Seawitch

TWENTY

“Could they do that?” Solis asked. “Lure a ship to its destruction?”

“According to legend, that’s their stock-in-trade,” I replied. “I’ve discovered that there’s often more than just a kernel of truth to that sort of story. And what happened to the Valencia is almost too bizarre to be true—everything went wrong, seasoned officers and crewmen made horrendous errors, and when the storm finally died down long enough to launch the lifeboats, they still couldn’t get to shore and all the women and children died in the water. Truth really is stranger than fiction, because if that were a book or a movie, people would reject it as over-the-top.”

“But why take Seawitch?” Solis asked, apparently having decided to throw his wavering disbelief on the junk heap for the sake of puzzling out a killer’s motive; it didn’t matter what he believed as long as he could understand what the killer believed. “If she had the souls of Valencia, why go to the trouble for a mere four more?”

“Aside from simple opportunity, there’s the racial-feud angle and—if anything Fielding said on this point is true—possibly a bit of overzealous payback for messing with her daughter. If Starrett actually harmed Shelly and Fielding didn’t stop him, then they’d just compromised the sea witch’s heir. There may have been nothing to it, but the appearance or accusation could have been enough since, for a lot of high-level paranormals, successful breeding is tricky and frequently fatal for someone. On top of that they’re usually long-lived, which means slow to mature and slower to age. Even if she had more than one daughter or if Shelly wasn’t harmed, the sea witch would not be happy to see her heir compromised or threatened. That’s possibly dynasty-ending, and with paranormals that can mean the end of a species or at the least the total wipe of a local population. There are fewer of them than us, so they take that kind of threat very seriously. And she would be even less happy if she thought her clan’s racial enemy—a royal dobhar-chú—had anything to do with it.”

Solis nodded slowly, scowling. “It has all the twisted logic of a gang war. So . . . although he wasn’t even aboard when the crime occurred, the sea witch would attack Reeve . . . to lure Fielding out of hiding.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, too. The sea witch would go after any of his remaining friends and family who might help him once he escaped from her—as he obviously did. And did we ever find Fielding’s family?”

“No. There was no reply from his father’s last known address and no forwarding address or phone number.”

“Maybe we should find out if he’s dead. . . .”

Quinton made a disgusted face at me. “How morbid.”

“But if he is it would support the idea that the sea witch and her merfolk are wiping out all traces of the Fieldings and anyone who might have helped Gary. I suspect that if we could ask we’d find out that his mother is dead and has been for a while.”

“Then if Shelly Knight was the sea witch’s daughter, who is the sea witch?”

“Maybe she is, now. We don’t know her status as virgin or nonvirgin or even if it’s truly relevant. Shelly and Jacque could be the same creature with only a bottle of hair dye to separate them. What if . . .” I said, my speech slowing as I thought out loud. “What if losing the Valencia’s soul—the bell—also lost the sea witch her power, or limited it severely? She hasn’t been very aggressive in attacking us and she must know by now that we’re coming. And what if . . . it wasn’t the mother that took the souls of Seawitch, but the daughter? Then she’d have quite a bit of power, while her mother had little or none. So Seawitch may have been just a pawn in a power grab.”

“It is a very elaborate plan,” Solis objected. “Not robust or simple enough to work.”

I admit I’d been speculating rather wildly, feeling the press of time and the need for some kind of answers before we were face-to-face with the sea witch. “True. Simple is usually better. But what if it wasn’t a plan but just opportunity seized? That might explain what Shelly was doing hanging around the marina for a few years: She was looking for chances to accrue her own power and topple her mother.”

Solis wasn’t quite convinced, if his scowl was any indication. “She comes to the marina to look for opportunities to wreck ships and steal souls, then accidentally meets the son of her family’s enemy. So she watches him and gets close. Then things go wrong and she . . . what? Cries for help with the spell we discovered in her cabin?”

“Why not? No . . . wait. It was a complex spell—not something you’d cast in a hurry to get help—and the spell circle was broken. So whatever that spell was, it wasn’t functioning when Seawitch was taken. I wish I knew what the spell was for. . . . But it might be enough to know who broke it. Because that’s when the situation went to hell, according to Fielding—assuming he’s not lying on that point, once again.” I tried to talk the pieces of this puzzle into place. “If Shelly broke it herself, then that act brought down the merfolk. If someone is going to show up as soon as you break a spell . . . they’d have to be looking for you in the first place. So the spell has to have been some kind of . . . disguise or protection for the boat; she’d just use an amulet or a gris-gris if it were for herself alone. So . . . she breaks it deliberately to . . . get out of a bad situation with Starrett, wreak revenge on the dobhar-chú—or Fielding, as the case may be. But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t cast a complex spell just so you can break it later—that’s a waste of resources.”

“What if Starrett broke it when he . . . paid her a visit?” Solis suggested.

I felt myself smiling as I thought about it. “The result is still the same but the emphasis is different: The merfolk descend like hungry wolves, but now . . . all that bloodletting and crazy stuff Fielding described isn’t Shelly attacking them . . . it’s Shelly trying to repair her spell in a panic. A spell that was keeping Seawitch hidden from the merfolk or her mother. And it would take a complex spell to hide a moving object that weighed more than sixteen tons. Why she was hiding it, I don’t know, but when things start to fall apart, first she panics, then she gets mad and curses Fielding, and, last, she tries to salvage what she can—and in the process she creates enough havoc that it’s easy to snatch a few souls in the affray.”

“Affray?” Quinton asked with a laugh. “You’ve been reading Agatha Christie again.”

“Marsh. I wanted a break from the noir—my life’s noir enough.”

Solis sighed. “You who work with the darkest things do not find mystery novels . . . ridiculous and artificial?”

“Of course I do—that sort at least. Good triumphs over evil and the world is restored to order without a lot of angst and grotesquerie. That’s why I like them: They are as far from my life as I can get without reading historical romances.”

“Why do you not, then? Read romances.”

“They depress me.”

Solis looked puzzled. “My wife says the same thing.”

“I like her more and more,” I said, teasing a little but mostly serious.

Solis smiled—a real smile that actually moved his cheeks and creased the corners of his eyes. Then he glanced around as if looking for something mislaid. “Oh, Zantree says that it’s Quinton’s turn at the wheel—his watch, rather.”

“Already?” I asked.

“Yes. Two-hour shifts. He sees no reason for you or me to take the wheel with such a short distance left to go.”

“But we’ve got a time limit and we don’t know when it will expire. We may have to push on until we find Fielding’s mystery cove.”

“We should discuss the search with him, but either way, he expects to be in Roche Harbor before dark.”

“So did Fielding. . . .”

June in western Washington is rife with vagaries of weather. It’s warm one day, cold and wet the next, and a single twenty-four-hour period can turn back and forth between the extremes two, three, or four times before the day finally passes away. By eleven the sun had come out, the fog was long gone, and Quinton was almost half through his watch at the wheel. As I came up the ladder to bring him sunglasses and sit with him, the view from the flying bridge was clear and full of blue above and below with land visible but distant in nearly all directions. It was beautiful, if still a bit cold. Sun sparkled off the wind-ruffled surface of the water that was scattered with sailboats cutting back and forth and faster motorboats skidding along like water striders on a pond.

I handed Quinton the shades and he slipped them on, sighing. “Man, I had forgotten what this was like. It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?”

I agreed. “Did you spend a lot of time on boats when you were a kid?”

“Not a lot but it was quality. My mom’s folks had a Hatteras—it was kind of like this boat but a little smaller overall and higher in front. My parents usually sent my sister and me up to stay with them for a week in the summer and we’d spend most of our time on the boat with Grandpa Quinn, just pottering around the Sakonnet river and in Narragansett Bay. It was great.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Narragansett . . . isn’t that on Long Island?”

He rolled his eyes and laughed a little. “Rhode Island.”

“You’re from Rhode Island?”

“No, my mom is from Rhode Island.”

“And you?”

“Not from Rhode Island. My sister moved in with my grandparents near the end of their lives. I . . . wasn’t able to go. She really took to the place. Met her husband there.”

“You miss it?”

“I miss them and I miss the way life felt easy when we were all together, tooling around in the boat. Rhode Island? Not specifically. What about you?”

“I’ve never been to Rhode Island.”

“I mean . . . do you miss . . . people?”

I peered at him in confusion. “Which people do you have in mind? I miss the Danzigers.”

“I wasn’t thinking of them.”

I cocked my head, curious. “Who, then? You’ll have to be specific, because I’m just not following your train of thought.”

He looked upset and I felt a spike of anxiety reaching between us. “I was wondering . . . about Novak, to be honest.”

“Will? Why? He’s been gone for almost two years now.”

“Is he really? Dead doesn’t always mean gone with you.”

I tossed my head in exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! When I say ‘gone,’ I mean gone. What was once William Novak is no more. I used to wonder if his personality lingered in . . . what he became, but I don’t see any sign of that. Of course, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time chatting the Beast up, so I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to bet, I’d say gone is gone in this case. You can’t call the way it tosses me around affectionate.”

“Maybe . . . he’s angry with you.”

“No. He isn’t there,” I explained, feeling my own frustration slowly drain away as I talked. “If anything remains, I would call that thing an echo of humanity—by which I mean the urge to be humane, not something endemically human. But I don’t know that it comes from Will. I’m not even sure it’s more than my imagination that the emotion exists in it at all; the Guardian Beast is not human. It’s not even alive, really. It has substance and existence, but not . . . not a life, no soul of its own. And . . . Quinton, there is nothing—not a ghost or a monster or another human being—that can stand between you and me. And not just because of some silly magic thing. I love you so much and so deeply that if I could let it all flow out of me, it would fill up the whole Sound and spill out into the Pacific Ocean and fishermen in Taiwan would be finding big, sparkly pink shards of it in their nets a hundred years from now.” I threw my arms around him. “I yearn only for you.”

Quinton gave a self-conscious shrug and an embarrassed laugh. “I feel the same way about you and I’m sorry I’m . . . being an ass. Also, I suspect you just wanted to use ‘yearn’ in a sentence.”

I gave my best Valley Girl imitation. “Well, like, duh.”

This time he laughed for real and hugged me back. “You are half-crazy.”

“More than half if you mean crazy about you,” I replied, feeling silly even as I said it.

“All right: totally nuts. Like Chock Full o’Nuts nuts.”

“Chock Full o’Nuts? You really are from the East Coast.”

“And you really aren’t. Chock Full o’Nuts contains no nuts—it’s coffee. Which is appropriate, considering how much of it you drink.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. Then I found myself pressing against him and neither of us had moved; the boat had moved under us.

While we’d been talking the boat had been motoring along in increasingly busy water and now bucked a bit as it crossed the swell from a larger boat’s wake.

Quinton frowned and looked down at the instruments. “Damn it,” he muttered. “Pressure’s falling.”

“Oil pressure?” I asked.

“No, barometric pressure. It means there’s a squall coming up, but . . . I don’t see one. . . .”

Rising wind from the east and south puffed against Mambo Moon, pushing it a touch to the side and a touch more, then swung around and blew in our faces or on the stern—as if the rigid hull were a toy sail to be gusted across a pond—until we were out of alignment with our original path. Being a landlubber, I didn’t think much of it. Having more experience with boats, Quinton figured we were a bit off but wasn’t sure by how much or if it mattered with so much room to maneuver in the wide swath of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He corrected the course and kept the boat moving ahead. After an hour I noticed that the distant shoreline seemed to be moving along more slowly. I pointed it out to Quinton.

“Well . . .” he started, clearly thinking aloud, “I suppose since the tide is still going out we might be encountering more resistance as we get closer to the mouth of Haro Strait, where the channel is much narrower, so the tidal current would be stronger and moving against us. . . . It should ease as we approach slack tide.”

I had to shrug. “It’s Greek to me. The currents of the Grey, I get; actual water . . . not so much. What’s slack tide?”

“It’s the point in the cycle where the currents have slowed as the tide is nearing the turn. In this case, just before the tide starts to come in, instead of going out like it is now. Areas of slow water like coves and harbors behind breakwaters become still and there’s little to no current movement at the surface. It’s very easy to maneuver in slack water because there’s no current to oppose you.”

“How long does it last, this still period?”

“Depends on the area but it’s usually two to three hours.”

“Then . . . we should be in slack water in an hour or two?”

Quinton paused a moment to consider the math. “Yeah. So the tide will be slacking about the time we have to turn for Mosquito Pass—the southern pass to Roche Harbor. We’re still on the ebb tide now.”

I scowled. “But if it’s slowing down, why are we being pushed sideways more now than before?”

Something slapped the boat again, sending a shiver through the whole structure. I stumbled sideways and Quinton lurched the same direction with me, dragging the wheel around a few degrees before he let go of it. Mambo Moon wiggled in the water like a gaffed fish. I heard the doors below slide open and Zantree came zooming up the ladder to the flying bridge.

“What was that?” he shouted. “Did we hit something?”

Quinton started to answer but a sudden, violent gust of wind whipped across the flying bridge and stole the words from his mouth. Water splashed up over the railings and the boat rocked like a toy. Everyone looked out to see what we had struck or been struck by, but nothing was readily apparent.

Zantree took the wheel, saying, “All of you go down to the deck and look around in the water. If you can’t spot what hit us, we may have gone over it. We don’t want whatever it was to damage the propeller or the rudder—or the hull if it bounces back up. Logs sometimes float vertically and if they pogo, they’ll knock the prop clean off her. And we sure don’t want to be dead in the water here if this storm comes in. Those rocks off the port bow are mighty sharp.”

We scrambled down the ladder and spread out around the boat, peering over the sides for any sign of what we’d struck. The boat moved sideways and leaned over as if it were being pushed by something in the water. I saw a bit of lambent color below the surface on the left side—the port side—but it moved away like a swimming snake and vanished. There was nothing else to see but water that seemed unusually agitated. Water splashed up onto the deck, spattering over the side rail where I stood, wetting my clothes from the hip down.

“What is that?” Solis shouted from the front. I gave up staring at the water and ran around toward him, heading for the bow. I could hear Quinton’s footsteps going around on the other side but couldn’t see him.

I cleared the front of the cabin bulge and started to the other—the starboard—side toward Solis, who was standing halfway up the open section of the bow deck and staring northeast out to sea on his right. He turned his head, saw me coming, and pointed over the rail toward the bulk of San Juan Island. “What is it?” he repeated.

I rushed to the rail beside him and grabbed on, astonished by the sight of what looked like a tower of water undulating across the waves toward us.

Quinton caught up to us and looked out, too. “Waterspout!” he shouted.

“Blast it!” Zantree yelled down from above. “There shouldn’t be any of those around here!”

“What is a waterspout?” Solis demanded.

Quinton glanced at him and said, “It’s like a tornado but on water, so it condenses moisture from the surface as mist. That’s a fair-weather spout. They usually don’t move much. . . .”

“Someone had best tell that to the waterspout,” Solis suggested, watching the rising vortex of mist, water, and debris waver toward Mambo Moon. “How do we avoid it?”

“We stay the course we’re on. The waterspout should continue on its line, east to west, and we’re heading north. As long as we’re moving at ninety degrees and faster than its intercept speed, we’ll pass it safely. But it shouldn’t be here—there’s no cloud above it.”

“I thought you said it was a fair-weather spout.”

“That just means it’s not part of a cyclonic storm. That one there’s a micro cell, but . . . it should still have a cloud. . . .”

“You said they condense moisture from the surface?” I asked.

The boat shuddered again and swayed side to side.

“Yes.”

“They don’t suck water up?”

“No. Something that size doesn’t pick up water or objects.”

“Then that’s not a waterspout,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re going to have to search too hard to find the sea witch.”

Staring at it through the Grey, the waterspout was thick with creatures that writhed and twisted in the rising liquid. A handful of human forms spun, screaming, in the water, festooned in seaweed and trailing chain. In front of it, coils of blue energy reached and spun through the waves toward Mambo Moon. The sea witch—or her minions—had come to us.

Quinton and Solis both gaped at me. I felt sick and my cracked rib seemed to stab into my side, sending a cold chill of fear and pain through my chest. Or maybe it was Quinton who was feeling scared and sick, but I didn’t think I was immune to common sense; the waterspout was not natural and it wasn’t staying put or moving in a nice, straight line. It was coming to get us.

“I think the sea witch wants her bell back. . . .”

Solis turned to me. “You have it aboard?”

“Why wouldn’t I? If we’re going back to where it happened, we have to have all the parts of the mystery or we can’t solve it.”

“How would the sea witch know we had it?”

“The same way she knew Fielding was aboard: spies. I’ll bet the dobhar-chú aren’t the only paranormal intelligence agency around. After all, they’re the enemy so the sea witch wouldn’t go to them. She’d post her own observers. And it doesn’t matter who; it only matters that they found us.”

That was when Zantree shouted down, “Hands on deck! Prepare to fend off!”