Seawitch

TWENTY-FOUR

I found myself turning to watch the expressions of Quinton and Solis. Quinton stared toward the cliff, his mouth slightly open with excitement and awe. Solis looked haunted.

“Do you see . . . Fielding?” I asked Zantree.

He scanned the cliff with the binoculars. “Not sure. There’s a dark shape in the water near the cliff base that might be him—it’s a lot larger than the others. . . .”

“Can you get us near them without cutting into the bubble? We’re probably safer near the otters than anywhere else,” I said.

Zantree frowned. “I thought we needed to go into the . . . whatever you call that bubble thing.”

“It’s an overlap where both the near-paranormal and the normal are visible and operating simultaneously. I’ve seen something related before. This one is the merfolk’s realm as it intersects ours. The temporary intersection acts as a gateway, or, as the ghosts put it, a gap in the worlds where both states exist in the same place and time until the gap closes when its operating schedule dictates. In this case I believe the cycle is twenty-seven years, because that’s how long it was from the time Valencia went down until its lifeboat was found and the same amount of time from the disappearance of Seawitch to its reappearance. Since it’s tied to water, I’m also guessing the cycle’s tidal in nature—it ebbs and swells, so Fielding or his dobhar-chú relatives snuck Seawitch out in the magical equivalent of slack water. And I’m pretty sure it’s the only place to solve this mystery. I don’t want you to take the boat in there if we can avoid it, and not until we’re ready if we can’t. If—when—the state that’s keeping this gateway open collapses, Mambo Moon could be trapped in the merfolk’s realm for the next twenty-seven years, just like Seawitch was. I don’t think you’d enjoy that adventure.”

Zantree shuddered. “Not my idea of fun, being drowned by merfolk.”

“I’m not sure if that bubble will stay in place all of whatever remaining time we’ve got. . . .”

“It has been stable for more than the fifteen minutes our previous test lasted,” Solis said.

“Really?” I replied.

He nodded.

“Then maybe it’s going to hold steady. . . .”

“Hope for the best, but prepare for a storm,” Zantree said, steering for the eastern rocks. “I’ll keep the Moon out of the bubble for now. We can’t get in too close to the cliff since we’re coming on high tide, and as the tide runs out again the Moon’ll swing on her chain. We don’t want to run aground out here—or slide into that freaky ghost wall when the boat tries to come around with the current. But we can drop the dink and set a stern anchor once we get the bow down. That’ll keep her safe off the rocks and out of . . . that.”

Quinton nodded and I mirrored him, though I had no idea what I’d just agreed with. Solis frowned at the lot of us as if he were rethinking the whole mad escapade and checked his watch again.

Zantree maneuvered the boat around about a hundred yards or so from the eastern cliffs until he found a location that satisfied him, then dropped the anchor off the bow with a rattling of chain running off the winch. Then he and Quinton took the dinghy out with a second anchor aboard and put it down a good distance out toward the mouth of the cove. They finished up by securing the second anchor rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat, which held Mambo Moon in position with her bow toward the distant dock and her stern toward the entry to the cove. “So we can cut and run if we have to,” Zantree explained, though it didn’t really help me visualize what he meant. I assumed our would-be pirate captain knew what he was doing since he’d got us this far intact, but I admit I was worried; our position was precarious and we were lying between the local version of Scylla and Charybdis. We’d have to wait a few minutes and see what the dobhar-chú and merfolk would do now that we were here. They had to be feeling the time pressure as much as I was, so I hoped they wouldn’t dawdle.

The light in the cove seemed thicker and more golden on the normal side of the water, though the long summer day was nowhere near ending. Our “quick run” had taken nearly ten hours—double the time it should have, according to Zantree. I wondered how long we could count on the presence of the otters and their Grey kin to keep the merfolk at bay, or if the forces of the sea witch would hold off until the fleeting hours of night to make their move against us—and they surely would move. I didn’t know if we could defend ourselves or even see them coming outside the bubble generated by the Valencia’s bell. I hoped it would hold, as I didn’t think it was practical to strike the damned bell every fifteen minutes and I wasn’t even sure that doing so would keep the layered zone of Grey and normal intact. I suspected we’d have only one short chance to confront the sea witch before the bubble collapsed and dragged us into her realm permanently—or close enough to make no difference. I might survive in her bit of the Grey, but my companions didn’t have the same skills and their chances would be slim.

Once Zantree declared the boat secure and shut down the engines, I went out on the foredeck to study the Grey bubble.

The cove was about a mile across at most and we were only a dozen yards or so from the bulging edge of the fringe zone. Still no sign of the Guardian Beast, I noted, so nothing that shouldn’t have been here was lurking nearby, but the things that did belong were frightening enough on their own. I felt more than heard someone walk up behind me and stop by the rail. I turned.

Solis was frowning out at the curving Grey wall as he held on to the rail. “It is a mirror,” he said, without turning his head to me. “It reflects what you believe.”

“That’s an interesting thing to say.” I don’t know why I was surprised he’d come to that conclusion; as a detective, he must have been observing everyone’s reactions and putting his own experience together with theirs to get a better idea of the situation as a whole. I supposed he’d finally thrown out his resistance to the idea of the paranormal.

“Do you not find it so?”

“Yes and no. I see a lot of things I never even knew existed, so they can’t be just what I believe . . . or the whole magical world would be a black blank to me.”

“You believe in nothing?”

“I believe in people, both what’s good and what’s bad in them. And I think that’s what I see, even when it isn’t something I know. But I also see—or experience—more. Things that aren’t just constructs of human belief, though I must in some way filter it through my own knowledge, memories, fears . . . otherwise I couldn’t recognize it enough to take it in through my own senses at all. It seems to be a state that’s objective and subjective at the same time.”

“When will it come for us?”

The boat swayed and lurched a little as someone moved around inside and the waves in the cove rolled gently under the keel. “It won’t,” I replied. “But the things inside it will—they want a resolution to this situation as much as we do—and they’ll either bring the perception shift with them or drag us to it. They’re . . . I’d say ‘real’ but that’s not quite the idea I want. . . . ‘Corporeal’ is the best I can do. These things aren’t ghosts. Well, there are ghosts here and in the bell, but the things we have to deal with have physical bodies. They can do us physical harm.”

“And can we harm them?”

I nodded, taking note of a slithering sound near the aft—maybe Quinton or Zantree was opening up the sliding doors. “Of course. You made some nice bloody holes in the one that grabbed you. I saw it bleeding.”

He nodded. “Good.”

“I approve also,” said a rough, new voice from the side deck.

Solis and I turned around and looked back toward the aft. Quinton stepped out onto the stairs from the pilothouse and looked down at our visitor with a startled expression.

The man was only a few feet forward of the stern deck and he crouched, naked, in a pool of water. He glanced at each of us as he stood up slowly, unfazed by his nudity or our stares. He was about Solis’s height, pale skinned and dark haired, and his eyes were a startling, clear blue—like those of some dogs. He appeared to be in his early fifties, judging by the lines on his face and the slight brush of silver hair at his temples, but he had the body of a sleek, young athlete—a swimmer or a gymnast, I’d have said, since he wasn’t skinny enough to be a dancer or unbalanced like a runner. He also had the sort of strong, active aura I associate with magical creatures: This one was a bright halo of violet and green that whirled with tiny white globes of energy glowing like pearls.

He nodded to me, apparently having decided I was in charge. “Our cousin requires help beyond my ability,” he said in his gravelly voice, exposing sharp teeth with pronounced upper and lower canines, a little more like a ferret’s than a man’s but not as mismatched as Fielding’s had been. “You must come with me.”

I gave him a doubtful glare and did my best to keep my gaze only on his face. “Must?”

He seemed puzzled at my reply. “Of course. That is why we sent him to you to begin with.”

“This cousin would be . . . Gary Fielding?” I guessed.

He nodded with raised eyebrows, as if he thought me a bit dim, but wasn’t going to insult me by mentioning it. “Please. We can go now? I find this form uncomfortable.”

This form. . . . I made a not-so-wild guess. “You’re Father Otter, then?”

He gave another, slightly impatient nod and pointed toward the eastern cliffs. “This is our holt. Within awaits our cousin, who will not live unless you come now.” He turned and loped along a wet trail back to the stern, where the ladder came up from the swim platform. So that’s how he’d come aboard. He scowled back at us once again. “We none of us have time to waste. Come.”

I looked at Quinton and Solis. I didn’t want to leave the boat, where I had allies and dry decks beneath my feet and any fishy adversaries were at a disadvantage. However, I was sure I’d need the help of the dobhar-chú to bring this business to a close and I knew I wouldn’t get it unless I helped Gary Fielding. The thought of getting into the chilly waters of the Sound gave me a shiver as I remembered drowning as a child and all the times I’d been soaked since the beginning of this case, not to mention the dreadful things that lived in the water of this cove. . . .

Father Otter glared at me. “You will not help?”

I walked past Solis and Quinton to get closer to our visitor, but not close enough to be grabbed and hauled overboard. “I will if I can,” I replied, “but . . . I don’t do water very well.”

“You cannot swim?”

“I can swim, but I get cold when wet. That will make it hard for me to help your cousin, especially since we have to act fast or we’ll be stuck here.”

Father Otter rolled his eyes and shook his head in disgust. “Bring yourself by boat to the crouch. It is dry within.” He pointed to a particularly cluttered bit of the tumbled shoreline where there seemed to be an inordinate number of shadows that resisted the sunlight. “We will meet you there and take you within. Bring your assistant if you must. But soon. The merfolk gather their strength.” That at least explained the cease-fire since we’d arrived and confirmed my thought that the sea witch had to husband her resources with care.

Then Father Otter turned his back, crouching and shrinking into the compact, dark-furred form of a massive otter. A cross of white fur marked his spine and shoulders. The huge otter turned its head to give us one last, annoyed glance before it dove under the rail and out, into the water, vanishing below the surface in a ripple that formed an arrow toward the cliffs before it dissipated into the rolling tide.

I turned back to Solis and Quinton and saw Zantree looking out of the pilothouse door also. “I guess I don’t have a lot of choices . . .” I said.

Quinton and Solis both stepped toward me, saying, “I’ll come with you.” Then they stopped and glanced at each other.

“I’ll go by myself,” I said.

“You don’t know that you’ll be safe,” Quinton objected, his aura spiking with alarm and sending little breathless jolts through our connection.

“I won’t be any safer with an escort. There’s bound to be more of them than us and I can’t hope to fight my way out, so I’ll have to presume their goodwill, because as much as I need their help, they need mine.”

“What if something happens and you can’t get back on your own?”

“I have my pistol in my pocket. If the dobhar-chú can’t help me, I’m sure you’ll hear it if I have to use it.”

Quinton didn’t like it but he knew I wasn’t going to budge on that point. Solis continued toward me with a determined expression.

“Now, wait a minute,” I started.

“I am coming.”

“No, you aren’t. You heard what I just said.”

“Yes. But I am not your boyfriend. I am your fellow investigator and Gary Fielding is material to my case as well.”

Quinton scowled and I didn’t have to experience his secondhand flare of confusion, jealousy, and discomfort to know how he was feeling.

I objected. “Solis—”

Solis shook his head as he came up to where I was standing. “There is no argument. He said to bring your assistant if you must. I am the only person who qualifies and I will come.”

“Well, if it’s that easy—” Quinton started.

I held out one palm to nip that in the bud. “It isn’t. If I have to put up with you guys being high-handed, then Solis has the best argument. And here’s one more: I don’t think more than two humans will be welcome and even that number is obviously begrudged. Do not push it.”

Quinton’s mouth hardened and he looked belligerent, but after a second or two sorting out the battle between emotion and logic, he let out a hard breath and quirked one corner of his mouth into a resigned nonsmile. “All right. You are the boss and you know what you’re doing. I’ll stick here with Zantree and wait. For a while.”

I gave him a grateful smile and went over to kiss his cheek. “Thank you.”

“Just come back fast—those fish-butts aren’t going to stay off our backs for long.”

“I know. If they come, just keep them off the boat and away from the bell. We’ll be back as soon as we can. And you know I love you and need you, right?”

“Yeah. And I love you . . . even when you’re a bullheaded pain in my ass.” He finally returned my kiss and then turned me around to face the aft rail before we got too maudlin. “Now get going.”

Zantree had no interest in butting into the conversation or tagging along, but he helped us get the dinghy deployed again and heading for shore with me and Solis aboard. It was only when we were on the way that I realized the little vessel was in the hands of the half of the party who knew almost nothing about handling boats. Luckily the water on the eastern edge of the cove was nearly still and the boat was a simple outboard type without a lot of bells and whistles to deal with and no oars to pull. We drew near the tumbled rocks and cut the engine, letting it glide toward the shadow Father Otter had indicated.

Three wet, dark otter heads popped up, bristling whiskers and making chuffing snorts, sniffing at us as we neared. They eyed us thoroughly before the largest one turned back toward the rocks and the other two swam forward to guide us in by bumping the gliding dinghy into the proper path with their bodies. I had seen otters at the Seattle Aquarium and it wasn’t until one of our escorts was cruising along the side of the boat only a few inches from my hand that I realized how big they are. This one was typical at about five feet long, including its rudderlike tail, and probably weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. It rolled on its back in the water and yawned, showing off its mouthful of ivory-colored fangs. I’ve heard otters referred to as clowns and playful, but seeing one that close I knew “play” was relative—it would be no work at all for this giant seagoing ferret to snap off one of my fingers or break one of my arms if it got those teeth into me. And while they had a thick coat of fur, the body underneath was all muscle, and quick with it. I hoped I would have no reason to tussle with any of the creatures living under Father Otter’s aegis, especially since dobhar-chú were even larger than the garden-variety sea otter swimming beside us.

In a few minutes the boat had come to a soft halt against the cliff base where a small, low cave had been carved into the rock by aeons of waves. Solis and I climbed out of the dinghy with care and jammed the little boat’s rope between two rocks so it wouldn’t drift away, though the otters looked at us with quivering-whisker expressions that implied they’d never seen a human do anything as silly as that before. At their vocal insistence, aided by nose prods and dirty looks, we scrambled for the cave and were met by one of the dobhar-chú—or I assumed it was since it was about twenty-five percent larger and had the telltale white cross on its back that I’d seen on both Fielding and Father Otter. Its bellow was something between a large cat’s mew and a dog’s bark. It looked us over and trotted off into the darkness at the back of the cave. Solis and I exchanged wary glances and followed it, stumbling on the slick, uneven rock of the upward-sloping cave floor. I winced with every jarring misstep and slip of the foot as we went.

In the dark all trips seem too long and perilous. Eddies and hollows of Grey washed around us, unnoticed by Solis, who kept his eyes on the dobhar-chú, while time rushed and lagged and broke into temporaclines that sparkled like shattered glass I dared not touch. The sound of muttering and mewling echoed ahead of us as we walked. In those weirdly dilated minutes, we passed through a ghost forest tilted at a disorienting angle and then through a flash of heat that dissipated into a bland, dim illumination the color of lichen. Before us opened a low-ceilinged cavern thick with half-lit things and the odor of fish and wet fur. Around the edges the cave seemed to writhe and it took a moment for me to realize the movement and the sound I’d been hearing all along was actually dozens of otters and dobhar-chú lounging, grooming, or moving in and out of the area through passages on each end that brought diluted air and light in from the outside. At our end a clearing had been made near the wall to accommodate a small group of dobhar-chú gathered around the misshapen bulk of Gary Fielding.

Fielding’s situation had deteriorated badly since we’d seen him earlier in the day. The dobhar-chú had settled him in a depression in the rock and filled it with water, but either there wasn’t enough water, or his brush with the merfolk had done him some new injury that brought trickles of blood from his eyes and nose running down his half-human face. The wet rocks around him gleamed with red streaks and he twisted in pain, rubbing more blood onto the rocks and his rough-furred body.

The largest of the dobhar-chú near Fielding started toward us, changing as it walked until Father Otter strode the last few paces across the cave to us in his human guise. He gave Solis an irritated glance and then seemed to dismiss him as he turned his gaze on me. He scowled. “You see what has happened? His forms must be untangled or he will die.”

“How did this happen?” I asked. “He seemed stable when we saw him earlier.”

“The world tide is changing. While it turns, the power of the merfolk rises and we lie so close to them that their evil magic is stronger.”

“Then why don’t you move a safe distance away?”

“This is our home. We will not leave.”

“Isn’t it their home, too?”

Father Otter bared his teeth at me. “But we do no evil. We do not sink ships and destroy men.”

“At least not anymore,” I said. “Your kind doesn’t have the nicest reputation in the Old Country.” That online research—thin as its yield had been—was paying off.

His face twisted with rage, his lips drawing back, and he hissed at me. He reminded me so much of Chaos when she was enraged that I almost laughed but I throttled the chuckle before it could escape. If he started jumping around and doing the weasel war dance, I really would lose it, and I thought that might be a very bad idea.

Instead I settled back on my heels and gave him a chilly look. “Let’s not pretend either of us is a white knight here. You want my help; I want yours. Whatever the problem is, it’s getting worse and I imagine there’s not a lot of time to fix this. So how about we get to it?”

Father Otter rolled his shoulders and scowled but he nodded and led us toward Fielding. Solis shot me a glance that was a little too white around the edges, but he didn’t say anything and he came along, if a bit hesitantly and keeping half a pace behind. This had to be horrible for him—being unable to stop or go back, powerless in the encroaching field of enemies—another fall into his nightmare. And yet he came of his own will.

At Fielding’s side I crouched down to get a better look at him. He was rolling around from pain and making growling sounds in his throat. He didn’t seem to register that I was there. I reached out and touched his wrist; it felt hot and the patchy fur on his arms was abrasive in my grip. I pulled back my hand and found my palm scratched and raw like a minor case of road rash. “Great,” I muttered. “Gary? Gary? Fielding, it’s Harper Blaine. Can you tell me what’s changed? What do I need to do?”

His reply was an unintelligible whimper.

I turned to Father Otter. “I’ll have to take a look myself. This is going to appear a little strange, so don’t freak out.” I didn’t add “and attack us” but I thought it.

He scrunched up his face in what I took for an expression of confusion, though it was a little hard to tell since he didn’t seem to have the same facial reactions as a human even with a human’s face. He shook his head with a sudden snort that was more like a violent sneeze than anything else. Then he glanced at me and shrugged. “As you must,” he muttered, turning his head away.

The rest of the dobhar-chú turned around also, giving me some kind of privacy, I assumed, or just not watching something as distasteful as dabbling with magic. I caught Solis’s eye. “I’m . . . uhhh . . . going to get a little thin here. Keep an eye on our friends.”

He nodded, his aura settling a bit at having an understandable job to do. His gaze shifted away immediately to scan the surroundings as I sank into the Grey.

The cave of the dobhar-chú looked like the remains of a wild party in the Grey. It was littered with knots of colored energy, tilted and tangled temporaclines, and mist alive with creeping strands of energy whose origin looked decidedly unwholesome. Fielding’s aura was rendered into a seething boil of violet and blue pierced through by green and red spikes that seemed to dig deeper as I watched. Long threads of each color stretched away toward the cove as if the energy around him was literally spun from the water outside. Resting partially on top of him lay a shadow whose densities of darkness in shades of night, coal dust, and tarnished silver welled and ebbed like tar bubbling slowly from the ground. The shadow seemed to be knitted to Fielding by the strands of energy that defined and stabbed his aura. It was difficult to see exactly how the filaments of color stitched through the shadow form as it writhed and twisted. I concentrated on the dark shape, pulling myself by inches through deeper layers and sideways through variations of the Grey until I could see it better.

I seemed to have snuck into a pocket of the Grey that abhorred me: cold and shuddering like San Francisco during an earthquake, the air itself seemed to stab me with needles of ice and then slice with razors of fire. I did not wish to stay any longer than necessary and I wondered where the hell the Guardian Beast was—surely this wasn’t a part of the Grey any living person should ever see. . . . But I steeled myself to the assault as best I could and stared hard at the strange form that was Fielding. As I’d feared, the shadow I’d seen on him was two shapes forced into the same space by the winding cables of colored energy. Each piercing thread of red or green caught a ripple of one or the other shadow form and pulled it toward the center of Fielding’s energetic mass, constantly tugging and tearing the fabric of his dual forms into one another. I could barely make out the pale separation still remaining between them. I couldn’t possibly pinch off every strand of magic that was knitting them so horribly together. I had neither the ability anymore nor the desire to try to reach into a living being and attempt to remove the burning twists and thorns of this unnatural torment. Especially not while I was being battered by an inhospitable corner of the Grey itself.

An icy shard of ghost-stuff ripped through my chest and I shivered so violently that I tumbled sideways out of the Grey.

I landed, wincing and trying to catch my breath as chilly tears welled over my lower lashes. Solis caught me and helped me back up to my feet. Work calluses on his palms and fingers felt like stones for a moment before the sensation faded.

Father Otter and his ilk had turned back around to watch me as I fell. Now they looked up at me—faces furry or human all curious and a bit repulsed by what they saw.

“He is no better,” Father Otter accused.

“I can’t do it here. I need to be in a more stable place in . . . the magic sphere,” I said, groping for the right words to express the Grey to him. “Where it overlaps the normal world. I can’t see what I’m doing under any other circumstances. You need to get Fielding and us out to the shore, where the two realms overlap.” It was a place I did not want to go even though I’d known I’d have to. I’d hoped to put it off to the end, to draw the sea witch and her minions into my own sphere of control first. But that plainly wasn’t going to happen and we had no time to argue.

“That shore is within the compass of the sea witch’s power,” Father Otter objected.

“I know that, and the gateway is closing so we could all be trapped, but I can’t do this here. We have to go where the overlap is already stable. It’s too difficult for me to hold the two worlds steady and do what needs to be done at the same time.”

“You will have to. We cannot fight her and defend you at once. We will attack—we will do whatever must be done, whatever you command us to do—to defeat her once our cousin is safe but we cannot do both in the same time and hope for any of us to survive. Including you and your . . . family.”

I gasped out a laugh at the vision of the motley crew of the Mambo Moon as a family and regretted it as my rib sent a stab of complaint into my chest. A frisson of fear came with it: We had so little time and this was a desperate move.

“All right,” I said. “I can try here, but it will have to be very quick. The only way to pull the two forms apart before they are knitted into each other too much to separate is to cut. There’s no other way to get through the . . .” Again I stumbled for a word and settled for a gesture of shoving my spread fingers together in a woven steeple shape, while saying, “The joining magic fast enough. It has to go in one fast sweep and it has to be done very soon. I’ll need some kind of knife. . . .” Part of my mind was gibbering in panic at the thought and the rest was doing its best to keep that element locked up where it wouldn’t show. My hosts wouldn’t have appreciated my freaking out and I didn’t know where that would leave Solis.

The dobhar-chú barked and squeaked at the smaller otters and there was a frantic shuffling around as the assembled creatures searched for something for me to use. A collection of shells, rocks, and bits of rusted metal were shoved across the wet stone floor to me, but even the metal parts were too small or too dull to serve. I dug in my jeans pocket for my own little pocketknife. The narrow two-inch blade looked pathetically small for this job but at least it was sharp, and although the edge would serve more as an allegory than an actual cutting blade, this was a situation that called for a fine-honed symbol of incision, not a metaphorical butter knife. “It’ll have to do,” I muttered. “I wish it were something magic or at least something . . . bigger.”

Solis tapped my shoulder and held something out to me. The dim light from the other side of the cave gleamed a moment on bright steel as he flipped the thing with care, hilt out. I blinked at him and took it gently. It was a karambit: an odd little Indonesian knife about eight inches long and curved the whole length. The handle and blade were all one continuous piece of steel. A ring at each end defined the handle as much as the grip scales did. The blade looked like the flattened silver claw of a raptor and it was wickedly sharp along the inside curve. It couldn’t have weighed a quarter of a pound and it wasn’t designed to stab, only to slice, but it would do that with elegant efficiency.

I looked a question at Solis, who shrugged his eyebrows and pulled a face as if to say “You know how it is.” Except that I wasn’t sure now that I did. Still, I nodded and thanked him and braced myself to go back to the inhospitable Grey.

Father Otter stopped me as I knelt back down beside the delirious Gary Fielding. “They will come as soon as they know our cousin is free or dead. Be prepared.”

My heart was shivering and running rough, but I turned a cold look on him as if I weren’t frightened to my very bones. “That will be your job, because my friend and I need some answers from your cousin before I go any further. And if I don’t like them, you should fear me as much as the merfolk.” Then I shook him off and turned back to Fielding.

Pure bluff and bullshit, of course, since there was no way I alone—or even with Solis’s help—could hold off an army of shape-shifting otters as well as a cohort of pissed-off mermaids. But I still wanted to know what had actually happened on board Seawitch and if I was about to free a guilty man from punishment, or a falsely accused one.

One of the problems of the Grey is time; it proceeds strangely, sometimes too fast and sometimes too slow. It breaks and falters and remains like ice floes adrift in the cold, cold sea. This operation would have to go fast, but no matter how quickly I went, I had no way of knowing how much time would elapse in the normal world or how fast any adversary would arrive in the Grey. I hoped Solis would be safe; then I pushed my fear aside and got back to work.

Instead of sinking down into the Grey as I usually do, I tried pulling it over me like a blanket, keeping myself physically present in the normal world while surrounding myself in the world of magic. The Grey resisted initially, then flowed over me in a rush, almost knocking me down into its flood. I held myself to the rocky ground and felt the parallel worlds shimmy and slither together. The sensation of motion sickness swamped me for a moment but I fought it down to a level I could sustain for a little while without throwing up. I crept forward a few inches so I was pressing against the struggling shadows of Fielding’s dual forms.

I reached for them and the world lurched. I slammed my hands down on the mist-flooded rock floor and heard the knife ring on the stone. The instability at my feet fled, leaving me anchored for the moment, but I was sure the ghost world would trickle back all too soon. I dug my toes under Fielding’s physical body and he gave a banshee wail, arching up a little before he settled back down, pinning my sneaker-clad feet to the corporeal reality of stone.

I muttered to him, “Just hang in there a little longer, Fielding.” Then I pushed my hands into the writhing mass of his shadows.

I pushed and tugged on the forms that burned my hands with alternating heat and cold. Representing the dual parts of his nature, they had polarized their representations in the Grey as well: the water form damp, icy, and fluid; the earth form spiky, hot, and resistant. While the water shadow moved aside easily under my push, it also flowed back fast and my first impulse to shove that aside and then sever the invasive magical strands exposed between the two masses was foiled by the material’s ability to ooze around my hand.

But the shadow wasn’t as fast-moving as water and it didn’t pass through my hand but around it. I pulled the combined mass closer, ignoring Fielding’s howl of agony by gritting my teeth until I heard them grind. Then I pushed my left hand into the thin cleft between the shadows, wedging it just wide enough to shove my shoulder into. I worked my way deeper into the combined forms, using my dense human body to hold the liquid shadow back long enough to expose a tangled net of energy. I blew out my breath to gain a precious inch and reached into the new-made gap to sweep the blade of the hooked knife through the nearest binding filaments of invasive magic.

The strands of red and olive sparked and burned away as I severed them and Fielding sighed and yelped at my feet, twisting with every virtual inch of separation gained. I worked deeper, toward the last dense area near the center of the entwined shadow forms. A roaring filled my ears and I forced myself to suck in a painful lungful of air and expand my chest as I leaned into the core of Shelly’s curse.

Through the din in my head I heard Fielding whimpering and a cacophony of shouts, barks, and yelps underscored by a pounding that shook the cave and thundered on my eardrums. The oscillating pressure of the sound made me shudder with nausea. I didn’t raise my eyes from the task at hand, even when I felt something cold and liquid spatter onto my legs and right shoulder. I shoved as hard as I could, paying Fielding’s scream no heed as I reached through the moment’s gap between his two forms and drew the knife down and back, the curved blade sweeping through the taut bundle of gleaming magic like a scythe through grass. The entangled, writhing forms rushed apart and Fielding roared, bucking and shoving me away as I clutched frantically and snapped off the last clinging filaments of the curse as I fell.

I landed hard on my back and felt my abused rib pop. I didn’t have the breath to cry out and barely kept hold of consciousness as the normal and ghost realms fell apart, leaving me beached on the wet rocks of the cave as the otters and the dobhar-chú leapt at the invading flood of waterborne merfolk.

At their back, held up by a wave that crested but didn’t break, I glimpsed two humanoid forms with long, streaming hair: one pale green; the other vivid red. And then the two forces crashed together and the battle front was obscured by an explosion of salt water.