For a moment I thought the creature on the low platform was a sea lion—it was as long as a man, dark brown, and oddly lumpy. I hurried forward, pressing my hand to my side to suppress the pain in my ribs, as I saw Solis pop out the aft door to see what had caused the boat to lurch to the rear. I came even with the thing just as Solis looked over the rail. Quinton stuck his head out of the door also and called out, “What is it? Are we clear to start the engines or not?”
“There is something on the . . . the rear platform,” Solis called back, not quite sure what to call that part of the boat, I guessed.
The creature looked around, moving its large, misshapen head even as its body seemed to writhe and change shape. It spotted me and let out a moaning noise that sounded a lot like “Moooove!”
Quinton ran out and stared down, too. “Holy shit! What is that?”
The creature was still writhing and morphing from a large furry lump to something vaguely human-shaped and kept its agonized gaze on me as I jumped from the dock to the swim platform, hoping I wouldn’t miss or lose my balance and fall in the water. I made it and crouched down, wincing and gasping as I grabbed on to the handrail of a steel ladder attached to the rear of the boat.
I stared at the thing, seeing it tangled in flaring coils of red and gold energy twined with the thinnest threads of bilious green and dimming lavender. The creature shrugged and squirmed as if it were trying to shed its skin. “Harper . . . Blaine,” it breathed, exhaling an odor of fish and brine laced with the burning tang of something magical.
“You’re the one from the other night,” I said. It didn’t look quite like it had when it stuck its head out of the water next to Seawitch and barked my name, but the voice—such as it was—was the same and the mutant head and body were all too similar.
It nodded its too-big head as its jaw popped and crackled into a harder, more square line. I could see a white scar running over the right side of its face now. Similar white weals like the marks of a rope or whip showed through the brown fur on its body, gleaming with filaments of red and violet energy—perhaps the residue of whatever had reached out from Pleiades that night and nearly hit me, too.
“Up, up,” the creature yipped, jerking its head toward the deck above us.
“Me or you?” I asked.
“Bofe. Now!” it barked. “Moooove!”
I’ve never been yelled at by a giant sea mammal before but I did as it said and scrambled up the ladder as best I could, wincing and yelping all the way.
Quinton turned back and yelled up to Zantree on the flying bridge, “Zantree! We need a landing winch!”
“What the hell for?” Zantree called back, “and what’s riding on my boat?” He started down the steps from the flying bridge and stopped, looking down. “That’s not a sea lion, is it? You shouldn’t be messing with sea mammals!”
“Not a sea mammal—not like that, anyway. Just trust me! We have to get this up and get out of here.”
“Jesus!” Zantree swore, getting an eyeful of the writhing thing on his swim platform. “I’ll take your word—and keep it out of my props or there’ll be fillet of freakfish all over the place. Flip up the davits and use that winch! Lines are under the transom rail in those lockers!” Then he turned and went back to the control console to flip various switches while the rest of us struggled on.
Quinton apparently knew exactly what Zantree’s directions meant and in a few minutes had a pair of lines attached to pulleys on the heavy metal bracket things that were attached to the aft rail. In no time he had jumped down onto the swim platform and passed the lines around the wriggling creature and back up to the deck with him. He handed one free end to Solis and kept the other for himself. “Haul steadily when I say so. The motor will do most of the work, but we have to keep him from tipping or he’ll fall off. Harper, get the lid off the fish hold. He’ll have to go in there for now.”
I turned and worked the top off the big built-in box where Zantree had sat the first time we’d met. It folded in the middle and was a little awkward for me alone with a cracked rib, but I got it flipped back and the fiberglass well exposed as Quinton and Solis pulled the creature up from the platform and wrestled it over the aft rail.
“OK, heave up!” Quinton snapped, and I fell back toward the doors, turning to keep an eye on what they were doing.
Solis and Quinton had the dripping, fur-covered thing in their arms and lifted it like a long sack full of rocks up and into the hold. The creature let out a yelp and the tangles around it flashed red. I winced in sympathy. The men pulled off the ropes and Quinton found a switch that began pumping seawater into the hold to keep the “catch” fresh. Solis stared at the thing with slightly too-wide eyes, crossed himself, and took half a step away before he forced a halt and held his ground. The creature looked back at him, visibly relaxing as the seawater crept up its body.
Quinton finished hauling in the lines and coiling them up. Then he called up to Zantree. “All clear to start engines! I’ll go down and prepare to cast off.” He turned to Solis and me, shaking his head. “Harper, you watch the monster. Solis, go up to the foredeck and handle the bow line as we cast off. I’ll walk us off astern and jump aboard when we’re free.”
Solis was still a little stunned, but he nodded and went jerkily forward along the side deck. His belief threshold was taking a beating.
Quinton looked at me. “Stay here and find out what gives. He looks as freaked-out as Solis.”
“He?” I asked, momentarily confused.
Quinton pointed at the fish hold. “This guy here. I think he needs a little help.”
I turned my attention back to our “catch” as my boyfriend scrambled off the boat and got busy with the mooring lines.
The creature in the fish hold was roughly man-shaped now, if that man was a bit short-limbed and otter-faced and covered in slick brown fur. There was a distinct manelike growth on its—his—head, and I got one glance that proved he was male and looked away quickly. He squirmed around and tucked his flippery legs under so he was semicrouching in the water of the hold.
“Sorry,” he muttered. His voice was still rough and a bit hissy between teeth that seemed too pointy for a face that was stuck halfway between otter and man. His nose and jaw had pushed out to a more human angle, but the upper part was an odd shape, neither one nor the other. His eyes were huge and brown, but they had acquired a rim of white, as if the openings had grown to a more human size and ovalness. He still had bristly whiskers on his upper lip and the side of his . . . “snout” was a better word than “nose,” really. I wasn’t sure what he was—Quinton and I had discussed the physics problems of shape-shifters before and been wrong at least once, so . . . here again I wasn’t sure what I was looking at except that it ought not to exist.
“You’re . . . umm . . .” I started.
“Gary Fielding,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”
I sat down on the nearest chair with a yip of pain and surprise as Mambo Moon surged forward and away from the dock.
“I guessed you were still alive,” I gasped back. “But this wasn’t what I imagined. . . .”
“Me, either,” he sighed, curling tighter in the fish hold. “Could you turn the water off? It’s getting a little high.”
I found the switch and pushed it to Off. “I am having some trouble with this,” I said.
“I hoped you would be able to understand. . . .”