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 had 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.
“Come with me, James,” Tara said.
“No,” Owen said. “He stays here.”
Nate nodded. Like this was a hard-won concession and not another kind of trap.
Because he knew he’d just hooked Owen, and soon the man’s mind would begin to work against him. Psychology was a wonderful tool if you knew how to use it. Owen thought he’d succeeded in holding on to James, whereas in actuality all he’d done was lose Tara. Soon, his cognitive dissonance would begin to use one poor decision to reinforce another. Soon, Nate’s hook would work its way so deep that Owen would beg to be reeled in. Then they could get out of here.
“Hurry back,” Nate told Tara. He turned away from Owen and stepped toward her. “The air up here’s getting worse by the second.” Cast off, Nate mouthed to her.
“Okay,” Tara said, reading his lips. But she didn’t go. Eyes swollen with tears, she glanced back at her twin.
“Go, Teej. It’s already hard enough to breathe!” James croaked into Owen’s sleeve. I love you. Nate watched the boy’s eyes signal to Tara. I love you, and I need you to be safe.
Nate wished Lucy had lived to see these two grow up.
Tara placed the flashlight on the ground, so Nate didn’t see her face as she left. He heard her sniffle and could imagine her tears, but they were all beginning to tear and drip and choke.
“So how’s this going to work?” Owen asked. He still sounded unsure, but now he’d come too far and committed too much to afford doubt. This was a game of confidence, and he had already lost.
“First we have to get off this pier,” Nate said. “The fire boat will be here soon, and we don’t want them to find us. We can go to Johnny’s house to regroup.”
Nate had moved closer to the doorway during Tara’s exit. The baseball bat was in the hallway, hidden from Owen’s sight, but all Nate had to do was stoop to reach it.
“And then?” Owen was desperate to believe Nate. The Storm King always had a plan.
Then it all fell apart.
“And then you turn yourself in.” Tom’s voice came from over Nate’s shoulder. “It’s over, Owen.”
“Tommy!” Owen sounded perplexed, but also somehow delighted. “Just like the old days! Too bad Johnny’s on the disabled list. He always hated being left out.”
“Pete Corso’s with the police, O,” Tom said.
Nate watched most of the doors to the future slam shut.
“The police?” Owen said, still not quite getting it. “You’re police, Tommy, but you’re my friend, too, aren’t you?”
Owen was indeed doomed no matter what, but there was no advantage in him knowing it. Quite the opposite. Even a harmless animal would attack when cornered, and Owen was as far from harmless as Nate could imagine. Tom had ruined everything.
Nate had to come up with another way out.
“Did you hear me?” Tom asked. He had his gun out of its holster. It wasn’t pointed at Owen, not yet. “The kid you’ve kept tied up since last night is with the cops. Officers are at your house. They’re in your basement. They’re with your mother. Do you understand?”
The last strands of the spell Nate had been weaving collapsed around them.
“You lied?” Owen blinked at Nate with the stupefied look of a child who’d just pulled Santa’s beard to find their father’s face underneath. “You were never going to help me.”
“It’s finished, Owen,” Tom said. “There’s no reason for this. Let the kid—” He cut himself off with a stutter of staccato coughs. Nate had covered his nose with his sleeve, but his head still rang from the fumes. They had to get out of here.
“No.” Owen shook his head, the peak of his hood shifting from side to side. “We can still get out of this. We always get out of it.” Heard often enough, even the most audacious lie sounded like the truth.
James’s face darkened as he wheezed in the acrid air and Owen tightened his grip.
“Don’t make it worse than it already is,” Tom said.
&nb
sp; Owen had the boy’s slim neck in his titanic grasp. Tom had a gun. The Night Ship was burning. The room was filling with smoke. Nate had no weapon or leverage. They careened toward something terrible, and he was somehow only a passenger.
“We can still figure this out,” Owen said. “What’s another lie or two?” A quake of collapsing infrastructure shuddered across the pier. “Did Nate tell you how I covered for you, Tommy? Did he tell you how I saved you that night you pushed Lucy into the water?”
“I’ve got an idea,” Nate said.
Owen laughed, or it began as a laugh. After a second it turned into a hacking cough, though he didn’t loosen his grip on James, who was now lank in his arms.
“Hear me out,” Nate said. “But first, we’ve got to go downstairs. That’ll buy us a couple minutes before we die of smoke inhalation.” The commands of the Storm King no longer held sway as they once did, but his logic was indisputable. If they stayed up here, they would die, and soon.
Nate walked from the room without waiting for a response. The key was to exit quickly and leave Owen too stunned to do anything but follow.
Once in the hall, he sprinted for the stairs. Flames still hadn’t reached the threshold of the nightclub, but the air up here in the Century Room was poison. Nate’s balance faltered and his vision narrowed as he took the spiral steps. He had to rely on his arms clutching the banister as he half-ran, half-fell down the gyre.
Black smoke now poured from the glass doors to the promenade. It rippled upward to the ceiling like whitewater captured in a long exposure. Beyond the furniture the children had piled in front of the exit, the glow from the fire had burgeoned to a noontime intensity.
Nate expected some negotiation between Tom and Owen as they choreographed their exit from the Century Room, but he knew he didn’t have much time.
More collapses shuddered from the landward side of the pier. Their crashes were answered with blasts of thunder from Medea.
The tall, south-facing windows had been meticulously boarded. Nate hurried to one near the back of the club, in the seating area beyond the pedestal that held the husk of the shattered aquarium. Most of these planks had been in place back when Nate was in high school, but others were fresh additions. The slats looked as thick and formidable as a wall, but Nate knew this place. He knew the Night Ship was rotted from its spires down to its pilings. The wood was like clay under his fingers. Even with his injured hand, it didn’t take long to rip out enough of the rusted nails to clear a section from the base of the window up to the height of his shoulders.
Only when he looked through the cracked pane during a blink of lightning did he realize the poor state of the boardwalk abutting this window. At least a third of the walkway flanking this side of the pier had fallen away. They’d have to be careful. Nate would risk braving the storm-pitched waters only as a last resort. The lake couldn’t be trusted.
Barking coughs sounded from the stairs while a flashlight beam cut through the bank of smoke that deepened against the arced beams of the ceiling. Tom must have forced Owen down ahead of him. When the huge man appeared at the base of the stairs, he had James slung precariously over his shoulder.
Owen wasn’t bearing the weight of the kid as easily as he had. The thickening air must have taken its toll on him. When he staggered from the stairs, Nate rushed to him with one palm raised in peace.
The big guy flinched when Nate helped him ease the boy to the floor. Then he took a few steps forward, bent over, and began coughing sludge up from his lungs. James was still unconscious, from either the smoke or Owen’s choke hold. Nate made sure the boy’s airways were clear and that he was breathing.
Owen retched in the dark, and Nate went to him. They weren’t supposed to fight each other. The universe was ruthless and cruel in the way it stacked chance upon chance. It was the enemy, not other people: least of all your own friends. It was only with your friends that you had a chance. But these were the ideals of better people born to luckier lives.
From the flashlight’s bounding beam, Nate knew that Tom was still on the floor above, but he’d reach them soon.
So many emotions churned inside of Nate. This place. This town. These people. They conjured so many things in him.
“You killed Lucy, but her death isn’t all on you, O,” Nate said. He wondered when was the last time Owen had received compassion. He wondered if anyone had ever told him that it’s never too late to be good. He grabbed Owen’s shoulder, as if they were friends again. Like they weren’t both monsters. As if all the years of rot had been pared away and they were back in that very first storm when Owen was a chubby kid with sleepy eyes and Nate was little more than undead. “It’s my fault, too. I see that now. And I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” Owen was winded, still bent at the waist with his hands braced above his knees. He spat something thick onto the floor. “That doesn’t change anything.” His voice was a rasp almost lost beneath the pounding of rain and the crescendo of flames from the promenade. “You said you had an idea,” he said. “A way to get us out of this.”
“The other kids all got away, O. But I’ve still got to save this one. I can’t let you stop me.”
“Just tell me your idea,” Owen wheezed.
“You’re not going to like it.” Nate dropped to his knee and plunged a fistful of rusted nails into the Achilles tendon of Owen’s left leg. The man’s scream sliced through the roar of the fire and the howl of the storm.
So few of the Lake’s stories had heroes.
Nate scrambled to get James clear of the hulking man, but he wasn’t fast enough. As Owen toppled, he grabbed Nate’s ankle, sending him hard into the floor.
“Liar!” Owen roared. “Traitor! Still trying to play me like all your other puppets.” He yanked Nate toward him. Nate pawed at the planks he sprawled across. He knew he had to stand, he had to get clear. But he couldn’t.
“Pull a string and watch the Porker dance!” Owen made a sound that was somewhere between a cough and a howl. He pounded Nate in the ribs with the hammer of his fist, and it was like being hit by a car.
“You think I want your apologies?”
The pain in Nate’s side was worse than muscular trauma. At least one rib was cracked. He tried to call for Tom, but he could do no more than gasp.
Owen tried and failed to get to his feet, swearing with the pain that must have come from using his ruined leg. One of the nails Nate had stabbed Owen with clattered to the floor. Four inches long, dripping black, and gnarled by decades of winters. There were six more where that came from.
“You know when I actually wanted something from you? When we were kids. When Mom cut a chunk out of me once a week. And where were you? Where was the Storm King?” He kneeled on Nate’s spine and ground into the vertebrae. The pain was electric. Nate spasmed from his toes to his fingers. “But you still think you call the shots here. You’re not a god, Nate. Here, I’ll prove it to you.” Owen grabbed a fistful of Nate’s hair and pulled his head back. Pinned by Owen’s weight, Nate’s spine stretched and bent, and his brain couldn’t tell him where all the agony came from.
If the wind would listen he’d speak it his love. He’d telegraph it from Medea’s coils across the storm-ravaged miles to the New Jersey hills where the best pieces of himself resided.
The sound of the gunshot felt like it was enough to knock a person over. It pulsed through his ears as it rang through the nightclub’s halls.
“Tommy!” Owen bellowed. Pain had ratcheted its pitch, but his voice had regained that same strange delight as before. He released Nate’s hair and rolled off his back. Dropping back to the scarred floor, Nate was as still as a living creature could be. Each ragged breath sank him deeper into the planks.
“What took you so long?” Owen asked.
“Checked the other rooms,” Tom said. “Had to make sure there wasn’t anyone else up there.”
Nate could feel his fingers as they probed the splinters of wood he lay on. He couldn’t see his
feet, but they seemed to move when he asked them to.
“You’re a credit to your profession, you know that?”
Nate experimented with bringing his knees into his stomach. His right side screamed. Its protest was noted, its concerns respectfully deferred until some future time.
“He doesn’t have a plan for us. Just another of his lies. So’d you think about what I said, Tom?” Owen asked. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
Nate rolled onto his side to look at the pair. The slant of Tom’s figure looked distressed, but he’d reached the dance floor in better shape than Owen. His flashlight was in one hand and his gun was in the other, pointed to the air into which Nate assumed it had been fired. He had a strip of cloth tied across his nose and mouth.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. This can all be traced back to him. It’s all his fault, and he even knows it. He just told me as much.” Though it must have been torture, the huge man pulled himself back into a standing position.
Nate also made the excruciating transition from his side to his feet. He’d hobbled Owen, but not disabled him. He had to get James out of here.
“You, me, Lucy, Grams, these kids. It all started with Nate. You know what the Storm King would say. All that suffering. All that pain. Someone’s got to pay for it.”
Nate would have given anything to see Tom’s face.
“And the other kids, they don’t know you pushed Lucy into the lake that night.”
“It was an accident.”
The glass door to the promenade shattered and the glare of flames filled the nightclub. Long shadows leapt and dove across the walls.
“You know that doesn’t matter. You’re part of the reason he lost Lucy, and the Storm King doesn’t forgive.”
Nate stooped to lift James from the floor. The teen was thin, but he was dead weight. Nate’s vision went white when something in his side clicked out of place with the strain. When this pain decreased to a simmer, he began to drag James inch by inch toward the window from which he’d cleared the planks.
The Storm King: A Novel Page 35
