“Could we open those up and air this place out a bit?” I asked.
Solis considered it, then nodded and went to open up the doors himself, scowling at me when I moved to help. I ignored him. The sooner we had the boat open and full of fresher air, the better, as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t as if we were trampling up a clean crime scene here. Whatever had happened aboard the Seawitch, it hadn’t taken place recently.
I touched the nearest of the folding doors and felt a cold frisson race up my arm and across my scalp. I must have gasped or twitched, because Solis cocked his head and glanced at me from the corner of his eye.
I shook him off. “Just one of those creepy feelings.”
He grunted, nodded, and went back to opening doors. Once we had the back of the boat open, fresher, cold air rushed in, swirling around and, to my eyes, raising filaments of violet, blue, and green energy off the floor and furnishings as if the magical residue of whatever had happened in the boat had dried out like sea grass left on the shore. The fine threads were the same colors I’d observed outside. I helped Solis shove the last of the resisting, warped doors aside and took a moment to peer harder at the Grey—that thin space of magic and possibility lying between the normal and the paranormal worlds.
The misty material of the Grey was acting stranger than usual here; instead of the foggy, airy movement I normally saw, the boat seemed to be filled with two separate Grey fluids that refused to mix. The brew flowed and crested in the space as if held in an agitated fishbowl, the walls warped and rough around it. At the far end and to the right was a staircase where one of the substances flowed down, taking all the amethyst color with it as well as the cerulean and emerald, while the other remained above, showing only thin watery shades of blue and green. The air felt colder in that area, piercing right through my jacket like winter ice.
I stared a moment longer at the strange tide of the Grey. It looked . . . as if something powerful had passed through the boat from back to front, sinking down where it found access and leaving this lingering stream as a reminder. How long ago had it been at full flood?
I turned my attention back to the normal world, to Solis, who was frowning at me nearby.
“This . . . evidence of something foul that brought you here—is it downstairs?” I asked, thinking about the direction and flow of the energetic traces.
He raised his eyebrows. “Yes. Come with me.”
He continued to frown as he turned to lead me to the scene of whatever crime the SPD suspected had happened aboard. Judging by the way his usually quiet aura spiked and jumped, I’d rattled him—which was no mean trick.
We bypassed the rest of the upper deck and I followed him down the narrow staircase—a “companionway,” to sailors—submerging into the oily, swirling Grey. For an instant I thought I was drowning, the rising spectral liquid bringing a cold recollection of a certain teenage summer when I’d gone swimming with my cousin Jill and not entirely escaped my first brush with death. Jill had not escaped at all. I was glad I was behind Solis and he couldn’t see me jerk my head back in suddenly remembered terror as the uncanny fluid seemed to rise over my face and push into my mouth and nose. In a moment the sensation passed as I continued to breathe normally, but my heart was still racing for a while afterward and the scent of the sea stayed in the air around me as long as we remained aboard the Seawitch.
From the foot of the stairs, Solis led me forward along a narrow corridor that ran about a third the length of the boat. As we walked I felt colder and colder and the sense of damp became oppressive. I realized I was slowing, as if I were fighting a current and feeling tired from it. Nearly to the end of the hall, Solis, who was several steps ahead of me, stopped and turned toward a narrow door on his left.
I moved to catch up with him—he hadn’t even opened the door yet—but a sudden blast of wet cold smacked me down. I stumbled to one knee, bowing my head against what felt like a deluge of icy water. Solis whipped back to stare at me and took a step away as I planted my hands on the walls and shoved my way back to my feet. Keeping my hands braced, I stood firm and shook back my hair with a sharp flip of my head. Water from my drenched locks spattered against Solis’s coat and face—seawater that reeked of dying things struggling in poisoned currents.
He caught his breath short and stared at me, his head pulled back, murmuring under his breath, “Madre—”
I took a couple of steadying breaths and fought off the sense of being battered by a riptide only I was caught in. “Welcome to the freak show,” I muttered.
TWO
The hall ceiling above me was dry—or at least no wetter than any other part of the ceiling—yet I stood in a puddle of seawater. My head, face, and the front of my jacket had taken the brunt of the unseen wave—for that’s what it had felt like—while my back and lower body were mostly dry. Solis, usually dead-calm unflappable, was fully flapped and had taken a step away from me. I must have looked like something from a horror film, judging by his wide-eyed expression. I’d never imagined the quiet Colombian could be so shaken, but I suppose it’s one thing to imagine someone you know is a little on the weird side and a different thing entirely to have it thrust upon you in a hallway the size of a Volkswagen’s backseat.
I was just thinking the wave was a onetime thing when I felt it rushing upon me again as the liquid Grey pulled back, just like the ocean before a tsunami, making a tugging sensation in my chest. I wasn’t worried about Solis—it seemed to affect him not at all—but I wasn’t in the mood to be soaked to the skin by invisible waterspouts. I didn’t pause to worry about what he’d think as I threw myself into the Grey, deep into the churning tide of this strangest manifestation yet.
A current of green energy “water” tore at my legs and I crouched to make a smaller, denser target as I looked for the cause of the surge. The Grey looked strangely white here, like a day of unbroken, high, thin clouds reflecting the sun in directionless glare. The harsh whiteness felt wet and cold and rippling curves of colored light rose in waves ahead of me. At their core I saw flickers of amethyst light that stretched and receded as the waves grew and rushed toward me. I plunged forward, diving into the approaching wave, and gripped the violet light.
It slipped from my hand like a fish and rushed away with one final flick that sent me head over heels through the suddenly becalmed Grey. I fell toward the normal and tumbled backward over Solis.
He jumped aside with a yelp of alarm, one arm coming up as the other reached for one of my flailing hands and twisted it behind my back. I didn’t fight—even if it hadn’t been Solis, I was too dizzy from the spinning transition to catch my balance.
Solis pushed me toward the wall by force of habit as if he were going to snap the cuffs on me, then realized what he was doing and let go. I sagged forward, catching myself against the wall beside the door. I gasped for breath and turned, leaning back against the nearest firm, upright surface.
Solis faced me, braced, his hands slightly raised as if he expected me to lunge at him, but wasn’t sure I was actually dangerous as much as confused, like a holiday drunk. His eyes weren’t quite so wide, but his stance and expression were wary—no, alert, like a fighter waiting on the next move of an unpredictable opponent. That was interesting. . . . He wasn’t freaking out, though his aura was jumping wildly and the tension in his body spoke loudly of a willingness to meet his fears rather than run from them.
I caught my heaving breath and kept my hands where he could see them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall over you like that,” I said.
“Fall?” he repeated. “Say more like flying, as if someone threw you. What . . . was that?”
I chewed on my words before I let them out. “I . . . sometimes have little disagreements with . . . um, with reality. And physics.” I offered a very thin, uncertain smile. As far as I could recall, Solis had never seen me interact with the Grey before—I usually kept that aspect of my job hidden and most especially from him, though I knew he thought I was strange
and that strange things happened in my proximity. Once or twice he’d even come close to accusing me of criminality—or at least lying through my teeth to cover up an unpalatable truth.
“So I see.” He seemed to be mulling over a few difficult thoughts of his own, but he didn’t speak them. He straightened up, letting his hands drop to his sides but still keeping a jaundiced eye on me. Maybe he thought I was going to lunge at him again. Then he asked, “Are you all right now?” Which I interpreted as “Are you going to do anything else disturbing?”
I never plan to be disturbing. . . . “I’m fine,” I replied, trying to look innocuous and predictable. “Thanks.”
He turned his head a bit so he was looking at me from the corner of his eye—a posture I was familiar with from the many times I’d used it to peer deeper into the Grey without falling in. “How did you get past me?”
I shrugged. “I’m slippery.”
“Yes, and you are, as always, not telling me something.”
I pulled a rueful face. “Can I explain later? Right now I just want to get a look at the problem and get out of here so I can change into dry clothes.”
He nodded and opened the door, keeping one eye on me the whole time.
Nothing new came out, but the tide of Grey surged a bit, as if he’d opened a gate at the locks and let a gush of water through. I waited for it to calm before I stepped into the doorway, mentally bracing myself, and looked into the cabin.
The room was cramped and not very square—or at least it looked that way with the wall opposite me sloping and curving outward on one axis and inward on the other. This was obviously the boat’s hull near the bow, where things got narrow and pointy. The narrow bunk made me think this was a crew cabin, not guest accommodations. Judging by the slopes and angles, part of this room—as with all the rooms and corridors down here—was below the waterline. The smell was strong here but not identical to the stink above; this had the additional odor of burned driftwood and the harsh sting of iodine. The room itself seemed just a bit out of focus, as if the swirling liquid Grey clouded my eyes, and everything was filthy with decayed ocean flora as well as the same sort of black and green mold stains we’d seen upstairs. That was ugly enough, but the floor and the built-in bed must have been the things that caught the SPD’s attention.
A low moan seemed to issue nearby and I jumped little. Solis didn’t look quite as startled, but even he was unsettled by the sound. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t a ghost—it was a foghorn—before I could return my attention to the strange sight on the cabin floor.
A pattern of rust-colored arcs and markings started on the floor and carried on over the surface of the bed and back to the floor, incompletely enclosing a twelve-pointed star in a circle of intertwined curves that looked like cresting waves. Smeared letters or numbers had been sketched at each point of the star with barely enough room between the point and the circling, painted waves. In the middle of the star something had bled a lot and matching spatters crusted in mold marked the walls. Incongruous dots of luminous color and rainbow shimmer were scattered throughout the weird markings. One edge of the ring and some of the figures had been wiped out, creating a gap in the circle. I’d never seen this before yet it felt familiar in a way I couldn’t pin down. . . .
I crouched, keeping one hand on the doorframe to steady myself as I studied the circle of symbols. Something gritty rubbed against my palm. Resting my weight against the doorpost, I looked at my still-damp left hand. The dry substance from the wall made a bright red stain on my hand. I held it out to Solis.
“Is this blood?”
He nodded. “It’s human.”
“Crap,” I muttered, and I knew what had tripped my sense of the familiar: This was some kind of blood magic—not like what I’d seen before, but I recognized the general sensation and stink of it. Magic really wasn’t my strong suit; I’d have to wing this one on my own, since my friends the Danzigers were out of the country and I usually brought this sort of problem to them. “Any idea whose blood this is?”
Solis shook his head. “It’s hard to tell with samples so old and broken down, but it appears to be mixed with something else as well as the blood of more than one person. Who is not yet known.”
“And may not be if the bleeders have no match in the DNA database. Any suspects?”
“Everyone who was on board when the boat was reported missing.”
I stood up again and turned to face Solis directly. “You have a working theory?”
He gave a small shake of his head. “Empty speculation has no point. This is the only cabin with such markings, although there may be traces of blood in many others. Traces only.”
“May be? You’re not sure?”
“This is a low priority case for the SPD and the risk of false positives is too high in this environment for extensive use of the Luminol test. I’ve had to take test scrapings from the obvious stains and submit them to the lab.” He pointed to the small, numbered evidence-location tags stuck here and there in the cabin. “The results are not yet available and stains have not been easy to find or identify.”
“Do you think they were cleaned up or just . . . decayed beyond identification?” I asked.
“It’s the discovery that has been difficult, but if this stain survived, why not others? The whole boat has the dirt and mold so if this marking is a sign of crime, why only here? If the passengers and crew were killed, why isn’t there more blood elsewhere? What does this symbol mean? This is where my questions begin.”
I nodded. “Dirt. Blood . . . Where did the seaweed come from?”
Solis raised his eyebrows. “From the sea.”
I was still wet and the room was unnaturally cold, so I was distracted, scowling, and shivering a little, but not enough to miss that rare spark of sarcasm. Or was it rare? I’d never spent much time with Solis beyond a cumulative hour or two of mutual info swap and occasional interrogation. I’d assumed the taciturn detective didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but that wasn’t likely. Homicide investigation is one of those fields that demands an outlet for the purging of the disillusion and disgust that come with the territory. A lot of cops and forensic investigators tend toward a sense of humor as black and dry as gunpowder; others become callous and irreverent or just plain crass. Only those about to crack lose their ability to laugh, however gruesome and unfeeling that may sound. Rey Solis was apparently—though quietly—just as odd as any other cop and possibly more stable than most.
I felt I should ask him some insightful, buddy-bonding sort of question at this point, but I couldn’t think of one. Or have some clever comeback for his snarky quip—if he’d have been Quinton, I’d have called him a smart-ass at the very least—but that also seemed to come up blank for me. Instead I just gave the eye roll I awarded to most bad jokes and puns.
“You guys find anything like this in the rest of the boat?”
“Not guys. Only me. But there is nothing else quite like this. Other stains, other similar materials, but not arranged as so.” He made an indicative circle with his finger at the blood-painted symbols and their collection of muck.
I stood back as far as I could and still see the whole space. I gave the encircled star and its mess a sideways glance through the Grey; it writhed and wavered in liquid colors that circled the bloody star like the edges of a whirlpool. I couldn’t detect any sign of who had made the circle or what it was for, but I did see some holes in the pattern—just two or three. . . .
“Is this exactly as you found it?” I asked Solis.
“No. I removed one of the pebbles and some of those shiny flecks for testing. I believe the flecks are fish scales.”
“And the pebbles?”
He shrugged. “Very old glass that’s been sand-scoured.”
Beach glass, though they didn’t look much like any kind of glass from where I was standing. Dull surfaced, pitted, dirty, and partially smirched with filth and blood, they looked more like small, colorful river rocks
or broken marbles of almost a dozen colors: cobalt, apple green, gold, cherry red, kelly, aqua, brown, violet, white, jade, and black with a rainbow sheen barely seen beneath the crud. They were irregular shapes that ranged in size from shards no bigger than my pinky fingernail to clods as long as my thumb; when you consider how large my hands are, that’s a good-sized chunk of junk. But even knowing what the material was, I still didn’t have any idea what had happened aboard the Seawitch.
I shook my head, disquieted and cold. “Let’s see the rest and get out of here.”
Solis raised an eyebrow at me—this was the second time I’d made a point of my desire to leave quickly when he knew me for a tenacious pain in the ass more likely to throw herself right in front of trouble than run from it. But I’d made a resolution not to get in Death’s face anymore; I was pretty sure I was no longer bulletproof, and I had someone else’s pain to consider now that I seemed to have an official significant other.
“C’mon. Do you really want to stay here any longer than you have to?” I asked.
He gave it only a moment’s thought. “No.”
I took a few reference photos using a small digital camera Quinton had lent me. Then Solis and I backed out of the cabin and I followed him through the rest of the boat. We looked into the other crew cabin, washroom, and storage area in the front part of the boat, finding more dirt and stains and a single, empty duffel bag abandoned at a random angle under a bunk and now glued to the floor by creeping black mold. Collectively, the boat had room for up to five crew members—providing they were very slim and not picky about privacy or claustrophobia. We also found a large compartment under the pointed bow where the stems of two large anchors poked into the hull through steel-lined sleeves, and a heap of chain and rotting rope sat to either side of a large electric winch so rusted that the chains would have to be cut free before the anchors were ever dropped again. I hoped we wouldn’t need to dig around in there for clues, though the twining, colored mist of the Grey that tangled in the chains gave me a sour feeling.