“You didn’t write any of this in the log.”
“I wasn’t sure I’d make it, but if I did, I didn’t want that kind of thing on the record. And if I didn’t . . . who was going to believe me if they ever found the log, anyway? I was going to steal the stupid thing when I brought the boat back but Father Otter convinced me to leave it—to bring you to us.”
“You brought the boat back.” As I’d suspected. “Good trick in the state you were in.”
“The ghosts and Father Otter helped,” Fielding admitted. “Then he went to look after Reeve, while I came back here for a while. I knew the merfolk would try to find me—even though they missed me right under their noses for twenty-seven years, the morons—and Reeve would be the obvious place to start looking. Even if he was still mad at me, I owed the old man some protection. None of this was his fault.”
“Wait: the merfolk didn’t keep you and torment you for that whole time, as you implied before?”
He looked a little uncomfortable at being caught out. “Not the whole time, but I couldn’t get any farther away than here until the gate in the worlds opened again. I found the bell by accident the first year and the ghosts said they’d help me hide if I helped them escape when the gate opened again. The sea witch was trapped in the cove until that time, too, so she wasn’t using the ghosts and wasn’t paying attention to any of the objects they were stuffed in. I had to keep on dodging her for the next . . . twenty years or so. When the gate started to form the dobhar staged a raid and she was too busy to notice when I moved Valencia’s bell into Seawitch’s bilge. I’d been making my plans to get to you for a year or more after the raid, and when I left, Father Otter warned me the sea witch would know I was out in the world again. He was pissed off about the business with Reeve so I didn’t tell him I was planning to go find him at the hospital and tell him what had happened to me and the boat—I figured that was another thing I owed the old man. I thought the merfolk would leave him alone once Father Otter foiled them once. But I guess not.” He didn’t seem as broken up about it as I’d have expected. He was unhappy about what had happened to Reeve, but it was almost a self-pitying kind of misery.
I shook my head in disgust. “Your Romeo and Juliet romance turned into a grudge and you didn’t try to clear up the misunderstanding; you just made it worse and spread the tale around. Why didn’t you just tell us the truth?”
“Because the truth is that it’s all my fault. I would have let him hurt her. When the ghosts saved me and the boat, I was still so angry and confused . . . I didn’t understand what had happened for years. I didn’t see what I’d done until it was way too late to fix it and Shelly and her mother . . . they’ve been looking for me ever since. Mermaids don’t forgive much. Sea witches forgive nothing.”
“This love story was never going to end well. Her mother wasn’t going to want a dobhar-chú for a son-in-law.”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“Sounds like a regular problem of yours. So now it’s not just Shelly who wants your hide, it’s her mom, too?”
He nodded. “She’s one hard bitch.”
“She wouldn’t happen to be a redhead?” I asked.
“Yeah . . . why?”
“I think we’ve met.”
Fielding finally looked up at me. “Oh . . . God, no.”
I shook off his fear. “I’m not working for her. In fact I’m not working for you, either. All I want is the ghosts.”
“But . . . you have them.”
“No, Fielding. I want all of them. You found one. I’ll bet you know where the rest are, too.”
The cave had fallen nearly silent and then a new sound started at a distance but came closer: a shuffling, snuffling, and squealing. The otters were returning.
“I can’t—” Fielding objected.
“I think you can. I think with you as go-between to your ex-girlfriend, we can offer the sea witch her bell back.”
“But . . . I thought you wanted to keep the ghosts.”
“I intend to. This is just the bait to move her where I can see her. Then you’re going to grab the rest of the receptacles. You know what they look like and where they are, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but . . . it’s suicide. She’ll kill us. Well, she’ll kill you and then she’ll kill me. And then everyone else.”
“I don’t think so. There are more of your cousins than there are of the merfolk, and once we have the ghosts, the sea witch has no power but what she gets from the merfolk. She’s a blood mage and she hasn’t got little merfolk batteries, so if she intends to use them, she’ll have to cast her magic the instant one of them dies. She’s not going to squander any more of her people for that. That’s counterproductive. She won’t diminish her population further. She may be a pissed-off hard-ass and half-insane as you and I see it, but she’s not stupid.”
“You are totally wild-ass crazy,” Fielding said. “I won’t do it.”
“Yeah, you will. Or you’ll go back to Seattle and stand trial for piracy and the murder of everyone on board Seawitch—since it is, as you said, your fault. You broke the protection circle, you would have let Starrett do what he wanted to Shelly, you made the bad decisions that put the boat in harm’s way. As the captain that makes it your responsibility legally and morally.”
He scoffed, though there was a certain amount of false bravado to the sound. “How are you going to make it stick? They’re not going to try an otter for murder. Your policeman friend isn’t going to keep my arm in a lock forever and you can’t stop me from changing form.”
“Don’t count on that, Gary. I cut you loose. I can tie you back up, too.” Blatant lie, but I wanted to see if Fielding was willing to risk it. I had other ways to get to the ghosts if I had to do without Fielding’s help, but I didn’t want to use them. Father Otter might not like it, but we had an agreement and he owed me. Magic creatures take that kind of thing seriously. Which reminded me . . . “You owe me for that, not to mention the lying and the underhanded way you got me into this pile of otter poop.” I wasn’t going to mention the Guardian Beast, since that wouldn’t get me anywhere and I’d already tried asking it for help and gotten nothing.
The noise of returning otters and dobhar-chú had drawn close so I wasn’t surprised to hear a short scrabbling sound followed by the rough clearing of a throat. I could feel Father Otter’s presence at my shoulder even without seeing Fielding cringe. Solis flicked his gaze a degree or two aside but his attention didn’t move away from Fielding.
“Does our cousin offend?”
“He’s not being cooperative,” I replied, keeping my eyes on Fielding. “I’ve rendered all the services I was asked to perform and I still have nothing to show for it. While it’s of no interest to you, there is a small matter of human law and the death of the people on board Seawitch to be resolved. And beyond that is the sneaky way your cousin used me and you and still let people die because he didn’t have the spine to do what he ought. He didn’t help his girlfriend and he endangered the crew and got Reeve killed by leading the merfolk to him at the hospital. While I’m willing to let the human matters go if I must, I’m not ready to leave the situation here as it is and simply excuse a debt of honor because Gary doesn’t want to get his paws dirty.”
I could tell by the way Fielding pulled back that Father Otter’s attention had turned on him and it wasn’t pleasant. “Have you not had enough of exile from your proper form? Will you prefer to be outcast and outlaw, too, now that you have regained it? We shall make it so—”