Daniel Morgan floated, nose just awash in cold salt water, the currents tickling his whiskers with news of a thousand fish within quick chase. He ignored their temptation, bobbing up and down with each swell and seeking glimpses of his tower and the village steeples and the burnt-out hulk of the Pratt's house with each crest.
Temptation. His selkie body loved the sea, called to him whenever he came within the smell of it and the feel of the tides within his bones. Even on the streets of Naskeag Falls he'd yearned for it. Twenty miles inland, the Naskeag River still answered that ebb and flow — salt water mixing with the fresh river scent flowing down from the hills and forests. The longer he'd walked the land, the stronger the call grew. Now he'd come home again.
Some ways, Ben was the lucky one. His feet belonged on solid ground. He'd never been an alien in his so-called native land.
Daniel bobbed to the crest of a swell and scanned the mists again, wishing a seal's eyes were better suited for distance vision. And that the rain and fog would clear enough to spot all his bearings in one glance. Out here in the middle of the bay, Morgan's Point and Pratt's Neck kept vanishing from their opposite horizons.
Ben had noted range and azimuth from the tower, vital data when lobbing shells from a recoilless rifle and then X-marks-the-spot on a chart, locating the shattered hulk of the smuggler's speedboat. Or what was left of it — secondary explosions had ripped it into flaming shreds. Dan had been a spectator for that show, barely able to hold his head up enough to look. Tupash had wanted Power, and the Dragon's Eye drew him like a moth to flame. He'd felt it before he'd even known it existed. He'd said that the Morgans had barely touched its powers through the centuries.
The bastard had proven he'd do anything to get the Dragon in his hands. Physical beatings from the fists of the brujo's thugs, mental torture by Tupash luring Maria to her death and then kidnapping Mouse and Ellie right out of the Haskell House through a golem constructed in Kate Rowley's form — blow followed blow followed blow. Daniel hadn't even had the strength left to change when Gary found him in the Pratt tunnels. The boy had towed him out to their lobster boat like a sack of clams, a helpless man nearly drowning in his native element.
The fog thickened, swallowing everything except the dark finger of Morgan's Castle and then fading it into a ghost image that might be there or might be just a memory. Daniel shrugged his shoulders, or the pinniped equivalent, and sank under the waves. The water came alive around him.
Gary had done this once already, searching for evidence, but the boy had barely found his way into his seal body. Daniel had needed years before he understood what he could do, heard what his new senses told him.
And how to ignore a salmon flashing silver across the currents. Just like with that girl of his, Gary had to learn how to keep temptations in their place. Keep the brain in charge of the body.
Daniel stood on his nose and dove. Tastes and vibrations and delicate shifts of temperature surrounded him, bathed him, bringing news of the currents for miles around. Faint and far at the edge of hearing, whistles told him of a pod of orcas hunting, four, five, and he reminded himself that his weren't the longest teeth in the sea. If they turned into the bay, he'd have to break off his search.
Gasoline tainted the water. Sharp and clinging and offensive, normally he'd avoid that smell. It would foul his fur for days. Now he skirted the edge of it.
The water darkened around him, closed in as he sank into black and cold. None of that bothered him. His human body would die so easily here, but the seal gloried in it. Pressure squeezed his body. Cutting back and forth across the current, he tasted, tested, searched. A corpse would spread its taint for miles.
He stirred a flounder from the muck and twitched after it, tracing its panicked flight by vibration and taste in the black water, memories of sweet blood erupting between his teeth. Temptation. "Once you change, remember to change back." Pointed warning, that was, echoing down the centuries. He pulled himself away from the lure and back to his real hunt. Gary had been right. No corpse-taint in the water.
Daniel had found bodies before, located wrecks before, lobstermen and scallop-draggers sunk or pulled overboard by their gear, clamdiggers cut off from their skiffs on a rising tide, pleasure-boaters who misjudged the lurking fury of these waters. Used that knowledge to direct a search, bring loved ones home for closure. He'd built a reputation as a wizard of wind and water. Even this long after the explosion, he should have found traces of the men who died on that boat. And he was sure that men had died.
Alice had ordered this second check, for whatever witchy reason troubled her thoughts. Something about that dead man in the abandoned hotel, he thought, something connected to the kid left dead in the stone circle. Even his seal body could feel it. This was not a good place to hunt. The water reeked of it. Something wrong had happened in these waters. Gary hadn't known his new body well enough to taste it.
Witchery, but dark, ugly, not the protective magic of the Haskell Witches, dangerous as that often was. He knew the taste, the feel, of that, had known it all his life. He surfaced again, breathed again, floated again under the fog that drifted with the onshore breeze. Thinking about the difference between dangerous and ugly, thinking about Stonefort, about Morgans and Haskells, tangled webs and long alliances. About outsiders tipping the balance that had ruled this remote corner of Maine for generations.
Pratts had been Morgan allies for centuries, sailed as captains and mates on Morgan ships. And vice-versa. Tom Pratt had thrown the balance off, bringing Tupash into Stonefort. Probably hadn't meant to, probably thought the Peruvian was just another cocaine source in the ancient dance of smuggling whatever the latest government wanted to control. And then Tom's source, Tom's tool, had elbowed Tom aside and taken over.
Now Stonefort felt the need to waken an old power to balance that. Waken Kate to why she held the sword and scales of Justice in Stonefort. That, more than the corpse out on the blueberry ridge, told Daniel that Alice hadn't finished the job when she shot her brujo. Silver bullets or no, something survived that battle.
Daniel turned his nose toward Pratt's Neck, across the bay. Gary had investigated the sunken boat. He had not poked back into that sea cave and the hidden entrance to the tunnels under the Pratt house. And too many things didn't add up.
Tom Pratt was a wily old dog, no question about it. Odds were, he hadn't been on board that speedboat, or involved in the shooting around his house. That's what God created minions for. Old Tom would still be alive. Alive as long as he'd be useful to Tupash.
The cops had searched the burnt-out house down to the foundations, but they never found that tunnel door Caroline had opened into a basement workshop. Too well hidden, even after the fire. The cops had found illegal drugs and weapons and a lot of other questions that they wanted to ask, but nobody to ask them of. No Pratts, living or dead. No Peruvian thugs, living or dead. Nada.
Daniel swam on, easy in the water, glad to leave the stink and bad vibes of that wreck. The cold waves and currents swept oil and gasoline from his coat, and twice he dove into tangled kelp and rubbed himself through it to speed the cleaning.
No Pratts at all, from an extended family numbered in the scores. They had a guest-house in the compound, undamaged. Suddenly empty. The family held property worth tens of millions, real estate and investments and deeply complicated trusts guarded by phalanxes of lawyers. Hints and sniffs of offshore assets. Nobody claimed them.
Sounded like the Pratts had a bug-out plan, laid on generations in advance and set up for just this kind of fubar. Which came as no surprise — Morgans had the same kind of contingency plan, for exactly the same reasons.
He felt the shore before he reached it, the hiss and boom of swells humping up and beating on steep rock. The water's taste changed, to rockweed and mussels and tide pools, and he sought the faintest touch of rust and fresh water tainted by char. And hemp. Try as best they could, the Pratts had never completely masked that evidence. He found the smells he wanted, and followed them.
Typical Morgan operation, gathering as much data as possible before doing anything. God is in the details. Haste makes waste. Or jail time, which comes to pretty much the same thing.
A channel opened in the half-tide ledges, narrow and angled for a concealing overlap, and the rock gave back different echoes — sharper, harder, weathered by centuries of storm and ice rather than millennia. Man had shaped this channel and the cave beyond, not nature.
Daniel guessed the first work dated to Jefferson's Embargo. Those idiots in Washington had turned smuggling into a cottage industry, almost a civic virtue along the harsh New England coast. Prohibition and the various drug laws had merely reinforced that attitude. Sort of like the Hispanic view of La Migra.
The water turned dark around him, the entrance to the tunnel. He swam warily. Gary had found the secret of the Pratts' original trap — photocells in a pitch-black tunnel, any stranger here would use a light. If they still used this place, odds were that they'd added more security. Nobody ever accused the Pratts of being stupid. They knew that he knew that they knew that . . .
Sound turned sharp and clear in front of him, echoes from wavelets reflecting off smooth metal instead of rough granite. Those orcas, the grinning dangerous porpoises, they used active sonar. Seals just listened, passive sonar, building an image out of sounds and reflections caused by others. Safer when you weren't at the top of the food chain.
The tunnel ended. He eased forward until his nose and whiskers touched bare steel slats that his human brain turned into a roll-up door. The sea gate. He'd seen the tracks of it months ago, stainless steel set into the stone, and paddled his kayak slowly past into the protected basin hiding within, flashlight probing, triggering the alarm. Now it sat closed, blocking waves and storms and nosy neighbors.
He tasted the water. This metal stayed clean, but carried no taint of deadly magic like the wreck. This metal had to be opened and closed regularly, had to dry out, or barnacles and mussels and weed would claim it. Someone still used the gate.
Daniel floated in the ebb and surge and darkness, thinking. Nobody ever accused the Pratts of being stupid. If the Morgan tunnels hid entrances and passages even he didn't know, damn sure the Pratts had more than two ways into this prairie-dog town.
He turned, and swam slowly out into gray light, and drifted down the crosscurrent that ebbed below the cliffs. Trickles of fresh water joined the salt, runoff here and there from the rain carrying soil and spruce resin and traces of char from burned house and garage, seepage from springs, faint hints of lawn chemicals and manure.
No. Not manure. Human waste, sewage.
He lifted his head out of the water and scanned, making sure he still floated beneath Pratt cliffs, tasted runoff from Pratt lands. A weathered gray gazebo crowned the point directly over him. Distinctive style. Pratt land, indeed.
Older houses in Stonefort, the Morgan house, the Pratt house, they'd been built before indoor plumbing. Not as old as the Haskell house, damn sure the Morgans hadn't been willing to put up with that much inconvenience. But plumbing had been an afterthought, hand pumps and cisterns and pipes, and then deep bored wells when electricity came through. And more pipes to take the water away again when you were done with it. But most of the places right on the shore just used the ocean as a cesspool.
People still lived in the Pratt tunnels. He smelled their waste.
Salt water splashed high to Daniel's left, and startled reflex threw him into a dive. Sharp thumps echoed off the bay floor and squeezed him from whiskers to flippers. Not orcas, not sharks . . .
He surfaced and gazed around, his seal mind curious and looking for play. The stone headlands still rose above him to the Pratts' gazebo. He still tasted char on the water, and runoff from last night's rain, and the odd flavors that might lead him to secret entrances and answers.
Echoes bounced above water as well, sharp rapid cracks like splitting stone or a tree snapped in the wind. Water spouted again, closer, to his right, and he dove again and the thumps squeezed him again and human thoughts rose up from beneath the seal's focus on current and taste and the tantalizing vibrations of a nearby school of herring.
Shots. Someone is shooting at me. He squirmed deeper, twisting away from the shore, and shunned the dark glittering spots of metal sinking from their shrouds of bubbles.
Someone was shooting at him. Daniel forced himself back into control, human over seal-mind, and swam. He finally surfaced, hundreds of yards offshore, and turned. The cliffs blurred in the distance, seal eyes again, but he couldn't pick out any movement. The Morgan tunnels had entrances and arrow-slits hidden in crevices of the rock, turned into gun ports with the advance of civilization. He had to assume the Pratts came similarly equipped.
Time to swap bliss for brains, become human again. Daniel turned and dove and surprised a lobster on open bottom and crunched it. Delicious. They never tasted quite as sweet once they'd been cooked. Then he felt for the warmth of the Dragon in his head and aimed for it. Like the ocean's call to his selkie body, he always felt his bond to that glowing red orb of whatever hiding in the dark stone passages under Morgan's Point, to its Tear he'd left behind when he changed. He could find them in the dark, in a full Nor'easter on the bay in February.
He followed that warmth home and dove and felt his way into the scent of fresh water welling up into the salt along the bottom of the bay. Into that taste, and through tight twisting passages of black rock, and up into the yellow artificial light of the tide pool inside the Morgan tunnels. He surfaced and wriggled his body onto a sloping granite ledge.
He closed his eyes. He hated doing this. So easy to just stay a seal, turn, dive, swim back down and out and away . . . fire seared through his bones, spreading into muscles and nerves and blazing across his skin, and he clamped his changing jaw against a scream.
And then he lay naked on coarse pink granite, panting, sweat mingling with the salt water draining down his skin and back to the sea. He rolled to his hands and knees, groggy as always with the change. Stood up, swaying and leaning on the stone wall cold and rough under his hand. He groped for a towel, and dried himself.
And dressed. He stood, staring at the slow pulse of the dark tide pool, the sea's memory of the swells outside. Once you change, remember to change back. It didn't get any easier with practice.
He stirred his aching bones and rubbed the towel through his hair again, before hanging the Tear around his neck. At least that gave him reason to come back.
He could take it with him, arrange a bungee collar that would hold it against a changing body. Instead, he left it as a hostage. Guarantee of his return.
Back to the question that had nagged him, all the way home. Someone had shot at him. No way anyone in Stonefort would shoot at a seal, much less kill one. Morgans had sorted that question out centuries ago. Legends left none of the normal Maine ambivalence toward the seal, watermen viewing seals as vicious competitors for fish and lobster, fair targets anytime the Marine Resources or Coast Guard fishcops were out of sight, while landsmen saw the animals as cute and huggable.
Stonefort watermen lived a different myth, seals as guardians and rescuers and guides, almost human, like porpoises in the Mediterranean. And they added an unspoken taboo — avoid the seal, leave it alone unless it sought you out. Seals had Powers, were uncanny creatures, spirit creatures. That came from the Naskeags and their legends of shape-changer shamans, of a People that hunted dark waters, apparently passed down from before the coming of the Welsh and selkies. At least Alice had said her ancestors hadn't been surprised.
But the bottom line was, no Stonefort man would shoot at seals. People might still live in those Pratt tunnels, but they weren't ruled by Pratts. Time for another talk with Ben, rework their strategy from "Go." Some ways, this made it easier. Different rules.
He wiped sweat from his face, and turned, and headed up the long dark weary stairs through the granite and up to the tower, pausing at each landing and turn and branch to rest and breathe and cool off. Changing back was always harder than gaining his body's proper form.
Climbing again and climbing again, he finally reached the third level of the tower and flopped down into a chair in front of the control board for the security system. He took a deep breath and scanned the board, automatic action.
He froze. Off to one side of the green lights of "all's well" and the yellow lights of sensors deliberately off line, he found a single line of red. Red from certain specific sensors, his memory told him, perimeter alarms designed to be triggered without drawing notice.
Ben had grinned like an orca when they set those up, a second system that lay outside the first. Pressure switches that sensed anything bigger than a rat, acoustic pickups that could hear a man breathing twenty feet away. They gave false triggers all the time, storm and wind and frost heaves and inquisitive raccoons. But Ben had wanted to catch patterns, not individual alarms. And every one of them had been tripped.
Someone had been scouting Morgan defenses. Not penetrating deep into the caves and tunnels, just scouting, probing and then retreating. Looking for hidden entrances.
The same thing he'd just been doing.
Time to arm the traps. Which means you have to warn Gary, warn Ben. Tell Alice to warn Caroline as well, dammit, because that smart-ass kid wanders in and out of here like it's the frigging village green.
He needed to find a pay phone in the next county. No calls out of the Morgan house with Gary away to college.
One of the TV monitors seemed to be on the fritz, lost vertical sync and the picture was rolling. He checked the circuit — that camera hung just on the far side of the tower wall from him, looking down into the family graveyard. He switched the camera to a different monitor. The image still rolled down, a wide slow black band with horizontal smear, and now the first monitor showed a clear view of the road out in front of the house. So the problem was in the camera. Have to let Gary know about that.
The view locked onto a steady picture, the graves and memorial stones. But the first monitor started rolling again, cutting the view of the road. What the hell?
Then Dan jerked, recognition pulling his eyes back to the view of the graves. Something lay across one of the markers, something long and narrow and gray in the mist. He reached for the video joystick, switched control to that camera, and zoomed in on a form wrapped in plastic.
A chill shivered his spine. He'd read the reports on that body Kate Rowley found out on the ridge. He'd studied the photos Alice took.
Reflex action, he pulled a 9mm Beretta out of the desk drawer, checked its magazine and chamber, and made sure the safety was off. He stood up. He scanned the monitors a final time, and the view of the road was still blurred. He felt adrenaline pumping through his blood, the twitching of danger. If he moved fast enough, he might catch those bastards . . .
Down through the winding tower stair, into the cold damp dim tunnels, three turns, up worn steps and through the hinged stone slab in the back wall of the crypt. Push a stone block here until it clicked and fiddle the green bronze flowers there until a metallic rasping unlocked the crypt door from the inside, all automatic actions after decades. He stopped in the shadow of the crypt door, calming his breath, using that black-painted iron plate as a shield, scanning the yard and thinning fog, scanning the graves, checking each bush and tree trunk for extra arms or legs. These monitors had shown clear, but he couldn't trust them anymore . . .
He stepped out of the shadow, checked right and left, circled the crypt, still all clear. The back of his neck itched, and the skin between his shoulder blades crawled with the sense that someone watched him from the shadowy edge of the fog. His pistol sights kept searching, and he pulled on his Tear's strange ability to help him see through illusions to the truth beneath.
The sense of watching vanished. That bothered him as much as the sense itself, as if witchcraft warred with whatever Power lived in the Dragon's Eye.
But the Tear said he was safe, safe to walk across the yellowing autumn grass, through the dank flowing mist, still turning and scanning over the sights of his pistol, safety off. Shoot first and don't even bother to ask questions later — that was the drill for this kind of scene.
And then he stood over the plastic-wrapped form lying across a memorial stone in the family graveyard. His memorial stone, Daniel L. Morgan, 1964 - 2004, Lost at Sea, the inscription always good for a shiver even without a corpse dumped on top of it.
Yes, it was a corpse. Yes, the wrapping matched that one up on Kate Rowley's ridge. He didn't touch it. He walked the length of it, crouched at a safe distance, puzzled out the features on the face under layers of polyethylene, and frowned. A local kid, teenager he'd seen now and then, he couldn't remember the name. Memory tied the boy to the drug scene.
Dan shook his head. That was another reason that Morgans had walked away from the old partnership — Pratts sold stuff locally. Started back in Prohibition with the smuggled booze. They cut the stuff, sometimes with bad alky, wood alcohol, jacked up the profit another notch, and then they sold it in Sunrise County, sometimes even right in Stonefort.
Daniel shook his head again. Bad policy. Never foul your own nest. Sooner or later, it's gonna bite you.
He stood up, eyes roving, pistol sights roving, that twitchy adrenaline making every screaming gull into a siren, the foghorn out on the Morgan's Point buoy a hooting alarm. An alarm someone might be calling in right now, whoever had set this up to smear mud on the Morgan name. And he couldn't hit the phone to beat them to it. He had to remember he was dead.
Daniel retreated into the darkness of the crypt, rushing through the complicated dance of resetting the gate interlocks and then the rear stone slab. Resetting everything, crash-dive priority.
Cops could be out there on the grounds in ten minutes or so. Cops could see the cameras if they looked, and cops were good at looking. Cops would be calling Alice for a key, wanting to go through the surveillance output, trying to find out who left that body. Bad scene if Dan showed up on the tape.
He had to change some parameters on the video system, set it to wipe the record after a day, edit the tape already running. And backdate the log to show the system setup changes dated to while Gary was still around to make them. All while under the gun.
Well, Ben had designed the system to allow that kind of high-pressure diddling. Part of thinking ahead.
And then he had to find out more about who or what lived in the Pratt tunnels. Someone there wanted to stir up trouble for Morgans, someone there knew about Morgans and seals, someone there knew Dan was still alive and that Morgans still used this place and watched the monitors, even with Gary off to school. Dan calmed his anger. He couldn't strike back yet — he didn't know enough. Time to sit and watch and make plans, spider time.
"Measure three times and cut once." That was Kate Rowley's take on making sure before you did something that couldn't be undone. He'd heard it a hundred times.
Calm, that was the prescription for now. Calm and fast, no mistakes, followed by calm and plotting and waiting. He gritted his teeth and swallowed. Morgans had centuries of experience with plans and patience.
Patience followed by blazing cannons and cutlasses red with blood.