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
