CHAPTER 2
Sssisssterrr . . .
Whore . . .
!
With Satan’s evil
incubus growing inside you . . . !
The voice rasped against Laura’s brain
again. She flinched and nearly stumbled as she thrust up the mental
wall against him again on her way to surgery to check on Conrad’s
condition. But her worst fears were confirmed: it was Justice.
And he knew she was
pregnant??? How?
The frisson that shivered down her
spine was an old friend. She’d felt it before many times, but not
since Justice Turnbull had been captured, convicted, and locked
away. Not like this. Not with this harsh hammering into her
thoughts.
Outside the doors to the surgical ward
she glanced around, always a bit uncertain that someone else
couldn’t hear him as well, though she knew from experience she was
the only one. She could block him from digging into her thoughts
and feelings, but she could not prevent her own mental receptors
from hearing him.
He was a devil. A scourge. A sickness
that frightened them all. He was—
“Laura?” Her ex, Byron Adderley, broke
into her thoughts, causing her to jerk as if goosed. “What’s wrong
with you?” he demanded instantly. Frowning, he stripped a pair of
surgical gloves from his hands and tossed them into a trash
receptacle. His eyebrows rose, as if he were waiting for her to
answer.
Like an obedient
puppy, she thought sourly.
He’d just come from surgery, she
realized. Of course she would run into him. Of course. Murphy’s
Law. Pulling herself together, she ignored his question. “How’s
Conrad? Do you know?”
“Who? Oh. That security guard?” He
shoved a thinning shock of coffee-dark hair from his eyes. “We
drilled into his head to relieve the pressure in case of a subdural
hematoma. Hope he has a brain left. Someone beat him half to
death.” He actually smiled, as if he’d said something clever. “That
what you wanted to know?”
“I was just concerned.”
His smile fell away and Byron gazed at
her hard. “You like him?”
“I barely know him,” she shot back. “I
just want to make sure he’s okay.”
“Yeah, well. ‘Okay’ is maybe not the
word for it.” Byron yawned. He stretched his arms over his head in
a move she remembered, one she’d once thought was sexy. No longer.
“God, I gotta get some sleep,” he admitted. “I was out late last
night, and this morning came early.”
Like she cared.
“What about Dr. Zellman?” Being a floor
nurse, and not part of the surgical team, Laura was forced to get
information secondhand.
“Jesus. He’s lucky to be alive! That
fuckin’ psychotic stabbed Zellman, too. Got his voice box but
good.” Byron actually sounded a little concerned. “Could be,
Zellman never speaks again.”
“Oh, I hope you’re wrong.” She glanced
past him toward the double doors that led into surgery. “That’s
what they’re saying?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Too early to
tell.”
“The psychotic who did this . . .
?”
“No surprise there. You remember the
one. Justice Turnbull.” Byron shook his head, his unruly forelock
falling forward again. “A whole new kind of crazy.” He stifled
another yawn. “Think Turnbull’ll come back to his old stomping
grounds and go after those cult freaks again?”
Laura went completely still. Tried not
to look as if his remark had hit a nerve. “The sheriff’s department
will find him,” she said with an effort.
“Oh, yeah.” He barked out a laugh.
“Count on them.”
Ever the cynic.
Laura had heard enough. “I’ve gotta get
back to work.” She turned on her heel.
“Hey. Laura.” She didn’t so much as
look over her shoulder and set her jaw. How had she ever found him
attractive, and why the hell had she married him? Her thoughts
strayed to the child growing within her, his
child, the baby that Justice seemed to sense, and her insides went
numb. “When are you going to stop dyeing your hair?” Byron called
after.
She ground her teeth together, angry at
him and herself for ever thinking they could build a life together.
She’d known he wasn’t her kind of man from the get-go, hadn’t she?
She’d suspected he was self-centered and narcissistic. How had she
let him convince her to leave Portland for this stretch of
coastline and Ocean Park Hospital, when she’d known it might not be
safe? God, she’d been a fool to let him talk her into anything so
idiotic. She hadn’t wanted to move. She certainly hadn’t wanted to
relocate here, of all places. The house
they’d rented together in Deception Bay, about six miles down
Highway 101, until he’d moved out wasn’t much to write home about,
and the apartment he’d subsequently moved into was even less
impressive, but that was just icing on the cake of her
unhappiness.
Why did you marry
him?
At a corner, she hazarded a quick
glance over her shoulder, but Byron had already turned away. He
couldn’t really care less about the horrific events that had taken
place at Halo Valley. If he wasn’t the center of the universe, then
the universe itself didn’t matter.
Because I wanted to
believe someone loved me.
And she’d been stupid enough to buy
into his good looks, his easy charm, his success . . . what a fool
she’d been and now . . . Automatically her hand strayed to her
abdomen and the life beginning to pulse within her. She couldn’t
keep this baby. Byron’s baby. She couldn’t. Yet, it was a child . .
. her child. . . .
Nurse Baransky, middle-aged, brusque,
was coming down the hall toward her. “Are you checking on Mrs.
Shields?” she asked.
“I’m on my way to her room now.” Laura
tried not to appear like she was hurrying, but inside she was
running, running, running. From Byron, from
her marriage, from the strangeness of her childhood, from Justice .
. . from the truth . . .
“Were you at the ER?” Baransky
asked.
“Just coming from outside surgery. No
word yet on Conrad or Dr. Zellman.”
Baransky nodded. “It was that madman
who escaped, wasn’t it? The one they captured in the shootout at
the motel a few years back? Can’t think of his name. Justin
something?”
“Justice,” Laura reminded carefully,
the taste of his name on her tongue bitter, the sound of it
striking a chord of terror that shuddered through her. Sssiissssttterrr. His hiss echoed through her brain.
Dear God.
“They were bringing him here for
testing because he was complaining of stomach pain off and on,
apparently.”
“He was faking,” Laura said
automatically.
“They told you that?”
Laura nearly bit her tongue trying to
take the words back and was instantly sorry that she’d blurted out
something she didn’t really want to discuss. “I’m just going on an
assumption,” she backtracked as a patient, a thick-in-the-middle
woman with a wan expression, walked tentatively down the hall. Her
plump fingers were clenched tight around the pole of a rolling IV
stand.
“You need help?” Baransky said, and the
woman offered the ghost of a smile as she shook her head,
determined to walk on her own. “You said that Justice Turnbull was
faking his illness?” Baransky asked, turning her attention back to
Laura.
She didn’t know how to answer that she
knew Justice was faking. She sure as hell wouldn’t be able to
explain that Justice had started banging against her brain,
something that had begun when she was young, though its strength
had waxed and waned over the years, and had practically been
nonexistent since he’d been incarcerated, had come back with a
vengeance. That she still could manage to hold him out, but there
was always a tiny iota of time before she could effectively throw
up her mental wall, an infinitesimal moment where he left traces of
his own thoughts, scraps that were available to her. So, yes, she
knew he’d faked the stomach pain because, in effect, he’d told her
as much. More like an overall realization than the needle-sharp
words he sent to her.
And she also knew he’d been planning
this escape a long time.
And she knew that he was hunting her
now. . . .
How does he know about
the baby?
“Laura?” Baransky suddenly demanded,
eyeing her closely. She had a big voice and little or no tolerance
for anything she deemed to be nonsense.
Laura could tell her face had lost
color. “I’m just overly tired. Didn’t get good sleep last
night.”
“Maybe you should sit down. I can check
on Mrs. Shields.”
“No, no. I’m okay.”
Laura forced out a smile as she walked
past her. She was feeling nauseous, but it was less about the
pregnancy and more about the realization that Justice Turnbull had
escaped. When the events of his rampage had taken place a few years
earlier, she’d kept the wall against his thoughts up solidly high.
Before then, he’d never been seen as a serious threat to her and
the others he’d targeted by either herself or her family. But then
suddenly he was after them all! Threatening the very foundation of
her family, her ancestors, anyone even remotely related to her, all
those who lived at the huge lodge shielded from the world by
massive iron gates. Her sisters.
Sissterr . . .
How he’d given the word a horrid sound. Her flesh crawled as she
remembered the sibilant sound of his voice, a hiss that grated,
like talons running down a blackboard.
Justice was bent on destruction and
chaos and killing, and though she hadn’t been before, Laura, within
the sterile hospital walls, sensed she was definitely in his sights
now.
Mrs. Shields was sitting up in bed, her
beady, dark eyes regarding Laura with avid curiosity as she walked
into the room. She was in her fifties and had been through knee
replacement surgery. “How many times do I have to push this
button?” she demanded. “I need painkillers, Nurse Adderley. Where’s
your husband?”
“My ex-husband,” Laura said for about
the tenth time.
“I need more pain medication. I’m
supposed to keep ‘on top of the pain,’ that’s what I was told, to
not be at a ‘ten on the chart,’ right?” She was referring to the
pain management chart that had been pinned to her wall, a row of
smiley faces where the smile disintegrated to a frown as the level
of pain increased. Zero was pain free; ten was excruciating, the
face on the chart twisted in serious agony, a far cry from Mrs.
Shields’s primarily ticked-off expression. “Right now, I’m at about
a level twenty!” she insisted and, when Laura didn’t respond
quickly enough, added, “I need Dr. Adderley
. . . stat!”
“You’re on the medication levels he
prescribed,” Laura said calmly as she tried to take the woman’s
temperature.
“It’s not enough!” Mrs. Sheilds said,
around the thermometer.
Her voice had risen, and it brought
Nurse Nina Perez to the doorway. Nina, an attractive woman in her
forties, was Laura’s immediate boss, and she was fiercely devoted
to her job. She also was fair and could assess a situation quickly.
“Everything all right in here?”
“No!” Mrs. Shields had been scheduled
to leave earlier in the day, but she was one of those rare patients
who wanted to stay in the hospital as long as possible. She was an
attention seeker who had bullied her husband for so long that he
seemed to have no identity and no ability to make
decisions.
“I need more painkillers,” Mrs. Shields
declared as Laura removed the thermometer and noted a reading of
98.6. Perfectly normal. “And here. Fill this up.” Mrs. Shields
thrust her water glass at Laura, who took it from her hand. Laura’s
fingers brushed hers, and a tingle fled up Laura’s nerves to her
brain.
Pancreas.
The word pulsed across her mind. Vivid.
Red.
She nearly dropped the
glass.
Laura knew, with certainty, that Mrs.
Shields would contract pancreatic cancer at some future point and
that the disease would ultimately lead to her death. Laura received
these messages from time to time when she touched another human’s
flesh, and it was this odd ability that had first steered her
toward a career in medicine. She couldn’t tell anyone about it,
just as she couldn’t tell anyone about her private communication
with Justice Turnbull, but she trusted it implicitly.
“Let me see,” Nurse Perez said. She
turned toward the woman’s IV and examined the drip. Laura suspected
that it was all an act for the bristling Mrs. Shields. The woman
was being given the proper amount of medication.
Laura asked her casually, “Does cancer
run in your family?”
“No. Why?” She was
suspicious.
“I thought I saw it in your medical
file.” She poured water into the glass from a near empty pitcher on
Mrs. Shields’s tray near her bed, then noted how much fluid the
patient was taking in.
The older woman harrumphed, then
admitted, “My father had cancer of the pancreas. Killed him in his
fifties.”
Nina Perez gave Laura a searching look;
it wasn’t usual for the floor nurses to pore over their patients’
medical history. The doctors ordered the protocol, and the nurses
followed through.
Laura, offering a smile she didn’t
really feel, said, “With all the tests you’ve had for this surgery,
I’m sure you’ve checked that, too.”
“I’m not sure of anything!” Mrs.
Shields declared. Her nostrils flared slightly, and there was a
definite purse to her lips. “Tell your husband to check on that,
too!”
My ex, Laura
thought, but nodded on her way out. She was grateful to Nina Perez
for not questioning her too closely, but now that she’d “heard”
this information, she wanted to follow through. So thinking, she
had to search out Byron, catching him coming out of the staff room.
That boyish smile she’d once found charming curved his lips, and
his eyes definitely sparked as he joked with one of the nurse’s
aides—a girl with round doe eyes, pert nose, and was probably just
into her twenties. Her face was bright and flushed as she looked up
at him with an adoration she didn’t bother to hide.
Laura didn’t know whether she was
disgusted or amused.
Byron’s latest woman—definitely not
this girl—wasn’t the kind to take his flirting with a forgiving
attitude.
Spying his ex-wife out of the corner of
his eye, Byron stopped short, as if caught in a nefarious
act.
Serves you
right, Laura thought as the clueless aide wandered away,
gazing back at Byron longingly and even waving her fingers
coquettishly before catching a glimpse of Laura, frowning slightly,
then rounding the corner to disappear.
A ninny, Laura
thought, but bit her tongue. Who cared?
It was surprising to find that she
didn’t.
But you’re pregnant.
With his child.
Ignoring that persistent and irritating
voice in her head, she said, “I was checking on Mrs. Shields. She
told me her father died of pancreatic cancer in his fifties, about
the age she is now.”
“I know her history,” he bit out,
obviously irritated. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just thought maybe it
was something to recheck.”
“What? Why?” he demanded,
affronted.
“Due diligence.”
“So now you’re
the doctor?”
She wasn’t going there, wasn’t going to
be drawn into a no-win discussion, and Byron’s pager erupted,
anyway, and he stormed off. Fortunately, in the direction of Mrs.
Shields’s room. Good. He could deal with her.
She walked the other direction but felt
him glance over his shoulder and give her an assessing look. The
way he always did when she became a puzzle, something he couldn’t
begin to understand. His ex-wife just wasn’t a square peg that fit
snugly into the square hole he’d wanted to force her
into.
Not that it mattered any
longer.
Laura pushed aside all thoughts of him
and, for now, her unexpected pregnancy. For now, she concentrated
on doing her job and keeping Justice, the monster, at
bay.
Thankfully, the rest of her shift was
uneventful, but as she was driving to her house, her senses were on
high alert. She hoped to hell they’d caught Justice already, but
she suspected that hope was unlikely. If he were captured, she
believed he would blast out a raging message to her, and since that
last sibilant ssssisterrrr, he’d been
quiet.
The house she and Byron had rented was
a two-bedroom with white trim and gray shingles. One bathroom.
Built in the fifties, renovated in the seventies, left to
disintegrate over time. She and Byron had bought a condo in
downtown Portland, and then the housing market had tumbled and
they’d sold for a small loss. It had soured Byron on real estate;
he hated losing anything. So, they’d chosen this rental for its
proximity to the hospital and signed a six-month lease, which had
turned into month-to-month as time had marched on. Once Byron had
moved out, Laura was grateful for the cheap rent, even if it did
come with a leaky bathroom faucet.
Pulling up to the back porch, she cut
the engine and climbed from her Subaru. Byron drove a black
Porsche, but Laura had preferred her dark green Outback. The
Porsche was leased and Byron’s affair; Laura owned the Outback in
her own name. Another blessing.
Hurrying past the rhododendrons long
past blooming, she heard the rumble of the Pacific Ocean and
smelled the thick, damp scent of the sea as she walked along the
cement walk to her porch. The neighbor’s black cat slid under the
porch as she climbed the two steps and unlocked the back
door.
Once inside the small kitchen, she
snapped on the lights, then dropped her purse and coat on the
counter. Its chipped Formica had been scrubbed to a shine when
Laura moved in, and she’d repainted all the interior cabinets,
trim, and walls herself. Tired it might be, but it was bright and
white.
And home.
Her sanctuary.
She’d thought that she might feel a bit
of nostalgia, a loss, when Byron had moved out, but all she’d
really experienced was relief, a quiet peace.
Until today.
When Justice had reached out to her and
reminded her that she was different. Growing up at Siren Song had
made her so. Now she was vulnerable . . . so very vulnerable.
Sighing, she sat down in one of the two café chairs surrounding the
small glass table, put her elbows against the surface, and buried
her face in her hands.
The baby . . . a baby . .
.
She should go to the lodge and talk to
Aunt Catherine, tell her that Cassandra’s prediction had come true.
But Justice was out there. Loose. Waiting for someone to make a
move. And she, being outside the gates, was the logical
choice.
Oh, dear God.
She shuddered. She’d never told Byron
about her past. She’d simply said she was estranged from her mother
and she’d never known her father. She’d been in her second year of
nursing at the hospital where he’d been a resident when they met,
and he’d just become a full-fledged osteopath when they’d started
dating. She’d been starry-eyed and too eager, and he’d been
intrigued by her ability to understand, practically diagnose,
underlying problems with his patients that had nothing to do with
the broken bones he corrected. He called it her instinct, and they
both let it be an understood, and basically untouched, thing
between them. Now she knew it was what had set her apart from the
other young nurses and medical staff that cast admiring glances in
his direction. When he’d casually suggested marriage, she’d jumped
at the chance. She’d ignored his selfish traits. She simply hadn’t
cared. She’d wanted the whole picture: the house with the picket
fence, 2.5 children, a dog, and a husband. She’d suspected Byron
wasn’t as deep as she was. The fact that he hadn’t been all that
interested in her family had been one clue, but she’d thought it
wouldn’t matter if she was more in love than he.
On that, she’d been wrong.
So wrong.
He was not only shallow, but he was
unfaithful. And uncaring. And unrepentant. He’d wanted her for his
wife. He was intrigued with her “instinct,” but he wasn’t going to
be monogamous for anyone. That was simply the way it was. She’d
tried to accept the rules but been unable. She’d tried once to make
believe they could work their way back together, and that was a
complete failure, for which she now was pregnant.
With Byron’s child. For so long she’d
wanted a baby, hoped for a child, and now . . . oh, God, now she
felt a fierce love for this baby but didn’t kid herself that
raising the child—Byron’s child—alone would be easy.
She sat at the table a long time,
finally got up and heated water in the microwave and, when the
timer dinged, dipped a packet of decaf tea into the steaming cup.
As the fragrant tea steeped, she turned on the television and
caught breaking news.
Her heart nearly stopped.
The narrow face of Channel Seven’s
Pauline Kirby, her short, slick dark hair blowing a bit in the
evening breeze, was reporting that Justice Turnbull, a known
murderer, had escaped from Halo Valley Security Hospital. Two men
had been critically injured. One was fighting for his
life.
“Oh, dear God.” Laura stared at the
screen.
“A madman is loose,” Pauline was
saying, and Laura recognized the redwood and stone facade of the
mental hospital in the background, filmed earlier this evening, and
shivered to her toes.
Her tea forgotten, she watched the rest
of the short report while her heart drummed in her chest and her
worst fears were confirmed.
She wished suddenly, mightily, that
there was someone out there who could find Justice Turnbull, dig
him out from under whatever rock he chose to hide, expose him, and
make sure he was locked away so deep that he could never hurt her
or the new life growing inside her, a life she was already bonding
with.