Seawitch

TWENTY-SIX

When Solis and I stepped back on board, the decks of Mambo Moon were a mess. The skirmish between the merfolk and the dobhar-chú had sent a lot of sea life tumbling over the sides of the boat, and Quinton and Zantree were still clearing it away when we returned. Finishing the job killed about twenty minutes of the hour or so that we had before I’d have to be in place to bargain with and distract the sea witch from the snooping presence of Fielding and his relatives. Explaining what I needed to do took another ten minutes and resulted in an argument I didn’t win.

I’d just finished summarizing the events and discussion in the otter cave and said, “So, Quinton and I will take the bell to the dock while Paul and Solis move the boat out as close to the bay’s mouth as possible. I’ll use the bell to get the sea witch’s attention—”

Solis said, “No.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“I will not allow you to put yourself into the first line of fire.”

“Not your decision, Solis.”

“I believe it is. I am a policeman; you are not.”

“This is no longer a police matter. You have the answers you came here for. Your case is closed one way or the other. You can attempt to take Fielding in or not as you see fit, and I have the background info I need to put the insurance case to bed, too. All that’s left is the concerns of the dead and the magical. That’s my field.”

He shook his head. “Nonetheless, I will not be sidelined while you put yourself in danger. I can’t allow it.”

“I can’t take you both: Mambo Moon requires two crew, since Paul will need a lookout while he pilots.”

“Quinton is the more experienced boat hand. And it makes more sense for me to come with you than to stay here.”

I sighed and shook my head in exasperation. “Things are going to get very weird out there—”

“And the earlier parts of this day were not?”

“Not like it’s going to get. A few ghosts in the engine room and some talking otters is not even in the ballpark. Quinton’s been through this sort of thing with me before.”

“And you trust him more?”

Way to put me on the spot. “That is not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

“Well, if you want the truth, I don’t think your family would forgive me if I got you killed.”

He laughed a single hard bark of irony. “Eventually Ximena would understand. But Mama Gomez . . . she’s the one you should fear.”

“I do.”

“Most of the neighborhood is afraid of her.”

“Which surprises me not at all.”

“And does not change the situation. I will go with you.”

Quinton cleared his throat. “Far be it from me to get in the middle of this . . . interesting argument, but I really am the better boat hand and if this is going to turn into another sea battle, we frankly need the best hands aboard. Not that I’m dissing you, Rey, but—”

“The right man in the right position is more important than hurt pride,” Solis said.

“Yeah. But while we’re on the subject of who won’t forgive whom . . . I’ve already lost Harper once.” Quinton gave Solis a meaningful look.

Solis returned a somber nod. “I understand.”

Zantree cackled. “I feel like I should break out the rum and cutlasses!”

“You might need to yet. Those merfolk aren’t numerous, but they seem to leave quite a mess. If they come after the boat again instead of focusing on me and”—I hesitated for a moment while I adjusted my mind to the change in my plan— “me and Solis, you may need a few sharp blades around.”

Zantree looked excited. “Really? ’Cause I have an old navy cutlass I’ve been dying to swing.”

Dying . . . I hoped not. “Much as I hate to say it, now would be the time. They may be magical and they have an illusory cohort, but these merfolk are corporeal enough to stab,” I replied.

Zantree looked ready to dance a jig and I wasn’t sure I’d just said the wisest thing. “Arrr! They’ll never take us alive. Eh, Mr. Quinton?”

Quinton laughed and saluted. “Aye, aye, Cap’n Zantree! All hands to stations and prepare to repel boarders!”

I felt a strange tickle of adrenaline from Quinton and I stared at them, incredulous. “Hey, this isn’t a game, you two. These creatures kill people.”

Quinton sighed. “Then all the better reason to get our humor on now. A little levity helps ease the sheer terror I’d otherwise be feeling at the thought of being gaffed by fish men.” I wanted to laugh, also, but I was too aware of how much responsibility I had for these three men and how terrible I’d feel if any of them were injured or worse. This responsible-friend thing? It bites.

We had a few more words about the details and I felt more and more desperate and afraid for them, but I didn’t speak up—what would have been the point?—even when Solis and I were ready to head out for the dock that stuck out from the shore, while Quinton and Zantree prepared to move Mambo Moon out as close to the cove mouth as possible to offer the surest escape. If Solis and I couldn’t rejoin them, we’d decided to ditch the dinghy, walk across the thin neck of forest to the other cove on the south side of the island, and wait there for the boat or a message. It was only a little more than a mile to hike, but we were sure the merfolk would not follow us across the ridge of dry land.

And although I had denied it to Fielding, I was prepared to destroy the sea witch if it was the only way to keep the men with me safe. I wondered if my mixed feelings of fear, frustration, and resolve were as strange to Quinton as the flood of excitement and trepidation he was sending to me.

Before we left, Quinton and Zantree did some flitting about with the dinghy to free the anchors. Once they were done, Solis and I, carrying one handheld radio between us, bundled up in waterproof jackets against the rage of the sea witch and her clan. Then we took the little boat and, with the bell from the Valencia tucked into a compartment in the bow, headed for the dock. As soon as we were clear, Zantree eased the big boat’s engines up enough to make way and turned her gently toward the exit. Solis and I continued on alone, running across the gold and orange reflections of sunset on the water. I hoped Fielding and the dobhar-chú were doing their part. . . .

This time there was no storm to weather and summer clouds picked up the reflected colors of the sunset and striped the sky in red and pink as Solis and I sped across the water to the dock. We had to cut into the edge of the paranormal bubble as we neared our goal, disturbing the calm like a pounding on the door, and the world turned dark and silver with washes of thin color, as if we’d plunged into an impressionist film version of the cove.

The water around us began to roil as if heated, though only a preternatural chill rose from it. By the time we’d tied off the dinghy at the short pier whose seaward half stuck into the overlay of Grey and normal, the water seemed to be alive.

I snatched the bell from the boat as it heaved on the unnatural swell. The green energy ribbons imprisoning the ghosts of Valencia within its bell burned vivid emerald spiked with ruby red and the spirits billowed around us in a howling chorus. I checked my watch; then I swung the bell hard and felt the clapper strike, the peal rolling outward like a shock wave of white light on a note that shook the sturdy little dock under our feet. If Solis was right in his observation, we’d have fifteen minutes until this bubble collapsed—and most likely took the gateway with it.

An answering shock of sound and light rolled back to us in a moment, and the water at the end of the dock belled upward like soft plastic deformed from below and lit by moving fireflies leaving sickly yellow-green trails below the bulging surface. The water rose higher until it was head height and then the surface peeled away, letting something come through.

Water shed off the writhing shape as it came up, as if it made the liquid and spat it forth until the air had dried it out too much to bear and the surface had to crack and peel away. The bulge differentiated slowly into three shapes riding a hillock of water: two slender women of nearly equal height and one wriggling, miserable man. The three were borne down to the dock as if by a giant watery hand.

The first woman stepped forward. Her long red hair fanned and billowed around her as if she were still immersed in the water and she gave a cruel little smile that showed serrated teeth. She seemed to be dressed in the shimmer of moonlight on the sea that obscured the details of her body without hiding the sensual shape of it. The face that was still that of Jacque Knight but, stripped of the illusion of boring humanity, she was more beautiful and terrifying. Behind her came her paler version: Shelly, whose white skin and silver hair both held a pearly greenish tinge that gave her the look of something fragile and ephemeral. In this overlapped world I could see the faint impression of scales under Shelly’s skin and a long scar ruining the symmetry of her coltish legs and awkward feet.

From a swift, hard glance deeper into the Grey I could see that Jacque’s form was more true, if somewhat glamorized, while Shelly looked more truly a woman who was half-fish, walking uncomfortably on her split tail.

Shelly held on to Gary Fielding’s right arm but it was Jacque who reached back to yank him forward. She held him out toward us and shook him. Shelly stumbled a little as she was dragged along.

“Did you send this creature into our realm to steal from us? Or is he as presumptuous as ever all on his own?” the sea witch’s voice ripped the air.

Fielding crumpled to his knees as Jacque let him go. I wanted to yell at him and demand to know what fool thing he’d been doing to get himself captured but I restrained myself.

“Where ever did you find him? I thought he’d taken off when Father Otter was busy with your fishy friends.”

“Does that fur-bearing fool think he can spy on me with the likes of this shabby thing? Or wreck my plans a second time by stealing my heir away?”

I held on tighter to the bell. “Has Mr. Fielding ever been one to do as he was told?” I asked, carefully skirting the question.

“And do you come to me now to ransom him back?”

“It’s not quite what we had in mind,” I replied.

As Jacque kept her attention on me, Fielding huddled into a ball. Shelly crept forward and dragged him backward a little, out from between the two of us. She kept her eyes turned away from mine, and her mother never turned her own gaze from me.

Jacque gave me an imperious raise of her eyebrows. “Then what brings you?”

“There is a small matter of the boat you took twenty-seven years ago—the Seawitch. . . .”

“What of it? I have it no longer, thanks to this one,” Jacque added, aiming a kick where Fielding’s head had recently been.

“It’s not the boat I want so much as the souls you took from it.”

Jacque crowed with laughter. “Paltry things!”

“Then you won’t mind trading them to me for these,” I said, holding up Valencia’s bell but making sure to keep it close to my own body so she couldn’t snatch it from me.

Jacque tried to dart forward, but she wasn’t built to do so out of the water and I fell back, luring her closer to the landward end of the dock. Solis was now nearly next to the sea witch and he made a face and stepped aside as if to avoid touching her, but his move put him slightly behind her, as we’d planned.

Then Fielding sat up and turned to look at Shelly. “I’m so sorry,” he babbled. “I didn’t mean what I did—I was so stupid and I let horrible things happen to you. And,” he went on, repeating himself compulsively, “Shelly, Shelly, I love you and I’m so, so sorry. . . .”

Jacque sneered and turned to look back at Fielding. I wanted to scream at him to shut the hell up.

But any sound I would have made was instantly drowned in a roar of churning water and the shriek of creatures throwing themselves into battle.

The water within the bubble of overlapping worlds burst upward as the shapes of otters and merfolk charged at one another and clashed violently all along the encircling edge. Too soon and bringing far too many, the skirmish couldn’t have been more ill-timed with Fielding’s babbling stupidity.

The sea witch whirled back to me, her face a rictus of fury. “A trap! I’ll tear you into chum!” she shrieked, and lunged at me.

I backpedaled as fast as I could and heard Shelly scream for her mother to stop. Fielding continued to cry out to Shelly and tried to grab her. She shook him off and chased after Jacque. He spun and came back toward me.

I ducked the sea witch and ran toward the free-floating end of the dock, hugging the bell to my chest until I could reach Fielding. “You giant furry idiot!” I yelled. “Stop mooning after your lost love and get the damned ghost receptacles. Now!”

He ignored me and threw himself at Shelly again, moaning her name. She skipped to the side but missed her footing and fell into the bay with a yelp of surprise. Then she flipped in the water and swam away.

“No! Shelly!” Fielding cried.

Jacque rushed up after me and snatched at him, tangling her hands in the shadow of his otter form. “I’ll show you once and for all, you meddling cur!”

Fielding screamed. I reached out with one hand to steady his form, snapping off the tendrils of Jacque’s magic as quickly as I could—which would never be fast enough, but I’d be damned if all the work I’d done would go to hell this way, and I didn’t want her and her magic reinforcing the merfolk against the dobhar-chú until I had what I needed.

“Goddamn you,” I muttered between gritted teeth, focusing my thoughts on the Guardian Beast, wherever it was. “Why aren’t you lending a hand if you want these damned souls so much?” But it replied not at all, nor showed any sign it was nearby. It’s nice to know management thinks you can handle the messes on your own but I really could have used more help.

Solis tried to grab on to the corporeal Fielding. The other man was squirming around and his shape was heaving and fluctuating too much to give the cop a grip, but the sergeant continued to try to hold his subject.

The sea witch abandoned the men with a howl of rage and turned her ire on me. “Give it to me!”

Mute from lack of breath and the jabbing agony in my side, I shook my head. Behind her I could see the bubble of the overlapping worlds shivering as if some wind had touched it and I thought we were about out of time. If I couldn’t break her power before the gateway collapsed, I wasn’t sure that we’d ever leave.

The sea witch bared her jagged teeth at me and I could see the wisps of ghosts drawn to her through the ether of the Grey, streaming like mist filled with faces that screamed in panic and pain before flowing into her. She threw her arms upward; the sea rushed up, too, and then rained back down in torrents of red as the sky seemed to catch fire. Fish and firelit water pelted back down and I cringed, still holding the bell to my chest. Beyond the end of the dock full-on war raged in the heaving waters of the cove.

Holding on to the bell with one hand and trying to steady the writhing Fielding with the other, I had no way to defend myself. I rolled on top of the bell, my broken rib stabbing at my side and sending dizzying pain through my chest. Jacque gestured and the air seemed to fill with small, voracious sea creatures that swam through the falling bloody rain to attack me, needle teeth biting into my face, hands, and the back of my neck. I could have swatted them aside with the barest effort, but that would have taken my hands off the bell or Fielding and I couldn’t risk either. Time seemed to jerk and start, coming and going in washes of blackness as I fought to stay conscious, and tingles of Quinton’s reflected adrenaline jolted across my nerves.

“I have him!” Solis shouted. I assumed he meant Fielding but I didn’t turn to look.

I shook off the biting things long enough to plunge my hands into the bell. The green energy net sizzled and burned against my skin, pulling a strangled whimper from my throat. This time they did not resist—I’d brought them to the right place and the right moment. I yanked at the magical restraints without plan or thought, ripping them aside so the ghosts spilled out, and the searing feel of the magic gusted away on a puff of bitter wind.

The ghosts of Valencia whirled around Jacque in a maelstrom of tormented faces that screamed and cried and spun her away from me. She fought them—or for them—grabbing at them and trying to clutch them to her chest or stuff them into her mouth, but they continually slipped away and soared, spinning upward to spread out in the dome of the bubble like a white cloud.

The ghosts screamed and sighed and wailed as they lashed past her, seeming to tear the strength from her in wisps that rose with them until they rushed upward, free. Their howls of horror and agony slid into shouts of joy at their escape as they touched the edge of the overlapping worlds and burst through the silver wall of ghostlight, sparking in the last rays of the sun.

As the last of them slipped out of her grasp, Jacque let out a scream that rose and shook until the edges of the worlds shook with it. The silvery bubble of the Grey collapsed with the sound of a gong reverberating across the water and the last impressions of the ghosts vanished into the darkness of the natural sky thickly spread with stars and smeared here and there with the smudges of summer clouds still holding the ruddy tinge of the sun that had already slipped below the horizon. It hadn’t felt like fifteen minutes had elapsed. . . .

But, against my hope, the sea witch was still here, or, more to the point, not there. The gateway had collapsed but she was here in the world—the normal world—and I didn’t have the ghost receptacles, which meant she still had power. I didn’t know why she was still here and not locked away again in her bubble of Otherplace, but I’d have to worry about it later as my mind threw out a stream of curses I didn’t have the breath to vent.

The sea witch threw herself at me, no words this time, no declarations of hate, only action meant to bring me down. As long as the other ghosts remained unclaimed she still had power, but she seemed too angry to use it and turned to her fists and teeth instead.

I dropped the bell and fought back, but I was slow and dizzy from the pain in my chest that seemed to be shutting down my ability to breathe, to focus, to see. . . . I struck back more by instinct than anything else, blind and desperate and flailing.

I managed to duck her next blow, diving to the deck and rolling forward, but the cost in black agony was high and I staggered, trying to rise again. I turned around as she flung herself at me with taloned hands outstretched, jaws opening improbably wide to bite at my face. I hopped sideways, falling as much as anything, and turning to get behind her, but she still managed to gouge a bit of waterproof nylon and flesh from my left arm as she whirled around.

I stifled a cry as the yellow slicker shed tears of my blood. She turned back and grinned as I lost my footing and landed hard with one knee against the wet dock boards. Then she darted forward again, swooping lower this time, knowing I could only go down to avoid her.

I knew Solis was somewhere behind me but I wasn’t sure how far away or if his hands were full. I couldn’t spare the attention to find out. I’d have to fend for myself. My vision was unfocused through tears that welled with the agony in my side and arm but I could still see her coming. I shoved my right hand into my pocket and hoped I wouldn’t pass out. . . .

She raked her hands toward my throat, scoring lines in my skin.

I fell flat backward, clutching the gun in my pocket and tilting it upward. I squeezed the grips and trigger, feeling the jolt and burn as the bullet ripped through the fabric, scattering burning residue and jetting hot gas against my hand in the confined hollow of my coat pocket.

She made a guttural sound as she passed over me, kicking, then turning with a jerk, unharmed. She was laughing. She stomped at my head and I rolled aside but she still connected. I screamed as her foot dug into my unbroken ribs, jarring the rest of my body and heaving me a short distance forward, where I folded into a half-fallen heap, unable to breathe or move out of her path, barely staying as upright and conscious as I was. I squeezed my eyes against the pain and tried to rise past my knees—I did not want to die again. Not now and especially not crushed down like a broken toy.

I could hear her moving closer, speaking, her voice rising with a wind that came to her call. Electricity hummed and crackled in the air, raising the hair on my neck and arms and prickling across my skin. I didn’t know any counters to this but to shut her mouth, and though I struggled to point the gun at her again, I couldn’t see her well enough between my pain and tears to be sure I would hit her.

There was a scrabbling sound behind her and the sea witch gasped, lunged down against me, then squealed and went limp, her weight shoving me all the way to the deck. I pushed her weakly aside and crawled away, turning my head to see why she had collapsed.

Panting and wiping red fluid from his face, Solis backed away from the crumpled, still body of the sea witch. The karambit, clutched in his fist, dripped blood from its claw-shaped blade.

Fielding yelped behind him and rolled onto his side, his shape shifting toward otter. Solis spun, the knife low and ready to take on whatever came next. Then he dropped it to the decking and dove after the mutating dobhar-chú. It eeled out of his grasp and bounded for the seaward end of the dock. Solis scrambled to catch the creature but the odds seemed to be in Fielding’s favor.

I managed to pull my pistol out of my inner jacket pocket and from my prone position it wasn’t so hard to fire into the wooden planking just ahead of the fleeing otter. Pure dumb luck, I assure you, because I was shaking too hard for it to be anything else. Fielding skidded to a stop and looked around for another escape.

I gulped in a breath. “Don’t try,” I warned him. “I will shoot you. Next time. And damn to Father Otter.” I felt like I’d been steamrollered, but I must have been terrifying: still dangerous even flattened to the deck.

Fielding stayed, cringing, where he was and slowly shifted back to his human form. “I’m sorry. Please don’t shoot me. I won’t run.”

I glanced up at Solis and watched him turn to collect Fielding and bundle him into the boat.

I put my head down for a moment and lay on the wet dock until Solis returned to help me up. “That wasn’t fifteen minutes,” I whispered. “We failed.”

He shook his head and kept me moving forward. “Not yet.”

I staggered with him to the boat as he dragged the bell along. I tried not to look weak as a newborn until it was too late for Fielding to change his mind, but maybe no one cared, since I was sure I looked as helpless as I felt. I needed to stop making a habit of this sort of bravado, especially when my head was reeling and I was barely keeping my feet under me. I figured my luck was nearly over.

I oozed into the dinghy and literally sat on Fielding to keep him from shifting form all the way back to Mambo Moon.