The Storm King(112)

Far from the great windows of the dance floor, the Century Room was impermeably dark. Nate would’ve been able to see just as clearly with his eyes closed. He tried to sort the storm sounds from all the other whispers of the place. The ticks and cracks of the nearing fire. The surge and release of the lake. Somewhere in there someone must be breathing. Somewhere underneath everything else were young hearts convulsing with fear.

Unless he was too late.

He took the central hall slowly, his socked feet making no more than a shush across the floor. He sensed more than saw the rooms he passed. They were silent, but that didn’t mean they were empty. If Owen had been in the walls, then he could be anywhere.

The hall continued. Nate tried to remember if this passage had always gone so deep into the building. For the first time, he wondered how it was possible for such a vast structure to exist on a pier in the first place. Multiple levels, warrens of halls and rooms. An entire world somehow stood upon these century-old pilings.

When it happened, Nate’s ears were more helpful than his eyes.

The crack of a planted foot. The hiss of fabric chafing against fabric. The whirr of something slicing through the air at tremendous speed.

Nate had time only to raise his arm to his face before the blow struck him. A baton or bat of some kind. He had a flash of standing in a lab, the sound of glass shattering, his body accepting the punishment of a lacrosse stick from the bulbs of his knees to the quiff of his head.

Another assault, but Nate’s old skills resurfaced. Despite the dark, he caught the baton in his palms. Ignoring the alarms from his hurt thumb, he yanked his attacker toward him and torqued them both to the floor. The figure beneath him was too small to be Owen.

“James?”

“I knew it was you,” James said. He writhed underneath Nate. Nate pulled the weapon from the boy’s grip and tossed it away. It felt like the baseball bat he’d seen the kids with earlier.



“Where’s Owen?”

“Get off me.”

“Where’re the others?”

“James?” A whisper came from nearby.

“Move the couch back and lock the goddamn door, Teej.”

Nate’s pupils imploded in a supernova of light.

“Teej!”

“James, he’s not even wearing rain gear.”

Nate felt dangerously vulnerable in the glare of the flashlight’s beam. Like a spotlighted actor or a prisoner attempting a doomed escape.

“Look at him, James,” Tara said. “Just look at him.”

Nate still squinted against the light as the boy slowed his struggling.

“What happened to you?” she asked. Nate remembered that his face was smeared in blood from colliding with the pile of furniture obstructing the stairs from the undercroft.

“A lot. We have to get out of here. But turn off the light. He’ll find us.”

“We aren’t going anywhere with you,” James said.

They were about the same height, but Nate had no trouble pulling the young man up by his shirt collar. James sputtered as Nate dragged him through the doorway where Tara stood.

“It’s him!” a boy screamed from the far corner of the room. Nate recognized him as the one who’d menaced him with rebar a few hours earlier. The boy backed away, into the pierced goth girl—the last of the four teens to account for.

The goth girl shushed him and draped her arms protectively around his shoulders. “Quiet, Carlos,” she said.

“Shut the door,” Nate told Tara. They didn’t have time for this, but he also didn’t have time to manhandle all four of them downstairs one by one. He had to convince them he wasn’t their enemy. He felt where the bat had struck his arm. A contusion was blossoming along his ulna. Battered but not broken.



He could finally see Tara now that the full blaze of the flashlight wasn’t in his eyes. She shrank from him, but Nate thought this was due more to guilt than fear.

“What’s burning?” the goth girl asked. Medea’s winds and the lake’s lamentations filled the room with peaks and troughs of sound.

“Everything. There’s a boat and a kayak down at the launch, and we don’t have the keys for the Scarab, but—”

“Where’s Pete?” Tara asked.

“Pete’s fine. He’s with the police right now.”

“Oh, well, I guess everything’s just great, then,” James snarled, giving Nate a full dose of Bennett family venom. He yanked himself free of Nate’s grip and stalked into the shadows at the opposite end of the room.

“What about Mikey?” the boy, Carlos, asked. He and the goth girl edged alongside Tara, closer to the light. “The man was hitting him and—”

“Mikey was hurt pretty badly,” Nate said, assuming Mikey was the boy they’d found downstairs with the head wound. “Tommy—Deputy Buck—is taking him to one of the boats. We’ve got to get down there, too.”

The room they were in was both long and wide. Tara’s flashlight illuminated the patch of floor where everyone but James was huddled. What Nate could see of the walls bristled with curls of shredded paint. Dark striations stained the plaster below the paint like the thick arteries and spindly capillaries of a cardiovascular system, as if the Night Ship itself was alive.