Seawitch: A Greywalker Novel Page 17

  “Oh, my,” I muttered, trying not to break the fragile mood.

  He sighed first, the brightness of the moment fading but not collapsing completely, I was glad to note. “I’ll clean it up,” he said, turning back toward the sink.

  I held him back long enough to kiss him again and then left him to it while I went to write up some notes on my home computer.

  Chaos the ferret was sitting on my chair, attempting to heave herself up onto the desk to wreak some havoc on my paperwork. I picked her up, giving her a quick scritch behind the ears, and deposited her on the floor, much to her ire. As I watched her dance in mustelid fury I remembered the way Solis had kissed his kids and his wife with casual ease, and for a moment I felt a pang of loss that I had never had that comfortable acceptance of place with a family. My family was Quinton, the ferret, and my annoying mother. I didn’t dare bring a child into the world; I didn’t know what might happen to it developing half in the Grey all the time. And if it emerged into the world healthy and human, what might happen to it then, surrounded by ghosts and monsters? It wouldn’t be like Brian Danziger, who seemed to be a perfectly normal little boy except for the educational effects of growing up with a witch and a paranormal researcher for parents.

  I sat down, feeling a little melancholy, and turned on the computer. I logged in to check my e-mail while the word processor started up.

  There was still no message from Ben or Mara Danziger. I typed up my paltry notes for the insurance company, then sat and poked at a few Web sites, trying to find some information about dobhar-chú, but it’s not easy to search for something you can’t spell and don’t have any keywords for. I swore under my breath and muttered, “Damn it, Mara, why don’t you write back?”

  I hadn’t noticed Quinton walking up behind me and I jumped a bit when he said, “You wrote to Ben and Mara.”

  I replied a little defensively, “Yes, I did. I know you thought I shouldn’t, but they are the experts . . . and I miss them. But what does it matter, since they didn’t write back?” The thin glow of our good humor of minutes ago collapsed and I felt cold and dreadful.

  “You’re still treating them like resources, not friends.”

  “That’s not fair. Or true. Even if you think it’s selfish and unfair of me, this at least gives me an excuse to communicate with them. I have to say something. . . .”

  Quinton humphed.

  I was a little ashamed of myself, but that wasn’t going to stop me asking them questions. “I suppose the issue is whether picking people’s brains and asking favors is the only interaction I have with people. . . .”

  “Not entirely, but it’s a big one.”

  “Would it help if I wrote back about something other than the only thing we have in common?”

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. “That’s the problem: You assume that you have nothing else in common, nothing else to talk about. So you don’t bother.”

  “I do! I just don’t know what to say! What the hell else should I say? I don’t have kids. I’m not married—well, not the same way they are. And we don’t have any other activities or hobbies in common. Where does the conversation start?”

  “Do you like Mara?”

  “Of course I do! I like Ben, too.”

  “And Brian?”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know. He’s a kid. I guess he’s all right. For an alien.”

  Quinton laughed. “I will grant you that most children are like aliens to many of us who don’t have any of our own. But he’s a good kid.”

  “You know I am trying. I can fake friendly long enough to interview someone, but I don’t know how to just . . . be friendly. It doesn’t come easily to me, and if I’m faking it, I’m plainly not being a real friend.”

  “Sometimes you just have to fake it until it’s true.”

  “I can try, but I’m a cold, prickly bitch. So I hear.”

  He sighed and I could feel him trying to exorcise the last of his own pique. “Not from me. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ride you about it. I was out of line the other night. I know that social butterfly is not in your repertoire.”

  I made an effort to turn the conversation to a lighter note and swiveled my chair around to face him. “Oh, come on. I don’t have to learn the whole butterfly thing, do I?” I teased. “You have to wear toe shoes for that. I hate those.”

  “Your call, but you’ll look silly in the wings and hiking boots.”

  “I think I’ll just stop when I reach the chrysalis stage.”

  “What, all encapsulated away from the world and mutating?”

  “Hey!” I said, directing a mock glare at him. “I could be a very dynamic chrysalis.”

  “You are a very dynamic chrysalis.”

  “Ooh, low blow, J.J.”

  He blinked at me. “Why do I find it disturbing when you call me that?”

  I winced, mentally cursing myself in light of the conversation we’d just had. “I am sorry. I promise I won’t do it again. It’s just that your name—umm, names—came up with Solis. He doesn’t know what to call you and I guess that got me wondering, too. I mean, I call you by a nickname, but we’re . . . almost like an old married couple. It suddenly seemed strange.”

  “I prefer it. I don’t really like being named after my dad. My grandfather was OK—he was the Jason. But being ‘James,’ or—worse—‘Jimmy,’ kind of curdles my blood. I’d rather be Mom’s son than Dad Junior.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I can see that.”

  And we both seemed to have decided to drop the subject. I went back to my computer and he went back to removing the burned pot pie from my dish. The ferret ignored us both and stole the keys from my bag, which I’d foolishly left on the floor, and we later spent twenty minutes looking for them. We found them behind a stack of ancient videotapes I’d forgotten I owned. Which led to laughing about old movies, then finding some online and watching them together. Which always leads to snuggling and snogging and then, of course, to various bed gymnastics and horizontal dancing. I had a feeling I’d be sleeping late. . . .

  FOURTEEN

  Morning comes too soon when it starts with excited phone calls from cops. Especially when I’ve been in bed only a few hours, and not asleep for most.

  “What?” I mumbled at my phone.

  “The lab has forwarded their report on the samples from Seawitch,” Solis repeated. “Also, I can find no records for Jacque Knight nor for Shelly Knight.”

  “Mysteries on enigmas,” I said, which made more sense when it started out of my mouth than by the time I’d finished. “What do the labs say?”

  “I would like you to see the reports for yourself.”

  I grunted and dragged myself upright. “Where? When?”

  “I am in my office. Where are you?”

  “In bed. I went back to Seawitch last night and stayed up too late. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t go aboard. I just wanted to look at Pleiades from a different angle,” I explained, staggering toward my closet with half-closed eyes. I hate morning on my best days and this wasn’t starting out to be one of those. I had that persistently groggy and startled feeling that comes from being rudely forced awake in the midst of a dream.

  Solis paused before he asked, “And what did you see?”

  “Something creepy and very interesting—but you’ll have to take my word for it, unless I can track down the otter.”

  “Otter?”

  “I’ll explain when I see you. Which won’t be for an hour or you’ll be embarrassed to be seen with me.”

  “I will meet you at your office in an hour.” He hung up without further ado.

  I turned my head and glanced at Quinton, who was still mummified in the bedding—the rat. “Why can’t breakthroughs happen after coffee?” I asked his shape.

  “Because they wouldn’t seem as interesting if you were fully awake,” the lump replied.

  “You don’t think this is interesting?”

  “What? The only interesting thing I heard was the pa
rt about being in bed.”

  I threw a pillow at him. “Sex fiend.”

  “Ah! There’s my girl, casting aspersions.”

  “Next time I’ll cast a shoe.”

  He let out a muffled chuckle but didn’t emerge from under the pillow. I was tempted to let the ferret sneak in and nibble on his toes, just for spite, but I restrained myself.

  I managed to shower and get dressed with my eyelids still at half-mast, and get out of the condo looking more like a human than I felt. I stopped for coffee and still managed to get into my office before Solis knocked on the door. I hadn’t checked my watch, so I don’t know if he arrived late or if I was just moving faster than I thought. I suspected the former.

  I let him in and returned to my chair behind the desk, picking up the coffee cup as I sat down. “So . . . what was in these reports?” I asked.

  Solis handed me an envelope with a few pages in it and removed his coat while I read them. He sat down and waited for me to finish, which didn’t take long since the report was pretty short.

  “So . . . there was human blood, but also something from a nonhuman mammal—specific genetic tests on that haven’t been completed yet so we don’t know what animal we’re looking for. But since we didn’t find animal remains at the scene, whatever it was probably didn’t die there. Still, it looked like a lot of blood. . . .”

  “Less-than-life-threatening amounts if there was more than one donor.”

  I nodded, my eyes feeling loose and gritty in my skull even under the influence of coffee. “With an animal in the mix it’s even less blood per . . . donor. And the rest of this . . . fish scales, mammal fur,” I read, “and nematocysts from some variety of jellyfish, all of these species unknown.” I looked up. “Does that mean they haven’t yet determined the species or they can’t identify it at all?”

  “I believe they have been unable to identify them yet,” Solis replied.

  “OK. And what’s a nematocyst?”

  “I also asked that. It is the part of a jellyfish that stings.”

  “So jellyfish stingers. But no jellyfish or remains of them. What sort of Frankenstein’s otter are we dealing with here?” I wondered aloud.

  “Again you mention otters. Why?”

  I drank more coffee and hoped I wasn’t just about to shoot the infant trust between us in the head. “I had a few interesting words with one last night at the marina.”

  Solis scowled. “Words? With a large aquatic mammal.”

  “It sounds crazy, but that’s kind of what you get with me.”

  “I know.”

  “Let me start at the beginning rather than giving it to you in pieces. Remember I said I saw something at Reeve’s house and again at the hospital?”

  “This green mist you mentioned and the dog.”

  “No, we didn’t see the dog for ourselves at the hospital. It was only hearsay. But the mist, yes. It’s some kind of energetic residue that was present at the hospital, but it was a more active thing at Reeve’s and I saw it wrapped around his chest like a snake that was constricting his ribs.”

  Solis frowned, but his expression was less skeptical than in the past. “I still don’t understand what this is that you see.”

  “I can’t be sure, as I said, but it’s related to what I suspect your mother-in-law sees—and that’s why she said what she did about me. She probably believes this is mystical in nature, that she’s crazy or ‘touched by God’ because she can see it, and she’s got preconceived notions about what sort of people have certain types of energy signatures. But I’m getting off the point. This paranormal energy is visible as light, or a reflection of light, under the right circumstances. In my case—and Maria del Carmen’s and probably Ximena’s, too—some energy that you can’t see is still visible to me and I perceive it as having color and radiance, even substance in some cases. Sometimes it just looks like light—like neon or a laser show. Sometimes it looks more like colored smoke, steam, or light reflecting through clouds and mist. In this case what I saw was a sort of dirty green smoke with brighter pinpoints of red light—like sparks—inside it. That’s what I saw wrapped around Reeve and squeezing his chest when he had his heart attack. The dog—or whatever it was—was at the other end of the smoke, but I don’t know if it was generating the stuff or trying to tear it away, now that I think of it. Because it was on the receiving end last night. . . .”

  I shook my head. “I’m getting ahead of myself again. Anyhow. I saw remnants of the same gray-green stuff around the bed where Reeve died. So my guess was the stuff came from the dog or—”

  “Or whatever it was,” Solis finished for me. He wasn’t comfortable with the discussion and his energy corona was flickering through several colors and fluctuating in size and shape, surrounding him with spikes of color one moment, then pulling in and blazing in fast-flickering hues the next. I guessed it was an indication of a more intellectual distress than I’d seen in most people, but he was trying to take it in or the energy wouldn’t have been so manic. Positive progress, but it must have been exhausting.

  “Right. Or whatever it was. And I’ll get to that in a moment. At any rate, I thought I’d like to get another look at Pleiades and see if any of the indications I saw before were similar when observed longer and from a better position, since I had no time to examine the boat earlier. So I went back to the marina and I walked around on B dock until I found a good position from which to observe Pleiades and I took a look there—I didn’t go on board or even near Seawitch. And the same sort of smoky energy I saw with Reeve was all around the sailboat. It was thick and very active.”

  I watched him for a moment, gauging his reaction, before I went on. “While I was there I heard some more splashing like we’d heard before. I thought is was just fish, but then something touched my foot and I looked down. A very large otter—and I mean a huge, mutant sort of thing—was in the water, looking up at me. Then it heaved itself partially onto the dock and it barked my name.”

  “Are you quite sure?” he asked. “Many people imagine their pets talk to them, but they do not; it’s only sounds that the human mind interprets as words.”

  “In this case, I’m pretty sure. But the interesting thing I want you to consider is this: The mammalian blood and fur found on Seawitch may well have come from an otter—the fur certainly looked like otter fur—and now that we know it’s possible, the lab should be able to confirm it or rule it out easily. Also a large—make that huge—otter and a medium-sized dog aren’t that far apart in size or appearance if you’re not really paying attention and see it only in a moment of confusion. So the creature that was reported at the hospital might have been an unusually large otter. Or, more to the point, an otterlike thing.”

  “A dobhar-chú, perhaps?”

  “I hate to say yes, but yes. I tried to get some information on the name Reeve gave us, but since I wasn’t sure how it was spelled, I had to try a description. Wasn’t very helpful and all I got was a small number of Web pages about an Irish lake monster that killed a woman in the eighteenth century. None of them said anything about talking, and the only thing any of them agreed on was a certain phrase, ‘The Father of All Otters,’ and that the creatures are vicious and look like giant otters.”

  “But they are mythical.”

  Now I was a little annoyed with him. He said he wanted to understand this and he’d been opening up to it slowly during the past two days of the investigation, but now he was digging in his mental heels. He reminded me a bit too much of myself in the early days. How had Ben and Mara stood me? “Biologists used to think the fossa of Madagascar was mythical until they found one,” I snapped. “And what about this investigation rules out the possibility of monsters? You saw ghosts! You saw them. You heard them. You saw me fade from the normal world and come back—twice. You even went with me into whatever occupies that engine room now and found Valencia’s bell, under the direction of ghosts! On the one hand you say you want to believe—for your wife’s sake if not any
other—and I’m endeavoring to help you. On the other you have a head as hard as a brick wall and start kicking up rough when believing is actually required. You can see there’s something strange here—you admit it—so why are you balking at the idea of one more bizarre thing in this case?” I demanded.

  I shut up quickly; I may have gone too far but I hoped not. . . .

  As he blinked at me, trying to form his reply, I kept my mouth shut over the one thing I wasn’t going to reveal to him, at least not yet: The Guardian Beast had bullied me about finding “the lost” and had also given the name Valencia. If the ghosts in the engine room of Seawitch were actually the remnants of the people who died on board the steamer Valencia, then I had, indeed, found “the lost” when we found the bell in Seawitch’s bilge. Lost souls . . . What had the ghosts said? “Our soul”? The Beast hadn’t pestered me since we’d found it, but it also hadn’t let me off the hook, so there was something more to it than just finding the bell. . . .

  I scrambled around on my desk and realized I didn’t have the information I was looking for. “Solis, what’s Paul Zantree’s phone number? Did you get it?”

  He shook himself. “What?”

  “Paul Zantree—the pirate. Did you get his phone number?”

  “I did.”

  “Give it to me. I need to ask him something while you make up your mind about your position on the paranormal.”

  He brought his notebook from the breast pocket of his suit and flipped it open, handing it to me at the appropriate page. I wrote the number on my desk pad and flipped the notebook closed before I returned it—I didn’t want Solis to think I was making an excuse to snoop in his official notes.

  I grabbed the phone and dialed Zantree. Apparently old pirates still get up before noon and he answered after only three rings. I went through the usual identification and greeting before I said, “Tell me about ships’ bells.”