The Storm King(22)

Nate’s own arm and side had been similarly bruised after the accident. Even from the depths of tranquilized shock, he’d registered the extraordinary color on his side where three of his ribs had broken. Every touch met with a dagger of agony and an alien firmness. Looking through red eyes at his skinny body, at the bandaged incisions under the plastic sheath over his arm and the expanding nebula of subdermal hematomas, Nate understood truly and completely that he’d one day die. That no matter the infinities of his mind, this meat and bone was all that tethered him to this earth.

And look at how tenuous that connection was: a hair’s breadth from being undone by a baseball and the promise of a peach pie. And he’d been the lucky one. The lake returns what it takes, but he was the only one given back in time for it to matter.

Johnny’s shirt was back on, but Nate could still see the ruin of his back. He could imagine his friend being chased by a man twice his weight. A man who was supposed to love him. He felt the breath knocked from Johnny when he crashed against the wall. That surge of pain as his stunned body took its inventory of the damage. He watched the childhood drain from Johnny as he lay on the kitchen tile, replaced with something cold and numb and knowing.

It’d be easy to despair at how unjust the universe was, but that wasn’t Nate’s way. He’d spent energy taunting Lucy and being baited by her, but he now understood that this had been childish. They were both victims. Their pain had been mighty, but their wrath had been misdirected.



There were true monsters here at the Lake. Lucy wasn’t one of them, and they didn’t infest the halls of the Night Ship. Beasts like Mr. Vanhouten and Owen’s mom were the real enemy. They infected this town—and like any disease, they had to be treated. Like the pain they caused, they had to be burned away.

“We’ll get him, Johnny,” Nate said.

The others turned to him.

“Your mom, too, Owen.” He felt his mouth crease into a smile.

“What do you mean?” Tom asked.

Nate decided that neither he nor his friends would ever be victims again. He grinned because he understood that while misery was an affliction, wrath was a tool. While anguish was weakness, fury was power.

He smiled because at last he knew what to do with his unquenchable rage.





Five

Medea was coming.

Nate could feel this in the wind and see it in the webs of electricity flaring within the soaring topography of the sky. No storm of his youth came close to what Medea was about to inflict upon the Lake.

In its deep place, a part of Nate twitched in its sleep.

He wasn’t far from the Empire’s entrance when a small figure detached itself from the shadows of a side street. Against the gray of the pavement, it was a silhouette of pure darkness. The way it was slumped made Nate take notice. A kid, he thought. Suspicion pricked across his neck. This wariness wasn’t just from the knowledge that vandals once again haunted these streets. Looking at the shrouded person, dressed in black, standing in the rain, an old thorn caught in a tangle of memories. There was a lacuna in Nate’s mind, right in the center of the worst day of his life. He was rarely reminded of this absence, but this was one of those times.

He slowed his pace. As he did, whoever it was stopped to stare at him. Something was wrong. What Nate had first taken for a long raincoat was actually a mismatched collection of shirts and sweaters. The clothes were strange, nearly rags, and it was difficult to see where one layer ended and another began.



Then the person slid back the hood. An old woman.

“You,” the woman said. Her voice was hushed in astonishment. Then she crooked a single finger at him. “You!” She was a wizened thing, and her face stretched into a furious grimace. The mass of wiry white hair that her hood had concealed shot from her head in all directions.

“I’m sorry?” Nate heard himself saying.

“After everything, you come back here? You ruined it!” she screamed. “You ruined everything!”

Nate was familiar with the insanity of strangers. His ER rotation had been a master class in everyday madness, and his trips via the subway were refresher courses. This woman had martyr’s eyes, blazing with righteousness and resignation. He gave her a wide berth, his hands raised in surrender.

The woman’s face changed as he moved. Lucidity took grip. For a moment it seemed as if she suddenly had become afraid of him. Then she donned her hood and bolted. She cut across the road with surprising speed, her footsteps breaking the shining palette of the street.

Nate looked around, but the sidewalks were bereft of witnesses. The woman was gone, the shadows on the other side of the street absent even a hint of movement. He might as well have imagined her.

He hurried to put the encounter behind him.

As he made his way to the house on Bonaparte Street, he was caught between the need to rush there to protect it and the desire to submerge himself in the rhythms of the storm and let it guide him to the vandals who’d fallen upon the Lake.

Walking these rain-scoured streets gave Nate the sense of homecoming he’d been missing. This was an all-sensory revelation: the wetness of his cuffs clinging to his socks, the scuff of his steps through puddles, the thousand shades of dark that marked the squalling night.



The only thing that wasn’t right was that he was alone. Again, he’d left his friends behind.