and debris waver toward
“We stay the course we’re on. The waterspout should continue on its line, east to west, and we’re heading north. As long as we’re moving at ninety degrees and faster than its intercept speed, we’ll pass it safely. But it shouldn’t be here—there’s no cloud above it.”
“I thought you said it was a fair-weather spout.”
“That just means it’s not part of a cyclonic storm. That one there’s a micro cell, but . . . it should still have a cloud. . . .”
“You said they condense moisture from the surface?” I asked.
The boat shuddered again and swayed side to side.
“Yes.”
“They don’t suck water up?”
“No. Something that size doesn’t pick up water or objects.”
“Then that’s not a waterspout,” I said. “And I don’t think we’re going to have to search too hard to find the sea witch.”
Staring at it through the Grey, the waterspout was thick with creatures that writhed and twisted in the rising liquid. A handful of human forms spun, screaming, in the water, festooned in seaweed and trailing chain. In front of it, coils of blue energy reached and spun through the waves toward
Quinton and Solis both gaped at me. I felt sick and my cracked rib seemed to stab into my side, sending a cold chill of fear and pain through my chest. Or maybe it was Quinton who was feeling scared and sick, but I didn’t think I was immune to common sense; the waterspout was not natural and it wasn’t staying put or moving in a nice, straight line. It was coming to get us.
“I think the sea witch wants her bell back. . . .”
Solis turned to me. “You have it aboard?”
“Why wouldn’t I? If we’re going back to where it happened, we have to have all the parts of the mystery or we can’t solve it.”
“How would the sea witch know we had it?”
“The same way she knew Fielding was aboard: spies. I’ll bet the dobhar-chú aren’t the only paranormal intelligence agency around. After all, they’re the enemy so the sea witch wouldn’t go to them. She’d post her own observers. And it doesn’t matter who; it only matters that they found us.”
That was when Zantree shouted down, “Hands on deck! Prepare to fend off!”
TWENTY-ONE
“Fend off?”
“Well, you don’t say ‘repel boarders’ when it’s not human, do you?” Quinton shouted back. He snatched a pole from a pair of clamps beneath the rail and shoved it into my hand. “You go to the bow and smack down anything that tries to come over the rail—this is going to hurt and I’m sorry about that rib, but we have no choice. Solis, you stay on the side deck—your back will be protected by the cabin, but you’ll have to move up and down the deck pretty quickly to keep off whatever’s coming. I’ll take the stern until Zantree tells us otherwise. We don’t have time to tie off to safety lines since we didn’t run any, so be careful, keep your flotation vests on, and grab or tie yourself to something whenever you can.”
He ran back to the stern and returned in a moment with a wicked, narrow hook on a short handle. He thrust it into Solis’s hand and then dashed back the way he came.
Solis blinked and paled, then turned to me. “What is coming and how will I know?”
“I think you’ll see it just fine—these guys aren’t being subtle. And if you can’t tell, hit anything that isn’t one of us or part of the boat.”
“What about Zantree?”
“He’s pretty busy on the bridge.” I gave his shoulder a steadying squeeze. “It’s just like any other fight. Only wetter.”
I didn’t wait to hear him object but ran forward to take up my position on the bow, partially as the specially talented lookout, I realized, as much as a defender. I was puffing uncomfortably by the time I reached my spot and my side was already achy.
The waterspout was less worrisome than the roiling sea ahead of it. The gleams of Grey energy I’d spotted earlier were uncoiling now, reaching toward our boat and spreading like blind vines groping for us with seeking tendrils. And as they came, the strands formed outlines of shapes, monstrous and strange: creatures half-man and half-fish with wide mouths full of jagged teeth and extra appendages like the grasping tentacles of giant squid. The lines began to fill with sea foam whipped by wind and our own personal squall drew in fast, accompanied by harbingers of magical destruction and a high, keening song that caught across my ears and my throat, sharp as the metal taste of ozone. I risked a drop into the Grey to get a better look. . . .
The ghost world roared with the voice of a storm and the cold blackness of the Sound flickered with lightning rising from the depths to burst through the surface in gouts of green, blue, and violet light. The colored energy from the depths reached into the smoky substance of the Grey, twisting it into vaporous shapes and running in quicksilver streams through the billowing eddies of ghost-stuff. Farther away, the Grey held a small cohort of more solid shapes that surged through the water. At this distance it was hard to be certain, but the things seemed to be the same shapes as the monsters projected in the magic and sea foam that was closing in nearby. One of the fast- running threads of energy snapped toward me with the sound of lightning and a stink of ozone; it clamped around my upper arm and yanked backward, trying to drag me off the boat. I snatched at it with my free hand and tried hooking one of my legs around the nearest upright on the rail and bracing my feet against whatever solid purchase I could feel to resist the strand’s tugging me into the water, but the rail was insubstantial so deep in the Grey. I threw myself backward, pinching off the energy strand that had wound itself around my arm as I tumbled back into the normal.
And into a descending wave cresting over the rail.
“I’m getting . . . a little sick . . . of being wet all the time,” I muttered, picking myself up, wincing and gasping.
A storm front pushed by the waterspout had closed in on the boat with unnatural speed while I’d been “out” and
It wasn’t so much a concealment as it was a literal front. The magic wasn’t deep and it probably wouldn’t hold up past a certain degree of damage, distance, or time, but how long or far we’d only know when it broke. The first real assault came over the side as blue-green figures of foam and water, reaching for us with tentacles and teeth. I heard Solis shout in alarm as the watery specters heaved aboard. I swung my boat hook at the nearest one, feeling the shaft connect with a slow thud to the mass of animate liquid. But the pole didn’t stop; it merely bogged down against resistance and snapped out the other side too fast under the power of my muscles, causing me to stumble and twist forward as the hook came free into the air on the other side. The figure I’d swung through dissolved into a huge splash, as if I’d shattered an aquarium.
I swore as pain broke across my ribs and I jabbed the pole’s butt backward into the next sea-foam monster. That, too, fell into a dousing explosion of water that knocked me down onto the deck, breathless and unable to refill my lungs as each heaving attempt was cut short by the sharp agony in my side. I needed to hold on to something or I’d pass out and the enchanted waves would wash me right off the other side. I rolled onto my back with care and started to shove my feet against the next one, but my foot passed through it and I felt a wet, electric shock as something gleaming wrapped around my leg and yanked me toward the rail.
