Seawitch

Quinton, you want to go up for a minute until I get back?”

Quinton nodded and scrambled up the ladder to the flying bridge as Zantree gave one more scowling shake of his head at Fielding before nipping into the cabin.

Fielding glanced around as if reestablishing in his mind just where he was and that his condition was not some kind of horrible dream. “Was that really Paul Zantree? He’s gotten so old. . . .” Fielding whispered, hissing a bit between his reemerging fangs.

“You’d be only a little younger if you were in your proper form,” I said.

“I don’t know. . . . Some of us freaks live a long, long time,” he replied, looking me in the eye.

I returned a narrow glare and was about to say something cutting when Zantree stepped back out from the cabin, tugging on a pair of lightweight gloves. He took one more hard stare at Fielding and frowned. “We all thought you were dead, Gary. Why’d you let us think that? Did you do it? Did you pirate the ’Witch and hide her all this time? Did you kill the lot of them? Did you kill Shelly?”

“No! I didn’t do any of those things! I just— Things went bad. I didn’t do anything but try to save us . . . but I didn’t stop anything, either.” He hung his head, but I wasn’t sure if it was contrition or an attempt to hide his uncanny lack of expression. “I just ended up stuck in the same place with that damned boat all this time. The way back opens up only every twenty-seven years and it doesn’t stay open long. We’re almost out of time as it is.”

“Time for what?” Zantree demanded. “Are any of the others . . . like you? Did they survive? Are we going to save them or is this just about you—like it always was?”

Fielding cringed, salt tears coming a little faster down his face. “No. They’re all dead.”

Zantree’s face crumpled a little and he looked appalled. “Maybe you should be, too.” Then he turned and, without another word, climbed back up the ladder to the flying bridge.

His voice floated back down in a minute, but the wind stole the meaning of the words and they were just sounds snatched from the breeze. Then Quinton returned to our little party on the aft deck.

“He says he wants to hear everything,” Quinton said.

“Do you think he’ll understand it all?” I asked, thinking of how unbearable some stories from the Grey were.

Quinton looked grim. “Yeah. He’s a tough old bird. And he’ll keelhaul the lot of us if we don’t. So he said.” But his glance was directed at Fielding.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Fielding whimpered.

“Yeah, all those dead people were just a mistake. That’s what everyone claims,” Quinton replied, a storm of little red sparks shooting through his aura. He reached over and flipped a switch on the wall beside the cabin doors on what looked like some kind of intercom system.

An uncomfortable silence fell, scored by the grumbling of the engines below us and the susurrus of waves.

I shook off the feeling first. I didn’t like Fielding, but I had other fish—or otters—to fry. “All right. Fielding, you said Shelly was watching you, but not because she wanted to join the bedroom Olympics. . . .”

“Yeah. She watched me and I mistook it for . . . well, something it wasn’t. I guess she was really keeping an eye on me, at least in the beginning. I don’t know what she was doing at the marina in the first place—it’s not like mermaids go and hang out with humans much unless they’re trying to kill them.”

A snort came from the intercom and I put up my hand to stop his tale. “Wait. Shelly Knight was a mermaid?”

“Oh, Shelly is not just a mermaid. She’s the Mer Maid. And aside from me, she’s the only one of us who survived. She’s the daughter of the sea witch and she’s supposed to be a virgin or she won’t become the sea witch herself when Mommy kicks the bucket. Which has got to be a load of crap because there is no way Shelly hadn’t been spreading her . . . tail for someone—”

Solis and Quinton both made low noises in their throats that collectively sounded a lot like a growl.

Fielding was startled and recoiled from them. “Hey! I’m just saying!”

Solis gave him a black glare. “Don’t.”

Fielding glared back, then looked away with a funny coughing sound. “Well. Yeah. All right.”

“So,” I summarized, “she’s a mermaid, daughter of a sea witch, and you’re the child of a royal dobhar- chú. Which makes you . . . what?”

“Ironically, it makes me almost human, but not quite. I guess it’s where I got my skill on the water, but the problem was I didn’t understand what my mother was telling me that day on the beach or the warnings she was giving then or so many times before she left us. With Shelly and Seawitch, I got into a situation I didn’t know was dangerous. I didn’t know Shelly was some kind of mermaid and therefore my enemy from birth. And . . . all right, I was a jerk. On that last trip with Seawitch things started out freaky and got worse and worse.

“There was kind of an uncomfortable feeling among the passengers right from the first, like there was something going on they were all trying not to talk about. And then Les got into a fight with Shelly. He kept saying she was just teasing him and I thought it was a sex thing, but it wasn’t that and everyone was kind of out of sorts anyhow because the girls wanted to get up to Vancouver and go shopping, but Cas made us change course to go to Port Townsend for a halibut.”

“A halibut?”

“Yeah. Pacific halibut season is really short. That year it ran long—they extended it by two days—and Cas wanted his damned fish. You’re only allowed one and he hadn’t got his. He took his fishing more seriously than most people realized. I mean he really wanted that fish—standing-in-the-water-in-the-dark- with-a-spear kind of want. ’Cause that’s what the crazy SOB did. I changed course from the inside of the Sound and brought us out to Port Townsend—and I gotta tell you, it was a hard swim catching up to you guys up here. A lot harder than boating it was.”

I stifled a snide comment and just told him to go on with his tale.

“Anyhow, anyhow, so we tie up at Townsend and I take him out in the skiff to the shallows so he can try to swim around with a snorkel and spear one—you’re only allowed to use a spear or a longline to get them—”

“A spear?” Solis asked, frowning.

“Halibut are stone stupid, so you have to even the odds in their favor. That’s why it’s called sportfishing. Anyhow. Nobody else wanted to swim around looking for halibut, so they stayed on board with Shelly and played cards or something. Whatever they did, Les was mad at Shelly when we got back and the girls were kind of . . . freaked-out about something and no one was talking to anyone, so dinner was a real cozy disaster. Afterward Les comes up to me, looking all weirded- out, and asks me to make that note in the log about his being on board the whole trip—which he was. I had no idea why he wanted me to put that in, but he did and I did. And then Cas and I went out to look for more halibut—night fishing with a spear. Totally wacko.

“We finally got that damned fish about four in the morning. And we should have cleaned it, but I was sick and tired of it, so I just dumped it in the icebox and we went to bed. So in the morning Cas is still obsessing about his fish and he wants us under way on the morning tide so we don’t—as he put it—waste the whole day, so I get up and get the boat moving on five hours of sleep, and we’re in the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca when we get a call at, like, ten, from the Seattle PD via the radio telephone service, saying that Odile Carson is dead. Les flips out. Not because she was dead but because of the way she died and the timing. He says Shelly told him she was dead the night before and he goes nuts. We all did. It was like there was something in the air. Or maybe it was the food . . .” he added, suddenly thoughtful—which looks very strange on a face that’s only half-human and covered in wet brown fur. “Shelly was the cook . . . maybe she fed us something that made us even crazier than we were. . . .”

“Don’t speculate on what you can’t know,” Solis warned.

“All right, all right!” Fielding snapped back, his interlocking fangs clashing together in a disturbingly violent bite.

The longer he spoke, the more of the mist of unpleasant green began to draw around him. I didn’t like it and I tried to call his attention to it again, but he shook me off and carried on with the story. I tried looking around but I couldn’t find a source for the color—it seemed to rest with Fielding himself and I thought its unpleasant shade might have been a manifestation of the dysfunction in his shape-shifting ability. Of course, some people’s auras turn sickly