Seawitch

Solis was still a little stunned, but he nodded and went jerkily forward along the side deck. His belief threshold was taking a beating.

Quinton looked at me. “Stay here and find out what gives. He looks as freaked-out as Solis.”

“He?” I asked, momentarily confused.

Quinton pointed at the fish hold. “This guy here. I think he needs a little help.”

I turned my attention back to our “catch” as my boyfriend scrambled off the boat and got busy with the mooring lines.

The creature in the fish hold was roughly man-shaped now, if that man was a bit short-limbed and otter- faced and covered in slick brown fur. There was a distinct manelike growth on its—his—head, and I got one glance that proved he was male and looked away quickly. He squirmed around and tucked his flippery legs under so he was semicrouching in the water of the hold.

“Sorry,” he muttered. His voice was still rough and a bit hissy between teeth that seemed too pointy for a face that was stuck halfway between otter and man. His nose and jaw had pushed out to a more human angle, but the upper part was an odd shape, neither one nor the other. His eyes were huge and brown, but they had acquired a rim of white, as if the openings had grown to a more human size and ovalness. He still had bristly whiskers on his upper lip and the side of his . . . “snout” was a better word than “nose,” really. I wasn’t sure what he was—Quinton and I had discussed the physics problems of shape-shifters before and been wrong at least once, so . . . here again I wasn’t sure what I was looking at except that it ought not to exist.

“You’re . . . umm . . .” I started.

“Gary Fielding,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

I sat down on the nearest chair with a yip of pain and surprise as Mambo Moon surged forward and away from the dock.

“I guessed you were still alive,” I gasped back. “But this wasn’t what I imagined. . . .”

“Me, either,” he sighed, curling tighter in the fish hold. “Could you turn the water off? It’s getting a little high.”

I found the switch and pushed it to Off. “I am having some trouble with this,” I said.

“I hoped you would be able to understand. . . .”

“No, no . . . that’s not what I mean. I’m a little confused. What are you and how did you come looking for me? And what happened with Seawitch? Is happening . . . ?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Start talking. It’ll be six hours before we reach Roche Harbor.”

EIGHTEEN

As Fielding talked, I peered at him through the Grey. A sort of shadow of his otter self hung around him and I wondered fleetingly how he managed the mass problem. For an otter he’d been enormous; as a man he was a bit on the small side but still heftier than the otter. Well, mostly a man and partially submerged in seawater at that. Quinton and Solis had made their way back to me, but Zantree was still up top, steering the boat out of Port Townsend and striking across the Strait of Juan de Fuca for the lower end of the San Juan Islands.

“Why the water?” I blurted.

He stopped and looked down at himself, half-immersed in seawater. “It’s easier to stay in one form when I don’t have to concentrate as hard. I can’t make the full transition to a man or to an otter—I’m always part the other. This is about the right amount of water to hold this form steady without sweating it too much. More and I have to fight to stay otterlike. Less and I can’t stay human enough.”

“That sounds backward,” I said.

“That’s because it’s a curse and that’s sort of how they work: You turn the nature of something on itself.”

“Not always, in my experience.”

“Well, maybe not. The dobhar-chú aren’t normally magicians so I had to guess based on what the mermaids were doing. They seem to work with elemental magic—according to Father Otter—and then they twist or reverse some aspect of nature. Or that’s what makes sense to me after keeping an eye on them from hiding for twenty-seven years.”

I waved my hands in the air as if clearing it of hanging, obfuscating words. “Let’s get to that later. First, what are you?”

“Umm . . . kind of messed up. See, that’s the problem: I’m not really one thing or the other. Part water hound, part human, one hundred percent screwed.”

“So . . . the dobhar-chú do exist and they are involved.”

He nodded. “I guess you could call them my extended family. They took me in when this happened and they’ve been trying to help me and the ghosts ever since. But not because they’re nice guys or anything like that— you gotta understand that they are so far from human that I’m a freak to them. But I’m family and I’m the enemy of their enemy. So . . . they’re on my side.”

“Family. So . . . you were born . . . this way?”

“Not this way, no. But you could say I was born to have this problem because I’m half dobhar and half . . . normal. But I didn’t know about the water hound part until things went cockeyed on Seawitch. Well, I knew but . . . I didn’t really . . . believe it.”

He glanced around at the men and then back to me. I looked, too, then brought my gaze back to Fielding. He could see we weren’t quite following him. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said. “When I was a young idiot I used to joke that I was kissed by a Columbia River mermaid. But, see, that’s not really a joke. One summer when I was a kid, my mom and me and a bunch of the neighbor kids and their moms went out to Fort Stevens. Our parents really didn’t want to take us because the ocean’s pretty dangerous and cold in that zone, but it was a big deal for us kids to go to the ocean beach. I mean, we all grew up on the river and that was no big deal to us, but to go out in the salt water—that was super-cool. My mom couldn’t talk me into swimming in the jetty lagoon on the river side—I had to swim in the ocean. She couldn’t really say no, though I didn’t understand why at the time. So we went over to the ocean side of the park. It was a weekday, so not terribly crowded, and of course we all wanted to see the wreck of the Peter Iredale, like everyone does, and we walked back up toward Clatsop Spit afterward and staked out a place near the parking lot that was close enough to meet between the swimming area on the lagoon side and the beach on the ocean side. Most of the kids thought the seawater was too cold and they just splashed around in the surf and made a lot of noise but I swam out pretty far. Until I got stuffed by a wave.

“Or I thought I had been, because I’m paddling along fine—I’ve always been a really good swimmer—and suddenly I’m underwater and I’m scared and then there’s this strange woman towing me away. And my mom came out into the water—which she never did—and took me away from the woman. I should say, really, they fought for me. Mom won, of course, but the other woman kissed me on the forehead before she let me go and then she swam away very fast. My mother was seriously cranked off about it. She told me to stay away from women like that. Now, see, what I didn’t understand, ’cause I was just a kid, was that she wasn’t saying I should avoid loose women or ladies who swam topless or something like that, but that I should avoid females of that species. The woman was a mermaid, which seemed kind of obvious at the time because she had a tail and gills and even webs between her fingers, but I started erasing that part of the story from my memory because my mom didn’t like it and because it sounds babyish to say you saw a mermaid when everyone you know says there’s no such thing. And when I got older it was like a joke and I used it to charm people into buying me drinks or hiring me or . . . Well, I used it on a lot of women in bars and at parties. . . .”

At the moment, he didn’t look like he could charm anyone, being furry and misshapen and possessing a mouthful of teeth intended for cracking crab legs and ripping open fish the size of a man’s leg. But I could see, by concentrating hard on the Grey, two overlapping, massy shadows attached to him: a phantom otter, sleek and dark-furred, with a streak of white down its spine and a crossing streak on its shoulders; and a ghost form of his