She closed her eyes, wrapped her right hand around the pendant, and turned in a slow circle. Then she started walking. Jane caught her before she banged nose-first into a wall. Hand in hand, a few more sideways glances from people passing in the hall, she led Caroline to a cross-corridor and then played guide-dog through the tangle of the union building and outside into darkness.
They wound their way through campus and shadow, through thin cold rain again full of the smell of fallen leaves, October in Maine, Caroline with her eyes closed and that dragon in her fist, Jane watching out for curbs and trees and fences in the darkness. Good thing it was dark, or people might have asked a question or two.
Or not. Campus, after all, Friday night, just a couple of loopy students with a beer or five too many between them.
Caroline stopped short, took a deep breath, turned to Jane, and stared through the semi-gloom where streetlight met shadow. "There's one more thing you need to know before you decide to trust us. Aunt Kate. She's a cop. Town constable in Stonefort."
A shock like ice-water splashed in her face, Jane jerked against her hand, almost broke free; but Caroline's grip held, too strong, too determined. "Cop means different things. Aunt Kate is more interested in good and evil than laws. If Aunt Alice is working with you, that's all Kate's gonna ask. But she'll stay away, if you want; you never have to see her. She has her own house."
Oh, shit. Jane started shivering, she couldn't run, caught in the trap. She lashed out with her free hand, fingernails as claws, searching for eyes, found herself spun around into a hammerlock with years of training behind it, arm around her neck, pressing on the arteries, fuzzing her brain to the edge of black. Warm breath touched her ear and she smashed backwards with her skull, aiming for the nose, the eyebrows, anything to stun, to break free. She hit nothing. Free elbow drove straight back, found nothing but air.
The warm breath again, beside her head, too close to hit sideways, "Easy, easy, easy . . . Aunt Alice won't ask questions. She doesn't believe in laws. She killed a man last spring, Gary killed a man, both slimeballs needed killing. I helped him, maybe blew up a boat or maybe didn't, lots of mean hombres on board shooting at us.
"If you want help, we'll give you help. We don't give a flying damn what you might have had to do, surviving on the street. It's what you do from tonight that matters. But you have to decide if you can learn to trust again."
And then Jane's arm was free. She spun out of the hold into darkness, tripped on some damned shadow, and fell twisting and rolling into wet tangled bushes, felt scratches burning across her skin. Caroline didn't follow. Jane could see her standing, waiting, still that eerie kung fu calm ready to welcome her back into warmth. Everything about her said that if Jane ran, she wouldn't follow.
If you run, you'll never see Gary again. These people know what you are and want to help you anyway. Just like Dana. You can run and run and run, or you can stay. And if you run away one more time, you never will get back.
Caroline waited, a shadow against the campus streetlights.
Chapter Twenty-Two
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
