At least a hundred and fifty yards, Daniel calculated, maybe two hundred, his human brain overruling the seal-thoughts. He floated. He drifted. He waited, just awash, a minimum target. A calculated risk. Some guns had voices, just like that movie character said. You could tell them by the sound. That had been an AK-47 firing, full auto, the other time he'd floated in the waves below the Pratt gazebo. And the AK wasn't a paragon of accuracy. Couple that with a downhill shot . . .
Water splashed, between him and the cliff. Sharp cracks echoed off the rock, high-velocity rifle, the AK again. He stood on his nose and headed deep. The water welcomed him.
Yes, someone still hid in the Pratt caves.
Daniel played for a bit, enjoying the water and his body. He'd earned it. He dove. He swam. He dove and swam again. The bottom rose under him, and he followed the taste of familiar land, felt familiar shapes in the sounds of the sea turned to touch through his sensitive whiskers and the pressure of slow regular waves humping up and crashing against stone. He smelled seals in the water, smelled the oil of torn herring that washed from well-fed teeth.
Shallower and shallower and into the rockweed and he let a surge wash him up onto a ledge smoothed by centuries of seal bodies and seal fur into a hollow trough only slightly modified by human hands. Morgan hands. He squirmed up the stone beyond the reach of the waves and into afternoon sunshine, and lay there panting gently and basked while unmeasured time passed.
The other seals ignored him. Generations of seals had ignored generations of Morgans on this island, something different about them and yet not threatening. Just different.
Daniel scratched his right ear with his flipper, an itch from drying salt or sand fleas or just peeling skin. Herring scales dotted his snout and whiskers, and he rubbed them loose and sent them flying with a sneeze. The sun warmed his coat and the granite ledge under him, tempting him to drowse. Sun and clean cold water and fish in the sea — what did a seal care about security systems and corpses with their hearts cut out?
For that matter, what did a seal care about missing sons? A seal never even knew his sons. Daniel had been spending too much time in his other body. That mistake had captured more than one Morgan through the generations. He shook himself, sending drops of seawater flying, and hunched along over ledge and rumbling cobbles until shade touched his back and the heavy pungency of spruce surrounded him and he was hidden from any prying eyes.
His bones burned with liquid fire as they flowed inside his body, he grunted a squeal of pain that turned into a groan as his mouth and throat changed shape, and he was human again. Human, with sweat and tears running down his face and with the need of human clothing against the chill breeze off the water. As always, turning into a man felt like a loss to him.
Something he'd often wondered — had Morgans been seals before they became humans? What would science make of his DNA? Morgan blood was human enough to allow transfusion. Morgan sperm and ova had proven quite compatible with Homo sapiens, down through the centuries. Was a selkie human? Did "normal" humans have the capacity to change? And if so, why had some ancestral Morgan learned and the rest of the human race missed out?
He heaved his body upright and picked his way naked over shattered urchin shells and spruce twigs, wincing at their sharpness on his bare feet. Ten yards, twenty yards deeper along an old path into the spruce thicket, and his teeth were chattering before he found his clothing as he had left it, in a clearing of sun-dappled ledge carpeted with reindeer moss. He dressed and pulled on his boots and shivered in the sunlight until warmth grew inside the synthetic fleece that replaced his seal-fur and blubber.
They'd better get this mystery solved before winter set in. The island gave him a private base, a secret base, where he could watch the coast from Pratts' Neck to Morgans' Point, but the weather out here could turn damned nasty in a month or less. He couldn't stay in Stonefort and stay human, brown skin or pale — he'd grown up in the town, raised children in the town, and too many people would recognize a dead man walking down the street.
Ben could wander in and out unchallenged. He'd been "dead" for twenty years now. Not just time dulling memories, his face had changed with age. Neighbors would just see a generic Morgan cousin, one of dozens from out of town, checking on things while Gary was off to school. No need to wonder which cousin.
Daniel had taken another calculated risk, visiting Alice at the House. A minor risk, balanced against need, minor because hidden ways reached the House from three of the four winds. Nosy neighbors could only see the road approach. Even there, the side yard hedges screened any distant view of just who or what got out of a car. He'd never stopped and thought about it, but the Morgans and the Haskells were alike more ways than not. Both set great value in secrecy.
Secrecy. Like this island, off-limits since before the English came, a spirit land, Morgan property through dummy owners and now conservation easements to a coastal heritage trust, the "No Trespassing" signs reinforced by Federal endangered species teeth to protect nesting terns and puffins and a pair of bald eagles in the tall spruce at the center. And there'd been a tendency for trespassers to simply disappear, no trace.
Even the Pratts knew those legends, lived those legends. They were hoods, but they were Stonefort hoods. They lived inside the same shields as the Morgans. Stonefort closed ranks against outsiders and outside laws.
They wouldn't shoot at seals. And they wouldn't go around firing automatic rifles if they were hiding in the tunnels. Tom Pratt was smarter than that, smarter than making big noises from a burned-out house and abandoned estate. That sort of thing made cop-type people ask awkward questions.
Daniel shook his head. It had to be the Peruvians, the drug runners, and that said that Tupash had survived. Otherwise, the "muscle" would have cut and run. He needed to talk to Alice again, hand the problem back to her.
He followed the faint path farther through spruces and massed blueberry bushes and bracken to the seaward side of the hundred-acre island, followed it to a huge flat moss-crusted boulder squat between rugosa roses that was too square to be a boulder under its quilt of spruce needles and slowly rotting branches that spoke of decades undisturbed.
The far side, the sea view side, opened into the sinister black horizontal slot of a pillbox. Coast-watcher post, World War II, the army built it after two Nazi spies rowed ashore from a U-boat about twenty miles from here. They'd been caught within days, but someone high up got the shakes from the might-have-beens.
Daniel snorted at the overkill — sixteen-inch reinforced concrete walls and roof, mount for a .50 caliber Browning HMG. Even a bunkroom farther back, but that had two feet of stagnant mosquito-breeding rainwater on the floor. For a single civilian with binoculars and radio. Must have used a standard blueprint, "Build an A-5 out there." Military thinking.
And Granddad couldn't keep the army out without raising questions he'd known were better left unasked. Morgans had claimed the island for the same reason the army wanted it — a clear view half the way to Nova Scotia, and first warning of anyone who sailed there. But family lawyers had made damned sure Morgans got the island back after the war . . . .
He ducked and slid inside, tight through the gun slit, into damp musty shadows, and checked his gear. Food, water, gasoline camp stove and gas, scanner radio, bedding — all undisturbed. He needed to fetch more water, no drinking water on the island. But the mass of the concrete would hide him from any prying eyes, even from infrared snoops. He pumped up the stove and started to boil water for coffee. Damn place always held a bone-deep chill, and it was going to get much worse.
The coffee boiled and dripped and produced a mug of hot nectar that warmed his soul as much as his stomach. Daniel sipped coffee and sorted through his gear again, making a mental shopping list. And checked the damned aluminum case that protected Ben's precious flint. It irritated Daniel every time he saw it, the only bit of evidence that this wasn't some Ph.D. candidate ornithologist's research camp and bird-watching blind.
Ben had a thing about that flint, it seemed to go beyond fascination. He didn't want to keep the damned thing with the hidden guns or with the other loot. Hell, just a piece of stone, they could hide it on the sea bottom without taking any damage. Daniel hated leaving sore thumbs like that sticking out where any snoop could trip over them. But Ben insisted.
Back to business. Dan slid a tripod out through the gun slit, added the boxed Questar scope, and followed them into the cold sea breeze. Back through spruces and underbrush to the landward side of his island, he set the scope up in shadows and focused on the soot-blackened chimneys of the Pratt ruins far across the water, and then scanned rocks and cliff face below for any movement or changes. Nothing. Daniel settled on a mossy boulder well in from the shoreline and waited for sunset.
Ben would be watching from the landward side, taking notes. That was the Morgan way. Dan would rather hand those notes to Alice, get her to act if Tupash was involved. Morgans didn't mess with magic. Morgans didn't do head-on assaults. But they had to do something, with ghosts snooping around the tower and leaving corpses in the lawn.
Damned idiots, shooting at seals in Stonefort.
Then something caught his eye, a flash of light from the rock face across the water. He panned the scope again, searching for it. Light came again, fleeting, from shadows in a bare stretch of cliff. Not a car windshield through the woods, not the sun glinting off spray or a boat low in the water below.
Binoculars or a telescope.
Dan checked his jacket, reflex, checked his pants. Gray-green, mottled, and he sat in shadow backed by spruce and fir and stone. He should be invisible. Invisible to whoever looked for him looking at them.
*~*~*
Daniel slid his kayak between two shadowy rocks and into a trough of rockweed that greased and silenced his landing. Gray rocks, gray rockweed, gray mottled kayak —everything turned gray with the fading twilight. Even his hands shone gray against the darkness. He'd never have found this landing if he hadn't used it a hundred times before, in human and in seal form. Half tide, falling, the kayak would wait safe and dry for hours. He'd only need minutes. Still, he searched under the weed to his right until he found an iron ring set there decades ago, and tied off his stern line.
Belt and suspenders — that was the Morgan way.
He sat for a minute, thinking, watching, listening, even sniffing for any smells out of place. That could have been the family motto — think and wait and listen. Don't move until you know what you're doing.
Ben had been forgetting that a lot lately, the way this Jane White thing had him spooked. Now that the old boy had a chance to be a father — in one case knew he was a father — he was trying to cram twenty years of parental fingernail-chewing into weeks. He'd never had to live each day with the skinned knees and bruises that could have just as easily been cracked skulls. No calluses.
Daniel knew Gary better. The boy had a brain in his skull, not just balls lower down. Young Caroline Haskell should thank her lucky stars she was off in Arizona and out of range of Ben's notions of parenting.
Anyway, they had more important problems to trouble Daniel's sleep. The more he thought about it, the more that shooting bothered him. Not just the personal reaction to shots aimed at him. Shooting at seals in Stonefort. That meant someone knew things that only Morgans should know, knew that a seal might be something more, something different. Bad news.
Daniel levered himself out of his plastic coffin and set one foot just so on a hollow in the stone, safe footing in slippery wet rockweed, and pulled his flattened water jugs out of the kayak's fore and aft compartments. He followed the remembered set of steps upward across popping float bladders and cracking barnacles. Handholds, footholds, above high water and up the cliff in growing darkness, he found a cleft and slipped behind it and slid feet-first into total darkness and the smell of old damp stone. The Morgan tunnels closed in around him, protection rather than claustrophobia.
A few feet in and a sharp right turn to baffle any light, he sat up and reached overhead to check clearance before rising into a crouch. He reached for his caver's head-lamp with its red filter to preserve night vision and then paused, thinking.
Gary. Ben had never bonded with the Dragon, never Changed, never received a Tear. Daniel had, and last spring Gary had followed. Daniel fumbled at the neck of his fleece jacket and wet suit, pulled out the smooth silver coil of his dragon pendant, and caressed the stone set in its heart.
"Can you talk to Gary?"
The stone lit with a faint crimson glow deep in its center, a glow that mirrored the gleam of the true Dragon's Eye set into granite in a flooded tunnel well below low tide. Whatever the hell that was, the Tear had once been part of it, carried a bond with it that crossed miles and carried speech as thoughts.
<I do not touch the Gary.>
Damn. He hadn't expected that answer, and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest.
"You touched him before. Is he hurt? Is he dead?"
Seconds ticked by like minutes, before the hollow words formed in his head. <I do not touch the Gary. I did not feel the Gary die. We have felt many Morgans die.>
Well, that gives a faint ray of hope. Be grateful for small favors. Then Daniel remembered another bond, a test for range and limits. "Do you touch Caroline?"
<I do not touch the Caroline. That touch faded into darkness.>
So maybe Gary had left the university, left Naskeag Falls? Was out of range? "Did Gary's touch fade?"
<The Gary's touch stopped. It did not fade. Your touch stopped before.>
Stopped when Daniel had destroyed his first Tear to save it from the brujo's hands. Had Gary shattered his Tear, melted his Dragon, because of Ben's dangerous meddling? Or had he just taken it off, a symbolic break with his family?
"Listen for Gary, please keep listening. If you touch him again, tell him . . . tell him I trust him. Ask him to trust me."
<We will listen.>
And that was the best Daniel could do.
He climbed the long steep stairs to the tower, filled those collapsible water jugs not quite to capacity so that they'd mold to the kayak's shape, filled a backpack with more so-called food. And checked the answering machine. One message.
Crackles and hisses, clicks, Ben's voice. "Sorry, wrong number. Nothing." Click. A synthetic voice gave date and time, early morning today. And then another hollow click and silence.
The message was "Nothing." He hadn't been able to reach Gary. And he shouldn't have tried. The damn fool was violating Morgan rules.
Daniel shook his head. One of these generations, the Morgans were going to have to go straight. God knows, they didn't need the money. But fraud and theft were the family industries, sort of like any other trade, son following father in an apprenticeship. And it was fun, solving puzzles on a grand scale with the added spice of danger and defiance. Gary had taken to it like the proverbial duck to water. Now Ben was paying the price. If Gary didn't want Ben to find him, the old pirate didn't have a prayer.
He walked down the long stairs, out the back-door tunnel, down the cliff into the half-rotted salt reek of drying rockweed, Daniel stowed his baggage fore and aft, balancing the load so his kayak still rode properly, and sealed the deck hatches. He slid the keel down into the water and pushed off into darkness, bobbing in the slow rise and fall of the swells of yesterday's storm, fitting himself back into the sea. Stars opened out above, vast swaths of stars that city people never saw, and the night sounds of owls and a loon flowed out from the land behind him.
He paddled, breathing the cold damp salt of fog waiting to form in the night chill, sighting on the stars and then the outline of his island against the stars' shimmer on the water, and felt his world settle comfortable around him. This was where he belonged. Masefield, tall ships and stars to steer them by. He'd get this Pratt thing sorted out, cut that tangled web Ben had spun between himself and Gary, and then to hell with Morgans and with stealing.
I'm dead, no reason I can't retire.
He paddled, and paddled, and sighted on a notch in the black spiky mass of trees against the sky and paddled some more until he slid into another trough in the rockweed and stopped and climbed out on slippery footing he knew well. He skidded the kayak up over rumbling stone and under spruces into a hollow that hid it from prying eyes. Swung the backpack across his shoulders, hung a water jug from each hand, followed the faint gleam of a trail under the stars until the old pillbox loomed black ahead of him and he flashed his head-lamp for an instant to shove gear ahead of him into the gun-slit.
Inside, his nose twitched and he sorted odors. Freeze-dried backpacker pilaf, musty concrete, gasoline faint from the stove. Burned motor oil. He sniffed again. Yes, oil. Outboard motor exhaust, faint but recent, new since he'd left for Morgan's Point. He tensed and flashed the caver's lamp again, but all the shadows resolved into his own gear.
He'd had a visitor. Might still have a visitor, somewhere on the island. He dug his starlight goggles out of one pack, an apparent flare gun that was something rather more deadly out of another, loaded it with a flare that wasn't a flare out of a third, and felt adrenaline pumping through his blood.
A slow grin spread across his face. He remembered why he'd scorned retirement before. Morgans didn't need the money, didn't need more trophies over the mantelpiece like Ben's flint. But damn, the chase was fun.
Ben's flint. Daniel flashed his lamp again, checked that particular corner of the bunker a second time. Empty.
The aluminum case was gone. Someone had stolen the flint, a thief stealing from thieves.