The Storm King(67)

Nate didn’t look at me while he hacked away at Adam, but he did when he was finished. And Christ, his face. That way he smiles like a wolf. All teeth. I’ve seen that look before, but he’s never used it on me. Not ever. It’s different when those ice-cold eyes are on you. So I ran. Because I know Nate isn’t really there when he’s like this. He’s something else, and whatever that thing is, it scares me. I think it scares everyone. Sometimes in bed I wonder—

Christ. No peace for me tonight. Not even in the Night Ship. Someone’s coming.





FOR NATE, EVERY song was an excuse to hold Lucy close and not let go. If he flung her spiraling outward it was only to clutch her tighter when she returned to him.

“Too bad you only dance when you’re drunk, McHale,” Lucy said into his shoulder.

Maybe it was the music, or the pot, or the pills, but the edges of the party blurred and faded until she was the only thing he saw in color.

This night was theirs, as would be every night to follow.

The glade was a torrent of everything. The music got louder, and the movements of the crowd became faster. The amazement of chemicals conflated Nate’s senses in unexpected ways. The bass beat from the speakers smelled like pine. Seeing Tom’s grin felt like a bath of indigo.

People appeared and vanished. Lucy was in his arms and then she was gone. He jumped to the rhythm with Tom and Emma, their movements out of tandem and perfectly in synch. Nate was a note in the song and together they were a chord and with the others in the glade they became a symphony.



The night declined, and the party diminished with it. The pace slowed, the fervor cooled, and their pack fractured. Nate found himself by the remains of a keg with Jim Tatum, Parker Lang, and Winston Chu. The beer tasted pleasantly of cigarettes.

The smoke from the bonfire brought a wistful ache to his eyes. This was the climax of their childhood, and it was ending all around him.

Tom reappeared, and Nate’s energy returned at the sight of him. His friend. The best friend anyone could hope to have.

He looked unsteady, his Tom. The whole world was unsteady.

It became even more so when Nate saw Lucy being hoisted into the air by the large man on the edge of the clearing.

Nate was not jealous about such things. Seeing her lifted by the waist by most people wouldn’t have triggered more than a wry smile. But Adam Decker wasn’t just anyone.

There was a sensation of falling. Not falling down, but falling away, or falling into. The abyss appeared beneath him, and it took him whole.

The world turned black and red, and he had the sense of movement and electricity. The unquenchable fire bloomed within him, and Nate ceded himself to it. Adam Decker’s vacant shark eyes grew and then diminished. There was wetness on Nate’s skin. Ripples from impacts hummed from his fists and feet.

He came back to himself with his hands raised over his head, the glade a riot of rain and mud and smoke. A deluge of sound filled the space. He was soaked, and when he unclenched his fists they were tacky with blood. He felt his face, and it was not his own. Its lips were stretched into the most savage smile.

A figure was curled on the ground, a fallen giant of a man. A single hand raised in submission.

Nate became aware of the crowd around him. They were his friends, but with their voices blaring he couldn’t recognize them. They were howls and screams.



The fury had left him exhausted, but he became deeply conscious of a single fact.

Something is wrong.

Nate turned to scour the gathered and the palisade of trees.

Where was she?

She’d been here a moment ago. But had it only been a moment?

He stepped over Adam’s crumpled form on his way to the tree line. Had she run away? he wondered. Had she run away from him?

Behind him, the screams of the crowd faded. A moment broken. An era ended.

Nate crashed into the undergrowth. Branches snapped, and brambles scraped his bare chest. “Lucy!” he called into the trees. Away from the party, the forest was strange. Faint smoke brushed with firelight lanced the air between the trees in spectral geometry.

Where had she gone and why had she gone there without him? He called for her again.

Arrhythmic footfalls broke through the brushwood behind him.

“You did it,” Tom said. He was breathless. “You really did it.”

“Did you see where she went?”

“You destroyed him.”

“Lucy!” Nate screamed into the trees.

“Forget her.”

He couldn’t see Tom’s face, but his friend’s voice was thick, as if he was crying.

“Where is she, Tom? Help me find her.”

“How’d you do it?”

Nate tried to remember why he’d fought Adam, but the tethers of logic had come undone. Its ropes unspooled around him, the universe unanchored and free to stack chance upon chance.

“What are you, Nate?”

“Help me, Tommy. Please.” Desperation crept up his throat like an ice lattice. He didn’t know where it had come from. Something is wrong. He felt it in the ache of his arm and heard it in the skirl of wind through the branches.



Tom grabbed Nate’s face and mashed his lips into his. Nate was somewhere else. Wondering where Lucy was and why she’d gone there. When he realized what was happening, he carefully pulled his mouth away from Tom’s.