The Storm King(94)

Owen hadn’t made it to Lucy’s funeral, so Nate had guessed he was either still with Johnny at the hospital, or handling whatever chaos Medea wreaked over at the Empire. Nate knew that Owen’s father was dead and that his mother had suffered a stroke and was now an invalid. Mrs. Liffey had been a cruel woman and particularly brutal to her son, so it said a lot about Owen that he’d taken it upon himself to care for her. When Nate wondered what he might have done in Owen’s position, he didn’t like the answer.

Rain streamed from the daggers of glass that marked the Liffeys’ broken window. There was certain to be water damage, and with Owen away it would only get worse. Nate assumed that a caregiver stayed with Mrs. Liffey while Owen was out, but perhaps Medea had tossed all normalcy to the wind and the incapacitated woman was temporarily alone.



If Nate had never done any good in this town, he could at least help in this tiny way.

The lawn was sopping. Water crested his shoes with each step.

Though he and the others had trashed the Liffeys’ landscaping during Thunder Runs on more than one occasion, Nate had never been beyond their home’s threshold. Mrs. Liffey had cherished her flowers, so Nate had come up with the idea of salting the gardens and lawns. They’d doused them with enough rock salt to poison the soil several inches deep. Even now, the grass was patchy, the shrubs bare and stunted.

If every decree of the Storm King rippled with ill consequences, he wondered what unexpected catastrophes that act of destruction had caused. Nate was in a mood where anything seemed plausible.

While the yard and flower beds were pitiable, the home itself was well cared for. It was a pretty Victorian with gray paint, black shutters, and white trim. Nate ascended the steps to the porch. The doorbell was useless without power, so he used the knocker.

No response.

He picked his way along the edge of the house. When he reached the broken window, he called into the dark interior. While he waited for an answer, it occurred to him that it wasn’t clear how the window had broken. No tree had collapsed against it, and there was no trace of debris that might have struck it. A Klaxon sounded in his mind when he peered into the dim interior. A trail of muddy footsteps was smeared among the wet shards of glass.

Someone had broken into the house.

The legions of regrets fled his mind. He parsed the thousand sounds and smells of the hurricane and scanned every shadow of the room in front of him. There was danger here, and it required all of his focus.

Owen had said that the vandals hadn’t hit him the night before, but maybe they’d been waiting for today. It seemed audacious to attack the place in daylight, but perhaps Medea had made them bold. Or maybe Nate’s appearance and quick departure from the Night Ship had enraged them enough do something reckless. Even now, they could be trashing Grams’s house, but Nate subdued the reflex to run to Bonaparte Street. A house was just a house, and the one on Bonaparte Street was empty. But if Mrs. Liffey was alone here, she’d need him.



He climbed through the window and added his tracks to the ones that had been laid before him.

It was a tidy room with a fireplace, a corner of couches, wingback chairs, and a large coffee table. Dentil molding lined the ceiling and floor, and expensive-looking wallpaper and bland art filled the space between. It was a room designed to be admired and not inhabited. This fit with what Nate knew about Mrs. Liffey. With her yoga-trim body, designer clothes, and pretty house, she was a woman who prized appearance above everything else. There was a collection of portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Liffey on the mantel, a handsome couple who looked plucked right from a J.Crew catalog. These were normal enough decorations, except that Owen wasn’t in a single one of the photos. Nate wondered if in her ill health Mrs. Liffey could finally be proud of the man Owen had become.

The rug was soaked, and the slap of water followed him everywhere he walked. The wooden floor was sure to be ruined, but storm damage was no longer his primary concern.

He crossed the glass-strewn floor as quietly as he could. Hammering away at the door and calling into the house would have alerted the vandals to his presence. If they were still here, then they already knew he was coming.

The mud tracks led to the dining room and then to the kitchen. He scanned the walls and counters for a landline to try, but the room’s shadows were deep. He felt grit through the soles of his shoes and a suggestion of dirt spanned the kitchen tiles, but the dim light from the windows made it difficult to see anything in detail.

After probing drawers of cutlery, measuring cups, and napkins, his fingers finally grazed the grip of a small metal flashlight. He started to pan its light around the room when the spill of its beam caught a flash of color on the floor.



As he’d guessed, the tiles here had a coating of mud, but there was another color mingled in its brown: the unmistakable ocher of dried blood.

His pulse quickened, and the ache in his bad arm seemed to amplify. With the beam, he traced the mud and the blood to a closed door. The basement, he assumed. The blood across the floor was more than incidental: Someone had been seriously hurt.

A bang shook the house. Not thunder, a slammed door. Floorboards creaked and footsteps sounded.

They’re still here. Nate grabbed an electric kettle off the counter, switched off the flashlight, and tried to sink into the kitchen’s shadows.

The footsteps were even, unhurried, and getting closer.

A large figure appeared silhouetted against the dim light from the doorway.