Page 76 of Midnight Coven

Thinking about that, Nick realized the old man was right.

“Sitting ducks,” Nick muttered. “For someone determined.”

“For someone determined… most definitely,” Morley agreed. “Only works if no one knows who you are. Or where you are.”

“Or care enough to make the effort,” Nick added grimly.

Morley only nodded.

Nick found himself thinking again how smart the old man was.

He did a good job of hiding it, so those insights of his still caught Nick off-guard occasionally. Even so, Nick was pretty sure James Morley was the smartest human he’d ever known. Well, the smartest not-evil human he’d known, anyway. Most of the others, including Lara St. Maarten, had more than a small streak of sociopathy in them.

Nick glanced at the Japanese-style stone lions, each of them eight feet tall and maybe six wide, where they squatted in a forbidding row just past the arched tunnel. He noted more designs in the stone walls that followed, including a dragon with a long tail, and a fountain with a circular sun-disk of some red stone, evocative of the old Japanese flag.

Then they were through.

The walls ended.

Trees framed the driveway on either side.

Despite the Japanese touches, the grounds themselves made Nick think more of something from an old gothic horror story.

He glimpsed a high fence on the other side of the trees out the window to his left. Made of iron bars with spears at their end, it had sharp hooks pointing outward on the bars themselves, barbed and notched from what his vampire eyes told him.

Nick had no doubt some type of organic or semi-organic electrical field supplemented the protection of the iron bars and spears on their own. Anyone who lived out here would likely have both high-tech and low-tech security measures, since they wouldn’t want to rely solely on electrical fields to save them in the event of any outages.

Even so, it was still a strange sight, that fence.

It struck him as an odd sort of anachronism, an old-school method of declaring oneself rich and willing to defend that wealth with force.

Morley wound them deeper into the trees.

Soon, Nick couldn’t even see the iron fence, even with his vampire eyes. The acreage swallowed the outer walls, hiding them behind forest and tall boulders and even a pond they passed on the way in, and a bridge-covered stream.

It struck Nick again, just how much land this was.

They’d been on the driveway alone for at least fifteen minutes.

Most of the road had been straight, although there had been a few sloping turns.

After a somewhat sharper turn than all the others, Nick finally saw lights in the distance.

He glanced at the clock in his headset and realized it was just coming up on midnight again. The same time when the bodies of the other Tanakas were found by a concerned neighbor on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan.

That feeling of being in a Gothic horror novel increased as he watched the house approach them out of the dense trees. Windows shone out of that darkness, rows of them, at least four stories up. More windows were lit on the ground floor, spilling light out onto a wide, circular lawn Nick could not help but realize he recognized from his dream.

From what Nick could tell, every window in that main building appeared to be lit with an orange-tinted light, almost like candlelight.

In the wash of that bright light, Nick saw the stretch of white sand making up the Zen garden to the left of the house, just like he remembered from his dream. He saw the stone statues of little temples and Buddhas, a red painted bridge spanning a small stream.

Bronze sculptures of cranes waded there, next to bronze turtles and ducks.

Yet even that style wasn’t consistent.

Minutes later, they were driving around a large fountain filled with jumping and twisting stone carp, or possibly koi, huge and shimmering green and orange from infusions of metal into the stone. They got past that and Nick saw another set of more medieval-looking statues of people on the right side of the house, almost like they’d divided the massive garden in half.

Then Nick forgot the gardens altogether.

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