Solis opted to stay on the flying bridge with Zantree while I went down and tucked myself into the galley. The morning air was still a bit too cold for me without more layers and I felt a little woozy when I looked out at all that water from the height of the flying bridge. I wasn’t so much seasick as sea wary—after all, whatever had forced Fielding off the boat had to come from somewhere and I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t come back, even though Fielding seemed to be its focus.
I sat on one of the built-in settees around the dining table, blocking myself in the upholstered corner to counter the boat’s movement and the strain on my rib a little. I rested my elbows on the table and my chin on my hands and cogitated.
Quinton came in and joined me about fifteen minutes later. “Hey, beautiful. What’s eating you?”
“I’m just thinking. If the dobhar-chú were trying to protect Reeve from whatever magic the merfolk sent, they must have been standing guard or watching him in some way. But I didn’t see their guard until the magic was already actively trying to kill him the first time. Why did they take so long to act? And why did the merfolk want Reeve dead? He was just an old man who was already retired and far away from his old haunts. They hadn’t bothered to try before, so why now?”
“Didn’t Fielding say something about time?” Quinton asked, going past me and deeper into the galley to scavenge coffee.
“Did he? Huh . . . yes, he said it, too. Well, that at least gives some veracity to his story, since the ghosts said the same thing.”
“Which ghosts?” Finding no coffee left, he opened a few cabinets and looked for the raw materials for a new pot.
“The ghosts of the Valencia. They said something about time and place. . . . I had the same impression of opportunity dwindling away as I got from Fielding. They both said something to the effect of ‘the way back only opens every twenty-seven years.’ And that the time it would be open was almost at an end. . . .”
He discovered a can of coffee and a stack of filters for the built-in coffeemaker and started setting up. “That implies a barrier as well as a time frame, like a gate on a timer.”
“So . . . when we find this place—if we can find it,” I said, “we’ll have to get into the right area and work fast.” I closed my eyes and swallowed a touch of panic. “We’re running on the clock here, without any idea how much time we’ve got, and I still can’t figure how Valencia is connected to Seawitch.”
“Well, there’s the bell. . . .”
“That’s a clue, not a cause.”
“Fielding said everyone on board—everyone human, I assume—died. Just like everyone still aboard Valencia died.” He filled the coffeemaker with water and snapped the carafe back into its place under the drip hole. He flipped the switch.
“What you’re suggesting is that the ghosts themselves—or the deaths—are the connection. Is that right?” I asked.
“Why not? What if Reeve knew about the mermaids? Or at least what they did.”
I blinked, considering it. “He must have. . . . He spoke to me as if he thought I was a mermaid. He called me a fish-tailed bitch and threatened to put me over the side—I assume that means throw me overboard—just as if we were at sea and I’d done something dreadful. He also had a mermaid statue on his porch that was a little . . . eerie, and he was the one who introduced the dobhar-chú into the discussion. He knew about the merfolk. He knew about the water hounds. . . .”
“Reeve’s an Irish name, isn’t it?” Quinton suggested. “Don’t you always say that the Grey is shaped by belief? If Reeve was Irish American and had grown up with those stories. . . .”
“He was one old man. I don’t think he conjured the dobhar-chú here on his own. The time frame doesn’t work either, since Fielding’s mother was one and she was the seventh pup of a dobhar-chú—even if he’s lying about something, I don’t think it’s that—which would imply at least two generations of them up here before she was born. But Reeve did say he saw one on his boat and that’s why he didn’t take Seawitch out for the final voyage—seeing the dobhar-chú made him sick or so frightened that he made himself sick. But I’ll bet the dobhar-chú was just looking for Fielding when it came on board. They’re the paranormal gossipmongers, so if they heard one of their kind was around, they’d want to check it out. They probably hadn’t expected to be recognized for what they were, and when that happened they had to keep Reeve off the boat so they could get to Fielding.”
The coffeemaker began to gurgle.
“How would they hear about Fielding?” Quinton asked.
“Maybe Father Otter lied when he told Fielding he didn’t know anything about his mother. . . .”
“That’s possible,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back on the counter, waiting for the coffeepot to fill. “Bending the truth seems to run in the family.”
I followed my train of thought rather than pursue the fruitless complaint of Fielding’s questionable veracity on some points. “Of course, there’s always the merfolk. If the one that kissed Fielding as a kid really had put a mark on him, maybe any of them who spotted him would know he was their enemy, whether he was aware of it or not, and the word might have slipped out through them. Especially if they were planning something unpleasant. They seem to be a bloodthirsty lot.”
“Yeah, Zantree was saying so upstairs. The original siren legends are pretty gruesome. It’s not all The Little Mermaid.”
I snorted. “Even The Little Mermaid isn’t The Little Mermaid. Did you know Andersen originally wrote it as a ballet?”
Quinton shook his head.
I continued. “I’ve danced that, back when I was still ballerina-sized. It’s a horrible story: The mermaid gives up her voice to get legs so she can marry the prince she’s in love with—and possibly get a soul as well. Every step she takes on land is agonizing, and to get a soul she has to persuade the prince to kiss her so she can take his. To get him to kiss her she has to dance for him. Dancing in terrible pain. And in the end he doesn’t marry her—he marries someone else. It’s a ballerina’s story, really: giving up something you don’t know enough to value to gain something that’s utterly fleeting, and being in pain all the time until you die of a broken heart. So she dies and becomes some kind of angel and soars off to do good deeds and gain a soul and a place in heaven, but the ending always seemed a bit of an afterthought—Andersen did a lot of those ‘but the girl went to heaven and was never cold/sad/alone again’ endings. I hated that show.”
Quinton made a face and turned to pour us some coffee. Then he came to the settee to join me and brought two mugs of coffee along, saying, “That’s a nasty tale. I don’t think I’ll ever think of it the same way again.”
“Now you know how I feel,” I said, accepting one of the mugs and clasping it in both hands.
“Zantree’s stories are equally grotesque, but they don’t include kissing princes. Mostly they’re about singing sailors to their death on the rocks—”
“Wait . . .” I interrupted him. “I know that story: Scylla and Charybdis from the Odyssey. One was a monster in a rocky cave and the other was a whirlpool. . . .”
“Actually they were both monsters—sirens. They used to be sea nymphs; each had been cursed to be a monster but they still had voices that were irresistible. Sailors would hear their voices and either steer their boats into the maelstrom or be wrecked on the rocks on the other side. Then the sirens would eat them. Umm . . . why are you staring at me like that?”
I felt electrified and I must have looked it. The door from the aft deck slid open but I ignored it. Even breathing shallowly with excitement, my chest ached from the clutch of an idea too fascinatingly terrible to ignore—well, that and a sore rib. “The ghosts called them sirens,” I said. “I missed the reference. Valencia was wrecked on the rocks just the other side of Vancouver Island from here and all but thirty-seven of those aboard died. Wrecked on the rocks like sailors lured to Scylla, but what if, instead of devouring their flesh, these sirens took their souls?”
/>
“What would they do with them?” Solis asked from the steps. “What use would the merfolk have for souls?”
I shook myself, taking too sharp a breath in my surprise and flinching as I recovered. “Blood magic. I told you how that works, Solis—a spell cast literally in blood. You don’t have to kill to do it, but you get more power if you do. Fielding said Shelly was the daughter of a sea witch. Fielding and the ghosts both made a distinction between the witch and the merfolk, and Fielding mentioned elemental magic specifically. Not blood magic. But that’s definitely the flavor Shelly cast with that broken circle on board Seawitch, so chances are good it’s what she learned from her mother. She probably doesn’t—or didn’t—have the same degree of power or autonomy, so she didn’t kill anyone right away. OK, yes, I’m just speculating. But what if she left that aside so her mother could collect the important part: the souls? Shelly might not have even had a choice if her mother was using her as a stalking horse. If the sea witch could store these souls, she could have power whenever she needed it without having to take the time and go through the rituals of bloodletting and invoking.”
Solis was confused. He narrowed his eyes and blinked at me.
I explained, “Remember what I said about there being several major categories of magic and whatever type you practice, you have to have access to the right power source? In this case, blood and sometimes death. Under the right circumstances any source can be captured in a properly prepared magical storage device. So having this power in storage is like flipping a switch when you’re connected to a big bank of batteries, versus having to fire up the generator first. Magically speaking, it’s a hell of an advantage.”
Solis scowled, rough-edged spikes of color flashing around his head as he fought with the concept. “You suggest that this sea witch collected the souls of Starrett, Carson, Ireland, and Prince?”
“I suggest a lot more than that: I suggest she first collected the souls of the passengers and crew aboard Valencia. That she and her merfolk caused or aided the conditions that wrecked the steamer on the rocks to begin with and they then killed everyone who hit the water.”
TWENTY
“Could they do that?” Solis asked. “Lure a ship to its destruction?”
“According to legend, that’s their stock-in-trade,” I replied. “I’ve discovered that there’s often more than just a kernel of truth to that sort of story. And what happened to the Valencia is almost too bizarre to be true—everything went wrong, seasoned officers and crewmen made horrendous errors, and when the storm finally died down long enough to launch the lifeboats, they still couldn’t get to shore and all the women and children died in the water. Truth really is stranger than fiction, because if that were a book or a movie, people would reject it as over-the-top.”
“But why take Seawitch?” Solis asked, apparently having decided to throw his wavering disbelief on the junk heap for the sake of puzzling out a killer’s motive; it didn’t matter what he believed as long as he could understand what the killer believed. “If she had the souls of Valencia, why go to the trouble for a mere four more?”
“Aside from simple opportunity, there’s the racial-feud angle and—if anything Fielding said on this point is true—possibly a bit of overzealous payback for messing with her daughter. If Starrett actually harmed Shelly and Fielding didn’t stop him, then they’d just compromised the sea witch’s heir. There may have been nothing to it, but the appearance or accusation could have been enough since, for a lot of high-level paranormals, successful breeding is tricky and frequently fatal for someone. On top of that they’re usually long-lived, which means slow to mature and slower to age. Even if she had more than one daughter or if Shelly wasn’t harmed, the sea witch would not be happy to see her heir compromised or threatened. That’s possibly dynasty-ending, and with paranormals that can mean the end of a species or at the least the total wipe of a local population. There are fewer of them than us, so they take that kind of threat very seriously. And she would be even less happy if she thought her clan’s racial enemy—a royal dobhar-chú—had anything to do with it.”
Solis nodded slowly, scowling. “It has all the twisted logic of a gang war. So . . . although he wasn’t even aboard when the crime occurred, the sea witch would attack Reeve . . . to lure Fielding out of hiding.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too. The sea witch would go after any of his remaining friends and family who might help him once he escaped from her—as he obviously did. And did we ever find Fielding’s family?”
“No. There was no reply from his father’s last known address and no forwarding address or phone number.”
“Maybe we should find out if he’s dead. . . .”
Quinton made a disgusted face at me. “How morbid.”
“But if he is it would support the idea that the sea witch and her merfolk are wiping out all traces of the Fieldings and anyone who might have helped Gary. I suspect that if we could ask we’d find out that his mother is dead and has been for a while.”
“Then if Shelly Knight was the sea witch’s daughter, who is the sea witch?”
“Maybe she is, now. We don’t know her status as virgin or nonvirgin or even if it’s truly relevant. Shelly and Jacque could be the same creature with only a bottle of hair dye to separate them. What if . . .” I said, my speech slowing as I thought out loud. “What if losing the Valencia’s soul—the bell—also lost the sea witch her power, or limited it severely? She hasn’t been very aggressive in attacking us and she must know by now that we’re coming. And what if . . . it wasn’t the mother that took the souls of Seawitch, but the daughter? Then she’d have quite a bit of power, while her mother had little or none. So Seawitch may have been just a pawn in a power grab.”
“It is a very elaborate plan,” Solis objected. “Not robust or simple enough to work.”
I admit I’d been speculating rather wildly, feeling the press of time and the need for some kind of answers before we were face-to-face with the sea witch. “True. Simple is usually better. But what if it wasn’t a plan but just opportunity seized? That might explain what Shelly was doing hanging around the marina for a few years: She was looking for chances to accrue her own power and topple her mother.”
Solis wasn’t quite convinced, if his scowl was any indication. “She comes to the marina to look for opportunities to wreck ships and steal souls, then accidentally meets the son of her family’s enemy. So she watches him and gets close. Then things go wrong and she . . . what? Cries for help with the spell we discovered in her cabin?”
“Why not? No . . . wait. It was a complex spell—not something you’d cast in a hurry to get help—and the spell circle was broken. So whatever that spell was, it wasn’t functioning when Seawitch was taken. I wish I knew what the spell was for. . . . But it might be enough to know who broke it. Because that’s when the situation went to hell, according to Fielding—assuming he’s not lying on that point, once again.” I tried to talk the pieces of this puzzle into place. “If Shelly broke it herself, then that act brought down the merfolk. If someone is going to show up as soon as you break a spell . . . they’d have to be looking for you in the first place. So the spell has to have been some kind of . . . disguise or protection for the boat; she’d just use an amulet or a gris-gris if it were for herself alone. So . . . she breaks it deliberately to . . . get out of a bad situation with Starrett, wreak revenge on the dobhar-chú—or Fielding, as the case may be. But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t cast a complex spell just so you can break it later—that’s a waste of resources.”
“What if Starrett broke it when he . . . paid her a visit?” Solis suggested.
I felt myself smiling as I thought about it. “The result is still the same but the emphasis is different: The merfolk descend like hungry wolves, but now . . . all that bloodletting and crazy stuff Fielding described isn’t Shelly attacking them . . . it’s Shelly trying to repair her spell in a panic. A spell that was keeping Seawitch hidden from the
merfolk or her mother. And it would take a complex spell to hide a moving object that weighed more than sixteen tons. Why she was hiding it, I don’t know, but when things start to fall apart, first she panics, then she gets mad and curses Fielding, and, last, she tries to salvage what she can—and in the process she creates enough havoc that it’s easy to snatch a few souls in the affray.”
“Affray?” Quinton asked with a laugh. “You’ve been reading Agatha Christie again.”
“Marsh. I wanted a break from the noir—my life’s noir enough.”
Solis sighed. “You who work with the darkest things do not find mystery novels . . . ridiculous and artificial?”
“Of course I do—that sort at least. Good triumphs over evil and the world is restored to order without a lot of angst and grotesquerie. That’s why I like them: They are as far from my life as I can get without reading historical romances.”
“Why do you not, then? Read romances.”
“They depress me.”
Solis looked puzzled. “My wife says the same thing.”
“I like her more and more,” I said, teasing a little but mostly serious.
Solis smiled—a real smile that actually moved his cheeks and creased the corners of his eyes. Then he glanced around as if looking for something mislaid. “Oh, Zantree says that it’s Quinton’s turn at the wheel—his watch, rather.”
“Already?” I asked.
“Yes. Two-hour shifts. He sees no reason for you or me to take the wheel with such a short distance left to go.”
“But we’ve got a time limit and we don’t know when it will expire. We may have to push on until we find Fielding’s mystery cove.”
“We should discuss the search with him, but either way, he expects to be in Roche Harbor before dark.”
“So did Fielding. . . .”
* * *
June in western Washington is rife with vagaries of weather. It’s warm one day, cold and wet the next, and a single twenty-four-hour period can turn back and forth between the extremes two, three, or four times before the day finally passes away. By eleven the sun had come out, the fog was long gone, and Quinton was almost half through his watch at the wheel. As I came up the ladder to bring him sunglasses and sit with him, the view from the flying bridge was clear and full of blue above and below with land visible but distant in nearly all directions. It was beautiful, if still a bit cold. Sun sparkled off the wind-ruffled surface of the water that was scattered with sailboats cutting back and forth and faster motorboats skidding along like water striders on a pond.
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