Seawitch: A Greywalker Novel Read online

  Also by Kat Richardson

  GREYWALKER

  POLTERGEIST

  UNDERGROUND

  VANISHED

  LABYRINTH

  DOWNPOUR

  ANTHOLOGIES

  MEAN STREETS

  (WITH JIM BUTCHER, SIMON R. GREEN, AND THOMAS E. SNIEGOSKI)

  A GREYWALKER NOVEL

  KAT RICHARDSON

  A ROC BOOK

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Kathleen Richardson, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Richardson, Kat.

  Seawitch: a greywalker novel/Kat Richardson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-451-46455-2

  1. Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. 3. Psychic ability—Fiction. 4. Seattle (Wash.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.I3447S43 2012

  813'.6—dc23 2012007910

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  For my sister: Thanks for being here, yet again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The year 2011 was a very difficult one for me and my family, and getting this book written, revised, and through the whole process was a bigger team effort than ever before. It’s impossible to quantify my appreciation for even the seemingly small things people did to help me bring this off, but the following is, I hope, at least some measure of recognition.

  Thanks to:

  Armando Marini for help with the rivers and estuaries of Rhode Island and for letting me steal his wife for a month—including her birthday.

  Michael Kinsella for help with small craft routing across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

  Cherie Priest for lunches and being there.

  Elizabeth Rose-Marini, for being the best and most patient sister in the world.

  Jacque Knight for agreeing to be bad.

  Rosanne Romanello for sympathy and help beyond the call of any publicist.

  Richard Foss for the guest room and wonderful conversations and for being gracious about my forgetting to mention him in the previous book for suggesting the Ley Weaver.

  Robin MacPherson for beta reading, good suggestions, and common sense as well as, y’know, friendship.

  Julie, Judy, Peggy, Jacqueline, Aliza, Kirsten, Mita, and the rest of the folks at the Swedish Hospital MTC in Ballard for everything.

  Shawn Speakman for carrying on.

  Kelli and Lance Zeilinski for the BBQ.

  John and Susan Husisian—you rock.

  The fabulous staff of Murder by the Book in Houston, Texas, and Duane Wilkins, Fran Fuller, JB, M’E, Christelle, Synde, and the rest of the booksellers who keep on pimping my books—I love you guys.

  Jon Jordan for letting me graciously off a hook.

  Jen Jordan for being . . . well, Jen.

  Mary Robinette Kowal for being utterly wonderful and so much more, and Rob Kowal for much help and even more help after that.

  Laura Anne Gilman for professional advice and personal charm, plus the occasional kick in the head.

  Janna Silverstein for help and letting me hide in her home.

  Sally Harding for picking up my professional pieces and being a wonderful friend as well as a fabulous agent.

  Anne the Amazing Editor and the rest of the crew at Roc—you make me look smarter than I am.

  Janet, Carolina, Linda, Mario, and my unknown copy editor who corrected my Spanish.

  Chris McGrath for Oh My God gorgeous cover art. Again.

  The Minions for picking up the promo slack when I couldn’t and for being the best minions in the world. No evil overlord could ask for more.

  Paul Goat Allen for saying wonderful things in very public places.

  Mario, Caitlin, Mark, Richelle, Jeanne, Jaye, Nicole, Chuck, the Rainforest folks, Nova, Sandra, Jilli, Bruce, Arinn, Erin, Blake, Charlaine, Toni, Dana, Patrick S., Shanna, Cat R., and the rest of my mad writer friends.

  Diana Rowland for mutual venting and being amazing.

  My husband, Jim, for pirates, cutlasses, dogs, passion, compassion, and heaters as well as all the other things that are too numerous to list.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kat Richardson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  I am trying to break my habit of dying. I’ve had my turns on the dance floor with death at least three times that I know of. So far, it has never lasted more than a few minutes and I hope I won’t be staying longer anytime soon. Although I fear my next pas de deux with the Reaper will be the last and lasting one, I prefer to put that bow off as long as possible.

  Each time I’ve died, I’ve awakened changed in ways normal people can’t see. These unexpected and unwanted adjustments have stuck me with a strange job: to protect the Grey, the fringe between the normal world and the world of the purely paranormal, from which rise the ghosts and monsters of our collective nightmares, where magic sings across the blackness of this worl
d between worlds as clouds and lines of gleaming energy. Sometimes I must also protect the rest of the world from the Grey and things that are birthed there. I am not a magical creature myself—at least not in the way a ghost or a vampire, a witch or a sorcerer, is. I’m just the legman and general dogsbody for the thing that guards the place; I’m a Greywalker—Hands of the Guardian, Paladin of the Dead.

  None of these titles is on my business cards or my office door. As far as the normal world of Seattle is concerned, I’m Harper Blaine, private investigator. It’s the job I was doing long before an angry man killed me and helped introduce me to the Grey. I continue to do it partly because I’m good at it and largely because ghosts tend to stiff me on the bill. Some days I long for the boredom of background checks, personal-injury fraud, and missing persons handed off from an overworked police department. But something always seems to lead me back to the Grey, whether I want it to or not. My friends and family—such as they are—get the short, hard end of the stick too much of the time. I am sorry for that and I know I owe them something better. When the living nightmares are bleakest and thick around me, these ties are all that keep me anchored to what is good and right and human, and I will hold those things close, because this is not a job you quit—it’s one you die from.

  ONE

  The news called it a ghost ship. I didn’t detect any ghosts from the outside, but the boat was enshrouded in thick, colored skeins of Grey fog and ghostlight in gleaming, watery shades: aqua and cerulean with thin whispers of violet twining through them all. I didn’t see any ghosts per se, but there was definitely something paranormal going on—more than any reporter was likely to credit.

  I stood in the fog near the end of B dock, waiting, looking at the Seawitch. The insurance paperwork called the old wooden boat a fantail motor yacht, designed by someone named Ted Geary—which I guessed was a big deal. I’ve dealt with boats before, but I’m certainly not an expert and a lot of the technical information about this boat meant nothing to me. It had a long, low profile—relatively speaking—with a round stern and rakish angles that exuded a Jazz Age sense of power. I knew the family had money—the boat wasn’t the only expensive object the insurance company that had hired me had covered for them—but the vessel wasn’t flashy; in its current derelict and stained condition, freighted with mystery, it was grim.

  By all reports—official and speculative—the Seawitch had cruised away from its berth in this same marina twenty-seven years earlier and vanished from the knowledge of men, taking four passengers and one crewman with it. They had never returned but the boat had; suddenly and without any sign of hands aboard, it had simply been found one recent morning, standing at the end of its old dock. The derelict boat had been moved to B to rest with the abandoned, broken, seized, and foreclosed vessels until the truth of its reappearance could be ascertained.

  The story in the newspaper claimed that the boat had sailed into port under its own power, but, really, the Seawitch seemed to have arrived under cover of the strange, low-hanging morning fog that had swelled around the edges of the Sound and skulked below the bluffs every June morning in Seattle that year, making the hills and spires of the city appear as islands afloat in a haunted sea. Here it was, a lost ship piloted by no one living, returning to its berth after being presumed lost with all hands. Of course, that wasn’t quite the truth of the matter but it was close enough. And it raised the hit rate at the news Web sites by a thousand percent, which was far more important than veracity; advertisers pay for eyeballs, not for unvarnished truth.

  The insurance company had paid the claim long ago, and when the Seawitch reappeared, they were far more interested in where the boat had been all this time and why it wasn’t a hotel for fish at the bottom of Puget Sound than in unraveling any ghostly sea stories. They felt it far more likely that someone had defrauded them than that the boat and its crew had somehow vanished and remained hidden for all this time. They wanted prosecutable answers.

  The case would have landed back with the original investigator but he’d retired, and since freaky circumstances are my specialty, it didn’t take long for the file to end up on my desk. This case had the smell of something that would taint your life and haunt your dreams for years afterward, so I wouldn’t have blamed anyone who passed on it, especially since insurance investigations of this kind don’t come with high-end recovery fees—just lowball hourly wages and the occasional dinky bonus. Insurance investigators are sometimes known to play fast and loose, so once the cops got involved, my colleagues were even less interested in contesting my assignment.

  Lucky me. I not only got the case; I knew the cop.

  And so I stood in the shreds of morning mist, waiting for Detective Rey Solis to arrive, show me aboard, and explain why the Seattle Police Department was involved in what should have been a matter for the maritime lawyers and insurance actuaries to scrap over in court. Something large and dark—maybe an otter hunting in the salmon run—splashed in the water beside the dock and made me jump.

  In the swirling fog, the sound of footsteps on the floating cement dock bounced off the water in a disorienting fashion. I turned my back to the boat and the unseen otter and stood still, waiting for someone to emerge. Solis, looking like a specter in his dark raincoat with his wet dark hair plastered against his head, seemed to resolve from the murk as he drew close enough to see me, and I him. He nodded to me and stopped at the foot of the steps someone had provided for boarding the Seawitch.

  “Good morning.”

  I wasn’t so sure of it, but I nodded back. “Morning, Solis. How did you get stuck with this one?” I knew he’d been promoted to detective sergeant not long ago and he probably had the seniority to avoid an assignment like this one. Homicide had been separated from other major crimes a few years back and this sort of thing wasn’t their usual beat. They were still top dog where any suspicious or violent death was concerned, but the vagueness of the jurisdiction might have put it in some other agency’s bailiwick or given a senior officer an excuse to push it onto someone else.

  He cocked his head in what I thought of as his half shrug, but didn’t explain himself. His aura didn’t give him away, either, but it rarely does.

  I can’t say I was unhappy to be working with Solis—he’s a good detective and I respect him—but I’d never thought Solis was comfortable with me or the creepy cases I seemed to attract, so this was going to be interesting, most likely in that Chinese-curse sort of way.

  “Well,” I started, not sure what I should say, “I’m glad it’s you. Better than working with someone new.”

  He gave another small nod and turned to look at the Seawitch. “It does not look like a ghost ship, does it?”

  “Looks solid enough,” I replied. The structure was intact as far as I could tell. I was more than ready to go aboard and not worried about the physical side of the boat: I couldn’t recall ever being seasick except when experiencing the sensation of the world heaving underfoot when I’d first been introduced to the Grey. I’d gotten over that eventually.

  Solis led the way on board, up a set of plastic stairs that were a little too short—the last step to the deck was about eighteen inches above the last riser and a couple of feet away across empty air. With my long legs it was only annoying, but Solis, being five inches shorter than I, had to stretch a bit. He then used a key on the padlock affixed to a makeshift hasp on the main hatch. Someone had taken a drill to the original lock inset in the narrow wooden door and the remains sat loosely in their case, making a metallic rattle as Solis pushed inward.

  “Did your guys drill the lock or was it that way when you got here?” I asked.

  “It was one of the Port Authority employees,” he replied, stepping inside, since there was no room to move any other direction with me standing on the side deck behind him.

  “They can just do that?”

  “Yes, if safety is in question.”

  The boat didn’t seem like a hazard—just a bit old and abused—but in
this day of terrorism, I suppose the thinking was, Who could be sure that it wasn’t a bomb or a floating biological attack waiting to happen?

  I nodded as Solis watched me slip through the doorway. I nearly recoiled at the smell inside.

  The room reeked of mildew and wood rot. We’d walked into a huge upper salon with scattered sofas and tables around the room and sturdy wooden cabinets and shelves built into the walls below the window line. The cream and blue upholstery on the seats was striped with green and black stains, and the filthy blue carpet felt moist and spongy underfoot. The matching blue curtains had rotted to shreds, and the tables and cabinet doors were warped and discolored. From inside I could see out in almost any direction between the ruined hangings. I would bet the sun shining on all that glass had done its part to advance the rot, and at the same time, the spotted windows made the room seem both open and trapped in its own personal fog bank.

  I sneezed and coughed a little as the smell aggravated my nose and throat. “Ugh,” I muttered. The movement of the boat was barely noticeable, but the stink was compensating for the lack of mal de mer.

  “It is unpleasant,” Solis responded. “It’s worse below.”

  “Oh . . . goody,” I replied, turning my attention back to the room around us.

  A squared-off arrangement of the furniture defined a lounge area that faced the rear of the living room–like space—I knew real hard-core boat people would have called it the saloon, as it was labeled on the plans, but damned if I would. I wondered why the seats were oriented to the back until I figured out that the entire rear wall was made of wood-and-glass panels that folded aside to open the back of the space to the round, covered aft deck. Passengers could sit inside reading, chatting, or eating while enjoying the outdoors without having to be in it—back when the interior was still clean and dry—and if the weather went sour could still use the area just by pulling the doors across. Judging by the moisture level, the weather had invaded at some point, doors or no doors.