Kat Richardson: Seawitch

For my sister: Thanks for being here, yet again.

The year 2011 was a very difficult one for me and my family, and getting this book written, revised, and through the whole process was a bigger team effort than ever before. It’s impossible to quantify my appreciation for even the seemingly small things people did to help me bring this off, but the following is, I hope, at least some measure of recognition.

Thanks to:

Armando Marini for help with the rivers and estuaries of Rhode Island and for letting me steal his wife for a month—including her birthday.

Michael Kinsella for help with small craft routing across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Cherie Priest for lunches and being there.

Elizabeth Rose-Marini, for being the best and most patient sister in the world.

Jacque Knight for agreeing to be bad.

Rosanne Romanello for sympathy and help beyond the call of any publicist.

Richard Foss for the guest room and wonderful conversations and for being gracious about my forgetting to mention him in the previous book for suggesting the Ley Weaver.

Robin MacPherson for beta reading, good suggestions, and common sense as well as, y’know, friendship.

Julie, Judy, Peggy, Jacqueline, Aliza, Kirsten, Mita, and the rest of the folks at the Swedish Hospital MTC in Ballard for everything.

Shawn Speakman for carrying on.

Kelli and Lance Zeilinski for the BBQ.

John and Susan Husisian—you rock.

The fabulous staff of Murder by the Book in Houston, Texas, and Duane Wilkins, Fran Fuller, JB, M’E, Christelle, Synde, and the rest of the booksellers who keep on pimping my books—I love you guys.

Jon Jordan for letting me graciously off a hook.

Jen Jordan for being . . . well, Jen.

Mary Robinette Kowal for being utterly wonderful and so much more, and Rob Kowal for much help and even more help after that.

Laura Anne Gilman for professional advice and personal charm, plus the occasional kick in the head.

Janna Silverstein for help and letting me hide in her home.

Sally Harding for picking up my professional pieces and being a wonderful friend as well as a fabulous agent.

Anne the Amazing Editor and the rest of the crew at Roc—you make me look smarter than I am.

Janet, Carolina, Linda, Mario, and my unknown copy editor who corrected my Spanish.

Chris McGrath for Oh My God gorgeous cover art. Again.

The Minions for picking up the promo slack when I couldn’t and for being the best minions in the world. No evil overlord could ask for more.

Paul Goat Allen for saying wonderful things in very public places.

Mario, Caitlin, Mark, Richelle, Jeanne, Jaye, Nicole, Chuck, the Rainforest folks, Nova, Sandra, Jilli, Bruce, Arinn, Erin, Blake, Charlaine, Toni, Dana, Patrick S., Shanna, Cat R., and the rest of my mad writer friends.

Diana Rowland for mutual venting and being amazing.

My husband, Jim, for pirates, cutlasses, dogs, passion, compassion, and heaters as well as all the other things that are too numerous to list.

I am trying to break my habit of dying. I’ve had my turns on the dance floor with death at least three times that I know of. So far, it has never lasted more than a few minutes and I hope I won’t be staying longer anytime soon. Although I fear my next pas de deux with the Reaper will be the last and lasting one, I prefer to put that bow off as long as possible.

Each time I’ve died, I’ve awakened changed in ways normal people can’t see. These unexpected and unwanted adjustments have stuck me with a strange job: to protect the Grey, the fringe between the normal world and the world of the purely paranormal, from which rise the ghosts and monsters of our collective nightmares, where magic sings across the blackness of this world between worlds as clouds and lines of gleaming energy. Sometimes I must also protect the rest of the world from the Grey and things that are birthed there. I am not a magical creature myself—at least not in the way a ghost or a vampire, a witch or a sorcerer, is. I’m just the legman and general dogsbody for the thing that guards the place; I’m a Greywalker—Hands of the Guardian, Paladin of the Dead.

None of these titles is on my business cards or my office door. As far as the normal world of Seattle is concerned, I’m Harper Blaine, private investigator. It’s the job I was doing long before an angry man killed me and helped introduce me to the Grey. I continue to do it partly because I’m good at it and largely because ghosts tend to stiff me on the bill. Some days I long for the boredom of background checks, personal-injury fraud, and missing persons handed off from an overworked police department. But something always seems to lead me back to the Grey, whether I want it to or not. My friends and family—such as they are—get the short, hard end of the stick too much of the time. I am sorry for that and I know I owe them something better. When the living nightmares are bleakest and thick around me, these ties are all that keep me anchored to what is good and right and human, and I will hold those things close, because this is not a job you quit—it’s one you die from.

The news called it a ghost ship. I didn’t detect any ghosts from the outside, but the boat was enshrouded in thick, colored skeins of Grey fog and ghostlight in gleaming, watery shades: aqua and cerulean with thin whispers of violet twining through them all. I didn’t see any ghosts per se, but there was definitely something paranormal going on—more than any reporter was likely to credit.

I stood in the fog near the end of B dock, waiting, looking at the Seawitch . The insurance paperwork called the old wooden boat a fantail motor yacht, designed by someone named Ted Geary—which I guessed was a big deal. I’ve dealt with boats before, but I’m certainly not an expert and a lot of the technical information about this boat meant nothing to me. It had a long, low profile—relatively speaking—with a round stern and rakish angles that exuded a Jazz Age sense of power. I knew the family had money—the boat wasn’t the only expensive object the insurance company that had hired me had covered for them—but the vessel wasn’t flashy; in its current derelict and stained condition, freighted with mystery, it was grim.

By all reports—official and speculative—the Seawitch had cruised away from its berth in this same marina twenty-seven years earlier and vanished from the knowledge of men, taking four passengers and one crewman with it. They had never returned but the boat had; suddenly and without any sign of hands aboard, it had simply been found one recent morning, standing at the end of its old dock. The derelict boat had been moved to B to rest with the abandoned, broken, seized, and foreclosed vessels until the truth of its reappearance could be ascertained.

The story in the newspaper claimed that the boat had sailed into port under its own power, but, really, the Seawitch seemed to have arrived under cover of the strange, low-hanging morning fog that had swelled around the edges of the Sound and skulked below the bluffs every June morning in Seattle that year, making the hills and spires of the city appear as islands afloat in a haunted sea. Here it was, a lost ship piloted by no one living, returning to its berth after being presumed lost with all hands. Of course, that wasn’t quite the truth of the matter but it was close enough. And it raised the hit rate at the news Web sites by a thousand percent, which was far more important than veracity; advertisers pay for eyeballs, not for unvarnished truth.