“Wait,” Tom said. He maneuvered himself and the boy so that Nate could reach his sidearm.
“Keep the light and keep the gun,” Nate said.
“If I can’t be here, then I want you—”
A cascade of crashes quaked the pier. It wasn’t thunder this time. It was shattering glass and screaming steel and splintering wood. The Night Ship was dying.
Tom was going to say something else, so Nate beat him to it. “The last time I shot a gun, all I had to do was spam the A button. If you weren’t talking so much, you’d already be on your way back.” He allowed a hint of the Storm King into his voice. “Go, Tom. And cradle his head.”
Nate couldn’t see Tom’s face, but he didn’t need to. He could have sketched it line for line. He held the kitchen door open, then helped support the boy as Tom scaled the oven that blocked the entrance to the undercroft. Before taking the service stairs, Tom turned back to him.
“Nate, I—”
“Christ, Tom, just go. Try to get back before the entire pier collapses.”
He listened to his friend descend the dark stairs.
Nate didn’t know what would be necessary to get the children off this pier alive, but he knew it would be unpleasant. The future branched in a hundred ways, and the doors at the end of those halls opened into pain. Tom already carried all the burdens he could bear. If he could, Nate wanted to spare him from whatever came next.
Young lives were in the balance, among them Lucy’s own brother and sister. Nate had to save them. No matter what it cost, he had to save them.
He slid out of his wingtips and padded once more across the kitchen to the swinging doors. His night vision had always been good. The nightclub was etched in gray scale pushed to the darkest edge of its spectrum, but not quite black.
Gradations of shadow and memory’s blueprints guided him to the spiral stairs draped in disintegrating velvet. As he ascended, he let his hand brush against the shreds of fabric. Decades ago, it’d been lush and deep and rich, but everything decays. Everything ends.
He reached the top of the staircase and walked across the balcony that overlooked the dance floor. The shapes of rotting banquettes and chaise lounges stood sentinel along the walls. A hallway beyond the balcony led to a series of rooms once used for a panoply of illegal activities. Chandelier light used to catch the silk of men’s tuxedos as they threw dice and laughed with one another. Upon these scarred floors, women in lace and feathers danced in clouds of cigar smoke. They were ghosts, but now something worse haunted these halls.
Far from the great windows of the dance floor, the Century Room was impermeably dark. Nate would’ve been able to see just as clearly with his eyes closed. He tried to sort the storm sounds from all the other whispers of the place. The ticks and cracks of the nearing fire. The surge and release of the lake. Somewhere in there someone must be breathing. Somewhere underneath everything else were young hearts convulsing with fear.
Unless he was too late.
He took the central hall slowly, his socked feet making no more than a shush across the floor. He sensed more than saw the rooms he passed. They were silent, but that didn’t mean they were empty. If Owen had been in the walls, then he could be anywhere.
The hall continued. Nate tried to remember if this passage had always gone so deep into the building. For the first time, he wondered how it was possible for such a vast structure to exist on a pier in the first place. Multiple levels, warrens of halls and rooms. An entire world somehow stood upon these century-old pilings.
When it happened, Nate’s ears were more helpful than his eyes.
The crack of a planted foot. The hiss of fabric chafing against fabric. The whirr of something slicing through the air at tremendous speed.
Nate had time only to raise his arm to his face before the blow struck him. A baton or bat of some kind. He had a flash of standing in a lab, the sound of glass shattering, his body accepting the punishment of a lacrosse stick from the bulbs of his knees to the quiff of his head.
Another assault, but Nate’s old skills resurfaced. Despite the dark, he caught the baton in his palms. Ignoring the alarms from his hurt thumb, he yanked his attacker toward him and torqued them both to the floor. The figure beneath him was too small to be Owen.
“James?”
“I knew it was you,” James said. He writhed underneath Nate. Nate pulled the weapon from the boy’s grip and tossed it away. It felt like the baseball bat he’d seen the kids with earlier.
“Where’s Owen?”
“Get off me.”
“Where’re the others?”
“James?” A whisper came from nearby.
“Move the couch back and lock the goddamn door, Teej.”
Nate’s pupils imploded in a supernova of light.
“Teej!”
“James, he’s not even wearing rain gear.”
Nate felt dangerously vulnerable in the glare of the flashlight’s beam. Like a spotlighted actor or a prisoner attempting a doomed escape.
“Look at him, James,” Tara said. “Just look at him.”
Nate still squinted against the light as the boy slowed his struggling.
“What happened to you?” she asked. Nate remembered that his face was smeared in blood from colliding with the pile of furniture obstructing the stairs from the undercroft.
“A lot. We have to get out of here. But turn off the light. He’ll find us.”
“We aren’t going anywhere with you,” James said.
They were about the same height, but Nate had no trouble pulling the young man up by his shirt collar. James sputtered as Nate dragged him through the doorway where Tara stood.
“It’s him!” a boy screamed from the far corner of the room. Nate recognized him as the one who’d menaced him with rebar a few hours earlier. The boy backed away, into the pierced goth girl—the last of the four teens to account for.
The goth girl shushed him and draped her arms protectively around his shoulders. “Quiet, Carlos,” she said.
“Shut the door,” Nate told Tara. They didn’t have time for this, but he also didn’t have time to manhandle all four of them downstairs one by one. He had to convince them he wasn’t their enemy. He felt where the bat had struck his arm. A contusion was blossoming along his ulna. Battered but not broken.
He could finally see Tara now that the full blaze of the flashlight wasn’t in his eyes. She shrank from him, but Nate thought this was due more to guilt than fear.
“What’s burning?” the goth girl asked. Medea’s winds and the lake’s lamentations filled the room with peaks and troughs of sound.
“Everything. There’s a boat and a kayak down at the launch, and we don’t have the keys for the Scarab, but—”
“Where’s Pete?” Tara asked.
“Pete’s fine. He’s with the police right now.”
“Oh, well, I guess everything’s just great, then,” James snarled, giving Nate a full dose of Bennett family venom. He yanked himself free of Nate’s grip and stalked into the shadows at the opposite end of the room.
“What about Mikey?” the boy, Carlos, asked. He and the goth girl edged alongside Tara, closer to the light. “The man was hitting him and—”
“Mikey was hurt pretty badly,” Nate said, assuming Mikey was the boy they’d found downstairs with the head wound. “Tommy—Deputy Buck—is taking him to one of the boats. We’ve got to get down there, too.”
The room they were in was both long and wide. Tara’s flashlight illuminated the patch of floor where everyone but James was huddled. What Nate could see of the walls bristled with curls of shredded paint. Dark striations stained the plaster below the paint like the thick arteries and spindly capillaries of a cardiovascular system, as if the Night Ship itself was alive.
“How did you get in here?” the goth girl asked. “We blocked all the ways in and made sure every window was boarded over.”
“You barricaded yourselves in here?” Nate assumed it’d been Owen who’
d clogged the exits and shifted the oven in order to keep the teens from escaping, though it was hard to imagine how even Owen could have done this all on his own so quickly.
The goth girl scowled at him. “This is our place.”
For a moment, Nate was stupefied—then he remembered what this pier used to mean to him. This was a place of his own, where he could be the truest version of himself. Or that had been the delusion. The problem was that the Night Ship was a trap masquerading as a haven.
“James said you weren’t going to scare us out of our own home,” Carlos said.
“And you’re not going to,” James said from the light’s perimeter. Nate had tossed away his baseball bat, but James now picked up a stalk of metal that might have once been part of a floor lamp. The boy was so angry. His rage was as blinding as Nate’s own had once been. “We aren’t going to fall for your tricks. What’re you trying to get us to do?”
“Owen’s trying to kill us. Can’t you smell the smoke? He set the Night Ship on fire. He clubbed Mikey. He killed Maura.” Nate’s shoulders dropped. Exhaustion took the steel from his spine. “He killed Lucy.”
There was a moment of perfect silence in the room.
“And he’s going to kill us next. We have to get down to the launch.” Nate reopened the door to the room. “Please. Your hurt friend’s down there. We don’t have any more time.”
Carlos and the goth girl looked back at James and then at Tara, and then at each other. Nate willed for them to move, and he could have dropped to his knees in relief when they did.
James took a step forward as if to stop them from leaving, though he didn’t. His face was alabaster in the light, his jaw clenched like a vise. But his eyes, his eyes were raw with pain.
“You need to be quick, but you also need to be quiet,” Nate said as the duo passed him and stepped into the hall. The path to the launch was currently clear, but he didn’t know where Owen was. The pair didn’t have a light, but these children were of the Night Ship. They’d find their way.
“He killed her,” Tara said, as the sound of her friends’ footfalls diminished. She didn’t say this as if it were a question.
“You’re lying,” James said, but there was no conviction in his words. He looked at Tara. A tear glistened on the precipice of his chin.
“He—” Nate’s throat constricted. A sound came from his mouth, but it wasn’t a word.
“It’s been Owen Liffey this whole time?” Tara asked.
Nate nodded because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
“We couldn’t see who came at us,” she said. “We were all downstairs sleeping. Mikey started screaming. There was blood all over him, and then we saw this guy in a raincoat and hood. But it was only for a second. The man started breaking the lanterns and we all ran up here—” Her eyes were wide and liquid. She looked so much like Lucy. “We thought it was you.”
It made sense that Owen would take out the lights. If the teens never saw him, they couldn’t identify him. Even if some of them escaped the Night Ship, Owen could still try to scapegoat Nate for the rampage.
Nate kept forgetting that Owen was deranged, but not stupid.
“Owen Liffey killed Lucy,” James muttered to himself. As if hearing this in his own voice would help him make sense of it. “Owen killed Lucy.”
“I thought we blocked everything,” Tara said. “What did we miss?”
“There are passages in the walls,” Nate said. “Just like in the stories. We never found them, but I guess Owen did.”
“Someone tried to get in here right after we wedged the couch against the door,” Tara said. “He almost broke it down. It took all of us to hold it. Then he stopped, and when we didn’t hear anything else for a while, James went out to take a look.”
James looked furious again, but for once this anger wasn’t directed at Nate.
“I don’t know where he is,” Nate said. “But the kitchen stairs are clear now. We can make it down there. If we see him he won’t be able to stop all of us.” If it came down to it, he’d waylay Owen long enough for the kids to escape.
“The Night Ship’s burning.” Tara turned to her brother. “We have to go.”
James closed his eyes and then nodded, suddenly looking completely spent. The truth was hard, especially when it changed on you. He let the metal rod clatter to the floor, and took a few steps toward the door, then stopped and turned back to the shadows.
All at once, the dark behind James shifted.
Tara screamed. It was a banshee’s wail, but it barely reached its full pitch before Owen had an arm as thick as a tree trunk wrapped around her brother’s neck.
Twenty-six
Tara’s scream didn’t fade so much as end. Choked as her twin’s breath was cut, as if the two of them shared the same thread of a windpipe.
In the circle of the flashlight’s beam, Owen was a monolith of black behind James. He wore the same raincoat he used to wear on Thunder Runs. With its hood cowled over his face, he might have stepped from any kind of nightmare.
“Lower the light,” Owen said. The calm of his voice was even more disturbing than the shade of purple ripening across James’s face. The boy kicked at Owen’s shins and jabbed elbows backward into the iron of the man’s chest. He may as well have fought a mountain.
The beam stuttered as Tara obeyed.
The flashlight’s new position illuminated the floor behind Owen, where Nate noticed a semi-digested rug in the swath of its light. A corner of it was curled against an open trapdoor that seemed designed to blend into the floor’s hardwood. Another access to the hidden passages that connected to the hatchway by the dance floor.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, Nate.” Owen cleared his throat. Nate’s eyes began to weep from the smoke. His soft palate had acquired a harsh, thick texture.
“Let the kid breathe, Owen.”
“Don’t tell me you’re on their side. These kids”—he shook James without a hint of exertion—“must have committed about fifty crimes in the last two weeks. Some of them felonies. Hell, don’t forget that before the week’s up they might even add murder to the list.”
Nate batted aside a flash of his grandmother in the ICU, lanced by tubes and swaddled in gauze. Next to him, Tara shrank deeper into the dark.
“You’ve got to think this through.” Nate’s voice was even, but his mind raced. Both the baseball bat and the metal rod were out of reach. He’d never get to them before Owen snapped James’s neck, which was the most present danger. Tommy would reach them soon, but perhaps not soon enough. Nate knew he’d have to talk his way out of this.
He tried to imagine the texture of Owen’s mind. He knew what his old friend wanted; Nate just had to convince him that this was precisely the thing that he offered.
Smoke rippled across the ceiling, and their futures narrowed by the moment.
“Where are the other kids?” Owen asked. “I thought they were all up here.”
“They’re safe.”
“Try again.” Owen hefted James, and the boy’s face darkened. His legs flailed like those of a child’s toy.
“They’re downstairs. But it doesn’t matter, Owen, because—”
Owen took two gigantic strides toward Nate. When he did, Nate realized that he barely came up to the man’s chin. Every cell in his body told him to run, but he buried this impulse in ice. He still had two children to save.
At Owen’s approach, Tara backpedaled into the doorway, and Nate thought that it was this that had stopped Owen in his tracks.
“No, Tara. You don’t want to leave,” Owen said. “That would be very bad for your brother. Trust me on this one.” Then to Nate, “They know too much. You know that.”
“It doesn’t matter what they know. It’s what they say that counts,” Nate said. He spoke in the voice of the Storm King. A blade of confidence polished with cunning. “They’re not innocent. You said it yourself: They’re in a world of trouble. We can use that, Owen.”
Owen h
ad maintained the upper hand during their last conversation, but that had been back in his own basement while Nate’s senses had been dulled by homemade chloroform. Now, the razors of Nate’s mind were sharpened by adrenaline. Now, they were in the Night Ship, which was his domain.
“It’s too late for that.” Owen shook his head, but Nate spied something in his eyes. Doubt? Hope? Whatever it was, it was something he could use.
“Of course it isn’t too late.” Nate sighed. For a few minutes he needed Owen to believe he was the Storm King again. “We both want each other’s silence. So we can make a deal with them. We can still get out of this.”
“I know you’re trying to get into my head, Nate. What do you mean, a ‘deal’?”
“We don’t want to go to jail!” Tara said.
Nate glanced at her, a bit surprised. He couldn’t have scripted that better.
Conflicting emotions clashed across Owen’s face. Nate could imagine the gears of the man’s mind spinning and grating. Remembering the past while trying to chart the future. Balancing who Nate was against what Owen had done. It boiled down to a single question: Was Nate his enemy or, even after everything that had happened, was there a chance that Nate might still be his friend?
The big guy loosened his grip enough for James to steal a single harrowing breath.
“We’ve got to show them that we can be trusted,” Nate said. “Then we come up with a story that works for everyone.That’s how we’ll do it.”
“And we can?” Owen asked, frowning. Nate could see him trying to keep up, trying to anchor himself to something that was true. “We can—be trusted?”
“Of course!” Nate laughed, then winked at him.
It was a kind of magic, playing the puzzle box of another’s mind to get a desired outcome. Not true magic so much as sleight of hand. A person could only be fooled if they didn’t know where to look, and if they, deep down, wanted to believe the lie in the first place.
“Get the others, Tara,” James choked out. “We’ve got to get our stories straight.”
The Bennett twins, they were quick, Nate had to admit. Just like their older sister.
The Storm King Page 34