Kat Richardson - Seawitch

“At least it is unlikely to read like a Stephen King novel,” he snapped, and that surprised me more than anything else I had seen or heard that day. He was deeply unsettled and it made neither of us happy.

And I had no choice but to make it worse. “You’re going to have to get used to the creepy factor, Solis,” I said. “Because we’re hip-deep in it.”

I got back to my condo about six thirty. The trip had been short once traffic cleared and there hadn’t been any point in lingering or stopping elsewhere. I’d type up my notes for the insurance company later; I’d been on the job for only twenty-four hours officially and they didn’t require a report so soon.

I didn’t see any sign of Quinton when I came in so I assumed he was busy elsewhere. We’re a couple but we don’t spend every free moment together, not least because we both have strange jobs, dangerous associates, and eccentric habits. Two born loners living—mostly—together requires a degree of laissez-faire most people haven’t got. I took off my boots and hid them in the hall closet to save them from possible predation by the ferret. Then I flipped on the TV to the first channel I found running a nature documentary and let Chaos out of her cage for a romp around the living room. Chaos loves nature shows, except for any part of Shark Week, which I think demonstrates a lot more common sense than I’d normally credit to a furry mammal the size of a sneaker who looks like an animated kneesock with teeth.

I was staring into the fridge and wondering why I never seem to have any food in the place when I got a whiff of an unpleasant odor that wasn’t coming from the icebox. A cold feeling ran down the back of my neck and I turned around slowly.

My kitchen and living room had vanished behind a wall of Grey mist and a gleaming doorway shape awaited my attention. I hadn’t seen this phenomenon in years—not since I’d first been introduced to the Grey. I’d seen it only once since then and none of these occasions had been pleasant. Apparently the Guardian Beast wanted to see me and was sending a formal invitation, for once. Usually it just showed up and beat me into doing what it wanted—not the most articulate of monsters, it tended toward violent demonstration more than discussion. Since it is, effectively, my boss in the Grey, when it shows up, I pay attention, especially since I’m pretty sure it could take me out permanently if it wanted to. I sighed and gave up on dinner.

“All right, I’m coming,” I muttered, and stepped toward the glowing portal of ghost-stuff, sinking out of the normal world and fully into the realm of shadows and magic.

The Guardian resolved from the boiling fog of the Grey, a long, sinuous, and coiling shape of silver reflection and ghostlight. The unpleasantly dragonlike head swooped down to my own eye level and looked me over, breathing cold and the odor of forgotten crypts on my face. Cold wisps of Grey mist suggested the imminent shapes of sharp horns and fangs.

I pushed the head back with the flat of my hand. “What do you want?” I asked. I would have demanded, but where’s the point in that?

“ Seawitch ,” the Grey sighed around me, silver-mist faces momentarily evolving from the cold steam of the world between worlds to give voice to the Guardian’s thoughts.

“I’m already on it, but I don’t have much to go on yet. You have to be patient.”

“Valencia,” the voices whispered.

“What?” I had no idea what the Guardian was alluding to. A city in Spain? An orange?

“Find . . . the lost.”

Not helpful, that. “That was on my to-do list already. If you have a more articulate or specific clue, I’d really appreciate it. I think I liked you better when you couldn’t speak at all.”

It laughed at me, the Grey rippling and rolling with its amusement. Then it coiled around me, wrapping its snakelike length up my body in cold loops that sent a metallic shock over my skin like touching the live contacts of a small battery. This time it didn’t pull me up and drop me down again, as it had once, but spun me round and round, the Beast uncoiling into a dark panorama before my dizzy gaze.

I reeled out of its clutches and stared at the scene it had composed of the Grey. A dark place with two large humped shapes and a black stain that thickened the air in one corner. . . . I’d been there, but it hadn’t looked quite like this. . . . Where was it?

As I looked, the dark clot of something widened and became more solid, spreading out to form an impossible crowd of black human shapes that couldn’t really fit in the confined space, yet they did—all contained as if warped into the area by some freak of black-hole physics. I thought there must have been a hundred or more, trapped behind the large, cold iron shapes of engines. . . . Yes, that’s what they were: engines. The space was Seawitch ’s engine room. Not as I’d seen it last, but as it might look from within the Grey.

I pulled back from the Guardian and its vision with an effort. “OK, I see it. The engine room. I’ll go there tomorrow and take another look. Is that what you want?”

The Grey made a hissing noise that slowly faded to a chuckle as the mist drained away, leaving me flat-footed in the arch between my kitchen and the living room. “Wait,” I cried. “What sort of creature—” But it was too late and I couldn’t call the Guardian Beast back. I felt cold and my skin was damp and stiff. “Thanks,” I muttered. “Next time I’ll bring a towel.”

“Don’t you always know where your towel is?” Quinton asked. “What sort of Hitchhiker are you?”

I whipped around to glare in the direction of the front door from which his voice was coming.

Quinton was smiling at me from just inside the closed door. “Hi. Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t realize you were . . . here/not here.”

“Just having a little conference call with the Beast and its Greek chorus.”

“And this leads to towels . . . how?”

I shook my hands out, flinging salty water at him. “I’m wet. This case revolves around a boat that was lost at sea and has now returned like a bad penny—a very wet bad penny. So I got drenched. The new Guardian has what passes for a sense of humor. Mostly on the verge of nasty.”

He looked at the puddle developing around my feet, which had now attracted the ferret, who darted in to take a taste and then backed off, making a face that clearly said the water was vile and she disapproved of it intensely. “You need a towel. Luckily, like a good Hitchhiker, I know where they are.”

“What is with the hitchhiker reference?” I asked, grabbing a dish towel off the drain board to wipe the worst of the moisture off my face and hair.

Quinton ducked into the linen closet in the hall and brought back a large bath towel. “You might want to change out of your clothes here, where the floor’s easier to mop up. And haven’t you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ?”

I took the towel and rubbed some more water out of my hair before I started to disrobe. “Nope,” I replied. “If it isn’t shelved in the mystery section, I haven’t read it.”

He heaved an exaggerated sigh and scooped up the ferret as she rampaged past. “One of the guiding principles of intergalactic hitchhiking is ‘Always know where your towel is.’”

I gave him a blank stare.

“I guess you had to be there,” he replied.

“I guess,” I echoed, taking off the last of my damp clothes. “This is the second time I’ve been soaked today by water that wasn’t there. Maybe I should be taking a towel with me.”

“The point isn’t that you have the towel with you—although that is implied—but that you know where it is.”