“This . . . water hound is some kind of sailor’s omen, then?” I asked.
Reeve shook his head. “Not an omen; the real thing.”
“A mythical beast . . .” Solis muttered.
Reeve’s aura flashed red again, but this time he didn’t hold his temper back. “You think I’m crazy? You think I’m lying?” he shouted, leaning farther forward with each angry sentence. His half-slack face twisted into something from a nightmare and his words came out in a wet slur. “You think because sailors are superstitious it must all be hokum and smoke rings? You’ll take it more seriously when you’re the one looking a devil dog in the face and you see those teeth shining, hear its voice. . . . You won’t think it’s a myth: You’ll think it’s going to rip your throat out and dance in your entrails. You will believe you are staring Death in the face!”
“Captain Reeve,” I started, leaning and reaching toward him, hoping I could touch that angry energy around him and maybe—if I still had the ability—calm him down. But he wrenched sideways in his chair as if my impending touch were poisonous, and he fixed me with a glare of utter malevolence.
“Don’t you try to gentle me, missy!” Reeve snapped. “I’ll put you over the side with the rest of those fish-tailed bitches.” And he made a jabbing gesture at my face with three arthritic fingers from his left hand. He seemed to look right through me or even past me as he continued. “You—you—you—” He started choking, the word catching in his throat like a bone and his face going crimson.
Still glaring through me and gagging on whatever curse he was trying to pronounce, Reeve began to topple from his seat. Solis swore and jumped up to help as I dove to catch the old man. But even falling and now turning blue in the face, Reeve jerked himself away from me, landing hard on the little cement patch of his patio. I could hear his head knock on the paving and he started convulsing and twitching, keeping his eyes pinned over my shoulder as Solis pushed me aside and tried to help him. I backed away from Reeve’s accusing stare and grabbed my cell phone to call 911, looking around to see what it was that was upsetting him so much—if it wasn’t actually me—but all I saw was the shuddering of leaves in the shrubs and a glitter of Grey sparks.
I turned my attention back to the men. The energy around Reeve’s head and body was blackening, as if ink were flooding into the psychic space around him, and I could feel a twisting, breathless pain in my own chest as I watched him in horror. He was dying right in front of me and there was nothing I could do for him and no way for me to avoid the wrenching shock of death that would strike me when he stopped fighting.
I started to kneel down and help even as I tried to tell the emergency operator what was happening, but Solis, cursing quietly in Spanish, pushed me away. “You frighten him,” Solis whispered. “Back away.”
I moved back a little, out of Reeve’s sight and where I could no longer see his accusing eyes. In a few minutes the EMTs arrived and hustled past me to the still-thrashing man. I could see Reeve arch and writhe, his eyes rolling up in his head, and I expected to feel the ripping pain of death slam through me. . . .
But it didn’t come.
I backed up against the plant-draped wall of the building and slid down into the Grey. I wanted to see what was happening to Reeve in the magical realm, since I wasn’t experiencing what I expected.
Reeve’s little garden was hot in the Grey. The plants were all a-rustle with green and blue energy and a spiked line of black and orange defined the wire fence along one edge that had become overgrown by plants. But there wasn’t much around Reeve himself except an exceptionally thick cloud of energy of mingled dirty-green, violet, and red threads that seemed to pour from the dry fountain and twist from the foliage, wrapping and swirling around him in coils like a boa constrictor slowly squeezing. . . . As I watched, the green-smoke snake of Grey loosened a little, unwinding a bit, and the pain in my own chest eased.
I looked for the source of the torturing mist. . . . Something was moving along the fence line, heading for a ragged hole where the flow of energy had been disrupted and towing the stream of ugly smoke. I dropped as deep into the mist world as I dared, knowing I was probably as incorporeal as a ghost to normal eyes, and started after whatever was slinking toward the magical exit.
In the deep Grey, where the mist is thinner and energetic strands and shapes of magic dominate the senses, everything living or magical looks like a child’s scribble executed in burning, colored light. The thing creeping away from Reeve, dragging the Christmas-colored rope of agony, was about the size of a large dog and wound of blue energy threads so dark they gleamed like sapphires dipped in running, liquid tar. Barbs of red erupted from the thing here and there, as if it had spikes and extra claws jabbing outward through its skin. I fixed my eyes on it and moved closer. . . .
It stopped and turned its ill-defined head to pierce me with a glare of furious light from eyes like a volcano’s seething heart. More eyes glared from the writhing green cable. I twitched backward, rising a bit out of the Grey without intending to. In the more normal zone, the beast that glared at me from the thicket had a heavy black head, a humped back, and luminous eyes, but was so dark it was difficult to see. Until it bared its teeth—a double line of sharp white serrations meant for crushing and tearing.
We stared at each other for a charged moment, then the hard-to-see creature sucked in the ugly skein of torment and turned away with a grunt as if brushing me off. It dove through the hidden hole in the fence, trailing sparkles of gold and green and a flicker of red and disappeared as if it had dissolved into the very fabric of the Grey.
I drew a long, slow breath and backed away, stepping out of the Grey and smack into Solis.
He blinked in surprise and took a step aside. “I thought you—” he started, then cut himself off. He looked back toward the EMTs, who had just finished loading Reeve onto a collapsible gurney. I turned my head that way, too.
The EMTs raised the gurney quickly, locking it into position to be pulled out to the aid car, and rushed their burden through the yard and house. We trailed behind. After loading Reeve into the back, one of the EMTs paused long enough to say, “He’s holding on but he’s not stable. We’ll take him to Highline—it’s the closest trauma center.”
FIVE
The emergency medical crew left us in the front yard in a swirl of retreating sirens and a cluster of concerned neighbors. Solis and I had to find someone to look after Reeve’s home until he came back—if he did—before we could leave, too.
I walked back to Reeve’s garden to grab my bag and paused to look at the dry fountain that had seemed to pour out so much of the Grey energy that had attacked Reeve. The bottom was painted with a brown scalloped pattern, like waves, obscured by a handful of sand, colored stones, and dried grasses.
Solis called to me to join him in the more pressing business of securing Reeve’s house. As we answered questions discreetly and asked after someone to take charge, I kept catching him scowling in my direction. I wasn’t surprised when he buttonholed me beside my truck as I tried to slip away from the diminishing crowd.
“I did not see you when the EMTs arrived. Where did you go?”
“I didn’t go anywhere.”
He frowned at me. “You did. As you did on board the Seawitch. You were not where you were.”
I crossed my arms over my less-than-impressive chest—I’m not built to win any wet T-shirt contests—but I felt suddenly defensive in the beam of Solis’s intensity. “I didn’t actually go anywhere. I saw something and I had to take a closer look. And my way of taking a closer look . . . it’s complicated.”