Ten-Foot’s palm came out of nowhere and slapped her hard on the side of the face. Maxine staggered, and Storm reached for Ten-Foot with a cry of rage. Ten-Foot easily sidestepped Maxine’s son and grabbed him around the throat, spun him down his arm, and ended up behind him with Storm’s windpipe trapped in the crook of his elbow. Storm gasped and tried to struggle, but Ten-Foot was too strong for him.
Three members of the Harbormen inner guard raised their guns to cover Maxine and the others.
“Sticks and stones, Maxine, sticks and stones.” Gabe stepped off the dais and offered Maxine his hand as she knelt on the floor as a result of Ten-Foot’s blow. The side of her face was on fire from the slap, but her heart was burning hotter. This was all too much to take in. Her head was swimming and her breath was short.
Gabe’s hand hovered in front of her face, and she ignored it. Pushing herself up on her knees.
“Suit yourself,” Gabe said, and then the burning in her chest intensified as Gabe turned his attention to Ten-Foot and his captive.
“Hello, Storm,” Gabe said.
Storm’s eyes were bulging, his cheeks blowing in and out as his breathing was restricted. Gabe waved a cursory finger at Ten-Foot, and the grip around Storm’s throat was relaxed a little. Not enough for him to get away, but enough for him to breathe a tad more easily.
“I’ve kept a keen eye on your progress, boy, over the years.”
Maxine wanted to put her hands over her ears.
“I followed you as a Tar Heeler. Even saw you race a couple of times. You were good. I was devastated when I heard about the cancer. So good to see that you got the best treatment on offer and have made such a fine recovery.”
Storm’s eyes flicked to Maxine. The confusion in them was apparent.
“And I bet Mommy dearest has never even mentioned me, has she?”
Storm shook his head.
“Gabe,” Maxine said, the tone of pleading in her voice bringing a smile to his lips.
Gabe held up a finger. “Now, everyone… Storm, especially… here’s your last rhetorical question alert.”
Gabe made a meal of clearing his throat. “So, what do we know about a king’s right of succession through the family line? Well… I’ll tell you.”
Storm and Maxine were separated from Poppet and Larry. They were put into a freshly painted wooden room that they’d been led to by Ten-Foot.
They were locked inside, and it was quite some time before either of them could bring themselves to speak.
The room was simple. Lit by oil lamps, it contained two beds, a table, and a couple of chairs. Ceiling and floor were made of unseasoned planks, and the door was locked on the outside with a galvanized hasp and padlock.
Storm sat on one of the beds and regarded his mom with disbelief. His head was reeling. Not just from what Gabe had told them, but from the whole setup inside Castle Jaxport.
It had been a horrendous journey south, but he’d kept in mind that there was a reason they were being kept alive, and now that he’d learned some sense of that reason, he felt like the thoughts in his mind might boil over and spill through the side of his brain. He was trying to find the right words, the correct questions to ask his mom. But they wouldn’t come.
He was stunned by what he’d learned. About how his life had begun, about how it had been followed and watched, and how Gabe’s priority had been to find him in the chaos of America so that he could bring him here.
Here… to be his heir.
Storm’s mom had begged Gabe not to tell him what he had. How his mom had willingly cheated on Josh, and how that had led to Storm’s birth.
Of course, his mother had denied it all; of course, she’d said Gabe was lying, and that it was just a series of lies to get back at her for rejecting Gabe and marrying Josh….
But the confusion in Storm’s head wouldn’t clear. Who should he believe? There was his mom—who’d had to admit she’d lied to Josh about their meeting, especially when Gabe had showed Storm the picture he’d taken on his phone of Maxine at the table in the restaurant. He said he’d snapped it when she hadn’t been looking, and printed it out for posterity.
“More like for stalking,” Maxine had replied bitterly. But the wedding ring was clearly on Maxine’s finger, proving that they’d met again after she’d married Josh. Or should he believe Gabe? The king who was proclaiming himself to be Storm’s legitimate father?
Storm buried his head in his hands.
How had his life turned in this direction? How had he not been prepared for this by his mom? When she had found out the true identity of the Harbormaster, and known they were traveling to meet him, why hadn’t she told him that this outcome was even a possibility?
Storm thumped his hand down on his leg and stood up, the rage catching light in his soul. “Mom, I don’t believe you could have done this! After all the ways Dad let us down, how he left you and me to fend for ourselves—how could you not tell me the truth? What is it with this family? Why can’t we all just look after each other like other normal families? I have a dad I didn’t even know about! Were you ever going to tell me that?”
Maxine looked up, her eyes red with crying. “That man is not your father.”
“He had a picture of you meeting him after you were married! Taken nine months before I was born! You admitted it! What do you expect me to think?”
“It’s not what it looks like, Storm. I promise. He drugged me. Slipped something into my drink. I fought him off… I promise. Nothing happened.”
“Are you sure nothing happened? I don’t feel like nothing!”
Maxine’s jaw slackened and her breath came out in a gasp. “You’re not nothing! But Josh is your father!”
“Are you sure?”
The hesitation told Storm everything he needed to know. “He’d found something out, hadn’t he? Back at the ranch. That’s why you had that fight, wasn’t it?” All the pieces were falling together in his head. The logical progression of events.
“Yes, that’s why we had the fight. That’s how I got burned.”
“So, he didn’t know anything about this before, either?”
Maxine shook her head. “No. Only your grandmother.”
“And she told Josh… when she was dying… because someone had to.”
Maxine nodded—because she was sobbing too much now to form any words.
Storm ran his fingers through his hair. “I just can’t, I just can’t believe this is happening to me. On top of everything else. The cancer. The operation. The world.”
A thought struck him. “Is Tally…?”
Maxine’s shocked face rose in mid-sob. “Of course, she is. Don’t be a fool.”
“Oh, so it’s just me you’re not sure about.”
“I’m as sure as I need to be…”
“But that’s not sure enough for me!”
Silence came down like an iron lid on the conversation, and that was that.
They were kept in the room for two days, being brought food and only taken out by Harbormen guards when they needed the bathroom.
Gabe did not visit them, even though Storm expected him to. In the brief moments he was allowed out of the room to use the facilities, he was accosted by the buzzing work going on around the castle to construct more rooms and spaces. To be seeing them painted opulent purples and reds, to see the mirrors hung to make the spaces bigger, and to hear people laughing and chatting around him all made the place—even though he was a prisoner—seem magical and otherworldly.
The very fact that he could hear people laughing on occasion was a revelation to Storm. He’d not heard much laughter since he’d left Boston on their crazy odyssey to West Virginia, and then headed south to Jacksonville. Laughter spoke of safety. Spoke of security. When someone had the chance to stop and laugh, it meant they weren’t engaged in the bitter battles of survival.
Whatever else Gabriel was creating at Castle Jaxport, however cruel and heinous his men were behaving outside the container port,
the place here was almost a sanctuary. A haven. Almost impressive.
How was he supposed to react to all this? What was he supposed to think? He didn’t know, but he was surprised at how calm the castle made him feel.
As he washed himself on the third morning, in warm water that had been brought to the wooden-walled bathroom in a porcelain bowl by a young woman in civilian dress, he looked at himself in the mirror above the basin.
Other than the sight of the back of the Harborman guard standing in the doorway, this could have been the freest and most comfortable Storm had felt since he’d settled into his room at UNC. He felt freed from his feelings about Josh. Why be angry at a man who wasn’t even his father? The anger he’d felt towards Josh—and he would call him Josh in his head from now on—had been for a man he’d felt connected to. Now that that connection had been all but broken, Storm’s anger had drained away over the last two days.
His anger at his mom was another matter. She hadn’t given him the necessary information he needed not to hurt. For him not to feel a little betrayed by her. It was almost as if he had a finite amount of anger, and it had drained from Josh and been transferred to her.
Perhaps, in time, he might be able to understand her motivations, and maybe even give her the benefit of the doubt—Storm had never been a person to stay angry long—but right now his anger was twisting inside him like a burning thread. Sharing the room with her wasn’t helping. His mom just lay on the bed crying most of the time, when she wasn’t asleep. Gabe’s revelations had hit her harder than Storm, it seemed, and she was in no real position to talk with Storm about what had happened over the course of his life, or to give him the answers he so desperately wanted.
But, no doubt, they would come in time.
Storm toweled his face and chest dry, enjoying the feeling of a freshly laundered towel against his skin. It was a luxury he’d never thought he would experience again, and now here it was, a normal occurrence at Castle Jaxport in the Kingdom of Gabriel.
“Storm?”
He turned, taking the towel away from his face. The guard in the doorway had been replaced. Gabriel was smiling and pointing into the corridor beyond him.
“I have a surprise for you. Come with me.”
“A surprise?”
“Yes.” Gabe beamed. “Come and meet the man who used to be your father.”
23
It had taken seventeen days of insane traveling. Three of the Harbormen’s horses had dropped dead along the way, so hard were they being pushed. The riders of the expired horses had been left behind and told to make their own way to Jacksonville on foot.
Josh and the others, including Halley’s sister Grace, had been forced to ride just as hard—and been under constant guard as they did so. Donald was the best horseman among them, but he’d been struggling with the pace, too. A pace that was killing horses would have an effect on their riders. Only allowing six hours of camp a night, the Harbormen’s leader, a Slavic-boned, floppy-fringed man who went by the name of Jank, told Josh that it had been an easy matter to follow them from Cumberland. They’d been seen leaving the city, and Jank had taken personal charge of capturing them.
They would be a fine prize to take back to the Harbormaster. And Jank had driven them without mercy so that he could get that prize back to his leader.
Josh and the others had surrendered from Grace’s house and been taken to horses almost immediately. The sense of Jank’s urgency was all-pervading. After a few days, the journey had become a blur of horses and landscape. Stopping overnight seemed to have been treated as a massive inconvenience for Jank. If he’d slept, Josh had seen no evidence of it.
They’d eaten up the miles south like a bead of red blood running down the cheek of America. Arrow straight for Jacksonville.
Kept from the healing waters in her house, Halley’s sister Grace had slowly deteriorated. At first, there’d been no perceptible change in her, but as the days had worn on, Josh had been able to see in her face that the paranoia and fear were returning. Her body would be hunched in the saddle. Her horse had needed to be led by another rider because she’d become incapable of steering the animal herself.
During the day, Grace had been bound hand and foot and slung across a horse like a pack. At night, she was secured tight to the nearest tree. When she was awake, she occasionally howled like a trapped dog, and cried rivers of tears. When that happened, Halley would sit with her under a guard’s watchful eye and sooth her with hugs and whispers. Eventually, she would calm and sleep. Halley didn’t get much sleep at all.
Halley had complained to Jank about Grace’s treatment, but Jank was impervious to argument and showed no concept of mercy. Every day, Grace had been tied up on the horse and led along with the others, and all the time, she’d become more and more an analogue of how Maria had been in the M-Bar when she had attacked Josh.
Josh had noticed that Donald could hardly bring himself to look at the woman, so complete had been her transformation into the same kind of insane, out-of-control person that his own wife had become.
Halley had spent the nights sitting out with his sister, trying to get her to eat or to rest. The nights were cold, but Halley didn’t seem to care; he’d tended to her where he could, and his eyes burned behind his glasses with hatred for Jank and his men.
When they reached the northern limits of the ruined city of Jacksonville, Jank didn’t let up the pace.
And as they had approached the dead cranes of the container port, Josh had seen the near overturned ship on the dockside with its spilled cargo, and the recognizable shape of the Sea-Hawk moored alongside it. They had traveled through the gates into the inner sanctum now, and they were being led by Jank and his men on foot into the massive bonded warehouse that Jank had called the Castle, which to Josh looked like something that had been cooked up inside a diseased brain.
Donald gave a low whistle as they were marched through the doorway into the thousand oil lamp lit interior. “What the hell is this place?” he asked. The construction going on around them was impressive. Wooden walls were being erected all across the space, hundreds of people working on them. The air hung thick with the tang of sawdust and the sounds of nails being hammered into place. Curled shavings blew across the floor in the breeze that had followed them inside.
Grace had been screaming so much that morning and Halley had been unable to effectively soothe her, so Jank had ordered her gagged. Now she was being carried into the building between two Harbormen, and Halley walked beside her with his hand on her shoulder.
Filly and Henry were looking around in wonder. Martha stuck close to Karel while Henry and Tally brought up the rear of the party, walking in front of another phalanx of Harbormen.
They were led along a wide corridor which opened out into an aisle with bleachers on both sides. It led, Josh saw, as he felt the incredulity rising within him, to a throne on a raised platform, on which sat a man in a crown.
“I’ve seen it all now,” Donald said. “I truly have seen it all.”
The man in the crown had stood up, and Josh noted the golden scepter in the crook of his arm. He’d been too concerned with taking in his surroundings to study the man’s face, but now he did as he got closer. And the ice of recognition was forming over the surface of his memory… until that solidly cold identification became a name.
Gabriel Angel.
Oh, he was older and broader, the face fuller, and the curly hair cut back to a savage fuzz, but it was Gabriel Angel. Named by his father, Gabe had told Josh in college, to give him something to fight for from the word go. A name that would draw ridicule at school because of its unsubtle religious connotations. And he was certainly a boy who had turned out to be no angel.
But now here he was in front of Josh. The man who, though not responsible for the world’s crash back to the medieval, was the one who had fouled so much of the immediate for him. He’d been in charge of Trace Parker in Georgia. He’d sent his forces to Cumberland to retake the city
from the Defenders, while at the same time tasking his men first with finding Maxine and Storm, and now having Josh and Tally brought into his clutches for who knew what reason.
And to have found out along the way that Gabe Angel might be the father of the son he had raised was the kicker. A knife of betrayal in his heart that was about to be twisted.
Josh could stand it no longer. He was trail weary, his body ached from riding, he was hungry, he was thirsty, and he ached for his family. The very embodiment of his fears and worries was there in front of him. Standing up, wearing a crown, and seemingly the master of all of… this.
The sheer howl of subhuman rage that roared from Josh’s mouth tripped a whole series of fail-safes in his head. He’d been a man who had stood for law and order, who had tried to put something back into the lives of kids who had fallen into crime. A man who’d loved his children like they were his own bones. And now he raised his bound wrists into a club and ran full-pelt at Gabe.
He exploded through the cordon of Harbormen and raced at the dais with his head fogged with murder. He didn’t think of the guns around him and didn’t care if they shot him like a dog. Nothing was going to stop Josh. Nothing was going to divert him from his homicidal course.
Gabe was going to die, and Gabe was going to die now.
A supernova of white light exploded in Josh’s head, but the rage was a solid thing. It reformed him as steel. Gabe was the target. Black and gold. The black of his clothing. The gold of his crown.
Black and gold.
Black and…
The Harbormaster swung the scepter like a baseball player picking out the fastball with consummate but deadly batting skill.
Tally screamed as it connected with the side of her father’s head and he spun away, the lights in his eyes out and his body crumpling like a deer carcass cut down from a bleeding frame.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 22