“No, no . . . that’s not what I mean. I’m a little confused. What are you and how did you come looking for me? And what happened with Seawitch? Is happening . . . ?”
“That’s a long story.”
“Start talking. It’ll be six hours before we reach Roche Harbor.”
EIGHTEEN
As Fielding talked, I peered at him through the Grey. A sort of shadow of his otter self hung around him and I wondered fleetingly how he managed the mass problem. For an otter he’d been enormous; as a man he was a bit on the small side but still heftier than the otter. Well, mostly a man and partially submerged in seawater at that. Quinton and Solis had made their way back to me, but Zantree was still up top, steering the boat out of Port Townsend and striking across the Strait of Juan de Fuca for the lower end of the San Juan Islands.
“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.