Seawitch

more time and waited for him to catch up to me. He was a lot closer than I’d realized and we both started a bit, coming nearly nose to nose. He hadn’t seemed that near, but the Grey does strange things to time and distance.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

Solis gave a tight smile. “De nada. So, it’s the engine room?”

“Something is. What, I’m not yet sure, but there’s a lot of paranormal disturbance here.”

He nodded.

I frowned. “Do you feel or see anything, or is that just the conversational acknowledgment nod?”

He cocked his head slightly. “I have . . . an unsettled feeling. Like an intuition.”

That intrigued me and I hmphed a bit in agreement. I knew the feeling, that something trivial is actually important or that a subject is about to do something revealing. I also knew most successful cops are hunch players and instinct followers and I wondered if that wasn’t some unacknowledged touch of the Grey.

“See anything? Anything at all?”

“No . . .”

“Are you having an urge to look over your shoulder for something that you don’t quite see in the corner of your eye?” I knew that urge, that sensation of flickering motion that makes you turn to find . . . nothing. Of course, something is there in the ghost world but most people have no clue and they truly wouldn’t want one.

Solis squinted, his eyes shifting back and forth. Then he tightened his mouth and forced his eyes back to me. I guess that was as good an answer as his nod. I remembered I’d started out much the same way, learning to look around the filters we raise between ourselves and what we don’t want to see. Most adults can’t make themselves drop those filters—the habit is too strong and self-preserving—but a few find a way to peep in, however limited the view. And then there are those rare cases, like me, who get the unlimited pass and wish they never had.

Such an encouraging thought to hold in mind as I opened the engine-room door . . .

Even barely touching the Grey, the room was black with a darkness no electric light could dispel—gleaming, energetic darkness that moved and writhed and muttered with voices at the threshold of hearing. It wasn’t like the voice of the Grey that I’d once, in near madness, listened to; this was the babble of something contained in it, not the voice of the Grey itself. I could hear Solis catch his breath behind me as I stepped through the opening and was plunged deep into the source of the icy cold that had risen through the boat. My lungs froze and I stretched upward for a surface that was not there, striving for light and air and warmth as the blackness clutched me within its ever- collapsing folds. I stumbled forward and down . . . through a sheet of mist that shattered and hung in the space around me, so frigid that the air itself seemed filled with crystalline ice. I felt my legs buckle and the hard floor of the engine room struck hard against my knees. I was in the normal world yet I wasn’t, drowning in the darkness that struck and shook me like storm waves. I heard screams, prayers, and the fury-roar of a hurricane as it battered us, overturning the lifeboats and drowning the women and children before our eyes. . . . and the crew lashed in the rigging, crying out, mouths filling with salt water—

I wrenched myself away from the invading sense of the storm-battered dying. These were not my own thoughts but those of others—hundreds of others.

Stop. I could not even gasp the word, only let it shout in my mind across the blackness as I begged and hoped. . . .

The storm around me eased and I gulped in sea-wet air. Coughing, I choked out, “I want to help.” A flood of thoughts burst against me from all directions and seemed to cut through my flesh in cold iron needles of fury, panic, horror, and a thin, keening hope as dim and ephemeral as a will-o’-the-wisp. I stretched toward that spindly thread even as my body seemed to be buffeted by blows from unseen objects careening through the air on the eldritch hurricane’s rage. That thread of possibility flickered near me and I clutched it, reeling it in and pressing the growing, glowing skein to my chest.

The tiny warmth of it seemed to ease my breathing and loosen the gasping terror of drowning that clawed at my brain and clutched my lungs. “I want to help you,” I repeated, a little stronger now. “Show me . . .”

The storm ebbed down slowly, the troubled blackness diluting to a more ordinary darkness. The ghost-filtered illumination showed me a room lit by insufficient light through an open doorway partially blocked by a human shape.

I looked around. Still the engine compartment and closer to normalcy, but somehow . . . it was filled with hundreds of ghosts. They pressed close and yet fell back into the hull of the ship, continuing on into the Grey to an impossible distance and density somehow contained within the Seawitch’s engine room. They were black tangles of energy, barely human shaped with flickering storm light for eyes. I stared around at them all, infected with a sliver of their own panic.

Solis stepped through the doorway and strode to me, reaching down as if he were going to raise me to my feet. Then he glanced around, his eyes as weirdly illuminated as those of the ghosts, and stopped moving, his hands clutching my shoulders. He shivered and pulled me up, his eyes still moving, still taking in . . . whatever he was seeing.

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