“Why the water?” I blurted.
He stopped and looked down at himself, half-immersed in seawater. “It’s easier to stay in one form when I don’t have to concentrate as hard. I can’t make the full transition to a man or to an otter—I’m always part the other. This is about the right amount of water to hold this form steady without sweating it too much. More and I have to fight to stay otterlike. Less and I can’t stay human enough.”
“That sounds backward,” I said.
“That’s because it’s a curse and that’s sort of how they work: You turn the nature of something on itself.”
“Not always, in my experience.”
“Well, maybe not. The dobhar-chú aren’t normally magicians so I had to guess based on what the mermaids were doing. They seem to work with elemental magic—according to Father Otter—and then they twist or reverse some aspect of nature. Or that’s what makes sense to me after keeping an eye on them from hiding for twenty-seven years.”
I waved my hands in the air as if clearing it of hanging, obfuscating words. “Let’s get to that later. First, what are you?”
“Umm . . . kind of messed up. See, that’s the problem: I’m not really one thing or the other. Part water hound, part human, one hundred percent screwed.”
“So . . . the dobhar-chú do exist and they are involved.”
He nodded. “I guess you could call them my extended family. They took me in when this happened and they’ve been trying to help me and the ghosts ever since. But not because they’re nice guys or anything like that—you gotta understand that they are so far from human that I’m a freak to them. But I’m family and I’m the enemy of their enemy. So . . . they’re on my side.”
“Family. So . . . you were born . . . this way?”
“Not this way, no. But you could say I was born to have this problem because I’m half dobhar and half . . . normal. But I didn’t know about the water hound part until things went cockeyed on Seawitch. Well, I knew but . . . I didn’t really . . . believe it.”
He glanced around at the men and then back to me. I looked, too, then brought my gaze back to Fielding. He could see we weren’t quite following him. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said. “When I was a young idiot I used to joke that I was kissed by a Columbia River mermaid. But, see, that’s not really a joke. One summer when I was a kid, my mom and me and a bunch of the neighbor kids and their moms went out to Fort Stevens. Our parents really didn’t want to take us because the ocean’s pretty dangerous and cold in that zone, but it was a big deal for us kids to go to the ocean beach. I mean, we all grew up on the river and that was no big deal to us, but to go out in the salt water—that was super-cool. My mom couldn’t talk me into swimming in the jetty lagoon on the river side—I had to swim in the ocean. She couldn’t really say no, though I didn’t understand why at the time. So we went over to the ocean side of the park. It was a weekday, so not terribly crowded, and of course we all wanted to see the wreck of the Peter Iredale, like everyone does, and we walked back up toward Clatsop Spit afterward and staked out a place near the parking lot that was close enough to meet between the swimming area on the lagoon side and the beach on the ocean side. Most of the kids thought the seawater was too cold and they just splashed around in the surf and made a lot of noise but I swam out pretty far. Until I got stuffed by a wave.
“Or I thought I had been, because I’m paddling along fine—I’ve always been a really good swimmer—and suddenly I’m underwater and I’m scared and then there’s this strange woman towing me away. And my mom came out into the water—which she never did—and took me away from the woman. I should say, really, they fought for me. Mom won, of course, but the other woman kissed me on the forehead before she let me go and then she swam away very fast. My mother was seriously cranked off about it. She told me to stay away from women like that. Now, see, what I didn’t understand, ’cause I was just a kid, was that she wasn’t saying I should avoid loose women or ladies who swam topless or something like that, but that I should avoid females of that species. The woman was a mermaid, which seemed kind of obvious at the time because she had a tail and gills and even webs between her fingers, but I started erasing that part of the story from my memory because my mom didn’t like it and because it sounds babyish to say you saw a mermaid when everyone you know says there’s no such thing. And when I got older it was like a joke and I used it to charm people into buying me drinks or hiring me or . . . Well, I used it on a lot of women in bars and at parties. . . .”
At the moment, he didn’t look like he could charm anyone, being furry and misshapen and possessing a mouthful of teeth intended for cracking crab legs and ripping open fish the size of a man’s leg. But I could see, by concentrating hard on the Grey, two overlapping, massy shadows attached to him: a phantom otter, sleek and dark-furred, with a streak of white down its spine and a crossing streak on its shoulders; and a ghost form of his human self that was dark-skinned, slim, and fit, sporting a thick, curly mane of dark hair that fell over large brown eyes. I suppose some people have a better imagination than I do, since if I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have conjured such a lady-killer image on my own.
Solis bent forward into my line of sight. I’d almost forgotten the men were there. He scowled at Fielding. “So, you played the lothario.” I wondered whether his contempt came from the thought of his own daughters in a few years of if there was some other source of his anger.
Fielding scrunched up his furry brow, puzzled for a moment. “That’s from Shakespeare, right? Was he, like . . . Romeo’s friend?”
“No,” Quinton said. “It’s from an eighteenth-century play about a woman who is seduced by a selfish jerk who takes off after he ruins her marriage. Lothario was the jerk.”
We all stared at him.
“Hey. I had to read it for a college lit class.”
Fielding glanced away. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I wasn’t that bad. . . .”
Solis continued to glower at him. “In your final log entry, you wrote that you did not stop a rape, that you were equally guilty. . . .” Ah, so maybe it was being a cop as much as a father of daughters stirring up his anger.
Fielding swallowed hard. “Oh . . . yeah. Umm . . . I have had so much time to repent that and think about it and try to remember exactly how it went down and why I . . . did what I did.”
I turned and glared at Solis. “Can we get back to the original question and catch up to pointing fingers in a few minutes, Rey?”
“‘Rey’?” Quinton muttered under his breath.
It seemed better to use his first name and remind the lot of them that once the freaky stuff was in our faces, we were no longer operating on normal protocols and it was now my show. I turned the quelling glance on Quinton next, raising an eyebrow, challenging him to make something of it. He settled down with a sheepish grin. Solis was still fuming but he nodded curtly and sat back.
“So . . . you became a dobhar-chú because you were kissed by a mermaid?” I asked.
“Ah. No. This is the really weird bit.”
Quinton smothered a snort.
“Just go on,” I prompted.
“See, my mother— No. Let me say this first: the dobhar-chú aren’t usually shape-shifters, any more than they’re magic users. It takes a special circumstance to be born with two forms. My mom was one of those rare few. Usually the dobhar-chú are not a friendly or social bunch—kind of vicious and unpleasant, actually—but when they moved to North America from Ireland, some things changed and they had to get smarter to avoid being killed for fur. So this aberration started—this is what my mom told me before she took off.”
“She left you?”
Fielding nodded. “She left me and my dad a couple of years after the swimming incident and disappeared. Eventually I assumed she went back to her clan, but when I asked the Father Otter here he had never heard of her.”
I stopped him with a waving hand. “Who or what is the Father Otter?”
He hmmed a bit
before answering. “Sort of the local clan chief of the dobhar-chú. I’ll get to that in a second. Oh, and incidentally, that’s how I heard about you; the water hounds are good at gathering information, even though they rarely use it for themselves. They’re sort of the information brokers of the local marine paranormal economy, so to speak. ’Cause who can resist a cute otter that’s hanging out near their boat or begging for attention at the marina? That’s mostly how they stay out of other monsters’ sights—by being useful and cute. But they didn’t have any information about my mom, so I don’t know what happened to her. And I probably never will.” He shook his head as if rejecting that thought. “Anyway, Mom said the dobhar-chú’s origins are that the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a regular otter is a dobhar-chú and then the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a dobhar-chú is a shape-shifter. They’re sort of dobhar-chú royalty. And that was Mom. I was her only . . . umm . . . ‘pup,’ as far as I know, but I seemed to be just a human. Or I thought so. But, see, the reason Mom wanted me to stay away from mermaids is that merfolk and water hounds are deadly enemies. The mermaid who took me that day at the beach wasn’t trying to save me; she was going to drown me or eat me, depending on how mad Mom was at me when she told me the story again.”
Seventh pup of a seventh pup rang true—I’d seen that on one of the Web sites I’d found about dobhar-chú, along with references to their viciousness—but I’d never seen any mention of shape-shifting or magic or their presence in North America. Still, I wasn’t going to stop the flow of his story now, even if I had doubts about its purity, so I just looked encouraging and leaned on the Grey a touch to give it a little unnatural weight.
Gary went along like a pebble rolling downhill. “But anyhow, I guess that kiss did something—marked me or something. When I met Shelly—um, Shelly Knight—I noticed she always stared at me real intensely and it made me feel strange. I thought it was because she wanted me. That tells you what a conceited ass I was back then, but Shelly was so . . . sexy and so . . . I don’t know. She was special. If we asked her to work on the boat she always said yes, and she’d watch me but she always kept her distance. I thought she was playing hard to get. But that wasn’t it.”
He was about to continue when Zantree slid down the ladder from the flying bridge and joined us around the fish hold. At first he just glanced around, as if trying to see which one of us had been speaking, but when his eyes passed over Fielding he did a double take and stared. “What in the name of hell are you?”
Fielding seemed to shrink and tried to slide lower in the water, but as soon as he did the water boiled and his skin turned paler and furless. He began to gasp and choke on the water that was suddenly splashing and washing over his face as blood seeped from his mutating nose and mouth.
Solis and I were the first to grab him and haul his upper body above the waterline. He coughed and spat up water for a minute or so, writhing around as his face and body reverted to a half-human, brown-furred state.
Zantree bumped backward into the cabin doors as he twitched back from the sight of Fielding in transition. “Dear God,” he muttered. “I never . . . never thought I’d see such a thing.” He glanced around with jerky movements. “Do you—you all know about this?”
Quinton caught his gaze calmly. “No. It was a surprise to us as well.”
“Well . . . what is that . . . thing?”
“That’s . . . Gary Fielding. Did you know him about . . . I guess it’s twenty-five or thirty years ago?”
Zantree’s eyes were as wide open as Sunday church doors. “Gary . . . ? What happened to him . . . ? And where’s he been all this time?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. He was what was hanging on to the swim step when we cast off at Port Townsend.”
“Jesus! I thought it was a sea lion, even when you told me it wasn’t. Sure wasn’t expecting that,” he added, giving Fielding a hard glare.
By this time Fielding had stabilized and was breathing easier. The blood had stopped flowing from his mouth and nose and now left a red swirl in the water. Salt-crusted tears dribbled from his eyes, leaving a track on the fur of his face. The white scars on his face and body sparkled for a moment with tiny violet stars as the haze around him flashed a bright emerald green that vanished as quickly as it had come. The sight startled me a little and I glanced up from Fielding in a momentary panic. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Fielding responded, glancing around.
“You . . . sparkled.”
He coughed up a laugh. “Like an ice skater in sequins?”
I scowled at him. “No, like a spell.”
“Maybe because I’m under one?” he replied in a snotty tone.
“Don’t start with me, Otter Boy,” I snapped back. “You wanted my help and I’m giving it, but I don’t have to. We can toss you overboard and go home anytime.” Not that I really could with the Guardian Beast lurking around, but that was no one’s business but mine.
He cowered a little but not enough to have another fit of uncontrolled shape-shifting.
Solis, looking uncomfortable, broke the tension by asking, “Who is piloting the boat?”
Zantree shook himself and looked away from Fielding. “She’s on autopilot. This stretch is clear and empty for a few miles, so I thought I’d grab some gloves. The breeze is chilly up there and it’s kicking on my arthritis. Quinton, you want to go up for a minute until I get back?”
Quinton nodded and scrambled up the ladder to the flying bridge as Zantree gave one more scowling shake of his head at Fielding before nipping into the cabin.
Fielding glanced around as if reestablishing in his mind just where he was and that his condition was not some kind of horrible dream. “Was that really Paul Zantree? He’s gotten so old. . . .” Fielding whispered, hissing a bit between his reemerging fangs.
“You’d be only a little younger if you were in your proper form,” I said.
“I don’t know. . . . Some of us freaks live a long, long time,” he replied, looking me in the eye.
I returned a narrow glare and was about to say something cutting when Zantree stepped back out from the cabin, tugging on a pair of lightweight gloves. He took one more hard stare at Fielding and frowned. “We all thought you were dead, Gary. Why’d you let us think that? Did you do it? Did you pirate the ’Witch and hide her all this time? Did you kill the lot of them? Did you kill Shelly?”
“No! I didn’t do any of those things! I just— Things went bad. I didn’t do anything but try to save us . . . but I didn’t stop anything, either.” He hung his head, but I wasn’t sure if it was contrition or an attempt to hide his uncanny lack of expression. “I just ended up stuck in the same place with that damned boat all this time. The way back opens up only every twenty-seven years and it doesn’t stay open long. We’re almost out of time as it is.”
“Time for what?” Zantree demanded. “Are any of the others . . . like you? Did they survive? Are we going to save them or is this just about you—like it always was?”
Fielding cringed, salt tears coming a little faster down his face. “No. They’re all dead.”
Zantree’s face crumpled a little and he looked appalled. “Maybe you should be, too.” Then he turned and, without another word, climbed back up the ladder to the flying bridge.
His voice floated back down in a minute, but the wind stole the meaning of the words and they were just sounds snatched from the breeze. Then Quinton returned to our little party on the aft deck.
“He says he wants to hear everything,” Quinton said.
“Do you think he’ll understand it all?” I asked, thinking of how unbearable some stories from the Grey were.
Quinton looked grim. “Yeah. He’s a tough old bird. And he’ll keelhaul the lot of us if we don’t. So he said.” But his glance was directed at Fielding.
“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Fielding whimpered.
“Yeah, all those dead people were just a mistake. That’s what everyone cla
ims,” Quinton replied, a storm of little red sparks shooting through his aura. He reached over and flipped a switch on the wall beside the cabin doors on what looked like some kind of intercom system.
An uncomfortable silence fell, scored by the grumbling of the engines below us and the susurrus of waves.
I shook off the feeling first. I didn’t like Fielding, but I had other fish—or otters—to fry. “All right. Fielding, you said Shelly was watching you, but not because she wanted to join the bedroom Olympics. . . .”
“Yeah. She watched me and I mistook it for . . . well, something it wasn’t. I guess she was really keeping an eye on me, at least in the beginning. I don’t know what she was doing at the marina in the first place—it’s not like mermaids go and hang out with humans much unless they’re trying to kill them.”
A snort came from the intercom and I put up my hand to stop his tale. “Wait. Shelly Knight was a mermaid?”
“Oh, Shelly is not just a mermaid. She’s the Mer Maid. And aside from me, she’s the only one of us who survived. She’s the daughter of the sea witch and she’s supposed to be a virgin or she won’t become the sea witch herself when Mommy kicks the bucket. Which has got to be a load of crap because there is no way Shelly hadn’t been spreading her . . . tail for someone—”
Solis and Quinton both made low noises in their throats that collectively sounded a lot like a growl.
Fielding was startled and recoiled from them. “Hey! I’m just saying!”
Solis gave him a black glare. “Don’t.”
Fielding glared back, then looked away with a funny coughing sound. “Well. Yeah. All right.”
“So,” I summarized, “she’s a mermaid, daughter of a sea witch, and you’re the child of a royal dobhar-chú. Which makes you . . . what?”
“Ironically, it makes me almost human, but not quite. I guess it’s where I got my skill on the water, but the problem was I didn’t understand what my mother was telling me that day on the beach or the warnings she was giving then or so many times before she left us. With Shelly and Seawitch, I got into a situation I didn’t know was dangerous. I didn’t know Shelly was some kind of mermaid and therefore my enemy from birth. And . . . all right, I was a jerk. On that last trip with Seawitch things started out freaky and got worse and worse.
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