The Storm King(82)

Would they beat him? Shatter his surgeon’s hands? Kill him? In the halls of the Night Ship above the raging lake inside the livid hurricane, anything seemed possible.

Then Nate spotted her, loitering behind the others. Gone was the confident bartender who’d slipped him a pint the day before. This was an ashen vestige of that girl. One look and he knew what she’d done. A part of him had known all along.

“Hello again, Tara Jane.”

“No one calls me that.” She muttered the words to the floor. Guilt rang from her like the note from a struck bell.

“She’s going to die, Tara.” His eyes wanted to well, and he let them. Let these children see the Storm King cry and see if that got him anywhere.

“Who?” But she knew. She was different from her twin brother and older sister. She didn’t have their marble faces and frosted armor.

“Wasn’t she good to you, Tara? My grandmother?” It made sense that whoever set the fire at the pub had access to the place.



“Stop talking to her,” James said.

“She gave you a job, didn’t she? She gave you a chance when no one else would.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be there!” Her voice was pure anguish.

“Teej. Shut up.” James turned to face his sister.

Nate felt the current of the room shift. Some of the kids began to look unsure.

“There is a murderer here,” Nate shouted. “But it’s not me.”

Menace had been gathering speed, but now doubt was ascendant. Nate used the confusion to go for the doors to the boardwalk. Not too fast, not too slow. Confident yet nonthreatening.

“The Union’s gone, too, not that it matters,” Nate said, as if they were in the middle of the conversation instead of at its end. “You already tore out the heart of that place.”

The white-blond boy with the baseball bat stood in front of the doors, but Nate gave him a look that sent him scurrying.

“No one was supposed to get hurt!” Tara was crying now.

“Teej, for Chrissake.”

Nate seized the opportunity to slip out the exit. The teens had the strength to stop him but still lacked the nerve. They weren’t following him, either. This didn’t surprise him. The Night Ship was its own universe with its own rules. Things that felt inevitable there might become unthinkable in the fresh air of the living world.

Still, he quickened his pace on the boardwalk along the northern side of the pier. This section of the pier had always gotten the worst of the weather, and the years had taken their toll. The wood creaked ominously underfoot, and Nate soon reached a stretch where an entire stride’s worth of planks were missing.

He girded himself and jumped across the gap. The plank he landed on cracked in protest, but he was quick to keep moving.

The rain had picked up again, and the wind was a mounting scream through the Night Ship’s spires. Across the savage waters, the headland’s peaks were devoured by clouds.

James could still rally the others through the promenade to intercept Nate, so it was important for him to hurry. But then he saw something that rooted him to the warped wood.



There was a body in the lake. He saw the black cap of a head and the dark outlines of legs and arms tossed by the furious waters only a few dozen feet from him. His first thought was of Lucy—which was impossible—and his second thought was of Pete Corso. The lake returns what it takes.

Then Nate realized that the person in the water wasn’t lifelessly bobbing. They were swimming. In the lake. In the middle of a hurricane. He watched the figure complete a half dozen strokes before he could believe his eyes. The body was slight, but there was something feminine in what he could see of the hips. Her limbs and head were dark because that was the color of the dry suit she wore as she cut an expert wake across the water toward a patch of shore close to the northern boundary of the town.

Back-plotting her trajectory led Nate to believe that the swimmer had exited the Night Ship through the boat launch in the undercroft.

Nate couldn’t imagine anyone he knew swimming through such weather. There was no chance it was a member of James’s crew.

This was someone else. Someone not in Lucy’s journals or in the chief’s files or on James’s hit list. Someone new. Nate was sure of it.

It was reckless to run across the fragile boardwalk, but Nate did it anyway.





Sixteen

Medea kicked spindrifts of water at Nate as he darted along the shore.

Few of the Strand’s homes were north of the Night Ship, but he ran through the backyard of every one of them as the headlands loomed in the gray distance. It was hard to track the swimmer through the curtains of rain and the whitecaps of the tempestuous lake. Just when he thought he’d lost her, a crooked arm of slick black broke the foaming surface.

The figure cut for the shore where the Strand turned from the waterline. Nate watched the swimmer emerge from the lake, her steps almost dainty as they negotiated the swell of surf and treacherous rocks. She shook off the lake’s cold water with feline contortions.

His black raincoat and a tangle of frayed juniper hid him as she made her way across the beach. She followed the arc of the Strand as it swung from the water. This was the farthest edge of Greystone Lake. The mountains dominated the northern horizon, and woods grew thick where the residential streets ended. This was the route Nate’s father had driven them that day in April, before he took the turn that switchbacked into the sky.