by Lisa Jackson
And now a memory stirred, crept up on him like a thief.
He’d been odd as a child. Everyone told him so. She’d dragged him to the cult time and again, but they wouldn’t even look at him. She’d shoved him in front of that black-hearted bitch with the blond hair and smug smile who had declared, “Changeling,” in disgust when she’d laid her witch’s gaze upon him. He hadn’t known what it meant, but she’d started babbling away, swearing it wasn’t so, sweeping an arm to include all the little blond girls the black-hearted bitch had birthed and who were accepted into the inner circle while he was kept outside, thrust from the heart of their group, scorned. The bitch had smiled at him meanly from her side of the gates and told her to take him far, far away.
“He has no soul,” she’d decreed solemnly, crystal blue eyes staring through the iron bars of the gate. Then, with one final disparaging look cast in Justice’s direction, the bitch had swept away from the gate back to the lodge, where her precious brood of blond angels were waiting. Giggling. Laughing at him. Secure in their huge lodge with its tall fence.
While he’d been left with her.
He hated the bitch with the knowing blue eyes.
But not as much as he hated her—the sobbing, babbling puddle of a woman who’d brought him to be judged by them in their high and mighty fortress hidden in the trees.
Her.
His mother.
She’d dragged him from their lodge, swearing, crying that they would accept him. He was no changeling. He was one of them. Couldn’t they see?
It was all so pathetic and futile.
Back in his bedroom at the time, he’d hidden from her and looked up the word surreptitiously. She hadn’t suspected he’d had the means. A fine specimen of a fortune-teller, one who couldn’t keep track of her only child. While she’d still been wailing at the unfairness of it all, he’d been pulling a nail from the floorboard of the rough-hewn planks that made up his bedroom floor and taking out one of the books he’d stolen over the years and made his own. The one he needed was merely a dictionary.
Heart pounding in dread, he’d rifled through the pages until he found the word he’d sought:
Changeling: idiot; a being of subnormal intelligence; a human child exchanged for another being in infancy.
Another being . . . something not human . . .
At first he’d been repelled; he’d wanted to scream at the world, rage at the black-hearted witch behind the gates that she was wrong about him! He was their cousin. All those twittering, nasty blue-eyed girls. He was of them! He belonged!
Of course, he’d been invited back, and as time had passed, he began to realize that the blue-eyed guardian of the gates was right, in her way. He was different than they were. Better. Further along the path chosen by their Maker. God.
He was God’s choice.
Over time his mission became clear, and as she, the embarrassment, the charlatan, the fortune-teller, scratched out a living by accepting coins from the tourists, he chronicled the blond angels, learning their names, their habits, their special abilities.
The first one he’d killed had been easy.
Too easy, as it turned out, because he’d been filled with a sense of self-importance and overconfidence, which had tipped off the blond angels, who were much wilier and clever than he’d first imagined.
He’d been blinded by success and he’d lost track of the ones outside the gates, only reconnecting when they were pregnant, when he could smell them again.
And when it had all been coming together again, when he was about to send another of them into the raging fires from whence they’d come, he’d been tricked! Fooled. Cheated by them. Captured and incarcerated.
Laughed at . . .
He’d been patient.
But now he was free.
His lips twisted at the thought that he’d fooled them all again. Including the weakling who had borne him.
He watched the western horizon turn an eye-hurting shade of pink and smelled the dank scents of the sea. A huge whip of kelp, a bladder attached to one end, its way of floating and capturing air, lay twisted on the sand in front of where he stood.
It was in the shape of an m.
Mother.
God’s sign. He was being guided by a divine hand.
Once again he felt himself going to his special place, his outer shell dissolving, revealing his true person, his beauty. But there was work to be done, and he reluctantly fought it off. He couldn’t succumb as he had in the past, letting his true self rule, because in this outside world he could stumble and be captured again.
No . . . no . . . !
With an effort he held his eyes open wide, refusing to see and feel anything but what was right in front of him: the beach littered with debris; the rising swirl and plaintive caws of the seagulls, scrounging at the tide’s edge; the brilliant refraction of light burning in his eyes; the restless, beckoning water in shades of gray and green.
Now he spurned his true self and almost wanted to cry out. It was his only refuge. His sanctuary.
But God had a plan, and he couldn’t tarry.
Turning away from the beach, he climbed up a row of sand-dusted stone steps to the parking lot above, where the Vanagon awaited in all its colorful, floral splendor. Anyone who saw it would remember it, but no one had witnessed him driving into this turnout with its view of the ocean.
He walked past the Vanagon without so much as a sideways glance. Cosmo wasn’t going to need it anymore, and he couldn’t be seen with it.
He was several miles south of a small hamlet called Sandbar, which was south of Tillamook, which was farther south from Deception Bay, his ultimate destination. He had Cosmo’s driver’s license and his clothes, which fit in length but were too big around. Not a problem for beachwear along the Oregon coast. June’s weather was unpredictable, and winds and rain could beat down at any time; the dress code was whatever worked.
He also had Cosmo’s backpack, hiking boots which fit okay, and a watch cap he’d discovered beneath the baby gear. He was growing a beard. He had thirty dollars, courtesy of Cosmo, who was really James Cosmo Danielson. He liked the name.
He hiked up the road until he’d passed the jutting rocks that divided this section of beach from the one where he’d left the Vanagon. Now he clambered down a sharp cliff of stones where rubble shifted under his feet and bounced down to the beach thirty feet below. Reaching the sand, he walked to the water’s edge and kept meandering northward. Fingers of wind snatched at his jacket, flapping it open. It was colder than it looked, and he passed several people: a couple strolling along, bundled up, their heads tucked together; a woman jogging; a man with a golden Lab, throwing a stick.
No one paid him the least bit of attention, which was just what he expected. He’d grown up in these parts, and he knew this section of coastline better than anyone. No one knew him except the ocean. It whispered to him, God’s voice trapped inside its swells and troughs.
A finger of land jutted out to the sea and then took a sharp turn northward, creating a natural bay, dividing the Pacific from a small protected area of smoother water. Justice climbed up and over the jutting, rocky spit, moving closer to the road rather than the ocean. At the eastern bay’s edge stood a bait shop, a rickety wooden hovel, part of a dilapidated structure that had once been a cannery; the cannery, in turn, being all that was left of a once thriving industry that had all but vanished over the last decades. Blackened, barnacle-clad posts stood in broken rows along the waterfront, revealing where docks, long rotted, had once stood.
As a seagull cawed, he climbed up a clattery wooden ramp to the back deck of the bait shop, glancing toward the bay before reaching for the door handle. He’d seen the faded FOR RENT sign when he’d driven by earlier, and he’d disposed of the Vanagon at the particular beach parking lot where he’d left it with the express purpose of heading back to this place. If, and when, the search for Cosmo began, it would fan out from the van, and Justice could be vulnerable to det
ection, except for the fact that he knew this area and he knew exactly what kind of person the bait shop’s owner, old man Carter, was: an ex-con with a healthy disregard of police in general, and the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department in particular.
That was, if he was still alive. And still around.
As Justice walked in, a jingly bell above the door announced his arrival. Carter, a few pounds heavier than he remembered, his hair a little grayer, was standing behind the bait shop counter. Though Justice knew of Preston Carter, the man didn’t really know him; and anyway, he was half blind and older than dirt.
“Yeah?” Carter barked in greeting, lifting his head. His eyes were bluish, rheumy, above a grizzled beard that sported a bit of oatmeal from the morning’s breakfast.
“The room,” Justice said.
“You want the room?” Carter repeated loudly. Undoubtedly, he was hard of hearing, too.
“I only have thirty dollars.”
“Thirty?” He seemed to consider. “Okay. We can start with that. Ya got any ID?” he shouted.
Justice slipped Cosmo’s driver’s license from his wallet, and Carter squinted at it. He didn’t write anything down, just slid the license back across the scarred Formica counter to him. “What’s your name, son?”
“Dan,” Justice said, handing him the money.
Carter fingered the bills. “I’m gonna have my girl, Carrie, check to make sure these are tens,” he warned. “I don’t see as well as I could.”
“Go ahead.”
He nodded in satisfaction. “All righty. But I guess meanwhiles I can give ya a key. You know, there’s a toilet? Back over there by the clamming sinks.” He waved an arm to encompass the other dilapidated buildings. “That’s all we got.”
Justice glanced toward the next building, with its rusted corrugated roof, where a row of sinks and clamming and crabbing paraphernalia, shovels, nets, and the like, stood beneath a listing roof that was streaked with seagull crap.
Justice made a sound of acceptance. He’d certainly seen worse. And despite the building’s dilapidated state, he was free. Away from that hellhole of Halo Valley Hospital.
“Good.” Carter turned to a coffee can on a shelf behind him, dug inside, and fished out a key. He handed it over to Justice and the deed was done. Justice determined he would stay in the room above the bait shop as long as he needed. Days . . . weeks . . . months . . . But he would be vigilant. If the sheriff’s department came looking for him, he would know it.
Climbing the outside stairway, the steps teetering a little, he let himself into a one-room space filled with cobwebs and worn linoleum flooring whose scarred and blackened surface looked like a permanent stain. He thought longingly of the sleeping bag in Cosmo’s van, but he’d sensed that people would remember him more later on if he were seen as a hiker of some sort, the guy with the sleeping bag. . . . No, that wouldn’t do. So he’d left the bag.
No matter. Justice was an accomplished thief, and he could gather things as needed. He was no good with conversation. No good dealing with people. He was too odd. Said too little. He caused people to remember him without even trying.
But he was a wraith. She had once said that about him. “You’re in the shadows. A listener. A plotter. A wraith.”
It had not been a compliment, but it had been accurate.
Dropping Cosmo’s backpack in the center of the room, he unzipped it and rooted through it. The hippie had a few interesting items, one of them being a jackknife. To go along with the box cutter. Moving the knife to his pocket, Justice also pulled out a pack of beef jerky, a picture of a woman holding a baby and the hand of another child, and two joints. He stuck a piece of jerky in his mouth and chewed slowly. The joints he transferred to an inner pocket of his coat. Nothing he planned to use himself, but they might be collateral. The picture of the woman and kids he tore into tiny pieces and shoved the pieces in the pocket of his pants. Later, he would scatter them to the wind.
He left other items in the backpack, planning to examine them more closely later. For now, he needed to sleep, and he lay down on the floor and put his head on the backpack, staring toward the cobwebbed joists above his head. Soon, he would have to get rid of all the rest of the evidence he’d taken from James Cosmo Danielson, deceased.
Then she came to him again, her heavy, vile scent wafting through this dingy room in thin, but distinct waves.
Sissstterr . . . I can smell you. . . .
His nerve endings jangled again. His eyes opened more widely.
She was close. Within a ten-mile radius. Maybe she was even with them at their lodge.
He smiled as he sent the message: The scent of your devil’s spawn is a beacon. . . . I’m coming for you. . . .
Saturday morning Laura stood motionless under the spray of her shower, her face turned upward into the hot needles, eyes squeezed shut, his words branding across her mind as she slammed the door to him once again.
He could really smell that she was pregnant?
Could that be true?
When she herself barely knew.
It was surreal and disturbing, and as she caught the fury and hatred in his message, her entire body quivered, not just with fear, but a building rage. The only person who knew she was pregnant besides herself was this deadly and strange psychotic who was bent on destruction!
Not on your life, bastard, she thought, twisting off the taps, then grabbing her towel and drying off. She was dead on her feet, having gotten home at dawn, but she dared not sleep and allow even the small chance that somehow he would find her.
She didn’t doubt he would; she’d grown up understanding that like herself and some of her sisters, Justice had his own special “gift,” what she considered a curse. While others, people who had grown up outside the walls of Siren Song, would find his heightened senses, his ability to communicate his raging thoughts, outrageous and unbelievable, she knew in the darkest part of her heart that he was hunting her down with the guile and patience of a bloodthirsty predator. That he was communicating with her was a gift. Yes, he did it to terrorize her, and it did. Man, oh, man, she was scared to death. But it also gave her a heads-up, made her aware, gave her a chance to be ready for him, time to thwart him.
“Just try it, you bastard,” she muttered under her breath as she wiped the condensation from the medicine cabinet mirror over the sink and saw rage in her own eyes. Before she’d known she was pregnant, she might have felt more bone-numbing terror, but now it wasn’t just she who was in danger. It was the tiny bit of life growing within her. Small as it was, she would protect it.
Justice Turnbull be damned. She slung her towel over the shower door and made her way to her bedroom.
After slipping into jeans and a sweater, she tossed on a Windbreaker, then slipped her feet into socks and sneakers. At the bureau mirror, she combed her hair straight down, seeing the thin line of light blondish brown at her center part, her grow-out. Dyeing her hair had become almost an obsession. As soon as she’d learned she and Byron were leaving Portland for the area around Deception Bay, she’d panicked inside, felt she had to do something, anything to hide her identity. She’d left the coast years before, to forge a new life but also to distance herself from her family in order to keep them all safe. Justice was a real threat, though not the only one, but he was definitely the most dangerous, the most immediate, the most determined. She’d tried to disguise herself physically in an effort to stay under the radar, but now she saw she’d underestimated his methods of finding her.
She walked into the kitchen, undecided about what her next move was, and snagged her keys from a hook near the back door. She was off work until the following evening. She thought of her family. The locals called them the Colony, and their lodge Siren Song. She had lived with them until her teens and had taken a job at a local market for a while, one foot in each world as she determined what she wanted. Two of her sisters had been adopted out when they were children. Another had simply wandered away. Most were still a
t the lodge, younger than Laura, under Catherine’s able, vigilant, and near paranoid care.
Maybe not so paranoid, she thought now.
When Justice had gone on his rampage a few years back, the gates, which had already been closed to the outside world, were locked shut. Laura was on her own and with Byron by then. She had sent Catherine a letter, asking if she needed her to come back and batten down the hatches, and had received a note in return that simply said: Stay away.
Then Justice had been caught, and Byron, never suspecting his wife had been in any kind of danger or that her roots were centered here, on the Oregon coast, had taken the position at Ocean Park. At first Laura had wondered if there was some connection that had drawn him here, if he’d somehow understood that she was from this part of the world, but she’d come to realize it was just a twist of fate. And though she’d resisted with all her might, driven by fear for her family, a part of her had been seduced by the idea. She’d spun a fantasy to herself whereby she could be part of her family and live a life with Byron outside Siren Song as well. Why couldn’t she have that? she asked herself. It wasn’t even a difficult request. Most everyone detached from their nuclear family to create their own, and yet the new family kept in contact with the old.
But “most everyone” wasn’t her family. They didn’t share her secrets and history.
They weren’t gifted.
Now she gritted her teeth and headed for the door and her Outback. Gifted. What a joke. Right now she would do a lot to rid herself of this gift.
Except it might be all that stood between her family and total destruction.
CHAPTER 8
Harrison awoke with a start and wondered where the hell he was in the moment before true wakefulness occurred. Then he saw that he was in his sleeping bag. On the floor of his new apartment. And it was damn cold. Jesus. June could be winter on the Oregon coast. Worse than Portland.