Demon Marked Read Free Page A

factual knowledge remained, though she’d no recollection of how or when she’d learned them.
    “Ah.” His gray eyebrows had lifted into an open expression. A friendly smile shaped his mouth. “A lack of affect simply means that someone doesn’t display a marked emotional reaction . . . or empathy for others.”
    His conflicting feelings and facial expressions suggested that he assumed Ash would be disturbed by that explanation, and that he was trying to soften its delivery.
    She wasn’t disturbed. She’d already known that she didn’t feel anything like the emotions she regularly sensed in other people. Nodding, she’d turned to go.
    “Ash . . .” When she’d glanced back at Dr. Cawthorne, he wore a puzzled frown. “How did you know what I’d written? My notepad was angled away from you.”
    “Yes. But it reflected in the glass.”
    She’d pointed to the framed diplomas hanging on the wall behind him. He’d looked around; when he’d turned back to Ash, his smile had been bright. He’d said something about her cleverness, but she’d tasted his sour fear.
    The reaction of the nurses and caregivers had echoed his: excitement followed by unease, and punctuated with spurts of fear. They began calling her Ash, but when they spoke together in other rooms and thought she couldn’t hear them, they referred to her as “the American,” as if trying to put distance between themselves and her. Ash paid closer attention to the actors on television after that, particularly the never-ending soap operas. Mimicking those accents upset the nurses more, however. Only after she’d overheard two of them discussing how unsettling they found her tendency to watch everyone without evincing any emotion, Ash had finally understood that her American origin had never been the issue. It was her lack of affect that disturbed them.
    “Even psychopaths learn to fake it,” one of them had said.
    But Ash didn’t care enough to fake her emotions, and by the time she’d decided to leave Nightingale House, the nurses didn’t even refer to her as “the American” anymore. She’d become “that one.”
    That one, who’d caused an uproar of hilarity and shock when her clothes had vanished during a group therapy session—followed by greater shock and fear when, after Ash had noticed her nudity, jeans and a T-shirt that the nurses hadn’t seen before simply appeared on her body. That one, whose blond hair—which the nurses had kept short for easy care—had grown to the middle of her back during a walk through the garden one August afternoon. That one, who’d pulled a prank with glowing eyes, and terrified one of the nurses so badly that she’d quit her position the next day. That one, whom the nurses had found crouching atop the roof of Nightingale House one morning, and who’d given no believable explanation of how she’d climbed the turrets. That one, who’d dropped from the roof to the ground as easily as another person stepped out of her bed, despite their pleas for her to stop.
    They’d shrieked when she’d jumped—but Ash hadn’t detected any relief from them when she’d landed on her feet, uninjured. There’d only been fear, followed by hot anger.
    Another nurse had quit after that, screaming to her supervisor that she’d expected Nightingale House to treat only drugaddicted celebrities and depressed aristos, and that she’d left the government-run hospitals for a posh situation to avoid the psychos. Ash had decided to leave, too, albeit for a different reason. The answer to the one question that interested her— Who am I? —hadn’t been at Nightingale House. No answers were there—except for one, and she’d asked Dr. Cawthorne for that information during her final therapy session.
    “A posh hospital must be expensive,” she’d said. “So who is paying for my treatment?”
    He’d paled. In the months since she’d begun speaking, the wrinkles around Cawthorne’s eyes and mouth had become more