Seawitch

“Not from Rhode Island. My sister moved in with my grandparents near the end of their lives. I . . . wasn’t able to go. She really took to the place. Met her husband there.”

“You miss it?”

“I miss them and I miss the way life felt easy when we were all together, tooling around in the boat. Rhode Island? Not specifically. What about you?”

“I’ve never been to Rhode Island.”

“I mean . . . do you miss . . . people?”

I peered at him in confusion. “Which people do you have in mind? I miss the Danzigers.”

“I wasn’t thinking of them.”

I cocked my head, curious. “Who, then? You’ll have to be specific, because I’m just not following your train of thought.”

He looked upset and I felt a spike of anxiety reaching between us. “I was wondering . . . about Novak, to be honest.”

“Will? Why? He’s been gone for almost two years now.”

“Is he really? Dead doesn’t always mean gone with you.”

I tossed my head in exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! When I say ‘gone,’ I mean gone. What was once William Novak is no more. I used to wonder if his personality lingered in . . . what he became, but I don’t see any sign of that. Of course, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time chatting the Beast up, so I’m not entirely sure, but if I had to bet, I’d say gone is gone in this case. You can’t call the way it tosses me around affectionate.”

“Maybe . . . he’s angry with you.”

“No. He isn’t there,” I explained, feeling my own frustration slowly drain away as I talked. “If anything remains, I would call that thing an echo of humanity—by which I mean the urge to be humane, not something endemically human. But I don’t know that it comes from Will. I’m not even sure it’s more than my imagination that the emotion exists in it at all; the Guardian Beast is not human. It’s not even alive, really. It has substance and existence, but not . . . not a life, no soul of its own. And . . . Quinton, there is nothing—not a ghost or a monster or another human being—that can stand between you and me. And not just because of some silly magic thing. I love you so much and so deeply that if I could let it all flow out of me, it would fill up the whole Sound and spill out into the Pacific Ocean and fishermen in Taiwan would be finding big, sparkly pink shards of it in their nets a hundred years from now.” I threw my arms around him. “I yearn only for you.”

Quinton gave a self-conscious shrug and an embarrassed laugh. “I feel the same way about you and I’m sorry I’m . . . being an ass. Also, I suspect you just wanted to use ‘yearn’ in a sentence.”

I gave my best Valley Girl imitation. “Well, like, duh.”

This time he laughed for real and hugged me back. “You are half-crazy.”

“More than half if you mean crazy about you,” I replied, feeling silly even as I said it.

“All right: totally nuts. Like Chock Full o’Nuts nuts.”

“Chock Full o’Nuts? You really are from the East Coast.”

“And you really aren’t. Chock Full o’Nuts contains no nuts—it’s coffee. Which is appropriate, considering how much of it you drink.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. Then I found myself pressing against him and neither of us had moved; the boat had moved under us.

While we’d been talking the boat had been motoring along in increasingly busy water and now bucked a bit as it crossed the swell from a larger boat’s wake.

Quinton frowned and looked down at the instruments. “Damn it,” he muttered. “Pressure’s falling.”

“Oil pressure?” I asked.

“No, barometric pressure. It means there’s a squall coming up, but . . . I don’t see one. . . .”

Rising wind from the east and south puffed against Mambo Moon, pushing it a touch to the side and a touch more, then swung around and blew in our faces or on the stern—as if the rigid hull were a toy sail to be gusted across a pond—until we were out of alignment with our original path. Being a landlubber, I didn’t think much of it. Having more experience with boats, Quinton figured we were a bit off but wasn’t sure by how much or if it mattered with so much room to maneuver in the wide swath of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He corrected the course and kept the boat moving ahead. After an hour I noticed that the distant shoreline seemed to be moving along more slowly. I pointed it out to Quinton.

“Well . . .” he started, clearly thinking aloud, “I suppose since the tide is still going out we might be encountering more resistance as we get closer to the mouth of Haro Strait, where the channel is much narrower, so the tidal current would be stronger and moving against us. . . . It should ease as we approach slack tide.”

I had to shrug. “It’s Greek to me. The currents of the Grey, I get; actual water . . . not so much. What’s slack tide?”

“It’s the point in the cycle where the currents have slowed as the tide is nearing the turn. In this case, just before the tide starts to come in, instead of going out like it is now. Areas of slow water like coves and harbors behind breakwaters become still and there’s little to no current movement at the surface. It’s very easy to maneuver in slack water because there’s no current to oppose you.”

“How long does it last, this still period?”

“Depends on the area but it’s usually two to three hours.”

“Then . . . we should be in slack water in an hour or two?”

Quinton paused a moment to consider the math. “Yeah. So the tide will be slacking about the time we have to turn for Mosquito Pass—the southern pass to Roche Harbor. We’re still on the ebb tide now.”

I scowled. “But if it’s slowing down, why are we being pushed sideways more now than before?”

Something slapped the boat again, sending a shiver through the whole structure. I stumbled sideways and Quinton lurched the same direction with me, dragging the wheel around a few degrees before he let go of it. Mambo Moon wiggled in the water like a gaffed fish. I heard the doors below slide open and Zantree came zooming up the ladder to the flying bridge.

“What was that?” he shouted. “Did we hit something?”

Quinton started to answer but a sudden, violent gust of wind whipped across the flying bridge and stole the words from his mouth. Water splashed up over the railings and the boat rocked like a toy. Everyone looked out to see what we had struck or been struck by, but nothing was readily apparent.

Zantree took the wheel, saying, “All of you go down to the deck and look around in the water. If you can’t spot what hit us, we may have gone over it. We don’t want whatever it was to damage the propeller or the rudder—or the hull if it bounces back up. Logs sometimes float vertically and if they pogo, they’ll knock the prop clean off her. And we sure don’t want to be dead in the water here if this storm comes in. Those rocks off the port bow are mighty sharp.”

We scrambled down the ladder and spread out around the boat, peering over the sides for any sign of what we’d struck. The boat moved sideways and leaned over as if it were being pushed by something in the water. I saw a bit of lambent color below the surface on the left side—the port side—but it moved away like a swimming snake and vanished. There was nothing else to see but water that seemed unusually agitated. Water splashed up onto the deck, spattering over the side rail where I stood, wetting my clothes from the hip down.

“What is that?” Solis shouted from the front. I gave up staring at the water and ran around toward him, heading for the bow. I could hear Quinton’s footsteps going around on the other side but couldn’t see him.

I cleared the front of the cabin bulge and started to the other—the starboard—side toward Solis, who was standing halfway up the open section of the bow deck and staring northeast out to sea on his right. He turned his head, saw me coming, and pointed over the rail toward the bulk of San Juan Island. “What is it?” he repeated.

I rushed to the rail beside him and grabbed on, astonished by the sight of what looked like a tower of water undulating across the waves toward us.

Quinton caught up to us and looked out, too. “Waterspout!” he shouted.

“Blast it!” Zantree yelled down from above. “There shouldn’t be any of those around here!”

“What is a waterspout?” Solis demanded.

Quinton glanced at him and said, “It’s like a tornado but on water, so it condenses moisture from the surface as mist. That’s a fair-weather spout. They usually don’t move much. . . .”

“Someone had best tell that to the waterspout,” Solis suggested, watching the rising vortex of mist, water,