The Storm King(63)

“He should be used to it.”

“This is the part where a well-adjusted member of society expresses remorse.”

“Is he still here?”

“No. He’s married with two kids now, you know. He’s also a lawyer. Claims he won’t press charges as long as you stay away from him.”

“That’s good.”



“Neither is my dad or the two officers.”

Nate wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“You could have killed him, you know. My dad.”

“No way.” Nate scoffed and shook his head, but he remembered the feel of the man’s life in his hands. The sinew of the masseter. The ridges of each cervical vertebra. An iota more force and—

“When’s the last time it happened?” Tom asked. “You losing control? I saw it in your eyes when you woke up. Just like back in high school. You drifted. Your eyes went blank and someone else was there.”

“There’s no one here but me, Tom.” He realized that his jaw hurt, too.

“You shouldn’t have let Dad see that side of you. You shouldn’t have come back here at all, Nate. This place is dangerous for you.”

There was a menagerie of suffering in the cages of Nate’s soul, and this town held all the keys. But pain could be more than a curse. Sometimes it could be a blade.

“I can be dangerous, too, though, can’t I, Tommy?” Nate felt the grin on his face twist into something less innocuous.

Tom weighed the key in his palm, then finally unlocked the cuffs. Nate rubbed the blood back into his wrists. He pushed himself off the carpet and onto his feet.

“I’m driving you home.”

“You’re the boss.”

They were in a back room Nate hadn’t seen on his way in. He followed Tom down a short hallway past the chief’s office. The office’s glass partition was shattered, and there were holes in the drywall.

“We’ll invoice you for the damages,” Tom said.

“That seems fair.”

The lights flickered overhead as they walked past the front desk. The uniform stationed there flinched at the sight of Nate. The young man held a bag of ice against his forehead. He pulled it aside long enough for Nate to see a contusion ripening there.



Outside, the world looked like the surface of an inhospitable planet. The trees were tilted at impossible angles, and the streets coursed with water. The wind was a roar that stripped away all other sounds. It was the height of morning, but might as well have been dusk. Above, the lead sky surged and boiled like rapids over rocks.

Tom’s cruiser was parked close to the station’s entrance, but Medea made them feel every inch.

A person wasn’t supposed to enjoy being wracked by the wind and rain, but Nate found that he did. The gale tearing at his hair, rain slapping at his face, and thunder shuddering his bones woke him up and made him feel alive.

Once in the car, he struggled to shut the door against the torrents of the storm. “Nuts to have a funeral in this,” Nate said.

“Says the guy I just talked out of walking to Gracefield.”

Tom took the roads slowly, never going over ten miles an hour. Branches crunched under the tires, and the cruiser rocked in the swells of the gale. Trees lay vanquished across lawns with their root systems exposed for all to see. The sections of town that had lost power had the feel of utter abandonment.

“When’s it going to let up?” Nate asked.

“Supposed to be a lull around noon, then it’ll pick up again. Should be mostly faded by tomorrow, but the flooding’ll go on for days.”

As brutal as the hurricane was, Bonaparte Street was several blocks inland, and Medea’s winds were blunted by trees and other structures. Nate imagined that things must be far more ferocious along the waterfront.

He’d weathered dozens of storms in the glorious ruin of the Night Ship, but nothing close to a hurricane. He pictured the wreckage of the promenade churning in the tumult of the gale. He could almost hear the storm howl through the hundred broken panes of the glass ceiling and feel the pulse of the lake’s assault on the pilings like compressions to an inert heart.

Some trees on Bonaparte Street had been lost, but apart from fallen branches scattered across the lawn, Grams’s house looked undamaged.



“I’ve got to get ready, too,” Tom said. “I’ll text you on my way back.”

“My phone’s dead. It got wet.”

“Let’s say an hour. No need to be early.”

Nate remained in the car, watching the dark house. Rain drummed against the roof, and leaves clotted the windshield wipers. “Is there anything else I need to know, Tommy?”

“Like?”

“Like anything. Your dad, Lucy—anything.”

“Christ. I’m sorry I didn’t remind you you’re a suspect in an unsolved murder. Guess I figured you’d remember something like that.”

“I’m not accusing you. What I’m saying is that I haven’t been here in fourteen years, and you have. You know more than I do. I’m trying to remember things I haven’t thought of in ages.”

Tom made a scraping sound that might have been a kind of laugh. “Not all of us could run away, Nate. Even if we wanted to.”