The Storm King(39)

He’d been the doctor-grandson and fired questions at the staff, grilled the paramedics, and double-checked the IVs and infusions and doses. He’d woken acquaintances with burn experience in the middle of the night for their advice. He wanted her airlifted to a burn center, but she was too unstable to move, and flying in this weather had its own risks.

The crisis had given Nate focus and direction. Lucy, the troubles of the Lake, and the ghosts of his youth were pushed to the rim of his concerns. But now that the active phase of the disaster was over, he was deep into the desolate territories of waiting. Here, the reasons he’d returned home cast their shadows over everything, each doubt and question and regret intensifying in shifting umbras and penumbras.

It was dawn, and he’d spent the last hour with his head in his hands.

Nate had been tested by water, but on that long-ago night when they’d burned Adam Decker’s house, the fire had but tasted him. It had been a kind of baptism, that dip into flame: the true beginning to their Thunder Runs, when Lucy joined them and together they reigned over the shore like bloodied angels. A world of new possibilities opened to him that night. Beautiful and terrible.

Someone tapped his shoulder. Tom in police-issue rain gear.

“What took you so long?” Nate asked. Tom had called him hours ago.

“It’s crazy out there.” Tom collapsed into the chair next to Nate. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His stubble made him look twice his age. His shoes and trousers were splattered with mud. “The hurricane. The vandals. How is she?”

“Not good, Tommy. She shouldn’t be alive at all.” It was amazing that she’d survived, but the spine injury alone could lay her up long enough for her to develop pneumonia, and that wasn’t her biggest problem. Even under the best circumstances, a full recovery was hard to imagine. Nate wanted to break his fists against the wall, thinking of how unfair a way this was to close out a good and gentle life.



“But she’s going to be okay?” Tom asked.

Nate felt as if he was on the threshold of a precipitous descent. A furious and familiar creature waited for him on the other side of the drop. Its eyes burned like ice, its smile was a blade, and it was now so close that Nate could feel its cold breath lick across his face.

“McHales are hard to kill,” Tom said, looking at him uncertainly. It was a risky thing to say.

“Some of us.” Despair was as useless an emotion as there was. But it had a dangerous cousin. As Nate sat up in his chair he felt himself slide a little closer to it.

“They’re finished now, you know,” Tom said.

The vandals, Tom meant. Nate was certain they’d set the fire at the Union. Maybe they hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, but their intentions were irrelevant. “Yes.” The creature inside him tried to affix its serrated smile to Nate’s face, but he still held it at bay. “Finished.”

“This is a felony.”

Nate nodded, though the letter of the law had never held much interest for him. He’d long followed his own commandments.

“Unless it really was an accident,” Tom said. “We’ll run tests to find out.”

Nate wished he could believe bad wiring or some flaw in the installation of a gas line was to blame. The universe was senseless in its violence, and another curse from it would be easier to accept than the fact that it was all his fault. But he was sure that the fire had been set deliberately, and that the old pub had been targeted because of his connection to it. He also knew that Grams never would have been outside at that time of night in the first place if not for him.



“What happened to you?” Tom asked, pointing to Nate’s chest. Nate looked down at a bloodstain on his T-shirt. It took him a moment to remember how it got there.

“Some of those kids were about to do something to Grams’s house. One of them knocked me out with a stepladder. Joke’s on me, I guess. Should’ve been more worried about the pub.” The CT technician still wanted pictures of Nate’s brain, but he’d been waving him away.

“You saw them? Can you make an ID?”

“One of them, maybe. A girl.”

“I’ll get the yearbooks from the high school and middle school. If we find her, then…” Tom trailed off.

Nate followed his friend’s gaze to his own hands. Droplets of blood trembled from the white promontories of his knuckles. He didn’t need to examine his hands to know that his nails had sliced into his palms. For years his hands had been marred with such half-moon scabs.

He wiped the blood onto his jeans. There were ruined anyway. Next to him, Tom’s face was an amalgam of alarm and dread. They’d been here before, the two of them, in this place between action and reaction. In this space between victimhood and vigilantism. And not a single good thing had come from it.

Before Tom could say anything, a torrent of swearing permeated the emergency room’s glass doors. They slid open, and Johnny hobbled through, heavily supported by Owen.

Tom stole another look at Nate’s bloodied hands before hurrying to meet the pair struggling through the entrance. Johnny slung his free arm around Tom’s shoulder when Tom reached him. “What happened?”

“Little shits broke into my house and slicked oil or something all over my stairs.”

“How bad are you hurt?” Tom asked. “How far’d you fall?”