Seawitch

asked.

“Why not? What if Reeve knew about the mermaids? Or at least what they did.”

I blinked, considering it. “He must have. . . . He spoke to me as if he thought I was a mermaid. He called me a fish-tailed bitch and threatened to put me over the side—I assume that means throw me overboard—just as if we were at sea and I’d done something dreadful. He also had a mermaid statue on his porch that was a little . . . eerie, and he was the one who introduced the dobhar-chú into the discussion. He knew about the merfolk. He knew about the water hounds. . . .”

“Reeve’s an Irish name, isn’t it?” Quinton suggested. “Don’t you always say that the Grey is shaped by belief? If Reeve was Irish American and had grown up with those stories. . . .”

“He was one old man. I don’t think he conjured the dobhar-chú here on his own. The time frame doesn’t work either, since Fielding’s mother was one and she was the seventh pup of a dobhar-chú—even if he’s lying about something, I don’t think it’s that—which would imply at least two generations of them up here before she was born. But Reeve did say he saw one on his boat and that’s why he didn’t take Seawitch out for the final voyage—seeing the dobhar-chú made him sick or so frightened that he made himself sick. But I’ll bet the dobhar-chú was just looking for Fielding when it came on board. They’re the paranormal gossipmongers, so if they heard one of their kind was around, they’d want to check it out. They probably hadn’t expected to be recognized for what they were, and when that happened they had to keep Reeve off the boat so they could get to Fielding.”

The coffeemaker began to gurgle.

“How would they hear about Fielding?” Quinton asked.

“Maybe Father Otter lied when he told Fielding he didn’t know anything about his mother. . . .”

“That’s possible,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back on the counter, waiting for the coffeepot to fill. “Bending the truth seems to run in the family.”

I followed my train of thought rather than pursue the fruitless complaint of Fielding’s questionable veracity on some points. “Of course, there’s always the merfolk. If the one that kissed Fielding as a kid really had put a mark on him, maybe any of them who spotted him would know he was their enemy, whether he was aware of it or not, and the word might have slipped out through them. Especially if they were planning something unpleasant. They seem to be a bloodthirsty lot.”

“Yeah, Zantree was saying so upstairs. The original siren legends are pretty gruesome. It’s not all The Little Mermaid.”

I snorted. “Even The Little Mermaid isn’t The Little Mermaid. Did you know Andersen originally wrote it as a ballet?”

Quinton shook his head.

I continued. “I’ve danced that, back when I was still ballerina-sized. It’s a horrible story: The mermaid gives up her voice to get legs so she can marry the prince she’s in love with—and possibly get a soul as well. Every step she takes on land is agonizing, and to get a soul she has to persuade the prince to kiss her so she can take his. To get him to kiss her she has to dance for him. Dancing in terrible pain. And in the end he doesn’t marry her—he marries someone else. It’s a ballerina’s story, really: giving up something you don’t know enough to value to gain something that’s utterly fleeting, and being in pain all the time until you die of a broken heart. So she dies and becomes some kind of angel and soars off to do good deeds and gain a soul and a place in heaven, but the ending always seemed a bit of an afterthought—Andersen did a lot of those ‘but the girl went to heaven and was never cold/sad/alone again’ endings. I hated that show.”

Quinton made a face and turned to pour us some coffee. Then he came to the settee to join me and brought two mugs of coffee along, saying, “That’s a nasty tale. I don’t think I’ll ever think of it the same way again.”

“Now you know how I feel,” I said, accepting one of the mugs and clasping it in both hands.

“Zantree’s stories are equally grotesque, but they don’t include kissing princes. Mostly they’re about singing sailors to their death on the rocks—”

“Wait . . .” I interrupted him. “I know that story: Scylla and Charybdis from the Odyssey. One was a monster in a rocky cave and the other was a whirlpool. . . .”

“Actually they were both monsters—sirens. They used to be sea nymphs; each had been cursed to be a monster but they still had voices that were irresistible. Sailors would hear their voices and either steer their boats into the maelstrom or be wrecked on the rocks on the other side. Then the sirens would eat them. Umm . . . why are you staring at me like that?”

I felt electrified and I must have looked it. The door from the aft deck slid open but I ignored it. Even breathing shallowly with excitement, my chest ached from the clutch of an idea too fascinatingly terrible to ignore —well, that and a sore rib. “The ghosts called them sirens,” I said. “I missed the reference. Valencia was wrecked on the rocks just the other side of Vancouver Island from here and all but thirty-seven of those aboard died. Wrecked on the rocks like sailors lured to Scylla, but what if, instead of devouring their flesh, these sirens took their souls?”

“What would they do with them?” Solis asked from the steps. “What use would the merfolk have for souls?”

I shook myself, taking too sharp a breath in my surprise and flinching as I recovered. “Blood magic. I told you how that works, Solis—a spell cast literally in blood. You don’t have to kill to do it, but you get more power if you do. Fielding said Shelly was the daughter of a sea witch. Fielding and the ghosts both made a distinction between the witch and the merfolk, and Fielding mentioned elemental magic specifically. Not blood magic. But that’s definitely the flavor Shelly cast with that broken circle on board Seawitch, so chances are good it’s what she learned from her mother. She probably doesn’t—or didn’t—have the same degree of power or autonomy, so she didn’t kill anyone right away. OK, yes, I’m just speculating. But what if she left that aside so her mother could collect the important part: the souls? Shelly might not have even had a choice if her mother was using her as a stalking horse. If the sea witch could store these souls, she could have power whenever she needed it without having to take the time and go through the rituals of bloodletting and invoking.”

Solis was confused. He narrowed his eyes and blinked at me.

I explained, “Remember what I said about there being several major categories of magic and whatever type you practice, you have to have access to the right power source? In this case, blood and sometimes death. Under the right circumstances any source can be captured in a properly prepared magical storage device. So having this power in storage is like flipping a switch when you’re connected to a big bank of batteries, versus having to fire up the generator first. Magically speaking, it’s a hell of an advantage.”

Solis scowled, rough-edged spikes of color flashing around his head as he fought with the concept. “You suggest that this sea witch collected the souls of Starrett, Carson, Ireland, and Prince?”

“I suggest a lot more than that: I suggest she first collected the souls of the passengers and crew aboard Valencia. That she and her merfolk caused or aided the conditions that wrecked the steamer on the rocks to begin with and they then killed everyone who hit the water.”

TWENTY

“Could they do that?” Solis asked. “Lure a ship to its destruction?”

“According to legend, that’s their stock-in-trade,” I replied. “I’ve discovered that there’s often more than just a kernel of truth to that sort of story. And what happened to the Valencia is almost too bizarre to be true—everything went wrong, seasoned officers and crewmen made horrendous errors, and when the storm finally died down long enough to launch the lifeboats, they still couldn’t get to shore and all the women and children died in the water. Truth really is stranger than fiction, because if that were a book or a movie, people would reject it as over-the-top.”

“But why take Seawitch?” Solis asked, apparently having decided to throw his wavering disbelief on the junk heap for the sake of puzzling out a killer’s motive; it didn’t matter what he believed as long as he could understand what the killer