Seawitch

EIGHTEEN

As Fielding talked, I peered at him through the Grey. A sort of shadow of his otter self hung around him and I wondered fleetingly how he managed the mass problem. For an otter he’d been enormous; as a man he was a bit on the small side but still heftier than the otter. Well, mostly a man and partially submerged in seawater at that. Quinton and Solis had made their way back to me, but Zantree was still up top, steering the boat out of Port Townsend and striking across the Strait of Juan de Fuca for the lower end of the San Juan Islands.

“Why the water?” I blurted.

He stopped and looked down at himself, half-immersed in seawater. “It’s easier to stay in one form when I don’t have to concentrate as hard. I can’t make the full transition to a man or to an otter—I’m always part the other. This is about the right amount of water to hold this form steady without sweating it too much. More and I have to fight to stay otterlike. Less and I can’t stay human enough.”

“That sounds backward,” I said.

“That’s because it’s a curse and that’s sort of how they work: You turn the nature of something on itself.”

“Not always, in my experience.”

“Well, maybe not. The dobhar-chú aren’t normally magicians so I had to guess based on what the mermaids were doing. They seem to work with elemental magic—according to Father Otter—and then they twist or reverse some aspect of nature. Or that’s what makes sense to me after keeping an eye on them from hiding for twenty-seven years.”

I waved my hands in the air as if clearing it of hanging, obfuscating words. “Let’s get to that later. First, what are you?”

“Umm . . . kind of messed up. See, that’s the problem: I’m not really one thing or the other. Part water hound, part human, one hundred percent screwed.”

“So . . . the dobhar-chú do exist and they are involved.”

He nodded. “I guess you could call them my extended family. They took me in when this happened and they’ve been trying to help me and the ghosts ever since. But not because they’re nice guys or anything like that—you gotta understand that they are so far from human that I’m a freak to them. But I’m family and I’m the enemy of their enemy. So . . . they’re on my side.”

“Family. So . . . you were born . . . this way?”

“Not this way, no. But you could say I was born to have this problem because I’m half dobhar and half . . . normal. But I didn’t know about the water hound part until things went cockeyed on Seawitch. Well, I knew but . . . I didn’t really . . . believe it.”

He glanced around at the men and then back to me. I looked, too, then brought my gaze back to Fielding. He could see we weren’t quite following him. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said. “When I was a young idiot I used to joke that I was kissed by a Columbia River mermaid. But, see, that’s not really a joke. One summer when I was a kid, my mom and me and a bunch of the neighbor kids and their moms went out to Fort Stevens. Our parents really didn’t want to take us because the ocean’s pretty dangerous and cold in that zone, but it was a big deal for us kids to go to the ocean beach. I mean, we all grew up on the river and that was no big deal to us, but to go out in the salt water—that was super-cool. My mom couldn’t talk me into swimming in the jetty lagoon on the river side—I had to swim in the ocean. She couldn’t really say no, though I didn’t understand why at the time. So we went over to the ocean side of the park. It was a weekday, so not terribly crowded, and of course we all wanted to see the wreck of the Peter Iredale, like everyone does, and we walked back up toward Clatsop Spit afterward and staked out a place near the parking lot that was close enough to meet between the swimming area on the lagoon side and the beach on the ocean side. Most of the kids thought the seawater was too cold and they just splashed around in the surf and made a lot of noise but I swam out pretty far. Until I got stuffed by a wave.

“Or I thought I had been, because I’m paddling along fine—I’ve always been a really good swimmer—and suddenly I’m underwater and I’m scared and then there’s this strange woman towing me away. And my mom came out into the water—which she never did—and took me away from the woman. I should say, really, they fought for me. Mom won, of course, but the other woman kissed me on the forehead before she let me go and then she swam away very fast. My mother was seriously cranked off about it. She told me to stay away from women like that. Now, see, what I didn’t understand, ’cause I was just a kid, was that she wasn’t saying I should avoid loose women or ladies who swam topless or something like that, but that I should avoid females of that species. The woman was a mermaid, which seemed kind of obvious at the time because she had a tail and gills and even webs between her fingers, but I started erasing that part of the story from my memory because my mom didn’t like it and because it sounds babyish to say you saw a mermaid when everyone you know says there’s no such thing. And when I got older it was like a joke and I used it to charm people into buying me drinks or hiring me or . . . Well, I used it on a lot of women in bars and at parties. . . .”

At the moment, he didn’t look like he could charm anyone, being furry and misshapen and possessing a mouthful of teeth intended for cracking crab legs and ripping open fish the size of a man’s leg. But I could see, by concentrating hard on the Grey, two overlapping, massy shadows attached to him: a phantom otter, sleek and dark-furred, with a streak of white down its spine and a crossing streak on its shoulders; and a ghost form of his human self that was dark-skinned, slim, and fit, sporting a thick, curly mane of dark hair that fell over large brown eyes. I suppose some people have a better imagination than I do, since if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have conjured such a lady-killer image on my own.

Solis bent forward into my line of sight. I’d almost forgotten the men were there. He scowled at Fielding. “So, you played the lothario.” I wondered whether his contempt came from the thought of his own daughters in a few years of if there was some other source of his anger.

Fielding scrunched up his furry brow, puzzled for a moment. “That’s from Shakespeare, right? Was he, like . . . Romeo’s friend?”

“No,” Quinton said. “It’s from an eighteenth-century play about a woman who is seduced by a selfish jerk who takes off after he ruins her marriage. Lothario was the jerk.”

We all stared at him.

“Hey. I had to read it for a college lit class.”

Fielding glanced away. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I wasn’t that bad. . . .”

Solis continued to glower at him. “In your final log entry, you wrote that you did not stop a rape, that you were equally guilty. . . .” Ah, so maybe it was being a cop as much as a father of daughters stirring up his anger.

Fielding swallowed hard. “Oh . . . yeah. Umm . . . I have had so much time to repent that and think about it and try to remember exactly how it went down and why I . . . did what I did.”

I turned and glared at Solis. “Can we get back to the original question and catch up to pointing fingers in a few minutes, Rey?”

“‘Rey’?” Quinton muttered under his breath.

It seemed better to use his first name and remind the lot of them that once the freaky stuff was in our faces, we were no longer operating on normal protocols and it was now my show. I turned the quelling glance on Quinton next, raising an eyebrow, challenging him to make something of it. He settled down with a sheepish grin. Solis was still fuming but he nodded curtly and sat back.

“So . . . you became a dobhar-chú because you were kissed by a mermaid?” I asked.

“Ah. No. This is the really weird bit.”

Quinton smothered a snort.

“Just go on,” I prompted.

“See, my mother— No. Let me say this first: the dobhar-chú aren’t usually shape-shifters, any more than they’re magic users. It takes a special circumstance to be born with two forms. My mom was one of those rare few. Usually the dobhar-chú are not a friendly or social bunch—kind of vicious and unpleasant, actually—but when they moved to North America from Ireland, some things changed and they had to get smarter to avoid being killed for fur. So this aberration started—this is what my mom told me before she took off.”

“She left you?”

Fielding nodded. “She left me and my dad a couple of years after the swimming incident and disappeared. Eventually I assumed she went back to her clan, but when I asked the Father Otter here he had never heard of her.”

I stopped him with a waving hand. “Who or what is the Father Otter?”

He hmmed a bit before answering. “Sort of the local clan chief of the dobhar-chú. I’ll get to that in a second. Oh, and incidentally, that’s how I heard about you; the water hounds are good at gathering information, even though they rarely use it for themselves. They’re sort of the information brokers of the local marine paranormal economy, so to speak. ’Cause who can resist a cute otter that’s hanging out near their boat or begging for attention at the marina? That’s mostly how they stay out of other monsters’ sights—by being useful and cute. But they didn’t have any information about my mom, so I don’t know what happened to her. And I probably never will.” He shook his head as if rejecting that thought. “Anyway, Mom said the dobhar-chú’s origins are that the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a regular otter is a dobhar-chú and then the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a dobhar-chú is a shape-shifter. They’re sort of dobhar-chú royalty. And that was Mom. I was her only . . . umm . . . ‘pup,’ as far as I know, but I seemed to be just a human. Or I thought so. But, see, the reason Mom wanted me to stay away from mermaids is that merfolk and water hounds are deadly enemies. The mermaid who took me that day at the beach wasn’t trying to save me; she was going to drown me or eat me, depending on how mad Mom was at me when she told me the story again.”

Seventh pup of a seventh pup rang true—I’d seen that on one of the Web sites I’d found about dobhar-chú, along with references to their viciousness—but I’d never seen any mention of shape-shifting or magic or their presence in North America. Still, I wasn’t going to stop the flow of his story now, even if I had doubts about its purity, so I just looked encouraging and leaned on the Grey a touch to give it a little unnatural weight.

Gary went along like a pebble rolling downhill. “But anyhow, I guess that kiss did something—marked me or something. When I met Shelly—um, Shelly Knight—I noticed she always stared at me real intensely and it made me feel strange. I thought it was because she wanted me. That tells you what a conceited ass I was back then, but Shelly was so . . . sexy and so . . . I don’t know. She was special. If we asked her to work on the boat she always said yes, and she’d watch me but she always kept her distance. I thought she was playing hard to get. But that wasn’t it.”

He was about to continue when Zantree slid down the ladder from the flying bridge and joined us around the fish hold. At first he just glanced around, as if trying to see which one of us had been speaking, but when his eyes passed over Fielding he did a double take and stared. “What in the name of hell are you?”

Fielding seemed to shrink and tried to slide lower in the water, but as soon as he did the water boiled and his skin turned paler and furless. He began to gasp and choke on the water that was suddenly splashing and washing over his face as blood seeped from his mutating nose and mouth.

Solis and I were the first to grab him and haul his upper body above the waterline. He coughed and spat up water for a minute or so, writhing around as his face and body reverted to a half-human, brown-furred state.

Zantree bumped backward into the cabin doors as he twitched back from the sight of Fielding in transition. “Dear God,” he muttered. “I never . . . never thought I’d see such a thing.” He glanced around with jerky movements. “Do you—you all know about this?”

Quinton caught his gaze calmly. “No. It was a surprise to us as well.”

“Well . . . what is that . . . thing?”

“That’s . . . Gary Fielding. Did you know him about . . . I guess it’s twenty-five or thirty years ago?”

Zantree’s eyes were as wide open as Sunday church doors. “Gary . . . ? What happened to him . . . ? And where’s he been all this time?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. He was what was hanging on to the swim step when we cast off at Port Townsend.”

“Jesus! I thought it was a sea lion, even when you told me it wasn’t. Sure wasn’t expecting that,” he added, giving Fielding a hard glare.

By this time Fielding had stabilized and was breathing easier. The blood had stopped flowing from his mouth and nose and now left a red swirl in the water. Salt-crusted tears dribbled from his eyes, leaving a track on the fur of his face. The white scars on his face and body sparkled for a moment with tiny violet stars as the haze around him flashed a bright emerald green that vanished as quickly as it had come. The sight startled me a little and I glanced up from Fielding in a momentary panic. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Fielding responded, glancing around.

“You . . . sparkled.”

He coughed up a laugh. “Like an ice skater in sequins?”

I scowled at him. “No, like a spell.”

“Maybe because I’m under one?” he replied in a snotty tone.

“Don’t start with me, Otter Boy,” I snapped back. “You wanted my help and I’m giving it, but I don’t have to. We can toss you overboard and go home anytime.” Not that I really could with the Guardian Beast lurking around, but that was no one’s business but mine.

He cowered a little but not enough to have another fit of uncontrolled shape-shifting.

Solis, looking uncomfortable, broke the tension by asking, “Who is piloting the boat?”

Zantree shook himself and looked away from Fielding. “She’s on autopilot. This stretch is clear and empty for a few miles, so I thought I’d grab some gloves. The breeze is chilly up there and it’s kicking on my arthritis. Quinton, you want to go up for a minute until I get back?”

Quinton nodded and scrambled up the ladder to the flying bridge as Zantree gave one more scowling shake of his head at Fielding before nipping into the cabin.

Fielding glanced around as if reestablishing in his mind just where he was and that his condition was not some kind of horrible dream. “Was that really Paul Zantree? He’s gotten so old. . . .” Fielding whispered, hissing a bit between his reemerging fangs.

“You’d be only a little younger if you were in your proper form,” I said.

“I don’t know. . . . Some of us freaks live a long, long time,” he replied, looking me in the eye.

I returned a narrow glare and was about to say something cutting when Zantree stepped back out from the cabin, tugging on a pair of lightweight gloves. He took one more hard stare at Fielding and frowned. “We all thought you were dead, Gary. Why’d you let us think that? Did you do it? Did you pirate the ’Witch and hide her all this time? Did you kill the lot of them? Did you kill Shelly?”

“No! I didn’t do any of those things! I just— Things went bad. I didn’t do anything but try to save us . . . but I didn’t stop anything, either.” He hung his head, but I wasn’t sure if it was contrition or an attempt to hide his uncanny lack of expression. “I just ended up stuck in the same place with that damned boat all this time. The way back opens up only every twenty-seven years and it doesn’t stay open long. We’re almost out of time as it is.”

“Time for what?” Zantree demanded. “Are any of the others . . . like you? Did they survive? Are we going to save them or is this just about you—like it always was?”

Fielding cringed, salt tears coming a little faster down his face. “No. They’re all dead.”

Zantree’s face crumpled a little and he looked appalled. “Maybe you should be, too.” Then he turned and, without another word, climbed back up the ladder to the flying bridge.

His voice floated back down in a minute, but the wind stole the meaning of the words and they were just sounds snatched from the breeze. Then Quinton returned to our little party on the aft deck.

“He says he wants to hear everything,” Quinton said.

“Do you think he’ll understand it all?” I asked, thinking of how unbearable some stories from the Grey were.

Quinton looked grim. “Yeah. He’s a tough old bird. And he’ll keelhaul the lot of us if we don’t. So he said.” But his glance was directed at Fielding.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Fielding whimpered.

“Yeah, all those dead people were just a mistake. That’s what everyone claims,” Quinton replied, a storm of little red sparks shooting through his aura. He reached over and flipped a switch on the wall beside the cabin doors on what looked like some kind of intercom system.

An uncomfortable silence fell, scored by the grumbling of the engines below us and the susurrus of waves.

I shook off the feeling first. I didn’t like Fielding, but I had other fish—or otters—to fry. “All right. Fielding, you said Shelly was watching you, but not because she wanted to join the bedroom Olympics. . . .”

“Yeah. She watched me and I mistook it for . . . well, something it wasn’t. I guess she was really keeping an eye on me, at least in the beginning. I don’t know what she was doing at the marina in the first place—it’s not like mermaids go and hang out with humans much unless they’re trying to kill them.”

A snort came from the intercom and I put up my hand to stop his tale. “Wait. Shelly Knight was a mermaid?”

“Oh, Shelly is not just a mermaid. She’s the Mer Maid. And aside from me, she’s the only one of us who survived. She’s the daughter of the sea witch and she’s supposed to be a virgin or she won’t become the sea witch herself when Mommy kicks the bucket. Which has got to be a load of crap because there is no way Shelly hadn’t been spreading her . . . tail for someone—”

Solis and Quinton both made low noises in their throats that collectively sounded a lot like a growl.

Fielding was startled and recoiled from them. “Hey! I’m just saying!”

Solis gave him a black glare. “Don’t.”

Fielding glared back, then looked away with a funny coughing sound. “Well. Yeah. All right.”

“So,” I summarized, “she’s a mermaid, daughter of a sea witch, and you’re the child of a royal dobhar-chú. Which makes you . . . what?”

“Ironically, it makes me almost human, but not quite. I guess it’s where I got my skill on the water, but the problem was I didn’t understand what my mother was telling me that day on the beach or the warnings she was giving then or so many times before she left us. With Shelly and Seawitch, I got into a situation I didn’t know was dangerous. I didn’t know Shelly was some kind of mermaid and therefore my enemy from birth. And . . . all right, I was a jerk. On that last trip with Seawitch things started out freaky and got worse and worse.

“There was kind of an uncomfortable feeling among the passengers right from the first, like there was something going on they were all trying not to talk about. And then Les got into a fight with Shelly. He kept saying she was just teasing him and I thought it was a sex thing, but it wasn’t that and everyone was kind of out of sorts anyhow because the girls wanted to get up to Vancouver and go shopping, but Cas made us change course to go to Port Townsend for a halibut.”

“A halibut?”

“Yeah. Pacific halibut season is really short. That year it ran long—they extended it by two days—and Cas wanted his damned fish. You’re only allowed one and he hadn’t got his. He took his fishing more seriously than most people realized. I mean he really wanted that fish—standing-in-the-water-in-the-dark-with-a-spear kind of want. ’Cause that’s what the crazy SOB did. I changed course from the inside of the Sound and brought us out to Port Townsend—and I gotta tell you, it was a hard swim catching up to you guys up here. A lot harder than boating it was.”

I stifled a snide comment and just told him to go on with his tale.

“Anyhow, anyhow, so we tie up at Townsend and I take him out in the skiff to the shallows so he can try to swim around with a snorkel and spear one—you’re only allowed to use a spear or a longline to get them—”

“A spear?” Solis asked, frowning.

“Halibut are stone stupid, so you have to even the odds in their favor. That’s why it’s called sportfishing. Anyhow. Nobody else wanted to swim around looking for halibut, so they stayed on board with Shelly and played cards or something. Whatever they did, Les was mad at Shelly when we got back and the girls were kind of . . . freaked-out about something and no one was talking to anyone, so dinner was a real cozy disaster. Afterward Les comes up to me, looking all weirded- out, and asks me to make that note in the log about his being on board the whole trip—which he was. I had no idea why he wanted me to put that in, but he did and I did. And then Cas and I went out to look for more halibut—night fishing with a spear. Totally wacko.

“We finally got that damned fish about four in the morning. And we should have cleaned it, but I was sick and tired of it, so I just dumped it in the icebox and we went to bed. So in the morning Cas is still obsessing about his fish and he wants us under way on the morning tide so we don’t—as he put it—waste the whole day, so I get up and get the boat moving on five hours of sleep, and we’re in the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca when we get a call at, like, ten, from the Seattle PD via the radio telephone service, saying that Odile Carson is dead. Les flips out. Not because she was dead but because of the way she died and the timing. He says Shelly told him she was dead the night before and he goes nuts. We all did. It was like there was something in the air. Or maybe it was the food . . .” he added, suddenly thoughtful—which looks very strange on a face that’s only half-human and covered in wet brown fur. “Shelly was the cook . . . maybe she fed us something that made us even crazier than we were. . . .”

“Don’t speculate on what you can’t know,” Solis warned.

“All right, all right!” Fielding snapped back, his interlocking fangs clashing together in a disturbingly violent bite.

The longer he spoke, the more of the mist of unpleasant green began to draw around him. I didn’t like it and I tried to call his attention to it again, but he shook me off and carried on with the story. I tried looking around but I couldn’t find a source for the color—it seemed to rest with Fielding himself and I thought its unpleasant shade might have been a manifestation of the dysfunction in his shape-shifting ability. Of course, some people’s auras turn sickly colors when they lie, too. . . .

“Les Carson lost his nut and we all went a little crazy with him. It was like Odile died and he had to find someone else to be with immediately or something was going to happen to him. Like he was going to explode or fall apart or something. So the guests were all . . . frisky with each other, but that left Cas out because he is still obsessing about his damned fish and I’m up in the bridge, trying to get us across the strait. And that is when Cas finishes up with the halibut and decides it’s a good idea to go down below and see if Shelly wants to ‘join the action’ and to find out if I want to . . . come along.”

He made that odd coughing sound and turned his gaze away from us again—his way of showing shame, I supposed, and I felt a bit better about him. But only a bit.

Fielding continued, raising his gaze only as the story swept him up again. “I put the boat on autopilot and followed him down to her cabin in the forepeak. He got a little . . . pushy. . . . She was furious. Her eyes actually sent out sparks! No, really! She grabbed Cas by the hand and she cut his arm open with this little bone knife she had on her bunk, and he started screaming while she shook him so his arm whipped around and the blood made a circle on the floor and the bunk. She was saying crazy things and then she grabbed me, too, and cut my hand and dragged me around the cabin. I couldn’t believe she was so strong! She pulled me around, saying things I didn’t understand, but they made me feel sick and hot, and she was acting crazy. It felt like . . . like I was burning up inside. Then she screamed something, shoved us both out of her cabin, and came after us with her knife. I pushed Cas up the stairs and I was right behind him. Cas got up to the saloon and out on deck, but then he fell down and he was bleeding and the others weren’t there to help us—they were down below, humping like rabbits.

“Shelly must have grabbed the speargun off the table in the saloon and come out after us when I went out after Cas. She followed us and she threw some things into the water. Then she turned on us. She shot Cas! I thought she was going to kill us both but she only spat in my face—it burned like acid—and then she said, and I remember this, ‘Half on the land and half in the sea, and never together your halves shall be. Dead by water if on land, burned alive by salt sea’s sand. Drown in air and burn by sea, reveal your nature, hound, and cursed be.’ More fucking Shakespeare.”

Quinton and I both shook our heads. “No,” I said, “I think that one was probably an original by Shelly. Did she do anything else?”

“She slapped me with her bloody hand and I fell down as if she’d gaffed me. Then she walked up to the bow and started shouting at the air. That’s when the storm came up. Just came. There one minute and not a sign the minute before. Not. A. Sign. I managed to go over, hoist Cas, and get him down to his bunk, but he was in a bad way. I tried to patch him up but he just kept bleeding. When I started back up to retake the helm, we’d just passed Discovery and Chatham islands, I think. We were running late and the sun was going to go down soon so I needed to be back in control of the boat before we left the open water. It should have been an hour or so to Roche from there, but we didn’t make it.”

“What in hell were you doing in the traffic lane?” Zantree’s voice came down through the intercom and, broken, on the wind from the flying bridge.

“We weren’t in the traffic lane! I took her around the west side of the banks. We came up from Port Townsend just like you are, remember? I was planning to go up through the inner channels from Anacortes originally, but we came out to Townsend for the damned fish. I wish we hadn’t. Maybe if we’d been in the channels around the islands instead of the straits there’d have been some other boat to see us and . . . save us. Or maybe . . . we would have run for Orcas or Lopez as soon as we heard from the cops and we wouldn’t have done what we did at all.”

“What happened next?” I asked.

The gray-green haze around him had thickened to a palpable smog and seemed to be contracting into tentacles. . . .

“Like I said, we were running late and short of sleep because of the fish, and Cas wouldn’t have me take the boat back to Townsend when the call came in for Les from the police. Les lost it and then the business with Shelly . . . I missed Mosquito Pass—” Fielding paused when he saw the confused looks on the faces of us three landlubbers. “It’s the southern route into Roche Harbor. We were below it when . . . Shelly happened. I couldn’t turn the boat in time because I was down on deck and I was more worried about Cas anyway, since he was bleeding. But I needed to get back into the pilothouse before we got any closer to the northern route, because there’s a BC ferry that runs up Spieden Channel. You have to stay out of its way and you have to be careful how you maneuver in Haro Strait before you get to Spieden so you don’t get on the wrong side of the traffic lane and get the Canadian Coast Guard on your ass. Right at the channel mouth it’s wide, but you can’t just charge into it like a bull into the ring—you have to watch the markers and make way for the ferry.

“But by the time we were turning for Spieden Channel we were engulfed in a storm—our very own personal storm. It had taken almost three hours to make the distance up Haro Strait that should have taken just one. So now it’s unnaturally dark, we’re stormbound, and the boat’s starting to make noises I knew weren’t good. I couldn’t control her enough to shoot the northern passage to Roche Harbor between Henry and San Juan islands, because there’s another island between them—Pearl Island—right in the mouth of the pass that makes the channel half the width of the southern route. There was no way to get to Roche safely and the storm and currents would not let me turn her around, so I kept her straight on. Straight down Spieden Channel, thinking I might be able to flip her around at the east end of Davison Head into Neil Bay, or even drag for Lonesome Cove east of that. I was willing to run her aground if I had to. Then the merfolk came on board and that’s when people started dying.”

“What happened to them?” Solis and I demanded together.

“The merfolk took them overboard. They just flowed on board with the water that was coming over the rails and then they just . . . it’s like they swam through the boat and they grabbed Cas and Les and the girls. But they left me. And Shelly went with them. After that . . . it’s hard to remember.”

“Did you reach the cove?”

“Cove?”

“In your last log entry you said you were trying to reach Lonesome Cove.”

“No. Not Lonesome Cove. I passed that, too, and— Oh!” And then his exclamation of surprise turned into a shriek of pain and he threw himself out of the hold and onto the deck, writhing, changing, and making noises increasingly animal and horrifying. He rolled across the deck and flopped upward, barking and moving as if blind and burning, then he toppled over the rail and fell into the water. The splash he raised spattered onto the deck with the same power as if we’d passed too close to a broaching whale.

“It’s them! The bell—” he barked just before he sank. The sick-green creepers of energy followed him into the depths.

We all rushed to the rail, but the boat was already too far ahead of the splash and Fielding, writhing in the water, was already changing back to what he had been before. Then he dove and vanished.

“He’s gone,” Quinton muttered.

“He said, ‘It’s them.’ The merfolk?” Solis asked.

“If so, then I now know a lot more than I did a minute ago,” I said.

Both of the men looked at me. I stared for a moment longer at the receding spot where Fielding had sunk out of sight. I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I should have. I turned back to the men.

“Everywhere we’ve seen the paranormal traces of this case I’ve seen the same energetic residue, the same color. A sort of dirty grayish green. I saw it at Reeve’s place when he had his heart attack and I saw it again at the hospital where he died. I saw it yesterday at Seawitch and also at Pleiades. I saw it just now on Fielding, but I’m sorry to say I wrote it off as an aura shift that usually indicates a lie. But that’s what forced him off the boat—that energy. I think he could have stayed, but it might have killed him. It’s not from the dobhar-chú, because it attacked him before at the marina and he said the water hounds aren’t magicians—though he could very well be lying about that and he’s certainly lying about the events of Seawitch’s last night. But if that stuff was what was attacking Reeve the first time I saw it, then the creature I saw at Reeve’s must have been either Fielding or one of his dobhar-chú cousins trying to protect Reeve. Either way, the party responsible for Reeve’s death is one of the merfolk.”

“Or a sea witch,” Quinton suggested in a soft, unhappy voice.

“Yes. Or a sea witch.”

I heard a clatter from above and Zantree came down the ladder from the flying bridge, landing on the deck with a thump. “What happened? I felt the boat lurch like we lost a marlin off a close-hauled line.”

“We lost Fielding.”

Zantree looked startled. “How?”

“I’m not sure.”

“And what were you going on about freaky spook stuff? Isn’t a water hound enough weirdness for one cruise?”

“I think I’d better explain a few things. . . .”