Seawitch

undisturbed by our passage.

As we slipped between the two arms of land that enclosed the cove, he brought the boat around sharply to port once again, keeping as much safe distance between us and the bubble as possible. We slid without challenge into the tiny cove on the island’s north shore.

The cove was nearly a perfect circle of water, embraced in the two reaching arms of the north and east points that enclosed the short spit of the park service dock at the south extreme of the bowl, directly across from the entrance. In spite of the early-summer weather, the calm little anchorage was abandoned; no other boat stood anywhere within the bay. The island beyond rose to a spine of rocky ground covered in still-green grass and tall, slim firs and cedars. The gentle slope at the dock’s end rose into craggy, tumbled cliffs on the curving scarp of the encircling points that enfolded the cove. To the west lay the northernmost point of the island, tall, stark, and black in the shadow of the slowly creeping sunset. On the east the cliff fell into a scatter of massive stones that had rolled down from the treed, curving spine of the island. The sun struck the wet black rocks a burnished gold that writhed with creatures.

“Don’t know that I’ve ever seen it this . . . empty,” Zantree said, his voice hushed as if he feared something watching us with malevolent intent.

I pointed to the eastern cliffs and their strange movement. “What’s that?”

Zantree peered at it, then pulled a pair of binoculars from a box fixed to the side of the steering station and looked through them.

“Otters. It’s a colony of sea otters. Well, I’ll be blowed. . . .”

TWENTY-FOUR

I found myself turning to watch the expressions of Quinton and Solis. Quinton stared toward the cliff, his mouth slightly open with excitement and awe. Solis looked haunted.

“Do you see . . . Fielding?” I asked Zantree.

He scanned the cliff with the binoculars. “Not sure. There’s a dark shape in the water near the cliff base that might be him—it’s a lot larger than the others. . . .”

“Can you get us near them without cutting into the bubble? We’re probably safer near the otters than anywhere else,” I said.

Zantree frowned. “I thought we needed to go into the . . . whatever you call that bubble thing.”

“It’s an overlap where both the near-paranormal and the normal are visible and operating simultaneously. I’ve seen something related before. This one is the merfolk’s realm as it intersects ours. The temporary intersection acts as a gateway, or, as the ghosts put it, a gap in the worlds where both states exist in the same place and time until the gap closes when its operating schedule dictates. In this case I believe the cycle is twenty-seven years, because that’s how long it was from the time Valencia went down until its lifeboat was found and the same amount of time from the disappearance of Seawitch to its reappearance. Since it’s tied to water, I’m also guessing the cycle’s tidal in nature—it ebbs and swells, so Fielding or his dobhar-chú relatives snuck Seawitch out in the magical equivalent of slack water. And I’m pretty sure it’s the only place to solve this mystery. I don’t want you to take the boat in there if we can avoid it, and not until we’re ready if we can’t. If—when—the state that’s keeping this gateway open collapses, Mambo Moon could be trapped in the merfolk’s realm for the next twenty- seven years, just like Seawitch was. I don’t think you’d enjoy that adventure.”

Zantree shuddered. “Not my idea of fun, being drowned by merfolk.”

“I’m not sure if that bubble will stay in place all of whatever remaining time we’ve got. . . .”

“It has been stable for more than the fifteen minutes our previous test lasted,” Solis said.

“Really?” I replied.

He nodded.

“Then maybe it’s going to hold steady. . . .”

“Hope for the best, but prepare for a storm,” Zantree said, steering for the eastern rocks. “I’ll keep the Moon out of the bubble for now. We can’t get in too close to the cliff since we’re coming on high tide, and as the tide runs out again the Moon’ll swing on her chain. We don’t want to run aground out here—or slide into that freaky ghost wall when the boat tries to come around with the current. But we can drop the dink and set a stern anchor once we get the bow down. That’ll keep her safe off the rocks and out of . . . that.”

Quinton nodded and I mirrored him, though I had no idea what I’d just agreed with. Solis frowned at the lot of us as if he were rethinking the whole mad escapade and checked his watch again.

Zantree maneuvered the boat around about a hundred yards or so from the eastern cliffs until he found a location that satisfied him, then dropped the anchor off the bow with a rattling of chain running off the winch. Then he and Quinton took the dinghy out with a second anchor aboard and put it down a good distance out toward the mouth of the cove. They finished up by securing the second anchor rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat, which held Mambo Moon in position with her bow toward the distant dock and her stern toward the entry to the cove. “So we can cut and run if we have to,” Zantree explained, though it didn’t really help me visualize what he meant. I assumed our would-be pirate captain knew what he was doing since he’d got us this far intact, but I admit I was worried; our position was precarious and we were lying between the local version of Scylla and Charybdis. We’d have to wait a few minutes and see what the dobhar-chú and merfolk would do now that we were here. They had to be feeling the time pressure as much as I was, so I hoped they wouldn’t dawdle.

The light in the cove seemed thicker and more golden on the normal side of the water, though the long summer day was nowhere near ending. Our “quick run” had taken nearly ten hours—double the time it should have, according to Zantree. I wondered how long we could count on the presence of the otters and their Grey kin to keep the merfolk at bay, or if the forces of the sea witch would hold off until the fleeting hours of night to make their move against us—and they surely would move. I didn’t know if we could defend ourselves or even see them coming outside the bubble generated by the Valencia’s bell. I hoped it would hold, as I didn’t think it was practical to strike the damned bell every fifteen minutes and I wasn’t even sure that doing so would keep the layered zone of Grey and normal intact. I suspected we’d have only one short chance to confront the sea witch before the bubble collapsed and dragged us into her realm permanently—or close enough to make no difference. I might survive in her bit of the Grey, but my companions didn’t have the same skills and their chances would be slim.

Once Zantree declared the boat secure and shut down the engines, I went out on the foredeck to study the Grey bubble.

The cove was about a mile across at most and we were only a dozen yards or so from the bulging edge of the fringe zone. Still no sign of the Guardian Beast, I noted, so nothing that shouldn’t have been here was lurking nearby, but the things that did belong were frightening enough on their own. I felt more than heard someone walk up behind me and stop by the rail. I turned.

Solis was frowning out at the curving Grey wall as he held on to the rail. “It is a mirror,” he said, without turning his head to me. “It reflects what you believe.”

“That’s an interesting thing to say.” I don’t know why I was surprised he’d come to that conclusion; as a detective, he must have been observing everyone’s reactions and putting his own experience together with theirs to get a better idea of the situation as a whole. I supposed he’d finally thrown out his resistance to the idea of the paranormal.

“Do you not find it so?”

“Yes and no. I see a lot of things I never even knew existed, so they can’t be just what I believe . . . or the whole magical world would be a black blank to me.”

“You believe in nothing?”

“I believe in people, both what’s good and what’s bad in them. And I think that’s what I see, even when it isn’t something I know. But I also see—or experience—more. Things that aren’t just constructs of human belief, though I must in some way filter it through my own knowledge, memories, fears . . . otherwise I couldn’t recognize