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.
TWENTY-FIVE
Battered, wet, cold, and laced by pain with every movement, I rolled to my uninjured side and squirmed sideways until I could touch the wall Fielding had been leaning against. Bracing my hands on the wall and floor, I pushed and pulled myself up to my knees. I paused to look around. Nearby lay a colossal mustelid even larger than Father Otter. Solis stood in front of it, glaring down while the otters and the rest of the dobhar-chú clan pushed their enemies back out of the cave by sheer weight of numbers. They’d worked the watery tide of merfolk and sea-witch illusions into a bottleneck in the cave complex and were moving them backward and out by short rushes.
Solis noticed me and, as he looked away, the huge otter got to its feet and tried to run past him to the back exit. Solis dove past me and tackled it. They rolled together on the wet floor, the otter snapping and growling as it writhed and changed shape. The otter form collapsed suddenly into a slender, dark-skinned man with long, curling black hair hanging to his back and his naked skin slick with blood and brine. Fielding eeled out of Solis’s grip and started for the back door again.
I threw the knife.
I’m not a great knife thrower and the curved form didn’t fly well, anyhow. It flipped into a flat arc, the base of the grip smacking into the back of Fielding’s right knee. He stumbled but he would have kept going if Solis hadn’t launched himself from the ground like a sprinter coming out of the blocks and snatched Fielding around the waist and neck, half shoving, half dragging the dobhar-chú down to his knees. Solis released his grip on Fielding’s waist and switched to his nearest wrist, twisting it up between the other’s shoulder blades.
I heard Solis warn him, “Change now and your arm will leave the socket. You will not enjoy it.”
Panting, Fielding hung his head. “All right. I give up. Just don’t . . . don’t tear off my arm.”
Solis stood up, pulling Fielding up with him. “I won’t. Unless you force me.” Then he marched Fielding back to me.
Fielding kept his head down and I doubted it was strictly over his nudity. I was beginning to think I’d now seen enough naked men to fill my quota for the rest of my life. I started to sigh and caught myself cringing as my rib twinged. I kept my gaze up as the two men stopped in front of me.
The noise of the battle moved farther away but it was still there in the background as I started to speak.
“So . . . I take it you’re not as innocent as you protested,” I started.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Solis glared at him and must have twisted Fielding’s arm a little, making the former sea captain wince.
“Hey!”
“What did you do?” Solis demanded. “What did you really do to bring down this sea witch’s wrath?”
“Nothing!” Fielding shouted back.
Solis’s mouth was a hard, straight line and I could see tension gathering in the muscles of his shoulders and arms. I shook my head at him and staggered over to pick up the knife from the slick stone floor.
I walked back, turning the knife in my hand as I came. “This is a long way from anywhere. And there’s a lot of water around, though I understand it only takes a few inches to drown.”
“Are you threatening me?” Fielding demanded, incredulous.
“I’m reminding you of the situation,” I said. “My friend’s not in a good mood where you’re concerned. See, he has a couple of da
ughters himself.”
“I don’t see how that’s important.”
I shook my head at him in disappointment. “Oh, Gary, is this the way you repay favors? You came to me to solve a problem. And I have. But now we have a new one and there’s still a question my friend needs answered and so do I. Not to mention, what should we tell the insurance company? Should we take you back to Seattle and let Solis lock you up as a rapist and a murderer?”
“I didn’t hurt anyone!”
Solis shook him. “You are alive and all the rest are dead. You say this came about because Castor Starrett attempted to sexually assault Shelly Knight and you didn’t stop him. Or did you do it?”
“No!” Fielding shouted, looking indignant.
Solis bumped him again. “Did you rape Shelly Knight?”
“No,” Fielding repeated but his tone was less adamant.
Solis continued to bully him, no longer twisting his arm but badgering Fielding with unremitting questions. “You worked together before. Why this time did she accuse you?”
“She was angry! She knew what I was!”
“She knew that before. Why now was she angry enough to curse you and call on her mother’s help when she’d hidden you all from her?”
“I don’t know!”
“Yes, you do.”
“I made a mistake.”
“What mistake did you make? Do not repeat that ridiculous story about going down below with Castor Starrett. What did you really do? Did you rape her?”
“No!”
“Did you find her with Starrett? Is that what happened? Castor Starrett had your woman before you could? You got angry, you hurt him, and then you had to get rid of witnesses—”
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