CHAPTER 9
As fog began to creep in from the sea, sending
long fingers of mist inland through the old-growth firs with their
drooping, moss-laden boughs, Laura nosed her Outback onto the lane
winding through the forest to Siren Song. Twin ruts cut through the
stands of fir and pine, while the clumps of shiny-leaved salal grew
to the height of trees.
Branches scraped the sides of her car,
and the rising mist caused Laura’s imagination to run wild. At
every turn she expected Justice to leap from the shrubbery, a knife
in his hand, the expression of a rabid maniac twisting his
features. Her heart was hammering, her fingers sweaty on the
steering wheel, as the Subaru bounced and shuddered over hidden
rocks and potholes.
Around a final curve, the massive gates
of Siren Song loomed. The hair on Laura’s nape rose and her throat
was dry. This was dangerous. Exactly what she’d tried to avoid at
all costs when Byron announced they were moving to the
coast.
But Justice was loose, and there was no
believing in safety any longer. He could be here now, lurking in
the shadows, lying in wait for her.
Ssssisssterrr . .
.
She could almost hear his sibilant
warning, but it was a trick of her mind, a memory. She cut the
engine, listening to it cool and tick, hearing mournful cries of
seagulls, their lonely songs underscored by the distant roar of the
sea.
Don’t freak yourself
out, she said as she climbed out of the car and locked it.
The thick, damp air was cold and pressed against her face, and
memories slipped unbidden through her mind, memories of braided
hair and dresses whose hems brushed the plank floors of the old,
rough-hewn lodge.
Home, she
thought, though long ago she’d rejected Siren Song and everyone in
it.
Fighting off a shiver, she crossed the
damp ground where ferns and nettles abounded and wrapped her hands
around the wrought-iron bars of the front gate, where she could see
the lodge, dark windows winking in the weird half-light of the
shrouded woods.
There was no good way to contact the
residents of Siren Song. They didn’t have phones. There was no
cable television, Internet, anything electronic. Electricity was
through a generator and only on the main floor. The women inside
the lodge were living in another century, a decision that was
consciously made by Laura’s aunt, Catherine Rutledge, who had made
the decree in the late ’80s, when Laura herself had been just a
girl. Laura had rebelled against the restrictions and had caused
Catherine no end of grief. It was only after she got her way and
was allowed into society outside the gates that she came to
appreciate the simplicity of their way of life, and even more so,
the careful isolation that had been built to keep them all
safe.
She called out, “Hello! Catherine?” but
her voice seemed to fade. There was no buzzer, so she rattled the
gate, but that sound, like ghosts rattling chains, sent another
shiver down her spine, and she realized she was on a fool’s
mission. What did she hope to accomplish by coming here? Did she
intend to warn her family? Or was this lodge a place she ran to as
a sanctuary?
If so, it was the first time she’d come
here in years. She’d learned to fight her battles outside the gates
of Siren Song.
But that was before
Justice.
She was about to give up and get back
in her car when she caught a glimpse of movement through the
branches of the trees, the front door of the lodge swinging open. A
woman about her same age stepped onto the broad front porch. For a
moment Laura didn’t remember the slim thirty-something—it had been
so long—but then she recognized Isadora’s somewhat aristocratic
features and Laura’s heart leapt. “Isadora,” she
whispered.
Isadora was the oldest of her sisters
at the lodge, and she’d remained frozen in Laura’s mind as a
younger, more modern woman. Now, however, Isadora’s blond hair was
twisted into a single long braid, and the dress she wore was a blue
print dress that reached floor length to a pair of sensible
shoes.
As if sensing someone watching her,
Isadora turned toward the gate. Her eyes were still cerulean blue
and welcoming, yet there was a quiet, cautious, almost furtive
demeanor to her.
“Isadora!” Laura called, grinning
widely. God, she’d missed her! Until right this moment, she hadn’t
realized just how much.
“Laura? Really?” Isadora’s face broke
into a smooth smile, showing even teeth. Quickly she crossed the
stone steps, avoiding the wet mud, the hem of her long dress
swaying as she walked to meet Laura.
When she was within easy earshot, Laura
said, “God, Isadora. It’s . . . it’s amazing to see you again.” She
blinked against a silly rush of tears that choked her
throat.
“Your hair . . .”
“I know. I dyed it.” She didn’t say
why, didn’t have to.
“What’re you doing here?” Isadora
asked, her fingers linking with Laura’s on the bars. With her free
hand, she dug into a deep pocket in her dress.
“I need to see Catherine.”
“She’ll be glad you’re here,” Isadora
said, glancing past Laura as she pulled out a ring of jangling keys
from her voluminous skirts. “It’s so great to see you.” She
unlocked the gate with a metal screech that
scraped Laura’s nerves. “Earl, our regular handyman, has been ill,
and we’ve been a little more tethered here,” she said by way of
explanation, and then the gate was open and they fell into each
other’s arms. Laura fought an onslaught of emotions and blinked
against the stupid tears as she clung to her sister.
Was this really
home?
Or was she just stressed? Her hormones
out of whack?
“It’s good to see you, too,” she said,
finally releasing Isadora and looking at her.
“What do you want to see Catherine
about?” Isadora asked. “Why now?” Those knowing blue eyes were
suddenly sober. Worried. She glanced toward the road, as if she
were expecting someone else.
So they knew. “You’re afraid he’s
coming here, aren’t you?” she asked, not mentioning Justice’s
name.
Isadora’s gaze slammed back to Laura’s.
She nodded, as if unwilling even to speak the thought aloud. “Let’s
go inside.” As Laura stepped through, Isadora was careful to
re-lock the gate.
Laura fell in step beside her,
resisting the urge to look over her shoulder as well. Hurry, hurry, hurry, she thought. Justice hadn’t
mentally spoken to her for several hours, but she could sense his
weighty presence, as if he were walking beside them.
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.