Seawitch

“Yes, and I agreed then. I agree now and I . . . think—I do not yet believe—that something extraordinary did take place. And that it is connected to the ghosts aboard Seawitch.”

I stared at him. I did not ask how he was sure or if his ability to see what he had was anything more than the occasional moments of clarity that hunch-playing cops get or just an effect visited on those who consort with people like me and his mother-in-law. I said only, “We’ll need a boat. And a talk with the only available witnesses.”

“What witnesses?”

“The ghosts of Valencia. If we take the bell, I think we’ll find them in Seawitch’s engine room.”

“Why must we take the bell there?”

“I don’t know if they’re bound to the bell or the boat at this point—the bell seems more logical, but I don’t want to take any chances. Ghosts like this are unpredictable. If we re-create the conditions under which we found them last time, we have a better chance of finding them this time.”

FIFTEEN

“Are not ghosts more active at night?” Solis asked as we walked down B dock once again toward Seawitch, with the bell in its canvas bag swinging from my arms.

I smiled. “You sound nervous about this.” We’d eaten lunch on the way to the marina and I was feeling human enough to have something at least approaching a sense of humor.

“I am not nervous. I’m afraid.”

“Of ghosts?”

“For my reputation.”

I shook my head, amused and remembering what a dreadful hardhead I’d been about the whole thing once, myself. “Trust me, no one will ever know except me and obviously I won’t tell. Well, I might tell Quinton.” Solis’s aura flushed an odd bilious yellow. What was that? Embarrassment? Fear? I turned to look at him, serious and as calm as I could manage, considering we were on our way to interview ghosts, a process that doesn’t always go well. “I’m teasing you. I won’t say a word to anyone—including Q.”

He looked relieved. “Thank you.”

I wondered why he would care. Yet he did so I did, too. Enough to keep it to myself unless I had to do otherwise. I turned back and resumed walking and Solis fell in beside me. It was strange to be the lead on this. Yes, the insurance company was the big dog in this case, but I wasn’t used to having a superior position to Solis’s. Parallel or sneaking around him in one way or another, yes, but equal? No. And certainly not the lead dog. As we walked toward Seawitch I noted that the colors and activity near it were brighter and stronger, smoky coils and chains of sparks writhing around the vessel and occasionally reaching out toward the water and other boats, only to be snapped back. I didn’t like it any better than I had the night before. Pleiades appeared dark and empty in my Grey-seeing eyes and I wondered where the energy, or its owner, had gone. Had all the local activity moved to Seawitch? I pointed at the boat. “There’s a lot of energetic activity around Seawitch today. Last night Pleiades was the busy one—some kind of sentry feeler took a poke at the . . . creature that came to talk to me and drove it off. Then it backlashed and almost hit me, but the charge was fading out and the activity was way down by the time I left.”

“I can’t detect such activity,” he replied, peering at Seawitch.

“You’ll have to take my word for it. Something’s happening but I’m not sure what. And I don’t know what happened to the creature that tried to talk to me, though that energy tendril seemed fairly dangerous as long as it was charged up.”

“Do they, then, discharge?”

“Well, this one did. Magic has power limits. You have to have sources to draw on and channels to feed it through, and there’s only so much energy a magic user or spell can pass before it shuts down or burns out, unless they have something to stabilize or store energy. Magic is not immune to the basic laws of physics.” It felt strange to be repeating the things Quinton had explained to me long ago when I’d been the one who was thrashing around blind.

“But . . . it’s magic.”

I cast him a sideways glance, trying to decide if he were making fun of me or not, but his expression was only puzzled, not sly. “Energy is still just energy, even if it’s paranormal,” I said.

Maybe it was having thought of dogs or maybe it was coincidence, but as we walked onto the dock beside Seawitch, something was there. Something like a large dog.

Solis twitched and stopped moving. “What is . . . that?”

Dripping, it padded toward us with a strange, waddling walk on legs too short for its body. A thick tail touched the ground, leaving a wet, serpentine trail behind it.

“That, I think, is the Father of All Otters,” I whispered. “But not the one I met last night . . .” I wondered if the previous one had survived whatever had happened with the magic that had emanated from Pleiades, but I didn’t want to ask this one. I didn’t know if it was as friendly as the other or was more like the woman-eating monster I’d read about the night before. I watched it warily as it approached. No magic seemed to trail from it or reach toward it, though, like many magical things, it had a glow to it that, in this case, appeared as a thin sheen of amethyst and blue, like oil on its pelt.

The creature was dark furred and probably weighed close to a hundred pounds. The guard hairs gathered into wet points along its body, shedding water as it moved toward us. Its thick whiskers bristled forward and I could hear it sniff the air, its lip curled up a little to reveal ivory teeth like the interlocking spikes of a bear trap.

Solis and I stood still and waited to see what the beast would do. It sat down by the steps to Seawitch’s deck. As we continued to stare at it, the beast lowered its upper body and lay on the cement dock, making a huffing sound as if it were mildly annoyed with us for making it wait. I glanced at Solis and he at me. We seemed to come to an agreement without actually saying anything and began forward again together, with caution.

The dobhar-chú—if it was one—jumped back to its feet as we approached and watched us anxiously. Or I took it as anxiety because bright yellow-orange sparks seemed to leap from it and vanish into the air around it with a wet, sizzling sound. But it didn’t move toward us. Perhaps it was afraid of scaring us off. . . . I’m not afraid of dogs, but this creature sent a chill up my spine as it stared at us with inscrutable dark eyes. We closed the gap to the steps slowly, watching the beast as we did.

At ten feet or so, the dobhar-chú took a single pace forward, blocking the stairs, and made a noise that sounded like “Who?”

I glanced at Solis, who wasn’t quite as calm as he was trying to project. His gaze met mine in a jump that turned away again before it returned more steadily.

The creature barked again, “Who!”

I waved my hand at the policeman. “This is Rey Solis. He’s a police detective. He’s supposed to find out what happened on board—if there was a crime when the boat was . . . lost.”

The dobhar-chú made a derisive laughing noise, then turned and dove into the water, vanishing in a flurry of bubbles.

“I guess that means you’re cleared to come aboard.”

“And if I was not?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. And we don’t have to find out today.”

We went aboard and even Solis shuddered at the touch of the boiling, sparking energy that engulfed the boat and reached inside with streamers of smoke like diseased fingers. All the way down to the engine room the air, thickened with magic and must, seemed to resist us and press into our noses with the odor of corruption beyond mere rot. I touched the engine-room door and hoped the ghosts hadn’t dissipated.

Inside they rushed toward us, a swarm of darkness and whispers that swirled up from the bell hanging from my hands and seemed to burst from the floor. I saw Solis flinch from the feel of them, like trailing cobwebs. I let