Seawitch (28 page)

“I know. If they come, just keep them off the boat and away from the bell. We’ll be back as soon as we can. And you know I love you and need you, right?”

“Yeah. And I love you . . . even when you’re a bullheaded pain in my ass.” He finally returned my kiss and then turned me around to face the aft rail before we got too maudlin. “Now get going.”

Zantree had no interest in butting into the conversation or tagging along, but he helped us get the dinghy deployed again and heading for shore with me and Solis aboard. It was only when we were on the way that I realized the little vessel was in the hands of the half of the party who knew almost nothing about handling boats. Luckily the water on the eastern edge of the cove was nearly still and the boat was a simple outboard type without a lot of bells and whistles to deal with and no oars to pull. We drew near the tumbled rocks and cut the engine, letting it glide toward the shadow Father Otter had indicated.

Three wet, dark otter heads popped up, bristling whiskers and making chuffing snorts, sniffing at us as we neared. They eyed us thoroughly before the largest one turned back toward the rocks and the other two swam forward to guide us in by bumping the gliding dinghy into the proper path with their bodies. I had seen otters at the Seattle Aquarium and it wasn’t until one of our escorts was cruising along the side of the boat only a few inches from my hand that I realized how big they are. This one was typical at about five feet long, including its rudderlike tail, and probably weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. It rolled on its back in the water and yawned, showing off its mouthful of ivory-colored fangs. I’ve heard otters referred to as clowns and playful, but seeing one that close I knew “play” was relative—it would be no work at all for this giant seagoing ferret to snap off one of my fingers or break one of my arms if it got those teeth into me. And while they had a thick coat of fur, the body underneath was all muscle, and quick with it. I hoped I would have no reason to tussle with any of the creatures living under Father Otter’s aegis, especially since dobhar-chú were even larger than the garden-variety sea otter swimming beside us.

In a few minutes the boat had come to a soft halt against the cliff base where a small, low cave had been carved into the rock by aeons of waves. Solis and I climbed out of the dinghy with care and jammed the little boat’s rope between two rocks so it wouldn’t drift away, though the otters looked at us with quivering-whisker expressions that implied they’d never seen a human do anything as silly as that before. At their vocal insistence, aided by nose prods and dirty looks, we scrambled for the cave and were met by one of the dobhar-chú—or I assumed it was since it was about twenty-five percent larger and had the telltale white cross on its back that I’d seen on both Fielding and Father Otter. Its bellow was something between a large cat’s mew and a dog’s bark. It looked us over and trotted off into the darkness at the back of the cave. Solis and I exchanged wary glances and followed it, stumbling on the slick, uneven rock of the upward-sloping cave floor. I winced with every jarring misstep and slip of the foot as we went.

In the dark all trips seem too long and perilous. Eddies and hollows of Grey washed around us, unnoticed by Solis, who kept his eyes on the dobhar-chú, while time rushed and lagged and broke into temporaclines that sparkled like shattered glass I dared not touch. The sound of muttering and mewling echoed ahead of us as we walked. In those weirdly dilated minutes, we passed through a ghost forest tilted at a disorienting angle and then through a flash of heat that dissipated into a bland, dim illumination the color of lichen. Before us opened a low-ceilinged cavern thick with half-lit things and the odor of fish and wet fur. Around the edges the cave seemed to writhe and it took a moment for me to realize the movement and the sound I’d been hearing all along was actually dozens of otters and dobhar-chú lounging, grooming, or moving in and out of the area through passages on each end that brought diluted air and light in from the outside. At our end a clearing had been made near the wall to accommodate a small group of dobhar-chú gathered around the misshapen bulk of Gary Fielding.

Fielding’s situation had deteriorated badly since we’d seen him earlier in the day. The dobhar-chú had settled him in a depression in the rock and filled it with water, but either there wasn’t enough water, or his brush with the merfolk had done him some new injury that brought trickles of blood from his eyes and nose running down his half-human face. The wet rocks around him gleamed with red streaks and he twisted in pain, rubbing more blood onto the rocks and his rough-furred body.

The largest of the dobhar-chú near Fielding started toward us, changing as it walked until Father Otter strode the last few paces across the cave to us in his human guise. He gave Solis an irritated glance and then seemed to dismiss him as he turned his gaze on me. He scowled. “You see what has happened? His forms must be untangled or he will die.”

“How did this happen?” I asked. “He seemed stable when we saw him earlier.”

“The world tide is changing. While it turns, the power of the merfolk rises and we lie so close to them that their evil magic is stronger.”

“Then why don’t you move a safe distance away?”

“This is our home. We will not leave.”

“Isn’t it their home, too?”

Father Otter bared his teeth at me. “But
we
do no evil.
We
do not sink ships and destroy men.”

“At least not anymore,” I said. “Your kind doesn’t have the nicest reputation in the Old Country.” That online research—thin as its yield had been—was paying off.

His face twisted with rage, his lips drawing back, and he hissed at me. He reminded me so much of Chaos when she was enraged that I almost laughed but I throttled the chuckle before it could escape. If he started jumping around and doing the weasel war dance, I really would lose it, and I thought that might be a very bad idea.

Instead I settled back on my heels and gave him a chilly look. “Let’s not pretend either of us is a white knight here. You want my help; I want yours. Whatever the problem is, it’s getting worse and I imagine there’s not a lot of time to fix this. So how about we get to it?”

Father Otter rolled his shoulders and scowled but he nodded and led us toward Fielding. Solis shot me a glance that was a little too white around the edges, but he didn’t say anything and he came along, if a bit hesitantly and keeping half a pace behind. This had to be horrible for him—being unable to stop or go back, powerless in the encroaching field of enemies—another fall into his nightmare. And yet he came of his own will.

At Fielding’s side I crouched down to get a better look at him. He was rolling around from pain and making growling sounds in his throat. He didn’t seem to register that I was there. I reached out and touched his wrist; it felt hot and the patchy fur on his arms was abrasive in my grip. I pulled back my hand and found my palm scratched and raw like a minor case of road rash. “Great,” I muttered. “Gary? Gary? Fielding, it’s Harper Blaine. Can you tell me what’s changed? What do I need to do?”

His reply was an unintelligible whimper.

I turned to Father Otter. “I’ll have to take a look myself. This is going to appear a little strange, so don’t freak out.” I didn’t add “and attack us” but I thought it.

He scrunched up his face in what I took for an expression of confusion, though it was a little hard to tell since he didn’t seem to have the same facial reactions as a human even with a human’s face. He shook his head with a sudden snort that was more like a violent sneeze than anything else. Then he glanced at me and shrugged. “As you must,” he muttered, turning his head away.

The rest of the dobhar-chú turned around also, giving me some kind of privacy, I assumed, or just not watching something as distasteful as dabbling with magic. I caught Solis’s eye. “I’m . . . uhhh . . . going to get a little thin here. Keep an eye on our friends.”

He nodded, his aura settling a bit at having an understandable job to do. His gaze shifted away immediately to scan the surroundings as I sank into the Grey.

The cave of the dobhar-chú looked like the remains of a wild party in the Grey. It was littered with knots of colored energy, tilted and tangled temporaclines, and mist alive with creeping strands of energy whose origin looked decidedly unwholesome. Fielding’s aura was rendered into a seething boil of violet and blue pierced through by green and red spikes that seemed to dig deeper as I watched. Long threads of each color stretched away toward the cove as if the energy around him was literally spun from the water outside. Resting partially on top of him lay a shadow whose densities of darkness in shades of night, coal dust, and tarnished silver welled and ebbed like tar bubbling slowly from the ground. The shadow seemed to be knitted to Fielding by the strands of energy that defined and stabbed his aura. It was difficult to see exactly how the filaments of color stitched through the shadow form as it writhed and twisted. I concentrated on the dark shape, pulling myself by inches through deeper layers and sideways through variations of the Grey until I could see it better.

I seemed to have snuck into a pocket of the Grey that abhorred me: cold and shuddering like San Francisco during an earthquake, the air itself seemed to stab me with needles of ice and then slice with razors of fire. I did not wish to stay any longer than necessary and I wondered where the hell the Guardian Beast was—surely this wasn’t a part of the Grey any living person should ever see. . . . But I steeled myself to the assault as best I could and stared hard at the strange form that was Fielding. As I’d feared, the shadow I’d seen on him was two shapes forced into the same space by the winding cables of colored energy. Each piercing thread of red or green caught a ripple of one or the other shadow form and pulled it toward the center of Fielding’s energetic mass, constantly tugging and tearing the fabric of his dual forms into one another. I could barely make out the pale separation still remaining between them. I couldn’t possibly pinch off every strand of magic that was knitting them so horribly together. I had neither the ability anymore nor the desire to try to reach into a living being and attempt to remove the burning twists and thorns of this unnatural torment. Especially not while I was being battered by an inhospitable corner of the Grey itself.

An icy shard of ghost-stuff ripped through my chest and I shivered so violently that I tumbled sideways out of the Grey.

I landed, wincing and trying to catch my breath as chilly tears welled over my lower lashes. Solis caught me and helped me back up to my feet. Work calluses on his palms and fingers felt like stones for a moment before the sensation faded.

Father Otter and his ilk had turned back around to watch me as I fell. Now they looked up at me—faces furry or human all curious and a bit repulsed by what they saw.

“He is no better,” Father Otter accused.

“I can’t do it here. I need to be in a more stable place in . . . the magic sphere,” I said, groping for the right words to express the Grey to him. “Where it overlaps the normal world. I can’t see what I’m doing under any other circumstances. You need to get Fielding and us out to the shore, where the two realms overlap.” It was a place I did not want to go even though I’d known I’d have to. I’d hoped to put it off to the end, to draw the sea witch and her minions into my
own
sphere of control first. But that plainly wasn’t going to happen and we had no time to argue.

“That shore is within the compass of the sea witch’s power,” Father Otter objected.

“I know that, and the gateway is closing so we could all be trapped, but I can’t do this here. We have to go where the overlap is already stable. It’s too difficult for me to hold the two worlds steady and do what needs to be done at the same time.”

“You will have to. We cannot fight her and defend you at once. We will attack—we will do whatever must be done, whatever you command us to do—to defeat her once our cousin is safe but we cannot do both in the same time and hope for any of us to survive. Including you and your . . . family.”

I gasped out a laugh at the vision of the motley crew of the
Mambo Moon
as a family and regretted it as my rib sent a stab of complaint into my chest. A frisson of fear came with it: We had so little time and this was a desperate move.

“All right,” I said. “I can try here, but it will have to be very quick. The only way to pull the two forms apart before they are knitted into each other too much to separate is to cut. There’s no other way to get through the . . .” Again I stumbled for a word and settled for a gesture of shoving my spread fingers together in a woven steeple shape, while saying, “The joining magic fast enough. It has to go in one fast sweep and it has to be done very soon. I’ll need some kind of knife. . . .” Part of my mind was gibbering in panic at the thought and the rest was doing its best to keep that element locked up where it wouldn’t show. My hosts wouldn’t have appreciated my freaking out and I didn’t know where that would leave Solis.

The dobhar-chú barked and squeaked at the smaller otters and there was a frantic shuffling around as the assembled creatures searched for something for me to use. A collection of shells, rocks, and bits of rusted metal were shoved across the wet stone floor to me, but even the metal parts were too small or too dull to serve. I dug in my jeans pocket for my own little pocketknife. The narrow two-inch blade looked pathetically small for this job but at least it was sharp, and although the edge would serve more as an allegory than an actual cutting blade, this was a situation that called for a fine-honed symbol of incision, not a metaphorical butter knife. “It’ll have to do,” I muttered. “I wish it were something magic or at least something . . . bigger.”

Solis tapped my shoulder and held something out to me. The dim light from the other side of the cave gleamed a moment on bright steel as he flipped the thing with care, hilt out. I blinked at him and took it gently. It was a karambit: an odd little Indonesian knife about eight inches long and curved the whole length. The handle and blade were all one continuous piece of steel. A ring at each end defined the handle as much as the grip scales did. The blade looked like the flattened silver claw of a raptor and it was wickedly sharp along the inside curve. It couldn’t have weighed a quarter of a pound and it wasn’t designed to stab, only to slice, but it would do that with elegant efficiency.