An icy shard of ghost-stuff ripped through my chest and I shivered so violently that I tumbled sideways out of the Grey.
I landed, wincing and trying to catch my breath as chilly tears welled over my lower lashes. Solis caught me and helped me back up to my feet. Work calluses on his palms and fingers felt like stones for a moment before the sensation faded.
Father Otter and his ilk had turned back around to watch me as I fell. Now they looked up at me—faces furry or human all curious and a bit repulsed by what they saw.
“He is no better,” Father Otter accused.
“I can’t do it here. I need to be in a more stable place in . . . the magic sphere,” I said, groping for the right words to express the Grey to him. “Where it overlaps the normal world. I can’t see what I’m doing under any other circumstances. You need to get Fielding and us out to the shore, where the two realms overlap.” It was a place I did not want to go even though I’d known I’d have to. I’d hoped to put it off to the end, to draw the sea witch and her minions into my own sphere of control first. But that plainly wasn’t going to happen and we had no time to argue.
“That shore is within the compass of the sea witch’s power,” Father Otter objected.
“I know that, and the gateway is closing so we could all be trapped, but I can’t do this here. We have to go where the overlap is already stable. It’s too difficult for me to hold the two worlds steady and do what needs to be done at the same time.”
“You will have to. We cannot fight her and defend you at once. We will attack—we will do whatever must be done, whatever you command us to do—to defeat her once our cousin is safe but we cannot do both in the same time and hope for any of us to survive. Including you and your . . . family.”
I gasped out a laugh at the vision of the motley crew of the Mambo Moon as a family and regretted it as my rib sent a stab of complaint into my chest. A frisson of fear came with it: We had so little time and this was a desperate move.
“All right,” I said. “I can try here, but it will have to be very quick. The only way to pull the two forms apart before they are knitted into each other too much to separate is to cut. There’s no other way to get through the . . .” Again I stumbled for a word and settled for a gesture of shoving my spread fingers together in a woven steeple shape, while saying, “The joining magic fast enough. It has to go in one fast sweep and it has to be done very soon. I’ll need some kind of knife. . . .” Part of my mind was gibbering in panic at the thought and the rest was doing its best to keep that element locked up where it wouldn’t show. My hosts wouldn’t have appreciated my freaking out and I didn’t know where that would leave Solis.
The dobhar-chú barked and squeaked at the smaller otters and there was a frantic shuffling around as the assembled creatures searched for something for me to use. A collection of shells, rocks, and bits of rusted metal were shoved across the wet stone floor to me, but even the metal parts were too small or too dull to serve. I dug in my jeans pocket for my own little pocketknife. The narrow two-inch blade looked pathetically small for this job but at least it was sharp, and although the edge would serve more as an allegory than an actual cutting blade, this was a situation that called for a fine-honed symbol of incision, not a metaphorical butter knife. “It’ll have to do,” I muttered. “I wish it were something magic or at least something . . . bigger.”
Solis tapped my shoulder and held something out to me. The dim light from the other side of the cave gleamed a moment on bright steel as he flipped the thing with care, hilt out. I blinked at him and took it gently. It was a karambit: an odd little Indonesian knife about eight inches long and curved the whole length. The handle and blade were all one continuous piece of steel. A ring at each end defined the handle as much as the grip scales did. The blade looked like the flattened silver claw of a raptor and it was wickedly sharp along the inside curve. It couldn’t have weighed a quarter of a pound and it wasn’t designed to stab, only to slice, but it would do that with elegant efficiency.
I looked a question at Solis, who shrugged his eyebrows and pulled a face as if to say “You know how it is.” Except that I wasn’t sure now that I did. Still, I nodded and thanked him and braced myself to go back to the inhospitable Grey.
Father Otter stopped me as I knelt back down beside the delirious Gary Fielding. “They will come as soon as they know our cousin is free or dead. Be prepared.”
My heart was shivering and running rough, but I turned a cold look on him as if I weren’t frightened to my very bones. “That will be your job, because my friend and I need some answers from your cousin before I go any further. And if I don’t like them, you should fear me as much as the merfolk.” Then I shook him off and turned back to Fielding.
Pure bluff and bullshit, of course, since there was no way I alone—or even with Solis’s help—could hold off an army of shape-shifting otters as well as a cohort of pissed-off mermaids. But I still wanted to know what had actually happened on board Seawitch and if I was about to free a guilty man from punishment, or a falsely accused one.
One of the problems of the Grey is time; it proceeds strangely, sometimes too fast and sometimes too slow. It breaks and falters and remains like ice floes adrift in the cold, cold sea. This operation would have to go fast, but no matter how quickly I went, I had no way of knowing how much time would elapse in the normal world or how fast any adversary would arrive in the Grey. I hoped Solis would be safe; then I pushed my fear aside and got back to work.
Instead of sinking down into the Grey as I usually do, I tried pulling it over me like a blanket, keeping myself physically present in the normal world while surrounding myself in the world of magic. The Grey resisted initially, then flowed over me in a rush, almost knocking me down into its flood. I held myself to the rocky ground and felt the parallel worlds shimmy and slither together. The sensation of motion sickness swamped me for a moment but I fought it down to a level I could sustain for a little while without throwing up. I crept forward a few inches so I was pressing against the struggling shadows of Fielding’s dual forms.
I reached for them and the world lurched. I slammed my hands down on the mist-flooded rock floor and heard the knife ring on the stone. The instability at my feet fled, leaving me anchored for the moment, but I was sure the ghost world would trickle back all too soon. I dug my toes under Fielding’s physical body and he gave a banshee wail, arching up a little before he settled back down, pinning my sneaker-clad feet to the corporeal reality of stone.
I muttered to him, “Just hang in there a little longer, Fielding.” Then I pushed my hands into the writhing mass of his shadows.
I pushed and tugged on the forms that burned my hands with alternating heat and cold. Representing the dual parts of his nature, they had polarized their representations in the Grey as welclass="underline" the water form damp, icy, and fluid; the earth form spiky, hot, and resistant. While the water shadow moved aside easily under my push, it also flowed back fast and my first impulse to shove that aside and then sever the invasive magical strands exposed between the two masses was foiled by the material’s ability to ooze around my hand.
But the shadow wasn’t as fast-moving as water and it didn’t pass through my hand but around it. I pulled the combined mass closer, ignoring Fielding’s howl of agony by gritting my teeth until I heard them grind. Then I pushed my left hand into the thin cleft between the shadows, wedging it just wide enough to shove my shoulder into. I worked my way deeper into the combined forms, using my dense human body to hold the liquid shadow back long enough to expose a tangled net of energy. I blew out my breath to gain a precious inch and reached into the new-made gap to sweep the blade of the hooked knife through the nearest binding filaments of invasive magic.