“No!” The single word came out in a long, agonized howl. “No! I didn’t hurt him. I didn’t hurt anyone. I just—” He cut himself off and curled on himself as if Solis had punched him in the gut. Then he sank to his knees on the slick rock floor of the cavern. “Les started freaking out. I still don’t know what she said to him exactly, but Shelly must have told him his wife was dead while Cas and I were out after that damned halibut. She could do that sometimes—she knew things. She didn’t like to say them, but Les probably badgered her into it. That’s the sort of guy he was.”
“Who broke the circle?” I asked.
“What?” Fielding barked, staring at me.
“Who broke the spell circle in Shelly’s cabin? That was the real problem, wasn’t it? Was it Leslie Carson or Starrett or was it you?”
Fielding stared at me. “What are you saying . . . ?”
“You lied to us about what happened on Seawitch’s last night. There was no spear mark and no blood on the deck or in Starrett’s cabin, although there was plenty in Shelly’s cabin. So Shelly Knight didn’t shoot Starrett with the speargun as you said. There’re a hell of a lot of marks on you, though. They’re scars that shine even through your fur. In fact, they show more, which means it’s your otter form that’s got them. But you said you’d never known you were a dobhar-chú until that night—and I believe that—so you’d never changed form before and you’ve never changed properly since, so all those scars happened that night. How’d you get them, Fielding?”
He gaped at me, his mouth working like a fish’s, but no sound came out. I just stared back as if I were only curious.
Solis poked him in the shoulder and peered at his face. “There is a scar here on his face. Like fingernails make, like a woman makes when she’s angry or afraid and she claws at your eyes,” he said, making a sharp gesture toward Fielding’s face with his own crooked and raking hand.
Fielding flinched.
“Come on, Fielding. We don’t have a lot of time. Maybe I can guess what happened and you can just tell me if I’m right.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“I think you said that before. So what is it?”
“I was out with Cas after the halibut and . . . he found out. He found out about Shelly—about us—and he . . . he wanted to fuck the mermaid,” he added in a mumble.
Solis fell silent and the sound of conflict still raged, but distantly and diminishing. Fielding’s whimpering sobs of shame trickled into the noise like tears into a pool.
I leaned forward and returned the knife to Solis, pretty sure he wasn’t going to use it on Fielding at this point but thinking I might. “So,” I started, “you and Shelly were together.”
Fielding nodded, still looking at the ground.
“Reeve disapproved, didn’t he?”
“Yeah . . .”
“And that’s why he didn’t get to come along on this trip. You or Shelly made sure he was too sick to sail. Didn’t you?”
Fielding nodded. “I put laxative in his beer at Charlie’s the night before we went out. He was talking about seeing the water hound on the boat and he was half-drunk and already half-spooked, so it was pretty easy.”
“You’re a real sweetheart, aren’t you, Fielding? How much did you know about Shelly then?”
“I knew she was special. She told me I was . . . something special, too. She couldn’t quite convince me it was true, but I was starting to believe it. She said no one could know about us—and especially not about how we were different.”
“But Reeve knew, or suspected, didn’t he?”
“Suspected. But Shelly wasn’t like that! She was . . . she was sweet.”
“So she didn’t come to the marina looking for victims for her mother. She came looking for something else.”
“She wanted to see the human world. She said she didn’t know any living humans. And when she found me she thought it was funny that I wasn’t really human at all. I didn’t understand. But I liked it. I liked her. I liked . . . being with someone forever, not just for the night.”
“I can understand Reeve figuring it out—he was a salty old guy and pretty observant—but how did Starrett find out about Shelly?” I asked. Solis seemed to have decided this was my part of the interrogation—I was good cop to his bad cop, I supposed.
“He saw her at Port Townsend. I guess she was upset after what had happened with Les so she went swimming to relax.”
“What did she tell Leslie Carson about his wife?”
“She knew Odile was dead—she just knew. He said she was teasing him since he complained constantly about how Odile threatened suicide all the time to keep him in line. Odile was messed up and unhappy and everyone but Les understood that. He thought Odile was just screwing with his head, because she’d told him she would do it this time and he’d come with us, anyway. So I guess when Shelly told him she was really dead this time and how and when . . . he was freaked, and more freaked when the cops called with the same details. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Yes. And his accusations upset Shelly because he didn’t take it seriously?
“Yeah. Well, knowing about it upset her, too. So she went swimming because that’s what she did when she was stressed out. It’s not very safe to swim in the Sound in the dark without dive lights—it’s easy to get lost and then you tire out and drown. But Shelly was half-fish and it was only in the dark that it was safe for her to swim near people. But Cas wanted his damned stupid halibut and he stayed up all night to get it. We didn’t have tank gear so he was using a mask and snorkel in the shallows where the halibut come up to spawn and he’d swum out pretty far from the dinghy. Shelly didn’t realize he was nearby—she thought we were going the other way. He saw her under the water. When I got the fish out of the fridge in the morning for him to clean, he told me he had seen her. He told me what he meant to do—he thought it was . . . funny, like it was a joke and I wouldn’t mind, ’cause we were buddies or something. He was that kind of jerk—he figured every woman was his to take. I was panicking—he was my boss’s boss and I’d made Reeve sick to get the cruise so the old man wasn’t there to back me up and he wasn’t going to take my side on anything when we got home, either. Hell, he was probably going to fire me once he figured it out. I didn’t know what to do. I already had the engines fired up and was ready to take the boat out. Cas didn’t seem in any hurry—it was like he was savoring the idea—and I didn’t know how to stop him, except to act like it didn’t bother me and try to get below ahead of him.
“It was my fault we were at sea when the call came in about Les’s wife and I wouldn’t go in to port because I was scared shitless about what was going to happen to me and what Cas would do to Shelly. I wanted to stay at sea so she could jump overboard and swim away, but . . . she didn’t. She wouldn’t. I got us out of Townsend and in the clear in the strait. I turned on the autopilot and I went down below, but she argued with me about leaving and we were still arguing when Cas came down. He laughed at us. And she . . . she told me I was an idiot. She told me to go away and take care of the boat and it wasn’t anything girls like her hadn’t been doing for centuries with guys like Cas. I didn’t understand what she meant—I still don’t. But I got angry and I shoved her and her foot slipped on the rug on the cabin sole. And then she was furious—it was like she’d flipped a switch and went from sweet girl to unholy bitch in a millisecond. I didn’t know what the rug was covering up until she started screaming at us. She threw it away and pointed at this crazy charm she’d drawn and now it was all messed up and she was shouting at us, telling us we were doomed, that we’d done it to ourselves and she . . . she was just crazy. She shoved Cas backward and he hit his head on the hatchway. She started pawing at the blood on his head and saying it wasn’t right, it wasn’t working, and I was trying to drag him away from her because . . . I thought she was nuts. I didn’t know she was trying to save us! I didn’t understand. She grabbed my arm and she cut me—”
“She cut you, no
t Starrett?” I asked for clarification.
“Yeah. It’s my blood in the cabin, but I figured no one has a DNA sample from either of us, so who’d know?”
“We didn’t need a DNA sample. The lab said it was only partially human blood; the rest was otter.”
“Crap!”
“Doesn’t matter. What happened next?”
“Shelly was trying to redraw her spell or whatever and I was just getting in the way. I was freaking out. I was trying to pull Cas out of the cabin and he wasn’t responding—he was barely conscious and he was bleeding and mumbling. . . . Shelly was angry at me and she was saying crazy things and crawling around on the floor. . . . And when I tried to grab her and make her help me with Cas, she screamed at me and started hitting me, hitting and hitting and calling me names. She clawed at my face and pushed me away and she cursed me and ran up on deck and threw something in the water. She was screaming the whole time. Then the rest of them came to carry her away. That’s when they started killing people.”
“You didn’t write any of this in the log.”
“I wasn’t sure I’d make it, but if I did, I didn’t want that kind of thing on the record. And if I didn’t . . . who was going to believe me if they ever found the log, anyway? I was going to steal the stupid thing when I brought the boat back but Father Otter convinced me to leave it—to bring you to us.”
“You brought the boat back.” As I’d suspected. “Good trick in the state you were in.”
“The ghosts and Father Otter helped,” Fielding admitted. “Then he went to look after Reeve, while I came back here for a while. I knew the merfolk would try to find me—even though they missed me right under their noses for twenty-seven years, the morons—and Reeve would be the obvious place to start looking. Even if he was still mad at me, I owed the old man some protection. None of this was his fault.”
“Wait: the merfolk didn’t keep you and torment you for that whole time, as you implied before?”
He looked a little uncomfortable at being caught out. “Not the whole time, but I couldn’t get any farther away than here until the gate in the worlds opened again. I found the bell by accident the first year and the ghosts said they’d help me hide if I helped them escape when the gate opened again. The sea witch was trapped in the cove until that time, too, so she wasn’t using the ghosts and wasn’t paying attention to any of the objects they were stuffed in. I had to keep on dodging her for the next . . . twenty years or so. When the gate started to form the dobhar staged a raid and she was too busy to notice when I moved Valencia’s bell into Seawitch’s bilge. I’d been making my plans to get to you for a year or more after the raid, and when I left, Father Otter warned me the sea witch would know I was out in the world again. He was pissed off about the business with Reeve so I didn’t tell him I was planning to go find him at the hospital and tell him what had happened to me and the boat—I figured that was another thing I owed the old man. I thought the merfolk would leave him alone once Father Otter foiled them once. But I guess not.” He didn’t seem as broken up about it as I’d have expected. He was unhappy about what had happened to Reeve, but it was almost a self-pitying kind of misery.
I shook my head in disgust. “Your Romeo and Juliet romance turned into a grudge and you didn’t try to clear up the misunderstanding; you just made it worse and spread the tale around. Why didn’t you just tell us the truth?”
“Because the truth is that it’s all my fault. I would have let him hurt her. When the ghosts saved me and the boat, I was still so angry and confused . . . I didn’t understand what had happened for years. I didn’t see what I’d done until it was way too late to fix it and Shelly and her mother . . . they’ve been looking for me ever since. Mermaids don’t forgive much. Sea witches forgive nothing.”
“This love story was never going to end well. Her mother wasn’t going to want a dobhar-chú for a son-in-law.”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Sounds like a regular problem of yours. So now it’s not just Shelly who wants your hide, it’s her mom, too?”
He nodded. “She’s one hard bitch.”
“She wouldn’t happen to be a redhead?” I asked.
“Yeah . . . why?”
“I think we’ve met.”
Fielding finally looked up at me. “Oh . . . God, no.”
I shook off his fear. “I’m not working for her. In fact I’m not working for you, either. All I want is the ghosts.”
“But . . . you have them.”
“No, Fielding. I want all of them. You found one. I’ll bet you know where the rest are, too.”
The cave had fallen nearly silent and then a new sound started at a distance but came closer: a shuffling, snuffling, and squealing. The otters were returning.
“I can’t—” Fielding objected.
“I think you can. I think with you as go-between to your ex-girlfriend, we can offer the sea witch her bell back.”
“But . . . I thought you wanted to keep the ghosts.”
“I intend to. This is just the bait to move her where I can see her. Then you’re going to grab the rest of the receptacles. You know what they look like and where they are, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but . . . it’s suicide. She’ll kill us. Well, she’ll kill you and then she’ll kill me. And then everyone else.”
“I don’t think so. There are more of your cousins than there are of the merfolk, and once we have the ghosts, the sea witch has no power but what she gets from the merfolk. She’s a blood mage and she hasn’t got little merfolk batteries, so if she intends to use them, she’ll have to cast her magic the instant one of them dies. She’s not going to squander any more of her people for that. That’s counterproductive. She won’t diminish her population further. She may be a pissed-off hard-ass and half-insane as you and I see it, but she’s not stupid.”
“You are totally wild-ass crazy,” Fielding said. “I won’t do it.”
“Yeah, you will. Or you’ll go back to Seattle and stand trial for piracy and the murder of everyone on board Seawitch—since it is, as you said, your fault. You broke the protection circle, you would have let Starrett do what he wanted to Shelly, you made the bad decisions that put the boat in harm’s way. As the captain that makes it your responsibility legally and morally.”
He scoffed, though there was a certain amount of false bravado to the sound. “How are you going to make it stick? They’re not going to try an otter for murder. Your policeman friend isn’t going to keep my arm in a lock forever and you can’t stop me from changing form.”
“Don’t count on that, Gary. I cut you loose. I can tie you back up, too.” Blatant lie, but I wanted to see if Fielding was willing to risk it. I had other ways to get to the ghosts if I had to do without Fielding’s help, but I didn’t want to use them. Father Otter might not like it, but we had an agreement and he owed me. Magic creatures take that kind of thing seriously. Which reminded me . . . “You owe me for that, not to mention the lying and the underhanded way you got me into this pile of otter poop.” I wasn’t going to mention the Guardian Beast, since that wouldn’t get me anywhere and I’d already tried asking it for help and gotten nothing.
The noise of returning otters and dobhar-chú had drawn close so I wasn’t surprised to hear a short scrabbling sound followed by the rough clearing of a throat. I could feel Father Otter’s presence at my shoulder even without seeing Fielding cringe. Solis flicked his gaze a degree or two aside but his attention didn’t move away from Fielding.
“Does our cousin offend?”
“He’s not being cooperative,” I replied, keeping my eyes on Fielding. “I’ve rendered all the services I was asked to perform and I still have nothing to show for it. While it’s of no interest to you, there is a small matter of human law and the death of the people on board Seawitch to be resolved. And beyond that is the sneaky way your cousin used me and you and still let people die because he didn’t have the spine to do what he ought. He didn’t he
lp his girlfriend and he endangered the crew and got Reeve killed by leading the merfolk to him at the hospital. While I’m willing to let the human matters go if I must, I’m not ready to leave the situation here as it is and simply excuse a debt of honor because Gary doesn’t want to get his paws dirty.”
I could tell by the way Fielding pulled back that Father Otter’s attention had turned on him and it wasn’t pleasant. “Have you not had enough of exile from your proper form? Will you prefer to be outcast and outlaw, too, now that you have regained it? We shall make it so—”
A light came on in my mind at his use of “we” and “our”—they were not the common plural, but the royal usage—as Fielding lurched forward and down, putting his face to the rock floor of the cavern.
“No! No, Uncle,” he gurgled even as his form flowed and shifted from human to otter in front of us. Even though he was the largest of them, he wiggled forward like a pup, keeping his head on the ground and rolling onto his side in front of Father Otter, exposing his throat and belly.
Father Otter shrank down to his own otter form beside me and lunged forward, biting down on a mouthful of Fielding’s nearest ear and scruff. Then he shook the larger dobhar-chú hard until Fielding squalled and flailed with all of his paws as he was flung about. A stench thickened the air and Father Otter held his miscreant relative down until Fielding made a docile yipping that sounded like “Pax, pax, pax . . .”
Father Otter spat out the fold of Fielding’s hide and glared at him with disdain. He made a barking noise at Fielding and turned his back on the younger creature before stalking away to join the rest of the returning otters and dobhar-chú redistributing themselves around the cave. The others watched but none interfered or gave any sign that they were upset at what had just happened. A few furry faces even looked a bit pleased.
Solis and I stood still and watched Fielding resume his human form, shivering and sweating as if the scene between him and Father Otter had been a sickening ordeal. Perhaps it had been in a way we mere humans couldn’t understand. Fielding didn’t get to his feet this time but curled up to sit on the floor with his knees drawn up against his chest. “I’m to do as you tell me.” He sounded like a chastened child.
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