Solis raised his eyebrows and looked genuinely surprised. “I find you strange but I do not mock you. What would you have me call you?”
I bit my tongue; I was being unreasonable. I was good at my job and I’d helped him out plenty of times—sometimes more than he knew—but I was worried that my revelations about just how “strange” I was were straining the relationship when I wanted it to be smoother, not harder. So if I overreacted now, any breakage would be my own fault. I took a long, slow breath and replied more evenly, “I’m sorry. Just Blaine, or even Harper, will do. What do you call the cops you work with?”
“I call them by their last names—it’s written on their badges.”
I laughed. It just came over as amusing that he implied he couldn’t remember people’s names without a label on them. Solis flushed a little and looked aside. He cleared his throat and waited for me to wind down. When I stopped chuckling he glanced at me and then at the boat again.
“Shall we proceed, M—” he caught himself and restarted. “If you’re ready, shall we proceed, Blaine?”
I grinned at him. “Yes, we can, Mr. Solis.”
“I like ‘Sergeant Solis,’” he replied with the hint of a smile. “It makes me feel taller. Which, beside you, is a feat. And my wife likes it.”
“I didn’t know you were married,” I said. Apparently we had broken some serious ice.
Solis nodded. “Sí.”
I raised my eyebrows, but he didn’t volunteer any more. He only gestured toward the boat and waited for me to precede him.
We started up the stairs to Seawitch’s aft deck. On the third step I felt cold and the pressure in my lungs increased as if we were diving into deep waters. I made the last steps and paused, catching my breath with an effort. Solis watched me and started to raise his hand as if to take my arm, but I waved him off and headed for the interior. He followed wordlessly, a frown of curiosity on his face.
Just inside the salon I turned back to him. “This is where things get . . . weird,” I said. “You ready?”
He gave it a moment’s serious consideration—he wasn’t taking this lightly and I felt a wash of relief, pretty sure that before replying he was recalling what I’d shown and told him yesterday. I didn’t push him to find in my favor; he had to do it himself. He seemed to brace himself, then gave a tiny nod. “Yes.”
“If . . . you can’t see me, call out. I don’t want to get separated.” Then I let myself slide a little closer to the Grey without getting too thin in the normal world. I would be glad of Solis’s presence if things got too rough but he’d be no help if he couldn’t see me. And I did expect it to get rough: The slice of the energetic world within Seawitch was aboil with colored mists, not just the thin threads I’d noticed the day before. A volume of foggy shapes seemed to battle in knots and whorls of green and red and blue that tangled and roiled against one another. It was like walking through the fringe of a war zone where the fighting had broken down to small but desperate skirmishes.
I stepped forward with care, resisting the urge to sink to a more elemental level and dodge some of the mist world’s turmoil. Streamers of animate fog buffeted me like ropes cut loose in a wind. The slender, bright thread of purple energy that had led down the stairs the first time I’d been aboard was missing this time. Shredded or removed, I wasn’t sure, but I had the strong impression that the energetic conflict up here was only a diversion from whatever was waiting in the engine room. I glanced around to spot Solis, seeing him as a ghostly version of himself with his carefully contained energy much brighter and more colorful than I normally saw it: a vibrant yellow with swirling sparks of blue and gold. Interesting . . .
I eased out a little and motioned to Solis to follow me down the stairs to the lower deck. Then I slid a bit back into the Grey and pursued the sense of something waiting. Through the crew quarters and down the passageway to the engine-room doors, the writhing smoke let me know I was taking the right path. I considered slipping through the doors in the Grey, but I didn’t want to lose Solis, so I stepped back to the normal plane one more time and waited for him to catch up to me. He was a lot closer than I’d realized and we both started a bit, coming nearly nose to nose. He hadn’t seemed that near, but the Grey does strange things to time and distance.
“Sorry,” I muttered.
Solis gave a tight smile. “De nada. So, it’s the engine room?”
“Something is. What, I’m not yet sure, but there’s a lot of paranormal disturbance here.”
He nodded.
I frowned. “Do you feel or see anything, or is that just the conversational acknowledgment nod?”
He cocked his head slightly. “I have . . . an unsettled feeling. Like an intuition.”
That intrigued me and I hmphed a bit in agreement. I knew the feeling, that something trivial is actually important or that a subject is about to do something revealing. I also knew most successful cops are hunch players and instinct followers and I wondered if that wasn’t some unacknowledged touch of the Grey.
“See anything? Anything at all?”
“No . . .”
“Are you having an urge to look over your shoulder for something that you don’t quite see in the corner of your eye?” I knew that urge, that sensation of flickering motion that makes you turn to find . . . nothing. Of course, something is there in the ghost world but most people have no clue and they truly wouldn’t want one.
Solis squinted, his eyes shifting back and forth. Then he tightened his mouth and forced his eyes back to me. I guess that was as good an answer as his nod. I remembered I’d started out much the same way, learning to look around the filters we raise between ourselves and what we don’t want to see. Most adults can’t make themselves drop those filters—the habit is too strong and self-preserving—but a few find a way to peep in, however limited the view. And then there are those rare cases, like me, who get the unlimited pass and wish they never had.
Such an encouraging thought to hold in mind as I opened the engine-room door . . .
Even barely touching the Grey, the room was black with a darkness no electric light could dispel—gleaming, energetic darkness that moved and writhed and muttered with voices at the threshold of hearing. It wasn’t like the voice of the Grey that I’d once, in near madness, listened to; this was the babble of something contained in it, not the voice of the Grey itself. I could hear Solis catch his breath behind me as I stepped through the opening and was plunged deep into the source of the icy cold that had risen through the boat. My lungs froze and I stretched upward for a surface that was not there, striving for light and air and warmth as the blackness clutched me within its ever-collapsing folds. I stumbled forward and down . . . through a sheet of mist that shattered and hung in the space around me, so frigid that the air itself seemed filled with crystalline ice. I felt my legs buckle and the hard floor of the engine room struck hard against my knees. I was in the normal world yet I wasn’t, drowning in the darkness that struck and shook me like storm waves. I heard screams, prayers, and the fury-roar of a hurricane as it battered us, overturning the lifeboats and drowning the women and children before our eyes. . . . and the crew lashed in the rigging, crying out, mouths filling with salt water—
I wrenched myself away from the invading sense of the storm-battered dying. These were not my own thoughts but those of others—hundreds of others.