Seawitch: A Greywalker Novel

by Kat Richardson

  The seaside town wasn’t pretentiously quaint yet, but it was working on it, keeping the buildings short and widening the sidewalks near the boardwalk and municipal marina to encourage foot traffic to the little commercial district along Marine View Drive. The east side, near the freeway, was nowhere near as picturesque as the west side. Reeve’s home was kind of the same: cute on the outside and much less charming inside.

  It was just after three o’clock as we pulled up in front of the building. I thought it looked like the suburban equivalent of a hobbit’s house: low and rambling with arched window frames and doorframes and green stucco that blended into the landscaping. The plants in the yard were just a little wild and seemed to have been miniaturized in some fashion, not to bonsai tiny, but to Kincaid-cottage cute. Straight cement walkways to each door slightly ruined the effect, but I thought it was probably a concession to canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. There was no front stoop in front of Reeve’s door; the porch was just a slightly sloped cement rectangle. A cast-concrete figure of a semireclining mermaid sat on one corner of the pad, patchy remnants of sparkly blue paint making her supporting tail look leprous, while the red color that had adorned her hair had flaked and gone gray-brown. A scatter of shells and a wisp of sea grass circled the base. Just beyond the porch I saw tiny white and blue sparks in the Grey that darted through the foliage near the house and danced fleetingly across the mermaid with a sudden blush of emerald light that faded as quickly as it had come. Other than that the building was magically dull.

  Because Reeve was now approaching eighty, according to the Department of Licensing, we did not attempt the tactic of simply showing up to ask questions. We called first, which netted us a civil greeting at the door, though it took some time for Reeve to open it to us. He didn’t move very fast; he wasn’t using a cane or a walker but it was obvious to me from the way his whole right side seemed slightly collapsed that he could have used some kind of assistance.

  “Ah, the cops!” Reeve exclaimed in a mushy voice that issued only from the left side of his mouth. He had been a big man in his younger days but now he was stooped and withered. His shaggy white mustache—now gone a little yellow—and large ears seemed to be compensating for his hair, which was white and had thinned to expose a spotted scalp between the fluffy strands. “Come on in. Don’t mind the place—I hate it. We’ll go out back.”

  Inside the house was faded and too full of once-fine furniture that didn’t really fit the small rooms. The whole thing had an air of benign neglect to it—it was clean enough but nothing was really kept up. We followed Reeve through a grim little kitchen that even yellow paint and matching wallpaper hadn’t perked up and out into a small yard made private by a vine-covered fence. A large tree cast pleasant shade over the green-painted iron table and matching chairs he directed us to with a jerky wave of his left hand.

  “The sundeck—if you will,” he said with what might have been a chuckle or an incipient cough. A plate of misshapen homemade cookies and a sweating pitcher of iced tea large enough in which to sink a small flotilla of bathtub toys awaited us.

  As we sat, something rustled in the bushes behind a tiny dried-up fountain with a flurry of Grey sparks that glittered green and gold for a moment, then vanished as the sound died away. Reeve grunted as he lowered himself clumsily into one of the chairs. “Neighbor’s cat’s always slinking around in the shrubs. Looking for rats, I say. She always squeals like a lubber when I say that. Don’t know why; killing rats is what cats are best for.” He seemed to fall the last inch or so into his chair and sighed heavily. Then he looked up at Solis and me. One of his eyes wandered a little, but the other was a piercing blue that seemed to cut right into us. “Now. What was it you want with me? Something about the ’Witch, I suppose.”

  We both gave him our best bland expressions. I spoke first. “Why do you suppose that, Captain Reeve?”

  “I’m a little slow these days, but I ain’t stupid and I watch TV. Saw her on the news the other night. Though why the police are interested after so long, I can’t guess. So tell me and I’ll think on how I might help you.”

  “I have to be honest with you: I’m not actually with the police,” I explained. “I was hired by the insurance company.”

  Reeve snorted. “Money grubbers. Probably think the boat’s a scam, don’t they?”

  I made a noncommittal noise.

  Reeve turned his sharp gaze on Solis. “And you?”

  Solis returned a small nod. “I am with the police. We wish to know more about your apprentice who captained the Seawitch on her last voyage.”

  “Gary? That scamp. Never could decide if I was glad or sad over him.”

  Solis lifted an interrogative eyebrow but said nothing.

  Reeve made another of his scoffing snorts. “He was an able seaman and captain—had the paperwork to prove it and the skill—but like a lot of young fellas then, he had a bit of an eye for skirts. Thought being a sea captain was sexier than being a bar pilot—it was all about getting the girls.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “What’s a bar pilot? Mrs. Starrett mentioned something about crossing the bar . . . is that related?”

  “Columbia Bar,” Reeve replied. “River comes down to the sea mighty strong and dirty—you can see the silt spill from space—and deposits the mud and debris for a couple miles at the mouth of the Columbia River, making a shoal. That’s a sort of moving underwater sandbar, missy. What with the current going out and the tides moving, it’s a damned dangerous place to cross. But you want to navigate the coast here, you’ve got no other choice ’cept to sail out a hundred miles or so to avoid the current push. Takes a skilled and experienced pilot to cross the bar more than once—’cause once could be luck, but more than that is skill. Gary had that skill—had a feel for the bar you don’t see in every ship’s pilot. Could take damn near any craft across and never so much as scrape the barnacles off a hull.” He gave me a wink and added, “Gary once told me he’d been kissed by a Columbia River mermaid when he was a kid and I half believed him.”

  “He sounds remarkable.”

  Reeve nodded. “He was. I worked with him first time on a yacht delivery coming up from Alameda. He fair impressed me. And he hadn’t his captain’s papers yet, so I offered to take him aboard so he could get his hours. Didn’t hurt me any to have another able man around and I thought I might start me a service, but I dropped that plan when Starrett come along with his offer. Hard to refuse.”

  “What was the offer?”

  “Prep, maintenance, and permanent on-call at thirty thousand a year. Doesn’t sound like much, but I could do whatever else I liked so long as I always had the Seawitch ready to go and took her out for him whenever he said. I also brought on a cook and extra hands if wanted and I could take the ’Witch out on my own for shake-down cruises and the like whenever he wasn’t using her. I made some right good money taking youngsters like Gary out for their training hours and doing the odd private party when Starrett was out of town.”

  “Did he know about your sideline?”

  “He did. Only kink in the line we ever had was Starrett blowing up rough at me over fuel costs. After that I paid the fuel myself, but I was charging the trainees and party folk for it already, so that was fair, yeah?”

  “Captain Reeve,” Solis cut in, “why were you not on board the Seawitch for her last voyage?”

  Reeve peered at Solis, his energy corona pulling in and fading to a watery apple green color. Then he looked away. “Truth to tell, I wasn’t fit for duty. First time since I’d taken the job.”

  Solis didn’t say anything for a moment or two and the silence in the yard stretched, broken only by a new rustling from the cat in the bushes. Finally he asked, “In what way were you unfit?”

  Reeve flushed a mottled red that continued into his aura, but he didn’t yell or demonstrate his anger. He just said quietly, “I was drunk. Three sheets to the wind and didn’t give a whore’s damn. Thought I could hold my liquor better than that.
Guess I was wrong. Starrett wasn’t pleased at first, but then he didn’t seem to mind so much when I said I’d send Gary along. He liked Gary—they had that skirt-chasing hobby in common. And I won’t say I was entirely disappointed to miss the cruise. Kept thinking I saw the dobhar-chú hanging around the boat.”

  I frowned at the foreign phrase that sounded like “dovr koo” and saw Solis do the same. Reeve noticed our confusion.

  “Dobhar-chú—the water hounds. Bad-luck beasts. You see one by a river, you run away fast or they’ll catch you and drown you. You seen one hanging round your boat, you can be sure something bad’s going to happen on board. That’s what I saw the last day I piloted Seawitch: a dobhar-chú. It came out of the water and right up the boarding ladder. Then it just stood on the foredeck and stared at me like it was memorizing my face, planning some kind of mischief. I went straight to the bar with the old hands and their gals once I got ashore and had a few drinks—maybe more. And I told myself it wasn’t anything but an otter, but you know what happened later, and I say it was the fault of the dobhar-chú.”

  “This . . . water hound is some kind of sailor’s omen, then?” I asked.

  Reeve shook his head. “Not an omen; the real thing.”

  “A mythical beast . . .” Solis muttered.

  Reeve’s aura flashed red again, but this time he didn’t hold his temper back. “You think I’m crazy? You think I’m lying?” he shouted, leaning farther forward with each angry sentence. His half-slack face twisted into something from a nightmare and his words came out in a wet slur. “You think because sailors are superstitious it must all be hokum and smoke rings? You’ll take it more seriously when you’re the one looking a devil dog in the face and you see those teeth shining, hear its voice. . . . You won’t think it’s a myth: You’ll think it’s going to rip your throat out and dance in your entrails. You will believe you are staring Death in the face!”

  “Captain Reeve,” I started, leaning and reaching toward him, hoping I could touch that angry energy around him and maybe—if I still had the ability—calm him down. But he wrenched sideways in his chair as if my impending touch were poisonous, and he fixed me with a glare of utter malevolence.

  “Don’t you try to gentle me, missy!” Reeve snapped. “I’ll put you over the side with the rest of those fish-tailed bitches.” And he made a jabbing gesture at my face with three arthritic fingers from his left hand. He seemed to look right through me or even past me as he continued. “You—you—you—” He started choking, the word catching in his throat like a bone and his face going crimson.

  Still glaring through me and gagging on whatever curse he was trying to pronounce, Reeve began to topple from his seat. Solis swore and jumped up to help as I dove to catch the old man. But even falling and now turning blue in the face, Reeve jerked himself away from me, landing hard on the little cement patch of his patio. I could hear his head knock on the paving and he started convulsing and twitching, keeping his eyes pinned over my shoulder as Solis pushed me aside and tried to help him. I backed away from Reeve’s accusing stare and grabbed my cell phone to call 911, looking around to see what it was that was upsetting him so much—if it wasn’t actually me—but all I saw was the shuddering of leaves in the shrubs and a glitter of Grey sparks.

  I turned my attention back to the men. The energy around Reeve’s head and body was blackening, as if ink were flooding into the psychic space around him, and I could feel a twisting, breathless pain in my own chest as I watched him in horror. He was dying right in front of me and there was nothing I could do for him and no way for me to avoid the wrenching shock of death that would strike me when he stopped fighting.

  I started to kneel down and help even as I tried to tell the emergency operator what was happening, but Solis, cursing quietly in Spanish, pushed me away. “You frighten him,” Solis whispered. “Back away.”

  I moved back a little, out of Reeve’s sight and where I could no longer see his accusing eyes. In a few minutes the EMTs arrived and hustled past me to the still-thrashing man. I could see Reeve arch and writhe, his eyes rolling up in his head, and I expected to feel the ripping pain of death slam through me. . . .

  But it didn’t come.

  I backed up against the plant-draped wall of the building and slid down into the Grey. I wanted to see what was happening to Reeve in the magical realm, since I wasn’t experiencing what I expected.

  Reeve’s little garden was hot in the Grey. The plants were all a-rustle with green and blue energy and a spiked line of black and orange defined the wire fence along one edge that had become overgrown by plants. But there wasn’t much around Reeve himself except an exceptionally thick cloud of energy of mingled dirty-green, violet, and red threads that seemed to pour from the dry fountain and twist from the foliage, wrapping and swirling around him in coils like a boa constrictor slowly squeezing. . . . As I watched, the green-smoke snake of Grey loosened a little, unwinding a bit, and the pain in my own chest eased.

  I looked for the source of the torturing mist. . . . Something was moving along the fence line, heading for a ragged hole where the flow of energy had been disrupted and towing the stream of ugly smoke. I dropped as deep into the mist world as I dared, knowing I was probably as incorporeal as a ghost to normal eyes, and started after whatever was slinking toward the magical exit.

  In the deep Grey, where the mist is thinner and energetic strands and shapes of magic dominate the senses, everything living or magical looks like a child’s scribble executed in burning, colored light. The thing creeping away from Reeve, dragging the Christmas-colored rope of agony, was about the size of a large dog and wound of blue energy threads so dark they gleamed like sapphires dipped in running, liquid tar. Barbs of red erupted from the thing here and there, as if it had spikes and extra claws jabbing outward through its skin. I fixed my eyes on it and moved closer. . . .

  It stopped and turned its ill-defined head to pierce me with a glare of furious light from eyes like a volcano’s seething heart. More eyes glared from the writhing green cable. I twitched backward, rising a bit out of the Grey without intending to. In the more normal zone, the beast that glared at me from the thicket had a heavy black head, a humped back, and luminous eyes, but was so dark it was difficult to see. Until it bared its teeth—a double line of sharp white serrations meant for crushing and tearing.

  We stared at each other for a charged moment, then the hard-to-see creature sucked in the ugly skein of torment and turned away with a grunt as if brushing me off. It dove through the hidden hole in the fence, trailing sparkles of gold and green and a flicker of red and disappeared as if it had dissolved into the very fabric of the Grey.

  I drew a long, slow breath and backed away, stepping out of the Grey and smack into Solis.

  He blinked in surprise and took a step aside. “I thought you—” he started, then cut himself off. He looked back toward the EMTs, who had just finished loading Reeve onto a collapsible gurney. I turned my head that way, too.

  The EMTs raised the gurney quickly, locking it into position to be pulled out to the aid car, and rushed their burden through the yard and house. We trailed behind. After loading Reeve into the back, one of the EMTs paused long enough to say, “He’s holding on but he’s not stable. We’ll take him to Highline—it’s the closest trauma center.”

  FIVE

  The emergency medical crew left us in the front yard in a swirl of retreating sirens and a cluster of concerned neighbors. Solis and I had to find someone to look after Reeve’s home until he came back—if he did—before we could leave, too.

  I walked back to Reeve’s garden to grab my bag and paused to look at the dry fountain that had seemed to pour out so much of the Grey energy that had attacked Reeve. The bottom was painted with a brown scalloped pattern, like waves, obscured by a handful of sand, colored stones, and dried grasses.

  Solis called to me to join him in the more pressing business of securing Reeve’s house. As we answered questions discreetly and ask
ed after someone to take charge, I kept catching him scowling in my direction. I wasn’t surprised when he buttonholed me beside my truck as I tried to slip away from the diminishing crowd.

  “I did not see you when the EMTs arrived. Where did you go?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  He frowned at me. “You did. As you did on board the Seawitch. You were not where you were.”

  I crossed my arms over my less-than-impressive chest—I’m not built to win any wet T-shirt contests—but I felt suddenly defensive in the beam of Solis’s intensity. “I didn’t actually go anywhere. I saw something and I had to take a closer look. And my way of taking a closer look . . . it’s complicated.”

  I knew he wanted to say something else but he settled for, “What did you see?”

  “Come and take a look for yourself.” I led him to the backyard again and pointed into the bowl of the dry fountain. “Does that look to you like what we saw on the boat down in that crew cabin?”

  Solis knelt and studied the red-brown figure under the blown sand and dried grass. “Similar . . . the same encircling waves . . . But what lies at the center?” he added. He took a pen out of his pocket and poked the dried grass aside. A tiny spark of oily green energy flared and died out as he moved the detritus.