter they got. Then the ground started moving like there was going to be an earthquake and the soil boiled up like lava.” He struggled to breathe. “And I just knew that fucking thing was going to try and drag me down there and that if it did, I’d never come up again.”

“That’s possible.”

“So I started to struggle and bite at the leaves and the sunflower just…laughed and dropped me on the ground. It bent over me and hissed something in my face, and that’s all I remember.”

Ella extracted the last of the images from Mr. Knight’s head and stored them carefully in her own mind. She was pretty sure she knew what had happened, but she needed to go over the impressions and make certain that she was correct. She cleared her mind and concentrated on the blank spaces in Mr. Knight’s memory until he was relaxed and breathing nicely.

“Mr. Knight, when you wake up you won’t remember the sunflower. What youwillremember is that you fell over a misplaced stone in Golden Gate Park, banged your head, and now you have a concussion.” She fed those images into his head like frames of film. “You’re still going to be pissed off, and you’ll gladly take the large sum of money the city is offering you as compensation for your injury before you sue their asses. Do you understand?”

He nodded, a beatific smile on his face. “Sue their asses. I like that. And you’ll take care of that…thing?”

“Yes, I will. I promise.”

He sighed. “Okay, then.”

She pushed power into his mind, sealing in the new memories and eradicating all traces of the old, and he fell into a more natural sleep. Ella watched him for a while and then rose to her feet and walked quietly toward the door.

Jose looked up as she approached the nurse’s station. “How’s Mr. Knight doing?”

She took off her white coat. “Much better. He’s going to be mad with our great city parks when he wakes up, but no longer babbling about things that aren’t there. Concussion does weird things to folks doesn’t it?”

“Sure does.” Jose handed her a cup of hot chocolate from the vending machine. “Here you go. I know you need your sugar.”

“Thanks.” He was far more observant than most of his team, and that was something she needed to keep an eye on for her own security. Taking and replacing people’s memories was actually quite draining and she really did need energy.

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