“So . . . you became a dobhar-chú because you were kissed by a mermaid?” I asked.
“Ah. No. This is the really weird bit.”
Quinton smothered a snort.
“Just go on,” I prompted.
“See, my mother— No. Let me say this first: the dobhar-chú aren’t usually shape-shifters, any more than they’re magic users. It takes a special circumstance to be born with two forms. My mom was one of those rare few. Usually the dobhar-chú are not a friendly or social bunch—kind of vicious and unpleasant, actually—but when they moved to North America from Ireland, some things changed and they had to get smarter to avoid being killed for fur. So this aberration started—this is what my mom told me before she took off.”
“She left you?”
Fielding nodded. “She left me and my dad a couple of years after the swimming incident and disappeared. Eventually I assumed she went back to her clan, but when I asked the Father Otter here he had never heard of her.”
I stopped him with a waving hand. “Who or what is the Father Otter?”
He hmmed a bit before answering. “Sort of the local clan chief of the dobhar-chú. I’ll get to that in a second. Oh, and incidentally, that’s how I heard about you; the water hounds are good at gathering information, even though they rarely use it for themselves. They’re sort of the information brokers of the local marine paranormal economy, so to speak. ’Cause who can resist a cute otter that’s hanging out near their boat or begging for attention at the marina? That’s mostly how they stay out of other monsters’ sights—by being useful and cute. But they didn’t have any information about my mom, so I don’t know what happened to her. And I probably never will.” He shook his head as if rejecting that thought. “Anyway, Mom said the dobhar-chú’s origins are that the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a regular otter is a dobhar-chú and then the seventh pup of a seventh pup of a dobhar-chú is a shape-shifter. They’re sort of dobhar-chú royalty. And that was Mom. I was her only . . . umm . . . ‘pup,’ as far as I know, but I seemed to be just a human. Or I thought so. But, see, the reason Mom wanted me to stay away from mermaids is that merfolk and water hounds are deadly enemies. The mermaid who took me that day at the beach wasn’t trying to save me; she was going to drown me or eat me, depending on how mad Mom was at me when she told me the story again.”
Seventh pup of a seventh pup rang true—I’d seen that on one of the Web sites I’d found about dobhar-chú, along with references to their viciousness—but I’d never seen any mention of shape-shifting or magic or their presence in North America. Still, I wasn’t going to stop the flow of his story now, even if I had doubts about its purity, so I just looked encouraging and leaned on the Grey a touch to give it a little unnatural weight.
Gary went along like a pebble rolling downhill. “But anyhow, I guess that kiss did something—marked me or something. When I met Shelly—um, Shelly Knight—I noticed she always stared at me real intensely and it made me feel strange. I thought it was because she wanted me. That tells you what a conceited ass I was back then, but Shelly was so . . . sexy and so . . . I don’t know. She was special. If we asked her to work on the boat she always said yes, and she’d watch me but she always kept her distance. I thought she was playing hard to get. But that wasn’t it.”
He was about to continue when Zantree slid down the ladder from the flying bridge and joined us around the fish hold. At first he just glanced around, as if trying to see which one of us had been speaking, but when his eyes passed over Fielding he did a double take and stared. “What in the name of hell are you?”
Fielding seemed to shrink and tried to slide lower in the water, but as soon as he did the water boiled and his skin turned paler and furless. He began to gasp and choke on the water that was suddenly splashing and washing over his face as blood seeped from his mutating nose and mouth.
Solis and I were the first to grab him and haul his upper body above the waterline. He coughed and spat up water for a minute or so, writhing around as his face and body reverted to a half-human, brown-furred state.
Zantree bumped backward into the cabin doors as he twitched back from the sight of Fielding in transition. “Dear God,” he muttered. “I never . . . never thought I’d see such a thing.” He glanced around with jerky movements. “Do you—you all know about this?”
Quinton caught his gaze calmly. “No. It was a surprise to us as well.”
“Well . . . what is that . . . thing?”
“That’s . . . Gary Fielding. Did you know him about . . . I guess it’s twenty-five or thirty years ago?”
Zantree’s eyes were as wide open as Sunday church doors. “Gary . . . ? What happened to him . . . ? And where’s he been all this time?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. He was what was hanging on to the swim step when we cast off at Port Townsend.”
“Jesus! I thought it was a sea lion, even when you told me it wasn’t. Sure wasn’t expecting that,” he added, giving Fielding a hard glare.
By this time Fielding had stabilized and was breathing easier. The blood had stopped flowing from his mouth and nose and now left a red swirl in the water. Salt-crusted tears dribbled from his eyes, leaving a track on the fur of his face. The white scars on his face and body sparkled for a moment with tiny violet stars as the haze around him flashed a bright emerald green that vanished as quickly as it had come. The sight startled me a little and I glanced up from Fielding in a momentary panic. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Fielding responded, glancing around.
“You . . . sparkled.”
He coughed up a laugh. “Like an ice skater in sequins?”
I scowled at him. “No, like a spell.”
“Maybe because I’m under one?” he replied in a snotty tone.
“Don’t start with me, Otter Boy,” I snapped back. “You wanted my help and I’m giving it, but I don’t have to. We can toss you overboard and go home anytime.” Not that I really could with the Guardian Beast lurking around, but that was no one’s business but mine.
He cowered a little but not enough to have another fit of uncontrolled shape-shifting.
Solis, looking uncomfortable, broke the tension by asking, “Who is piloting the boat?”
Zantree shook himself and looked away from Fielding. “She’s on autopilot. This stretch is clear and empty for a few miles, so I thought I’d grab some gloves. The breeze is chilly up there and it’s kicking on my arthritis. Quinton, you want to go up for a minute until I get back?”
Quinton nodded and scrambled up the ladder to the flying bridge as Zantree gave one more scowling shake of his head at Fielding before nipping into the cabin.
Fielding glanced around as if reestablishing in his mind just where he was and that his condition was not some kind of horrible dream. “Was that really Paul Zantree? He’s gotten so old. . . .” Fielding whispered, hissing a bit between his reemerging fangs.
“You’d be only a little younger if you were in your proper form,” I said.
“I don’t know. . . . Some of us freaks live a long, long time,” he replied, looking me in the eye.
I returned a narrow glare and was about to say something cutting when Zantree stepped back out from the cabin, tugging on a pair of lightweight gloves. He took one more hard stare at Fielding and frowned. “We all thought you were dead, Gary. Why’d you let us think that? Did you do it? Did you pirate the ’Witch and hide her all this time? Did you kill the lot of them? Did you kill Shelly?”
“No! I didn’t do any of those things! I just— Things went bad. I didn’t do anything but try to save us . . . but I didn’t stop anything, either.” He hung his head, but I wasn’t sure if it was contrition or an attempt to hide his uncanny lack of expression. “I just ended up stuck in the same place with that damned boat all this time. The way back opens up only every twenty-seven years and it doesn’t stay open long. We’re almost out of time as it is.”