A voice rose from the collective in the hissing of sea spume against rocks. “We did our part. Now uphold the bargain. Save us.”
Solis glanced at me. “Do you hear . . . ?”
I nodded. Then I put one finger to my lips, afraid his presence might disrupt the conversation I needed to have.
“It wasn’t my bargain,” I started. “I don’t know what happened or what to do. Tell me. Show me.”
The darkness of spirits shuffled and opened a narrow path between them. Solis and I both turned our heads to see where it led, but the only view was a hard green-gold gleam lying low in a sea of grime.
“You see—?” I started in a whisper.
“There is a light that cannot exist, gleaming where I cannot go.” His voice was low and unsteady.
“Yes, you can. Hold on to my arm and we can’t be separated. This is like walking a tightrope: Don’t look down and don’t look back until your feet are back on solid ground.”
I sucked in a preparatory breath, squared my shoulders, and felt his grip on my elbow. I started toward the glow. Solis came along a step behind me. I could feel the warm impression of his presence at my back, even though I didn’t dare turn to see him. I did not want them—whoever they were—to take any notice of Solis, nor did I want to lose sight of whatever it was they were showing me, leading me toward.
The ghosts remained nebulous and thready as we passed between them. I heard Solis breathing a little harder and faster than usual and I wished I knew what he was seeing, but it seemed a bad time to ask.
It felt like an hour but it must have been only a minute or two until we reached the gleam, walking slowly out of the Grey and back into the normal—or nearly normal—world. It lay near our feet, a reflection of light obscured by mucky water in the crook of the floor where it met the hull and gapped a bit here and there between the boat’s ribs. The reflection was duller here and the ghosts had become less present, though they were far from gone. I stooped and reached out for whatever the green-gold flash was coming from, shivering as my hands pushed into gelid water thickened with algae and gunk.
There was something cold and metallic below the water’s surface—just the merest inch or less of a curved edge sticking out. I pushed my long fingers between the hull and the thing to get a grip on it. It was hollow, and once I had hooked my fingers under the edge I pulled upward with care. The thing was chilly and heavy and felt too large to come back up through the narrow gap between the boat’s ribs.
Something clanked against the floorboards. Solid, normal floorboards. I risked a glance back over my shoulder at Solis, hoping he was really there, or really here depending on how I thought of it. He was and he stared down at me with a frown that was too tight around the mouth and too white around the eyes, but he was solid and willing.
“There is something?”
“Yes, something real, but it’s too big to pull through the hole. We need to lift this section of floor if we can.”
Solis reached into his jacket and brought forth a penlight. He sighed relief as the unexpectedly bright light came on at his flick of the switch, nearly blinding me. The flashlight cast a bright, shivering circle on the floor and hull just around the gap where my hand vanished into the hole. The illumination bounced off the metal edge I held on to and rekindled the strange spark of color we’d seen earlier. Solis played the light shakily across the floor until he spotted a seam nearby and, turning slowly, followed it to more seams.
“You will have to move to your right,” he said, his voice deadened by the insulation on the walls but no longer quivering. “Can you hold on to the object if you move?” Our return to the normal world must have reassured him everything was all right. I was a little less sure, but I’ve had more experience with ghosts.
I kept my own counsel on that score and replied, “I think so. It feels loose in here. . . .” I shifted the heavy thing into my left hand and shuffled awkwardly to my right like an injured crab with one claw dragging. It pulled on my fingers and made my knuckles feel swollen and overworked as it clunked along beneath the floor, jamming on ribs and thudding to a halt. I had to stoop like an ape and pass it from one hand to the other around each rib, then back into my left to drag it on until I’d moved my weight clear of the floor seam Solis was illuminating. My back, shoulders, arms, and hands ached from the strain and the chill, but I held on.
Solis bent and stuck his fingers into a depression in the floor to get a grip and lift the segment of floorboards. The thick planks came up with the screech of swollen wooden structures reluctantly scraping open. The smell of cold swamp water and brine wafted on the updraft.
Solis leaned the hatch against something bulky and denser than the ghosts. I guessed it was one of the engines, but I wasn’t sure and I wouldn’t risk my grip on the thing to look around. I wiggled the metal object loose from where it had lodged next to a rib and pulled it upward. It felt huge and ridiculously heavy for something hollow. . . .
Solis shone his light on it and it gave back another sickly green-gold shimmer.
“A bell . . .” I whispered as it came up into the light.
“Our soul . . .” the ghosts sighed, melting away and taking the remnant Grey with them. I didn’t think they were gone for good, just exhausted and satisfied that we had what they wanted us to have.
I turned the bell in my hands, letting the filth-crusted bronze catch the beam from Solis’s pocket flashlight as I wiped the worst of the gunk away. The bell was huge and weighed more than ten pounds, easily. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed too large for the bracket we’d seen the day before up near the boat’s bridge. The light caught on the cast edges of a deep engraving along the bell’s mouth. I read it aloud as Solis picked out the words with the penlight’s illumination: “S.S. Valencia.”
TEN
The penetrating chill of Seawitch’s engine room was too uncomfortable to encourage any further investigation once we had the bell in hand, so Solis and I agreed to head topside and catch the light and warmth before discussing what had just happened. The sun was still up, even though it was definitely heading for the western horizon, but at this latitude and so close to the solstice the light would linger until nearly eleven at night. We carried the slippery bell down to the dock and rinsed the worst of the slime off it. Solis kept a wary eye on me throughout the move and cleanup.
“I did warn you things were going to get weird,” I said, not looking up from the bell.
“You did. I had not expected quite what happened.”
“What did happen?” I asked, glancing at him as I brushed off the worst of the muck from the bell.
He gave me a puzzled frown in return. “You were there. . . .”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure that what I experience isn’t the same as what you do. So what was it like?”
Solis sat on his heels and thought about it. “Cold. Like a nightmare I used to have in my youth: darkness like sharp black lines that crowd in from the edges of vision, thicker as they draw together until I can only see straight ahead. Yet things continue to be there in the corners of my vision, stabbing at my eyes. I could see you—shining silver but dim, as if light barely touched you. Your arm was cold and hard to hold on to—insubstantial. There was sound, whispering that sometimes rose to sharp words and then quieted again, like people arguing when they don’t want to be heard but can’t stop themselves. And then the reflection of light off this bell was like . . . a distant star, so small and yellow. It shone where it could not have. It was under the floor but I saw the light. And then . . . just cold. But I felt as if someone watched us from concealment.”
“Huh,” I grunted, taking it in. It wasn’t so far away from parts of what I’d experienced, just less intense. It was his admission of nightmares that was most interesting, since the Grey tends to reflect and produce what the people in an area impress on it. This was the first time I’d had any proof that the experience of the Grey was individually tailored. It also made me wonder what other odd things had
happened in Solis’s life to let him get that close—because even pulled into it by me, a pragmatic hard case like him shouldn’t have experienced that depth.
Solis shook off the mood he’d created and turned his gaze back to the bell. “Valencia. Not Seawitch . . .”
“It’s obviously been there for quite a while.”
“Perhaps it was taken from another boat for service on board Seawitch.”
“Are you giving credence to the idea of a curse brought on by mounting parts from a doomed ship?”
“No . . .”
His voice wavered a little and I guessed he didn’t actually believe it was true but he was unsettled enough at the moment to let the idea slink into the back of his mind. I stuck a pin in that trial balloon. “It’s too big for the bracket we saw on board Seawitch. This bell never hung on that boat. Someone hid it in the engine room. I admit, I’d like to know why, and how it got there in the first place.”
“Do you wish to continue tomorrow? It’s after five now. . . .”
I hesitated. I wanted more answers and I wasn’t ready to stop for the night just yet, but I didn’t want to presume he had nothing better to do—he was married, after all, and I assumed from the way he’d mentioned his wife that his was not one of those barely functioning misery marriages that are too common among cops.
He echoed my own thoughts. “I would like some answers rather than endless questions. If you’re willing to bring the bell to my house, perhaps we can find some.” He raised his eyebrows, issuing a silent invitation.
“All right. I think there’s still a lot to talk about, too.”
He nodded and got to his feet, letting me take possession of the bell. “Agreed.”
Technically the bell was part of the boat’s inventory and therefore mine to oversee, so I appreciated the courtesy, but the damned thing was still pretty heavy and awkward to carry. Still, we could look at the bell in better light and more comfort at Solis’s house than Seawitch offered, and the other reports and photos would be available through his computer. So I wrestled the bell into the back of my Rover and followed Solis to his place.
Solis’s house sat on a moderate lot near the middle of the block on a street that wasn’t quite in trendy, yuppified Madrona and hadn’t quite bootstrapped itself out of gritty, poor, crime-ridden Central District. With its old foursquare houses straight out of a Sears catalog from the first quarter of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was mostly in the process of gentrifying. A couple of the neighbors hadn’t gotten that memo and their homes were still paint-peeling, weed-yarded hovels from which the sounds of TV and gangsta rap blared forth while packs of angry-looking young black or Hispanic men sat on the stoops and wandered in and out of the open doors, drinking beer, smoking, and conversing loudly. One of them hoisted a sarcastic salute at Solis as we drove past.
As he parked and got out of his car, Solis gave the boy and his seedy residence a narrow glare but he didn’t say or do anything more. Carrying the bell in a small canvas duffel I’d had in the back of my truck, I followed him up a short flight of concrete steps to his own neat, fenced yard and onto the raised wooden porch of the big, square two-story house. We opened the door on an old-fashioned foyer and an uproar.
A boy about ten years old raced from one doorway to another, hollering like a pig outracing a butcher. Solis reached out and caught the boy by the shoulder, turning him around with a firm curl of his arm. An irritated frizzle of orange sparks erupted around him in the Grey. The boy came to an abrupt halt, his eyes flashing wide and his own glimmering golden aura falling to a narrow band around his form as he stared at Solis and caught his breath with hastily compressed lips, smothering his shouts instantly.
Solis looked down and lifted one eyebrow, then shook his head, flinging a few sparks into the ghostlight while wearing an expression of severe disappointment. The little boy seemed to shrink, his shoulders slumping as he glanced at the floor. Solis relented, scooping the boy into a hug, followed by a whisper in his ear and a swift kiss on the cheek. Then he put the boy down again and asked him a question in Spanish. The boy pointed back toward the doorway he’d come from, his energy rising to a more normal range as he whispered something too low to make out and patted at what looked like a scorch mark on his sleeve. Solis nodded as if satisfied, examined and then kissed the reddened skin exposed by the burned sleeve, and shooed the boy away. The kid scampered off with a relieved smile up the staircase to our right.
A more distant ruckus continued farther back in the building. Solis glowered a second, his energy corona sparking orange and red. Then he reined in his temper with a visible effort and waved me on. We went under an arch and down a narrow passageway toward the noise, passing a large closet and a small bathroom tucked in under the staircase. Then we walked through a dining room with built-in cabinets that were partially refinished, making a low half wall between the dining room and a large, disarrayed living room on the left. We continued ahead through a scarred swinging door that was painted yellow on one side and white on the other.
We emerged in the yellow kitchen, where a petite woman in her thirties—his wife, I assumed—was trying to tear herself away from a flaming pan to go to the rescue of three very young children being herded into the rear utility room by a tiny, elderly woman in a white house dress and an aura so chaotic it looked like a furiously animated scribble of olive and red drawn by a deranged child. The children seemed to be objecting to the older woman’s harrying while Mrs. Solis—her own energy a harried orange shade flashing with tiny lightning bolts—snatched up a lid and slammed it over her pan, smothering the flames. Then she turned to intervene in the child herding, to which she seemed to object, judging by the way she flung her hands in the air and tried to separate the kids from their shepherd, muttering in Spanish as she did.
Solis cleared his throat and started, “¿Ximena? ¿Qué está—?”
Ximena Solis whipped around with a gasp, bringing her hands to her mouth, and I assumed some of the words she’d used weren’t appropriate around children or police detectives. A cloud of dismay seemed to envelop her. “Rey!” she squeaked, then launched a stream of flustered Spanish accompanied by a flurry of hand waving and gesticulating at the older woman. She broke off suddenly to bound over and wrench one of the children from the older woman’s grasp and push him toward Solis before she turned back to try to rescue another, scolding and pleading by turns, if I guessed the tone correctly.
The older woman picked up the smallest of the two remaining children—a little girl in a slightly grubby striped dress—and plopped her, shoes and all, into the wash sink. A splash of soapy water erupted along with a shriek and a spike of acid-yellow outrage from the girl.
Ximena, tiny red lightning bolts leaping from her, shoved the last free-range kid toward her husband and turned back around, planting her hands on her hips for a moment before throwing them into the air again in exasperation and letting out her own cry of indignation. “¡Mama! ¡No hagas eso!” She tried to reach past the older woman, who, though short, angular, and possibly addled, was apparently no weakling, and shouldered the younger woman away with insouciant ease. The other looked ready to explode.
Solis eased between them and pushed the two women apart. He kept his gaze on the older one, but he was clearly speaking to his wife when he said in carefully clipped syllables, “Ximena. Vuelve a la cocina.”
The moment she had flounced away to remove the other children from the kitchen, Solis reached past the old woman and her belligerent shoulders to pluck the now-wailing little girl out of the sink. For a moment, the sparking energy in both the adults’ auras seemed to hiss and coruscate as if on the teetering edge of flaring into furious white heat that would consume everything near it in a flash fire of destruction.
Solis set the girl on the floor and snatched a bath towel off a stack on the clothes dryer nearby to wrap her in, and the moment’s potential faltered, sending a shiver into the Grey.
The woman let out a screech of
her own and turned around to berate Solis, bony little claw fists propped on her hips and her beaky face thrust forward like a furious crow, her energy blowing outward into a harsh, violent tangle of red spikes. Her posture was so much the full-bore version of Ximena’s aborted stance that I knew the woman had to be her mother. She cawed at her son-in-law in a glass-shattering voice, dropping Spanish words I knew nice old ladies didn’t use in polite Colombian company.
Solis whipped a fisted hand up between them, pointing his index finger at her in a warning gesture as his aura flushed a deep, vibrating red. Unlike his mother-in-law’s, his energy seemed to pull inward, intensifying and burning in a tightly controlled band around him. His expression was stern enough to give a charging rhino pause. “Mi casa, mis reglas,” he snapped.
The old lady shut her mouth with a snap, her tangled strands and spikes sucking inward but not really dissipating, and glowered at him before she also spun around and marched out of the room.
“Bruja vieja y vil,” Solis muttered, rolled his eyes, and stooped to pick up the sodden child. The hard red energy around him drained away, leaving a slightly too-bright residue that gave off occasional low sparks and glimmers of white and orange. He turned and saw me and I could tell he’d momentarily forgotten my presence in his house. His sparks died away.
He cleared his throat. “Have a seat in the kitchen. I will take Claudia Elena upstairs but I won’t be gone long.”
I wasn’t sure if that was an apology in advance, a warning, or what. I shrugged. “All right.”
Solis offered a small smile and walked past me. I followed him into the kitchen, where I could just glimpse two children’s faces peering into the room from the hallway beyond until they saw their father coming and disappeared from sight. I took a seat at the oversized work island in the middle, putting the bag full of bell down on the floor beside me. Ximena Solis stood at the stove, her back to me. She was mumbling and working with jerky, angry motions, occasionally tossing her head in dismissive fury. She turned suddenly with the scorched pan in her hand and let out a fearful yelp as she saw me, jumping in shock and barely keeping hold of the pan and its burned, goopy contents. She started to question me in Spanish, then stopped, made an exasperated face while shaking her head, and restarted in English.
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