Wicked Lies by Lisa Jackson, Nancy Bush

nurses from Side B. Everyone was alarmed. Justice Turnbull was no minor problem. But there wasn’t much more to do here. The bird had flown, so to speak.
    “Back to HQ?” Delaney suggested.
    “We should all be off duty by now,” Lang said, looking up at the dark sky.
    “I’m not leaving,” Clausen said, and was met by a chorus of other voices, none of whom had any intention of waiting till morning to go after their quarry.
    Lang said without much conviction, “Maybe we’ll run across him on the way back to Tillamook.”
    “He can’t be that hard to find,” Savvy said. “He’s in a hospital van in hospital garb.”
    “Where is that van?” Lang muttered.
    “Bet we find it within the hour,” said Burghsmith. Clausen harrumphed. “Neither of you were around last time. The guy’s a gold-plated, class A psycho. He wasn’t ever easy to find. Even if we find him, catching him will be a trick. He’s wily. And weird.”
    And deadly, Lang thought, but he kept that to himself.
    They all knew it, anyway.

CHAPTER 7
    T he sun was rising in the east, its ascent reflecting upon the western horizon in pinks and golds. The dawning colors made it almost appear like it was rising in the west, a blazing orb about to burst into the skies above the Pacific. It was a lie, a trick, a phenomenon Justice had missed for over two years, and now he stared at it hungrily. The sea . . . the Pacific Ocean, which stretched to forever . . . reached into his heart and pulled. It had always been this way.
    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