Gary sat in the dark and stared out the dusty cracked window at nothing, night and rain and fog again, just like his life. He checked his watch, not that he had anywhere to go. Saturday morning, no classes, not even a half-assed football game in the afternoon. And no Jane to brighten up the gloom.
He glanced over at his dragon, lying on the windowsill in the dark. It glowed, pulsing gently in time with his heartbeat, but it grew fainter. It was a living thing, tied to him and to that glowing orb under Morgan Castle. He was going to have to wear it again, or it would die.
But wearing it meant he was a Morgan.
He'd never known what that really meant, until this year. And it had been fun, up 'til now, the danger and the adrenaline that went with it, the thrill of forbidden fruit when he picked locks and cracked computers and stole things. But Ben had rubbed his nose in the shitty part, the Welsh-Mafiosi "family" that swatted people like flies if they got in the way. Substitute "Godfather" for "father."
The same kind of people who had kidnapped Ellie and Mouse, the Pratts with their cocaine cowboys. Now Ben was aiming that at Jane. If she'd been in her room when those faceless spooks cleaned it out, they'd have hauled her away and dumped her body with the rest of the trash. No question. Just like the Morgans' bent KGB allies had killed some unknown file clerks who got tangled up in stealing Priam's Treasure.
It wasn't worth it. How many millions could he and Ellie and Mouse spend, anyway? Even if they never worked? Piracy sounded like grand fun until you put your head inside one of those poor innocent sailors blown to shreds.
Dark outside, dark inside, world and room and soul. Maybe he'd feel better after sunrise. If the sun ever rose beyond those clouds, in Maine in October. It was a gloomy time and place for examining your soul.
And cold, like the Morgan heart. He rubbed warmth back into his hands and wrapped the sleeping bag tighter around his shoulders. This penthouse suite didn't offer the luxury of a heating system. Or a working elevator, or official lights and phone.
On the other hand, it didn't exist, so the plusses and minuses cancelled out. Fourth floor, sort of, once served as the employee locker and break room for Woolworth's down at street level, abandoned even before Woolworth's moved out to the mall and then went out of business twenty, thirty years ago. Before Gary was born, anyway.
Access by a steep narrow stair that went nowhere near an exit. A firetrap, especially since the sprinkler system froze and burst a few winters back and the owner shut it off. But Gary had three other ways in or out — across connected buildings to the penthouse windows, through a forgotten fire door into another disused loft, or down a tight airshaft and over a spiked gate into the alley behind. And he had a power line snaked out to an active circuit, and wireless broadband for his laptop, and they never had shut off the water to the employees' shower and toilet. All modern conveniences.
He sneezed. All the dust he'd ever want, as well, free of charge. You get what you pay for.
His sneeze echoed. Was repeated, faint and muffled in a higher key. Gary snapped his thoughts back to the darkness around him. He turned toward the sound, reaching behind him for one of Ben's untraceable Berettas on the windowsill next to the dragon, one of many things he'd rather not keep in the dorm. That was one reason why he'd hunted up a place like this, over the summer. That pistol and the bullet-proof undercover vest and other big-boy toys the dorm RA might not understand.
Scraping hints of movement filtered through the connecting door. Rats? Restless pigeons? The other loft had several broken windows.
The dragon's jewel shone brighter in the darkness. Warning of danger? He didn't know all its powers. Dad didn't know, the archives didn't know. Nobody had ever poked at the limits, tested the things — engineering axiom, "If it works, don't fuck with it."
The sounds stopped. He waited, pistol not quite pointed at the door, safety off and a round in the chamber. The way Morgans always kept their guns. He'd rather not have to shoot blind, like Jane with that .45 hole in her door. The blast of a 9mm auto would attract too much attention at this time of night.
Or maybe not — solid brick walls, real plaster, closest occupied apartment was five buildings over and people probably asleep. He rarely heard traffic noise up here or the rumble of trains, only the distant stuff like Jake-brake trucks growling down the hills outside of town, noise that came in over the roof parapets. Like the air ambulance helicopters thumping back and forth to the hospital.
Thumping. Something thumped on the connecting door, light, tentative, a gloved hand knocking? Who the hell would bother knocking on an abandoned door? It came again, a little louder. He eased across the floor, feet sliding rather than stepping, thanking the solid concrete slab for its silence.
Whispered words through the door, he moved closer, just to the edge of hearing. Another knock, no try to open the door, damned polite burglar out there.
Whisper again, "Gary, it's Caroline."
Maybe, maybe not. Last he'd heard, she was still in Arizona. He pulled the bar back, defense he'd added when he took out his informal lease, and slid himself into a darker shadow among other shadows in the faint light from reflected streetlamps bouncing off the fog. Waited. The door opened, silent on the hinges he'd oiled when he installed the bar and brackets.
Black opening, no movement. Whoever opened the door wanted to keep some solid bullet-stopping brick between them. Sensible burglar. The voice came again, louder, clear, sounded like his sister. "Did Ben ever warn you about cheap .25 autos?"
Well, that came close to being a Morgan password. He waited, still silent.
"She was trying to set the safety."
Oh, shit.
Light flared, polite, not aimed into his hideaway but off across the connecting loft, a flashlight, red-filtered for night vision. Something moved, separated from a brick pillar, gained a face.
Jane.
Warm, trembling, hair smelling of herbal shampoo, wrapped around him like a second skin. "I'm sorry," she whispered in his ear.
"My fault. I should have set up a blind drop, let you read the files before trying to meet you. But I missed you so much . . ."
He held her. She held him. All the Morgans could go to hell. The rest of the world could go to hell.
Something pried at the Beretta in his hand. He let it go. He seemed to remember setting the safety on that, somewhere in the blur. Not important, not on the cosmic scale of things. Time passed, warm and comfortable and suddenly complete.
A finger tapped on his shoulder. "Hate to break up the party, but you guys can make out in the back seat while I'm driving. It's a long, long way to Tipperary. Or Stonefort. This girl needs to meet Aunt Alice. The rental car's about two blocks from here."
They separated, at least to arm's length. He looked down into the shadow of her face. Aunt Alice. Why the hell hadn't he thought of her? Aunt Alice and the House, they existed to help women like Jane. If she could feel safe anywhere, she'd feel safe there.
*~*~*
He held her hand as they walked across wet grass, through cold fog, reassurance for both of them. "You seem awfully ready to believe in real witches and real magic. Or are you just smiling politely and waiting for the men in white coats to show up with their straightjackets?"
"I've seen you vanish, sitting still. I've seen Caroline vanish. And I sure as hell felt something from that bag she's carrying. Something I don't want to meet." Jane paused and shuddered, and then her eyes turned away from his to scan the Morgan graves around them and the pink granite mausoleum crusted with moss and lichen, the autumn-brown grass and trees, the gray light of morning, the tower and old house vague through the mist. Scanning for dangers, or stalling?
Her gaze came back to the twin memorial slabs, Benjamin Morgan and Daniel Morgan, faint traces of a chalk outline still visible on the autumn grass. "That's where they found the body?"
He nodded. "Not killed here, no blood or anything. Just dumped. It's got folks staring at each other, wondering, two murders in two weeks. Ugly murders. People are locking doors, taking keys out of their cars and trucks when they park and locking them. We don't get two murders in a decade around here. The ones we do get are all domestics or bar brawls or bad drug deals, no mystery to them. This . . ." He couldn't find words.
Her eyes were still pointed at Ben's memorial, but they'd lost focus. "I saw something . . . once. Something horrible and impossible, and I had to watch and couldn't stop it or even run away because they'd have killed me too." Her hand squeezed his to the point of pain, and he felt the shakes starting again.
He held her, trying to think calm through his arms, the way Aunt Alice could, and waited. "You don't have to tell me, ever. If you can tell Aunt Alice, she might be able to help. I don't think anything you did, anything you saw, could shake her."
Gary had explained about Aunt Alice, about the Haskell House, about the Dragons and the Morgans, quiet ramblings with Jane snuggled against him warm and soft and more relaxed than he'd ever felt her, during the two-hour ride through darkness and fog and into dawn. Lots of things he never should have told an outsider, things Dad had probably never told Mom through all the years of their marriage.
But Gary didn't intend to have a marriage like that. Or whatever sort of pairing Jane might be able to accept, with memories of her parents haunting any relationship she had.
He breathed in the scent of her, nose buried in her hair, smelling the fear under Aunt Alice's lilac soap. They'd stopped in and cleaned up before coming over here, even took time for a cup of coffee that Aunt Alice had somehow known to have hot and waiting. "Are you sure you can face this?"
"I've got to quit running away from trouble. Most times before, that's worked. If I ran far enough and fast enough. But that was when I never had anything I couldn't stand to leave behind." She squeezed tighter against him, reminding him of her fears and his need to protect her.
"Just remember, this place is designed to be a trap. I don't know if Ben's in there, but if he is, he'll see us long before we see him. And it's dangerous, even if he isn't there. I don't know all the tunnels and all the dangers. Like Ben says, 'Never show 'em all your cards.' His translation of the family coat of arms. I think he even keeps secrets from himself."
"Are we going to get killed in there?"
"If I thought we would, I wouldn't take you."
"That's not a particularly encouraging turn of phrase. Too vague. Not decisive, you know?"
She shook herself and stood up straighter. "Let's get it over with. I can't believe your sister stays so calm through everything. She on drugs or something?"
That made Gary laugh, in spite of what they were facing. "Calm? Caroline? She's wound up tighter than a trawl winch drum. You're seeing her 'noble savage' face, stoic and inscrutable. She only puts that on when she needs to hide her feelings. You scare the shit out of her. You, or the fear of failing Aunt Alice and the House. Maybe both."
Jane was right about getting it over with. 'Ave, Caesar, nos morituri te salutamus.' Gary reached over to the side of the mausoleum door, fiddled with one iron hinge while screening his motions from Jane, and then unlocked the outer gate with several more twists and turns of the key than normal locks required. She didn't need to know the family codes quite yet.
They stepped into cold damp darkness, musty, granite crypts to right and left with Morgan names and Morgan dates from the 1800s, an empty stone slab for winter use if a coffin needed to wait for the spring thaw. She traced one date with her fingers, 'Gary Morgan, 1763-1821,' and looked a question at him.
"We recycle names. Best I can remember, he sailed as first mate on a privateer in the Revolution, killed a man and begat a man and commanded a prize ship into port before his seventeenth birthday. Nothing actually in that tomb — 'Lost at Sea.' Or maybe not. He might have been dodging the hangman's noose. Our family, you never know."
That blither had covered his hip's pressure on one end of the coffin slab and steps on certain paving stones. He set his hands low against the rear wall of the mausoleum and pushed, and a single slab shifted away from him, opening a low narrow door and steps down into blackness.
She stared at them, not moving.
"Second thoughts?"
She nodded. "And third and fourth and fifth. But I have to quit running away from trouble. Go ahead and lock the door behind us."
He took her at her word and locked them in, switched on lights inside the tunnel, and led the way down those steps. Closed and set the stone slab entry. Felt her tension like a squall line bearing down across the water, the sense that the trap had closed around her and there was nothing she could do to escape. He took her hand, offering what calm and strength he could. But he'd walked into the trap with her, and had no guarantee he could walk out again.
Down musty tunnels and around corners and up dimly-lit stone stairs worn into hollows by centuries of Morgan feet, passing from carved granite bedrock into shaped stone masonry that told him they climbed within the tower wall, up the curving stair and he didn't bother to hide because he saw active cameras and motion sensors and disarmed traps that told him his father waited up above. And then they stepped off onto a landing and faced a closed door and another security camera. He paused and took a deep breath. Get it over with.
He opened the door. Ben sat there facing him, desk under the security monitors, glaring. They stepped through the door and into bright light and stood blinking for a moment after the dim tunnels. Gary didn't see a gun on the desk, but that didn't mean much. He couldn't see his father's right hand, either.
Ben shook his head, still glaring under lowered brows. "You damned fool, bringing that girl here . . ."
"Shut up. Two things to say. Then we're leaving, unless you get a brain." Gary unclenched his fists and took another deep breath.
"First thing, she's staying in the Haskell House, under the protection of the House. Aunt Alice knows we're here. If anything happens to Jane, here or anywhere else, Aunt Alice says she'll find you."
And Alice Haskell was probably the one person on God's green earth who could stop Ben Morgan in his tracks. Gary saw it in Ben's face.
"Second thing, you mess with us one more time, any way at all, no more Gary Morgan." He tossed his dragon on the desk. "I haven't worn that for a week. I can live without it, and I can live without your Morgan money. Ellie and Mouse and Caroline can live without it; they're already more Haskell than Morgan. If you don't want a thousand years of Morgans to end right here, back off!"
Ben had turned pale when Gary mentioned Aunt Alice. Now his face was red again, his lips thin and eyes narrowed down to slits. Too used to being boss. He swallowed, took a deep breath, chewed on nothing, and swallowed again. Probably choosing words and rejecting them. He glared at Jane.
"I'm trying to protect you. You saw her files."
Gary leaned forward, hands on the desk to each side of his discarded dragon. "I saw them. She's seen them. She says she killed the Sweeneys. You never asked why." He stood up again and turned to Jane. "Show him why you don't shave your armpits."
He'd expected her to roll up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, three sizes too big, baggy enough to clear her shoulders. Instead, she reached down to the hem at her waist and pulled it up, pulled it over her head, pulled her arms free, dropped the shirt on the floor. She stood there, no bra, small breasts tight in the cool air, and lifted her right arm. She had shaved, over at Aunt Alice's, and the skin still glowed pink from the scraping.
A line of white shiny puckered scars, round and the size of a cigarette tip, traced the rear edge of her armpit. She turned and showed him her left arm, showed a matching line. "They got drunk now and then. Said we misbehaved. Too noisy, one burn. Drop a plate or glass, one burn. Bad language, one burn."
She glanced over at Gary with a wry smile. "Gary wonders how I can live with this stud in my nose. Do you want to see what's under it? I talked back. Any idea how long a cigarette will burn when it's shoved inside the nostril? Those damned things won't go out. Any idea how much that hurts? They were both drunk that day. Do you want to know what they wanted to do to Cindy? How Mrs. Sweeney wanted to punish Cindy when she first got her period and bled on her pajamas and bed? That's when we ran away."
Ben looked sick. He shook his head. His right hand joined the left on the desktop, clenched in a fist, empty.
Don't let him off easy. "Tell him why you couldn't call the DHS people."
"He made us do it. Made me smoke a cigarette and burn Cindy, made her burn me. Told us they could pass a lie detector, and we'd end up taking the blame. Mental ward or jail. Might not be true, but we believed them. We were kids, they were grownups."
One thing she hadn't said, talking to him or to Aunt Alice where he could hear. Gary wondered. "What happened to Cindy?"
"Took her part of the loot and bought drugs. OD'd, dead within a week."
She was shaking again, either cold or memories. He picked up her sweatshirt and handed it to her, but she didn't put it on, just stood there half-naked. She'd sold her body, surviving on the streets, told him, no secret. Another pair of male eyes didn't matter. Besides, she seemed to be somewhere else.
Ben stared down at his hands, lying clenched on the desk. A minute passed, and then another. Finally he spoke, almost to his fists rather than to her. "I think maybe I ought to kill someone at DHS. I'm sorry. I don't say that often. I'm not going to ask you to forgive me, or forget. I stood in the shadows for eighteen years, never able to meet Gary, never could admit I was his father. I wanted to protect my son. Make up for all the things I hadn't done for him."
He looked up, at Gary rather than at her, as if the Biblical taboo about looking on naked relatives already applied. "Dan didn't have anything to do with this. It was all me. He told me I was crazy, but I wouldn't let him stop me. I hope you can forgive him."
Ben shook his head with a rueful chuckle. "He told me I didn't know a damn thing about raising kids. Said it looked like I was taking the exact best course to push you two together, rather than splitting you apart. Guess he was right."