Lisa Jackson - Wicked Game

“Him? The guy who ran you off the road last night?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, watching her closely, as if he expected her to fall apart. “I’ve talked to the Brentwoods several times. They’re not very forthcoming about Jessie’s adoption.”

“My parents never even told me.” She made a sound of disbelief, then sank into another long silence while her mind rearranged pieces of her life like a jigsaw puzzle, trying it this way and that, discarding a piece, picking up another, moving it around.

“You do resemble her,” McNally pointed out.

Is that why Hudson “loves” me? Is that what he sees in me? She’d always wondered, and now it seemed a likely bet.

DNA was irrefutable. She believed McNally.

She stared into her untouched cup of coffee and felt as if her life, everything she’d ever held to be true, was crumbling at her feet. Why had her parents lied to her?

“Jessie never knew,” she said. Until after her death.

McNally nodded.

Becca swallowed. Hadn’t she always known she was different? Suspected that because of her visions, there was something in her past she didn’t know or understand?

Her hand tightened over her cup. Her whole life had been built on lies, and because of it she could not have predicted that this monster would relentlessly chase her down.

“He killed her,” Becca said with certainty. “He had a knife last night. He wanted to kill me but then he saw her and it stopped him.”

“Saw who?”

“Jessie. In a vision. Did I tell you I have visions? That I see Jessie standing on a cliff’s edge, whispering to me? She wants justice, and I think she wants me to end it once and for all with this demon who won’t let us be!”

“Let the police do their job,” McNally said quickly, clearly thinking she was going to charge out on her own.

And wasn’t she? Wasn’t that what she was thinking? Didn’t she feel the urgency inside her breast that was like an angry, living thing?

“We’re looking for him. He drove off, but his vehicle had to sustain damage. I believe you said it was white or tan?”

“The grill guard,” Becca said suddenly. “His truck had a grill guard.”

“A grill guard,” he repeated. “Maybe detachable, if he used the same vehicle to push Renee Trudeau’s off the road.”

“It was damaged. It was scraped.”

“Do you remember anything else? Something else that might help? Any little thing?”

She gazed at him a long time. McNally waited, wondering what was coming down the pike now. At length, she said, “I think the answer is in Deception Bay. I think he lives there.”

“Any particular reason?”

She almost told him about Siren Song. He hadn’t blinked when she’d mentioned her visions, but that only meant he was just taking in information, it wasn’t proof that he believed her. He could think she was the biggest nutcase in the world.

“There’s one more thing,” Mac said, drawing her back to the here and now. “You said this has happened before to you. That you were run off the road the last time you were pregnant.”

Her head snapped up. He knew?

“You told the paramedics and I overheard,” he explained, correctly guessing her feelings. “That accident was about sixteen years ago on the same stretch of road. My partner looked it up. Was Walker the father?”

She felt as if the life had been squeezed out of her. “Yes,” she whispered, nodding, “but I’ve never told him. If you plan on breaking that news, I should do it first.”

“If there’s a pattern, he needs to know.”

“There’s a pattern.”

“Then you need to tell him now.”

Becca couldn’t move for a moment. Every ache and pain sustained from the night before seemed to manifest itself ten times over. With the low-level energy of the elderly, she rose from her chair and headed back to Hudson’s room.

Hudson ached all over.

When he shifted in the bed, there didn’t seem to be an inch on his body that wasn’t in pain. He looked at the chart next to his bed, a sequence of “happy” and “not-so-happy” faces indicating where his pain medications should keep him. He was supposed to be in the kinda happy zone, and he definitely was not. But the nurse had just been in and adjusted his IV drip, so things would improve. The detectives from the sheriff’s department had already taken off as well.

It had been a frustrating interrogation. He’d learned little, and, he suspected, they’d learned less from him. A no-win/no-win situation, leaving both the cops and him discouraged.

He itched to get out of this place, to start looking for that unhinged jerk who had run them off the road and most probably killed Renee. But try as he might, he couldn’t convince the doctor to release him. Whenever he asked a nurse or physician when he could be released, he’d been met with a “soon” or “possibly later today” or “probably tomorrow.” He wanted out and he wanted out now. It worried him that Becca was still hanging out here, where all the trouble had started, where Renee had been investigating before she’d been killed, where the attacker had already tried once to kill them. What was to stop him now?

And what did it mean that both Becca and her attacker had seen a vision of Jessie?

Hudson cursed his luck, tried to move and felt another sharp pain slice through his shoulder. He forced his eyes closed so that he could think and plan. Somehow he had to nail the son of a bitch who’d attacked them before the lunatic got another shot.

The medication had just started to kick in when the door to his room opened and Becca let herself inside. He’d never been so glad to see anyone in his life. “Hey,” he said, sliding over as best he could. “I think there’s room for two up here.”

“Yeah, right,” she said and managed a bit of a smile.

“I’d make it worth your while.”

“Must be the pain meds talking.”

“Seriously.”

“Well, that’s just it,” she said, her smile sliding away. “I do want to talk to you. Seriously.”

He saw a shadow cross her eyes and wondered what was coming now. Something else had happened! Another one of their friends killed? Someone they knew?

Reading the alarm in his eyes, she grabbed his good hand and said, “It’s not that bad. Relax.” And then she told him about bone spurs and DNA and the fact that it looked like she’d been adopted, had never been told the truth, and had no idea who her biological parents were.

And she told him she and Jessie were sisters.

“What?” Hudson was stunned.

“We’re both from Siren Song,” she said. “Both of us. Those are our people, and they’re his.”

“I don’t believe you,” he declared, but he was lying.

“There’s something else.”

“Something else?” he asked in disbelief.

She took in a deep breath. “Something I should have told you a long, long time ago.”

“Okay…” Her tone sharpened his attention.

“Remember the last time we were together? After high school?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She was nodding and he saw a sheen in her eyes. Tears?

“We were together all the time,” she said thickly.

He nodded.

She hesitated.

The hospital room seemed to close in on him and the noises from the hallway outside receded. “What, Becca?” he asked and realized she was squeezing his hand so hard he felt it through the smooth haze of whatever painkiller was seeping into his IV.

“I was pregnant,” she said, her face white and twisted.

“What?”

“With your baby, Hudson. Just a few months, but very definitely pregnant.”

He heard the thudding of his own heart and noticed that her fingers, where they were clenched to his, were sweating. “So what happened to the baby?” he asked, but he knew as surely as if he’d heard the words. The baby hadn’t survived. He stared at her and felt a gnawing ache deep in his gut. Not for one second did he disbelieve her-all her raw emotions were etched across her skin.