Seawitch

“You have pockets like Quinton,” I said, accepting the pills with a quivering hand.

“Thank you. I have great respect for Mr. Purlis’s pockets.”

“Quinton,” I corrected without thinking, shaking capsules into my palm.

“Truly?”

“He prefers it.” I swallowed the capsules dry and gagged a little, but held back my lunch.

Solis waited, frustrated at being unable to thump my back with my broken rib, until I stopped choking. “I don’t understand the meaning.”

I gasped a little and handed him the pill tube. “Nickname from his mother’s maiden name.”

Solis frowned.

“Quinn’s son,” I explained. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t look up J. J. Purlis and get that info for himself. If he hadn’t already.

He mulled it for a moment and then he laughed. “I see.”

Had I ever heard Solis laugh before? I wasn’t sure. It was a sharp sound, short and rough, like something rarely used that had rusted and broken along the edges. I smiled back at him and stood up. A plume of mold and dust swelled into the air around me and I gave a sudden, violent sneeze.

Big mistake. The rib stabbed me and the world wavered and went black around the edges for a moment before the darkness closed in entirely. I could feel myself falling even as my sight blanked and then . . . nothing except the sudden fear of hitting my injured rib again before I lost consciousness.

SIXTEEN

Up and down. . . . Were we still on Seawitch? I felt woozy and my chest ached. So did my knees and my back and my butt. . . . “Who hit me?” I mumbled, feeling a stabbing sensation in my back and left side. Broken rib. Right.

“A ghost.”

I made a noise like a whale in heat—or I think that’s what the sound was like because it was loud and terrible and had a lot of moaning in it. I tried to sit up but someone pushed me back down before the busted rib could force the issue. It smelled like Quinton. I pried my eyes open and checked. Yup, Quinton.

He smiled at me from his position on the edge of my rear passenger seat.

“Where am I and how’d I get here?” I asked.

“Well . . . Solis paged me to your phone so I called you, and he answered and told me you were hurt but didn’t want to go to the hospital. Since you were unconscious he figured you didn’t have a say but I might, so I said I’d be right there and here I am.”

“But . . .”

“Hang on. We’re still at the marina, before you ask. We—that is, me and Solis and a guy named Paul Zantree—carried you to the Rover to take you to the hospital. But you woke up. It’s only been a few minutes.” He could see I wasn’t convinced. “I was in the neighborhood,” he concluded, throwing his hands up in a theatrical shrug.

“Liar,” I muttered. His aura was jumping around and flashing a bit of yellow and orange, which was his lying- for-convenience color. I can’t always tell with strangers, but I know Quinton well enough to recognize it with him. I also know cornering him in front of others will not bring answers. I nodded for the sake of onlookers—in this case Solis, who seemed a bit anxious, that rare emotion I’d never caught on him before this adventure began.

Quinton took that as a cue to help me sit up. Even with aid, my breath still caught on the pain in my chest and back as I moved. “I think you now hold the dubious distinction of being the only woman ever to pass out from sneezing,” he said.

“Time in the Grey, being smacked by ghosts . . . may be . . . extenuating circumstances,” I replied between gasps for breath.

“I blame the cracked rib.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A doctor would be a good idea.”

“No insurance. . . .” They’d canceled my coverage after my last major hospitalization.

“We’ll fake it.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“It’s an outpatient urgent-care thing—not even emergency. It’ll be a couple of grand, max. We’ll find a way to cover it. You can’t finish up this case with a broken rib and no help.”

“Can, too.”

“If you think I know the proper field dressing for a broken rib, guess again. Besides, a few painkillers would be a good idea. You can get some sleep and we’ll tackle the rest of the problem in the morning.”

I shook my head. “I know. Take me home. Do as I say. I’ll be fine.”

He glanced over his shoulder at Solis outside the truck. “She’s being stubborn, like I said she would.”

“I could arrest her for impeding an investigation,” Solis suggested.

“Bullshit,” I gasped. “My investigation.”

He shrugged. “True. But we need to find the cove mentioned in the logs—and by the ghosts. I need Blaine with me. We have reason to believe time is short.”

“I can find the cove,” Quinton said, “if you have a latitude and longitude. And I can pilot a boat but I don’t have one.”

A new, shaggy head hove into view over Solis’s shoulder. “We’ll take mine. You guys don’t know your way around the Sound—if you’ll pardon my saying so—and this isn’t a place to go messing around where you don’t know the tides and currents. Kills people, and I think there’s been plenty of that.”

Solis turned and I could see that the owner of the shaggy head was Paul Zantree. “How’s Ms. Blaine doing out here?”

“I’m fine,” I lied.

He peered at me and snorted. “You’ll manage but you’re not going to like it. So, are you going to do the smart thing and take an old hand or be a bunch of damned fools? And did you talk to that girl before she took off?”

“Girl?” Solis asked.

“On Pleiades. The Knight girl. She took off late last night—no one saw her go, but the hatches were all open when her neighbors went by this morning and her stuff was all gone when they checked on her. The place is kind of wet and mildewed, too. The owners are going to be pissed when they get here. And, damn, she looked like Shelly, but Shelly would never have left a boat in a state like that. I knew you guys were interested in her, and now she’s gone. So . . . did you talk to her? Did she know Shelly?”

That might explain the lack of magical energy around the boat this morning—and Zantree’s sharper memory of Jacque and Shelly Knight now that no strange tendrils of olive-colored energy were ringing around his head. I wondered what had scared her off: me, the otters, or the ghosts.

“She claimed no relationship and refused to answer other questions,” Solis replied.

I caught Solis’s eye. “Running.”

He nodded. If she was connected to Shelly Knight and the mystery of Seawitch— and there was every evidence that she was—we’d have to get to the cove as soon as possible. It seemed highly likely that she was heading back to the place the mystery had lain hidden for so long. She hadn’t taken the sailboat, so she had some other way to get there. “We’ll need a boat,” I reminded him.

“I told you we’ll take mine,” Zantree repeated.

Solis assumed control of the conversation. “You have a date to go fishing with your grandchildren.”

Zantree looked pugnacious. “They canceled. Can’t make it out here. I got nothing to do and a lot of questions to answer about my old friends, so why not help you guys? You do need my help.”

He wasn’t crazy about taking a civilian, but I could see him make up his mind. “We do. But Ms. Blaine is injured.”

“Well, get the woman to a sawbones, then! And where are we headed when you get back?”

“Somewhere near Haro Strait?”