The rough-hewn oak door to the lodge swung inward as soon as they reached it, and Catherine, tall, austere, with her graying blond hair scraped into a tight bun at her nape, gazed at Laura through blue eyes that were faintly misty. She wasn’t known for emotion, quite the opposite. But after Laura’s teen rebellion subsided, they’d been close, almost like mother and daughter.
Almost.
“Lorelei,” Catherine greeted her, and after only a moment’s hesitation, Laura swept into the older woman’s embrace, her throat hot. Catherine gave her one firm hug, and then Laura released her.
And when she looked around, she saw all her sisters. Over half a dozen of them. Blue-eyed. Blond hair ranging from a dark ash color to nearly platinum. Wearing look-alike calico-printed dresses, about which Byron, finding the only dress Laura had saved from her youth and holding it away from his body, had disparagingly said, “Hey, Ma. Hey, Pa. Let’s go on a hayride!”
Laura hadn’t explained. She’d merely shrugged and smiled, as if it were some kind of costume.
In a way it was.
Now Catherine shepherded her charges and Laura past the staircase that wound upward to a second story and toward the huge table, an oak plank that was large enough to seat them all in the dining room. A fire, embers glowing bloodred, burned with a quiet hiss in the huge stone grate and tinged the air with the smell of smoke. Overhead, suspended from the tall ceiling, a dimly lit fixture gave off a soft glow as the girls stood silently, their eyes burning with unspoken questions, their fear almost palpable. They all knew, each and every one, about the danger that Justice Turnbull posed, and she had a horrid sensation that she might have innocently brought the madman closer to all of them.
“You’ve all grown up,” she said as the last bench was scooted closer to the table where they’d had family meals and meetings for dozens of years.
“It happens.” Ravinia ran a hand down her long blond tresses, combing the unbraided locks. She was fifteen and full of herself. Even Catherine’s icy stare didn’t get her down. Laura recognized the signs of trouble; she knew them firsthand. She also knew if the rules weren’t abided by, strange and terrible things could befall them.
Cassandra leaned forward. Her hair was the darkest, almost a light brown. “I saw him,” she said on a soft breath. “Justice.”
Laura didn’t have to be reminded that Cassandra hadn’t really seen Justice with her eyes. She’d seen him in some kind of mental picture or dream, her own special gift, but she had seen him.
“You know that he escaped Halo Valley Security Hospital?” Laura looked to Catherine.
The older woman nodded solemnly, the lines on her face more apparent than Laura remembered. “From Cassandra,” Catherine explained.
It was their form of knowing what was going on beyond their gates, and it was narrow . . . and surprisingly accurate. Laura looked to Cassandra, who’d been christened Margaret, but then, when her precognitive skills were realized, their mother simply changed her name to Cassandra, after the Greek goddess who could predict the future but was never believed. Laura had been named Lorelei after the German myth where Lorelei lured sailors to their death by her singing, a take on the Greeks’ Sirens who called to Odysseus and his crew. That myth was how their lodge became named Siren Song, a derogatory gift from the locals who believed the women who lived within the lodge’s walls were capable of bewitching the men and stealing them from their wives, among other things. When she was younger, Laura had deeply resented the way they were treated as outcasts, but she also knew that her family suffered from, or was blessed with, depending on how you looked at it, inexplicable abilities that ranged from precognition to mind reading. Now, for ease and without the intended malice, even she thought of the lodge as Siren Song.
“You predicted I would be pregnant by the end of the year,” Laura said softly to Cassandra, who was only a year younger than Isadora.
Cassie swept in a breath. “It came true!” Her eyes danced and a smile lit her face. “I knew it!”
Laura nodded and Catherine murmured, “Oh, no . . .” She closed her eyes and bowed her graying head for a second, as if the weight of the world was just too much for her.
“He wants your baby,” Cassandra said on a gulp.
Catherine’s head snapped up. “He wants destruction!” she corrected, eyes blazing, jaw set. “Of all of us!”
“He’s been in my consciousness,” Laura said.
They all turned to her, and Catherine, after a long moment, rose to her feet. “I need to have some privacy here with Laura,” she said. “Cassandra, you and Isadora stay, too.” She shooed the rest of Laura’s siblings from the room. Ravinia rolled her eyes at what she perceived as favoritism, and Lillibeth, from her wheelchair, sent Catherine a pleading glance, desperately begging to stay.
The older woman was implacable. “Please. Just . . . go to your room, just for a little while,” she told Lillibeth quietly, to which Lillibeth wheeled reluctantly away, her chair gliding over the old wood floors.
Once the others were out of earshot, Catherine shook her head angrily. “He wants every girl child, every woman, all of us. I can’t see him like Cassandra does, or sense him like you do.” She was completely aware of Laura’s own ability, of all their abilities. “But I’ve known him since boyhood.” She glanced out the window warily. “Mary . . . she was not kind to him.” She was shaking her head. “I was afraid it would come to this,” she whispered, her voice like dried leaves rustling in an ill-fated wind.
Her skin crawling, Laura thought back to her childhood and tried to remember Justice or, for that matter, Mary, her own mother, who gave birth to all of them and then just disappeared one day.
It had been odd. Disturbing. But then everything Mary had done could be placed in the “odd and disturbing” file.
Never a giving soul, Mary had been hard on Justice in a way Laura had never fully understood, though she remembered the taunts:
“Cretin.”
“Moron.”
“Idiot!”
“Changeling.”
All said with a sublimely malevolent relish that had, at the time, turned Laura’s blood to ice. They were issued with such vile superiority that Laura, even as a girl, had known no person with an ounce of goodness in her soul would ever speak as Mary had to Justice’s face and especially behind his back.
Vaguely Laura could recall Justice’s mother, Madeline Turnbull, as a younger woman. However, those faded memories had all but disappeared over the years, and now Laura remembered Justice’s mother from the lurid news reports after Justice was caught and Madeline was nearly killed. Madeline had also had extra abilities, and she’d used them for profit. The locals had unkindly dubbed her Mad Maddie. A cousin to Mary and Catherine, Madeline shared some of the same genetic history, but she’d lived outside of Siren Song, which had been built by Mary’s great-grandfather.
“He tried to kill Madeline,” Laura said.
“He’s an aberration,” Catherine stated firmly, her lips flattening in hatred. “But we’ve had plenty of those over the years.”
Laura didn’t know how to respond to that. Though she knew Catherine was right, Justice was in a class by himself. A man on a mission to kill them all.
“He calls me Sister,” she said, though she knew he was a cousin, generations removed. They shared Nathaniel and Abigail Abernathy as great-great-grandparents, and yet he referred to her as “sssissterrr,” tried to make her think they were close. . . .
“Slam the door on him, Lorelei!” Catherine insisted. “He can’t hurt you, if you keep him out.”
“I’m worried about my baby girl.” Laura swallowed hard.
“You want to keep her?” Catherine asked.
“Oh, yes!” she said automatically, a little surprised by her own vehemence. Yesterday at this time she hadn’t even known she was pregnant.
No one questioned her belief that it was a female. In their family, girl children were the norm, and if by chance a male child was born,
there was generally something wrong, some affliction that severely impaired them in some way. Her flesh pimpled as she remembered her brother. Nathaniel was a case in point, though his death had been hastened by human hands, not disease. She had two other brothers, who were gone now as well.
And then, of course, there was Justice . . . a surviving male child, the monster.
“Have you told your husband?” Catherine asked.
Laura looked at her, thinking hard, but the message leapt from her mind to both Catherine’s and Cassandra’s, because they both gazed at her with a mixture of surprise and worry. “You’ve left him,” Catherine said.
“I divorced him,” Laura said. “I’m pregnant because I was trying to make it work when the marriage was already dead.” She felt cold all over again. “It . . . it was a mistake.”
“So you’re going to raise this child on your own?” Catherine was skeptical.
Yes! Laura spread her hands, not even knowing how to explain her mixed emotions, her attachment to this new being growing inside her. “Look, right now I just want to keep her safe from Justice.”
Cassandra stared past them. Laura slid her a look and felt the hair on her arms lift. From her childhood she remembered that stillness, that frozen mask when Cassandra saw something, the way her breathing was so shallow as to have nearly stopped. What Cassandra saw wasn’t a vision, per se, but flickering images that were somewhere in the future. Random pieces that might not fit together. But the pieces themselves were telling.
“You need him,” Cassandra said, her voice distant.
“What? Who?” Laura asked, trying to understand. “Oh, God . . . Justice?” Laura swallowed back a feeling of horror.
“No. The truth seeker,” Cassandra said in that far-off voice that caused Laura’s scalp to crinkle in apprehension.
“Who’s that?” Laura asked.
Catherine said, “Don’t listen to this. You know how she gets sometimes.”
Laura did. And it scared her. “Cassie? Who are you talking about?”
Cassandra slowly shook her head from side to side, and her eyes were focused to the middle distance, a world of her own. “He’s waiting for you.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” She placed a hand on Cassandra’s arm, and the girl didn’t so much as react. Frustrated, Laura said, “Cassandra, come on . . .”
But there was no response. It was nerve-rattling, the way Cassandra received information, as if she were getting bits and pieces, scraps of important messages. Laura had witnessed it before, years ago, when Cassie had warned of a deadly storm on a clear day. That night, she, Laura, had nearly been killed when the wind had picked up, gaining strength to hurricane force while she was working. The electricity in the store had gone out, and she’d tried to make her way home, through the rain and the dark, a car nearly running her down as the driver lost control. . . . She’d survived; the driver, a boy of nineteen, hadn’t been so lucky.
And then there was her pregnancy.
She hadn’t been here, to the lodge, in years. She’d barely known her younger sisters because she’d made a point to distance herself during her teen years. Catherine had told her of Cassandra’s pregnancy prediction in one of Laura’s intermittent communications with her aunt, yet the girl had been spot on.
“I’ll look for him,” she said, worrying about the prediction, wondering what in the world it meant. A truth seeker? Really?
“And keep Justice locked out,” Catherine warned again. Her brow was knit; her hands were worrying each other.
“You should stay with us,” Cassandra said, blinking, her blue eyes finding Laura’s again. She was back from whatever disjointed future she’d seen, but there was trepidation in her voice. “At least until he’s caught.”
“No.” Laura was adamant. She had a life and it was one outside these walls. As for the others . . . her sisters . . . “Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.” And somehow she would make that so. “But Isadora said you don’t have a handyman.” She turned to Isadora. “Who’s picking up supplies?”
“We have a driver,” Isadora said. “He’s a Foothiller, and he’s been taking Catherine to the market once a week.”
“Don’t leave the lodge,” Laura said urgently. “Any of you. It’s not safe.”
“It’s dangerous for you, too!” Cassandra’s face was animated again, her pretty features etched with worry.
Laura tried to allay her fears a bit. “I know. It’s not safe for any of us, but I live on the outside. I have a job. A life on the other side of the gates. I’ll be okay.” She said it as if she meant it, with renewed conviction.
“Then why did you come?” Catherine wanted to know.
“To make sure you were all right.”
“We’re fine,” the older woman assured and smiled, though her eyes remained somber and a dark, shifting blue. “He can’t get to us.”
They all knew that was false hope.
With a shiver, Laura said, “Check the fence line. Make sure there’s no easy way in.”
“Oh, we have.” Catherine was light-years ahead of her. “And we’ll know if and when he’s coming, anyway.”
They all looked to Cassandra, who nodded solemnly. “Yes, I’ll probably see him, but . . .” Her eyebrows slammed together and her features pinched as she thought hard. Then, she sighed, as if finally understanding she was totally helpless. “It’s you who’s the most vulnerable, Lorelei,” she said as Laura looked out the window to the surrounding gloom of the forest and the shifting morning fog.
“I know,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 10
Harrison strolled into the Sands of Thyme Bakery a little after eight o’clock. It had been about a forty-minute drive to Deception Bay from his apartment in Seaside, and he yawned as he approached the counter. Two women were working the front of the shop, one of them being a girl whose name tag read Cory; the other being his sister, Kirsten, who placed a hand over her heart when she saw him.
“You’re up before noon? Stop the presses.”
“I get up before noon lots of times,” Harrison told her as the warm scent of fresh-baked bread mingled with the aromas of coffee and cinnamon. “It’s all related to what time I go to bed.”
“Exactly. And when was the last time you went to bed before midnight?” She raised a skeptical brow.
“Two nights ago,” he said. The truth was he was a bit of an insomniac, a condition that had worsened since Manny’s death.
“Why?”
“I was . . . watching a DVD of a movie I’d seen a few times and passed out before it was over.”
“What time was that? Eleven fifty-nine p.m.?” She smiled, a crooked smile that was an echo of Harrison’s own.
He smiled back. “And fifty-five seconds.”
“Can I get you something?” she asked, flipping a towel at him.
“Coffee. Black. Lots of caffeine.”
“What are you doing here so early, really?” she asked, grabbing a paper cup and handing it to him as the other girl yelled, “Low-fat vanilla latte,” toward a group of three women who’d clustered around a newspaper strewn at one of the glossy tables.
“Oh, that’s mine!” A woman in rain gear scooted back her chair and approached the girl holding out a steaming cup with a frothy top of foam.
Harrison wandered over to the self-serve area and pulled the lever on a hot pot, shooting a stream of steaming brown liquid into his cup. He didn’t bother with a lid, which caused Kirsten to come around the counter and grab one for him, pressing it into his hand. “We make it hot here,” she said. “Don’t spill in the car.”
“I’m not leaving yet.”
“Yeah? You’re even too early for this date with destiny, whatever it is?”
“Very funny,” he said sarcastically, then eyed the glass display case where baskets of cinnamon rolls, scones, bagels, and coffee cake were visible. “What about those scones over there?” He waved a hand at the case. “Got any with cranberries?”
> “Didi’s favorite,” she said, returning to her spot behind the counter.
Cory was helping another customer, a girl who’d just walked in, so Harrison stepped out of the way as she, after handing the teenager a paper coffee cup, pointed to the hot pots he was crowding. The newcomer looked as if she’d just rolled out of bed and was still wearing her pajamas. She stumbled as if in a fog toward the coffee thermoses.
Kirsten picked up a cranberry scone with tongs, put it on a plate, looked at Harrison quizzically. “You want this heated?”
“Nah.”
She handed him the plate as the teenager nearly staggered into him. He was grateful the girl had the sense to put a lid on her coffee as she wasn’t exactly the picture of grace and stability. He sat down at a table and did the same, pressing the lid over the cup before picking up his scone and taking a sample bite. It was good, and he wolfed down the rest, then pressed his thumb on the crumbs, transferring them to his mouth.
The teenager sipped her coffee for several moments, and it was almost like Harrison could watch the caffeine do its job. Brighter-eyed, she headed outside to a newer model BMW. The vanity plate read BRITT88.
He watched her wheel out of the lot and head north with a screech of tires. Idly he wondered if he’d just met Britt Berman and she was heading back toward West Coast High. There were still a few days of school left before summer break.
Glancing over, he saw Kirsten watching him closely. “She’s a high school student,” she hissed in a stage whisper.
“I’m not looking for a date,” Harrison assured her flatly. “I just thought she seemed familiar, but the girl I’m thinking of lives in Seaside, not Deception Bay.”
“I think her father lives around here. She’s come in with him a few times, called him Dad. She pulls in from the south, picks up coffee, then drives north. Maybe she goes to her mother’s before school.”
“It’s Saturday,” the other girl at the counter said as she grabbed some ceramic cups and squeezed past Kirsten to the coffeemaker.