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
