Seawitch

Island . . .”

“Nothing you could hide a ninety-some-foot boat in,” Zantree said.

“What about beyond Lonesome Cove?”

“I can’t remember every blasted cove and bay in the islands! Quinton, take a look at that chart—page forty- six or so. Up and down Spieden Channel on the north end of San Juan Island, east of Vancouver Island.”

Quinton flipped over pages of a massive chart book, laying one of them flat on the folded-back book and running his fingers across the rough-edged, inverted-pear shapes of the big islands and the shapeless blobs of smaller ones until he found Spieden Island and the channel south of it. He guided his fingers along the outline of San Juan’s northern shore. “I see Davison Head . . . Lonesome Point . . . Lonesome Cove. . . . Maybe across the channel on Spieden, by Green Point? Or around the east side of San Juan into Rocky Bay?”

Zantree shook his head but kept his eyes on the view ahead. “With the wind he was describing, they couldn’t cut straight across to the lee of Green Point. Rocky Bay would have been too rough—they don’t call it Rocky for nothing. He said he’d tried for Davison Head, but he obviously didn’t make it or he’d have been home and dry, as long as he avoided the submerged pilings—and there’d have been a famous stink if he’d taken her aground on them. Look straight on down the channel.”

“There’s nothing down the channel. It opens up at the end of San Juan Island and there’s nothing else but Orcas unless you hook back over the top of Spieden Island.”

“Jones! It’s got to be Jones Island or I’m a gaffed marlin!”

“Why would it be Jones?” Solis asked.

“Because if what these two are saying about the sound traveling is right, Jones is the only landfall it could come from. It’s straight down the throat of Spieden Channel! That big rock before you reach Orcas.” He reached over and stabbed at the chart with his forefinger, mashing the page flat. “Right there.”

We leaned closer as he straightened up to keep both hands on the twitching wheel. Where he’d pressed the map lay a modest lump of an island with a nibble taken from the north and south shores. Jones Island. An unobstructed line drawn through Spieden Channel to Seawitch’s last known location cut right through the island’s northernmost point that guarded the nearly round little bite of North Cove.

TWENTY-THREE

It wasn’t tiny but on the map Jones Island wasn’t much more. There were smaller islands in the San Juans, but few as oddly alone as Jones. Smack in the middle of the confluence of several channels, the misshapen little island seemed isolated from its neighbors, though none of them was actually far away. The looming bulk of San Juan stood to its west and the long finger of Spieden pointed just over it to the massive curve of Orcas on the east. A few smaller islands stood below it like fallen crumbs and above it opened the passage to the northernmost islands, an empty stretch of churning water where the currents of the tidal race began their restless way through the riddles and gyres of the north Sound.

“North Cove’s a pretty place,” Zantree said, considering the chart, “but no one I know ever drops their hook there for long.”

“I imagine that the merfolk make sure it stays that way,” I said. Even if they aren’t entirely corporeal all the time, the denizens of the Grey have ways of making their presence known and driving off the unwanted attentions of normal people without showing their true nature: cold breezes, unpleasant smells, disquieting glimpses from the corner of your eye that are gone when you turn around, and the sense that—for no reason you can name—you need to leave. With all that deep cold water to play in, they probably had a whole host of tricks I’d never seen before, too, but I had no doubt I’d get familiar with them soon enough.

Once Mambo Moon had fought clear of the rocks and currents, the rest of the trip up Haro Strait was easy enough. But even with the current now in our favor, once we turned southeast above Henry Island the trip down Spieden Channel was a bitter fight for every yard in the teeth of a cold and adverse wind that sprang from nowhere and rushed up the narrow passage like a fury. Ragged white lines appeared where current- driven wave tops were whipped into foam by the wind coming from the opposite direction. The water in the channel became a choppy ribbon of dark blue crossed with white that sent the boat lurching up and then banging down like a hobbyhorse with a squirrely front end.

We each took a turn at the bow—mine cut a bit short by the swooning pain in my ribs—clipped safely in place with lines from our flotation vests to the rails. We kept a lookout for anything that might come under the boat as it reared up, but nothing significant did and we all got chilled in our damp, borrowed slickers as the sun started its slow summer crawl to the horizon. With the bulk of Vancouver Island far behind, the channel was cast into shadow long before dusk.

As we bowed and reared, the Valencia’s bell gave out occasional muffled chimes that sent a frisson through me and plunged the world into a dark cloud of the Grey for a few moments. The noise seemed to be folding reality, layering the normal and the Grey into a pleat where both appeared equally solid and real for the fleeting moments that they remained aligned. Between the motion, my cranky rib, and the fluttering of the worlds, I felt distinctly seasick by the time Mambo Moon finally exited Spieden Channel. Directly ahead lay Jones Island, shining gold in the westering sun between purple shadows lying on the water from San Juan and Spieden islands, closing on the little nub of land with their encroaching darkness like the pincers of a giant black crab.

Within a minute of the boat’s leaving the channel, the wind died down and the swells smoothed out as we hit the wider, more populated water. I was the last on lookout duty and I slogged my way along the deck sideways, bent and favoring my aching side. The bridge had its own doors that opened onto steps down to the side decks and I climbed them at a snail’s pace to leave my moist coat on a hook just inside the starboard door. The three men were in the pilothouse when I entered, panting.

“You look done in, Harper,” Zantree said from his post at the wheel.

I nodded. Quinton stepped close to draw me in tight against his chest so my back pressed to his heat while his arms circled my waist. Since I’m taller than he is, it was a little awkward, but I didn’t care. Warmth is warmth and when it comes from an attractive man who loves you, you don’t quibble about the way his chin hits your shoulder.

“How much longer?” I asked.

Zantree scrubbed at his damp hair with one hand as he answered. “Well, assuming we’re in the right place and all, maybe forty minutes at this pace. But I don’t get how we’re going to see anything but the park service dock and a few tourists.”

“I’ll have to get our hosts to come out and open the gate to Neverland,” I said.

I tried ringing the bell, but inside the confines of the pilothouse I couldn’t generate a solid peal, only an anemic clank or ping that shuttered the world in darkness for a moment before it fell away again. The men all flinched as the overlapping world flickered in and out of view.

I looked at each of them. “What are you seeing or hearing that’s making you cringe like that?” I knew what I was experiencing, but none of them were Greywalkers or even particularly sensitive to the Grey, though Solis seemed to take it in a bit more. Did the bell actually have some power to call up an entrance or was I imagining— hoping for—more than was possible?

“It’s fast,” Quinton said. “For just a second . . . it’s like seeing the world in the light of an eclipse.”

“Bleak,” Solis said. “It is not just a darkness but . . . a loss.”

“Storm light’s what it looks like to me,” Zantree said. “Like we’re on the edge of a hurricane or a blow coming down.”

“Do you feel something or is it just visual?” I asked.

“It’s cold,” Quinton said, and Zantree nodded.

But Solis frowned, shaking his head a little. “There is . . . expectation. Something waiting in the cold.”

Maybe it’s a cop thing—that intuition the good ones develop—that was giving Solis that extra bit of knowledge, but whether it was from his background, his family, his job, or being dragged in by me, he was picking up more than either of the other men. It was strange that Quinton wasn’t getting more, considering how much time he spent with me, but perhaps the difference in perception was in kind rather than in degree. Either way, I guessed