The Storm King(61)

How had he missed?

Adam began to look uncertain, and Tom realized that the crowd hadn’t been reacting to the hits Nate had taken, but the ones he’d somehow dodged.

Nate staggered in a semicircle, and Tom saw his face for the first time. He no longer looked drunk at all. His lips were curled between smirk and snarl, and his eyes glittered like the lake at dawn.

Adam whipped a haymaker at Nate.

Tom watched as Nate ducked the mast of Adam’s arm and thrust his left palm upward into the lacrosse player’s face. Not missing a step, he landed a brutal jab to his opponent’s midsection. Adam was thrown off-balance, his hands reflexively going to his nose. Blood caught the firelight.

Tom didn’t dare breathe. Adrenaline surged with the other chemicals he’d filled himself with, and rules of the world were suspended.

He watched the predator realize that he was the prey.

Nate darted to Adam’s favored side so quickly that Tom could not follow the motion. With a sweep kick, Nate knocked the man’s legs out from under him. Adam landed on his back in the mud, his face glossed in blood, grimacing in pain.

Impossible.

Tom had forgotten that while Nate was strong, his power didn’t come from his muscles. He’d overlooked the fact that while Nate was fast, his speed didn’t come from his reflexes.

The blond giant was mass and calculation and patience, but Nate was wrath itself. Adam had come to fight Nate McHale, but this was the Storm King.



Nate had once told Tom that he felt safest when the world quaked in a tempest, because that was when the true face of things was revealed. That’s where all illusions of munificence faded away, and the stone heart of the universe was laid bare.

This was the transformation Tom witnessed in Nate. As he whirled and pivoted and punched, his friend shed before him any guise of boyhood he’d clung to. Beneath these things Nate had pretended to be, he was not just a storm, he was an apocalypse.

A kick to the ribs. An elbow to the sternum. Nate broke Adam against the muddy ground and took him apart piece by piece.

The Creature of Catastrophic Futures forgot himself and released the scream he held inside him. It wasn’t a cry of horror but a flare thrown into the burning night, because even he found beauty in this violence.

Finally, every last rule and regret and obligation was stripped away under the raw truth of blood and dirt and storm. Here was something magnificent to feed that atavistic place that hungered for righteous carnage.

When Tom and the others in the glade shouted into the storm they howled the screams of the free.





Twelve

When Nate returned to himself, he was sprawled across rough tiles of carpet and handcuffed to a desk.

Tom sat on the floor across from him, his back braced against a wall. He looked exhausted in his filthy uniform. His eyes were red, and his hair was slick across his forehead.

“He’s back,” Tom said.

“Are you all right?” The chief came around Nate’s side of the desk. The man’s voice rasped like it’d been scoured. “I called a doctor.”

“I’m fine,” Nate said.

“Tom said you’d be.” Chief Buck leaned against the wall. His face was gray yet flushed. “You have a temper on you, son.” He rubbed his neck. “Hell of a thing to see.”

“I’m sorry about—back there,” Nate said. He was almost certain he’d picked the chief up by his throat. “That wasn’t me. I don’t know where that came from. I guess I was upset. It’s been rough, the last day. I lost myself for a minute. After seeing those things, I just…I didn’t know where to put it all.”



The contents of the chief’s files were burned in his mind: those high school yearbook photos of the children they’d been, the files pregnant with the bare facts, stark and unyielding in blue ink and Times New Roman. The pure shock of Lucy’s remains. He knew how decomposition worked. But to actually see it.

He raped her then he killed her.

Adam Decker had been at the station. Nate had rushed him before his world dissolved into blood and shadow. But his old enemy had to be long gone by now. Nate’s stomach clenched at the idea of his escape, and it was a battle to keep his face free of anything but puzzlement and regret.

“What things?” Tom asked his dad.

“Maura Jeffers.” The chief’s eyes didn’t waver from Nate’s. “Another dead girl, and with Lucy’s funeral in just a couple hours. Brought back all that old pain, didn’t it?” he asked Nate.

The chief knew perfectly well that the news about Maura Jeffers wasn’t what had set Nate off. The man must still want to keep the files in the closet a secret from Tom.

Interesting.

“She was so young,” Nate said, deciding to play along. “It’s so senseless.”

The chief nodded to him. “Talked to Father Stephen. Church lost power, and the burial will be pushed to next week, but the Bennetts want to go ahead with the funeral. Might not be much of a crowd, but they want it done with. Can’t blame them, can you?”

“No, sir.”

“Hodges and Antonetti are on the Wharf, keeping the tourists away,” the chief told Tom. “It’s blocked off, but they caught a few taking pictures. One gust and they’d be in the drink and mush against the pilings. And I just got a call that a transformer went down at Goldfinch and Bobwhite.”