Chapter Nine

The heavy churn of the water pressed against the cold hull, rocking Carwyn back and forth in a fishing boat heading north. He closed his eyes and tried to roll with the waves of the North Pacific, keeping his mind on his mate and on the problem at hand.

Find Brigid.

Find Zasha.

Kill Zasha.

Scream at Brigid for leaving him.

Don't puke.

"I hate you," Ben muttered from across the cabin he and Carwyn had been assigned.

"I told you I wasn't going to follow along after you like a puppy." Carwyn tried to focus on the metal of the boat, which was part of his element and provided some comfort.

Ben spat out, "I fucking hate boats."

"Huh. I do too."

"Useless pieces of crap with no air. No light."

"Light's not good for you these days." Carwyn kept his eyes closed, wondering when Ben was going to figure out the very obvious solution to his predicament.

"Horrible food," Ben continued. "I was stuck on a freighter from Shanghai once when I was human and?—"

"Benjamin." Carwyn had heard enough. "Just fucking float."

"We are floating. That's the problem."

Carwyn picked up a thick copy of Birds of the Puget Sound and chucked it at Ben's head.

"What was that for?"

"Fucking! Float!" Carwyn pointed at the ceiling. "In the air, you idiot. You're a wind vampire. Float in the fucking air so you don't feel the boat rocking. It's a very simple solution."

Ben was silent, but he immediately floated up to the top of the cabin and floated a foot or two from the top of the room. "That's better."

You think?

Carwyn closed his eyes again and tried to focus on the feeling of the metal against his palms. Steady, cool, beautifully solid metal holding the terrors of the vast Pacific Ocean at bay. It was fine. Even if the seams cracked and the water rushed in, he couldn't drown.

But he would be fucking cold and wet.

"Why do vampires get motion sickness anyway?"

Benjamin Vecchio was incapable of being silent.

"It's not actually sickness; it's an imbalance of the inner ear," Carwyn said. "If anything, we're more sensitive to it than humans are. It would be worse if there weren't water vampires on board."

Katya's ships were all captained by water vampires who both kept the worst of the chop away from the boats and also knew the water better than the fish. It was one of the reasons her fleet was one of the most successful in the area.

"Is commercial fishing a big part of her business?" Ben asked. "How many boats does she have?"

"Dozens, I imagine. All around this size." The Pacific Lady was a 120-foot vessel that fished for all kinds of seafood and shellfish off the coast of the US and Canada. It was registered to one of Katya's many companies and held seven human crew members along with the vampire captain. The men were crowded into two cabins at the moment since they were carrying vampire cargo, but as two of the crew members had missing relatives on the boats that vanished, no one was complaining.

"The food will be better on this ship if you get hungry." Carwyn was starting to get thirsty. He would need to hunt when they reached the first site. "In my experience, most fishing boats don't put up with bad food."

"I do like fish."

"You're in the right place then." He could feel the boat turn, and he waited for it.

Wait for it.

Just a second longer…

"Fuck!"

Carwyn smiled and opened his eyes. Ben hadn't felt the boat turn, and the sudden rocking had smacked his head on the corner of the hull.

"You all right?" Carwyn poked his head out from under his bunk.

"Yeah," Ben muttered. "I'm fine."

Carwyn looked at the black circle of the porthole. There was a light-safe shield that covered it during the day, but it was night. He could barely make out a few sparkling stars in the cold night and the sliver of the edge of the moon.

"You could go up to the deck if you wanted."

"That sounds like a recipe for me flying my ass away from here and leaving you behind," Ben said.

"Not if you want my help."

Ben muttered something in Mandarin that Carwyn pretended not to understand.

"Is this how you crossed the ocean back in the day?" Ben asked.

"Yes, and trust me when I say this is very much an improvement."

"Why don't you buy a plane like Gio and B?"

Carwyn had money. He had plenty of money. What he didn't have was the patience to pay bills. "Too permanent. Your uncle has a plane, which also means he has a pilot, a crew, a hangar to keep it in, and rent for that. He has bookkeepers and money managers and?—"

"Butlers. Don't forget the butlers."

Carwyn smiled. "Exactly. Which is why I love to visit your uncle, but I do not want to be him."

Ben rolled over to look at Carwyn. "Are you telling me you don't have a bookkeeper? That you don't pay taxes?"

"I don't think so."

"Carwyn, you tax dodger."

"I keep my money in gold, Ben. I don't have a job. I just cash in some gold every now and then when I need to buy things." He pursed his lips. "I need a Winnebago."

"Why? And won't you eventually run out of gold?"

"I really have a lot of gold," Carwyn muttered. "And I need a Winnebago so I have more room to stretch. I love a sturdy recreational vehicle."

"Okay, this is ridiculous." Ben floated down to the ground. "Is the crew working?"

"If you mean are they fishing, no. This is a passenger transfer up to Ketchikan, and then we're meeting another one of Katya's people up there."

"Where is Baojia?"

"On vacation in Indonesia apparently." Carwyn had a feeling that his old friend was going to be more than a little angry that his boss hadn't called him back when Carwyn showed up.

"I'm going to talk to the crew." Ben walked to the door, stumbling a little as the boat shifted to port. "Want to come?"

"No." Carwyn sat up and swung his legs over the side. "But I'll come anyway."

The crew of the Pacific Lady were a cool and serious group of professional fishermen consisting of six men and one woman. They ranged in age from the fresh-faced greenhorn to the woman, who looked like she had to be close to her seventies judging by the lines on her face.

Five of them sat in the mess hall, chugging coffee and playing cards while the cook that night—a middle-aged man everyone called Guff—cooked in the galley.

"What's for dinner?" Carwyn asked when he sat down.

The old woman stubbed out a cigarette and grinned. "Not us if you know what's good for you."

The men laughed, and Carwyn was immediately put at ease. "No worries, friend. If I took your blood, I'd definitely wipe your memory."

"See? Manners, Frannie." A red-faced man with yellow-blond hair and a Northern English accent grinned. "I told you they were gents."

"Brick, your idea of gents and my idea are gonna be very different things." She winked at Carwyn anyway.

The easy jokes led to more laughter and a few stories being passed around about different vampire captains the crew had worked under.

Ben was surprisingly easy with the men. Once they'd gotten him out of his stark black wardrobe and into some worn jeans, flannel, and a beat-up parka, he fit into the tapestry of the crew just fine. He was paler than most, but that didn't even stand out much in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun was covered about sixty percent of the year.

"So these two ships that went missing," Ben started. "The ones Carwyn and I are going to look for. What can you tell us?"

There was a hush for a moment, and then Frannie spoke. "Nothing special really. One was a little smaller than this one. Five guys and a good captain. Her name was Maureen, and I worked with her before I transferred to Jeb." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder toward the bridge. "Irish water vamp. Kept her head down and her hold full. Her boys made good money."

"You get paid based on how much fish you catch, right?" Ben asked.

All of them nodded.

"We get a stipend, right?" Brick added. "When things are lean. Not much, but it keeps the bills paid. But the bonuses go to us when the catch is good. The big boss is good to work with."

"And the catch is almost always good," Frannie said. "The only times we don't come back with a decent catch is when the rest of 'em get suspicious, right? You can't be that boat that never comes back empty."

"Got it," Ben said. "So the two boats?—"

"Three." The young man at the end of the table spoke quietly. "There was the Ranger and the Amaranth, but the yacht that went missing—that one had Grigorieva crew too. My girlfriend was the cook on the Dolphin. The Flying Dolphin, that was the yacht that went missing. We haven't heard from her in months."

He opened his phone and held up a picture of a brightly smiling blond woman in a blue-and-white striped shirt with a red scarf at her neck.

"That's her on the Dolphin," he said. "She started working for Katya, but the money Paulson offered was so good she switched over. We were saving up to get married."

"Paulson?" Carwyn asked. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but it wasn't immediately unique. The majority of Scandinavians were a -son or -dottar of something. Paulson was far from a rare name even in vampire circles.

"Henri Paulson," Frannie said. "He's the rich vampire that went missing along with his crew." She reached over and patted the young man's hand. "Christy's a smart girl. Don't you worry."

Christy was likely dead, and the young man knew it from the look in his eyes. He was already using the past tense when he mentioned her.

"She's not a vampire though." He glanced at Ben. "Is she?"

"We don't know if we're going to find any survivors," Ben said. "I don't want to give you any kind of false hope here. The chances that any of these crews are still alive after this many months is slim. I know Katya had people out looking, but…"

"It's a big-ass ocean," a voice rumbled from the galley.

"Yeah." Ben glanced toward the galley. "It's a big-ass ocean."

Everyone went silent for a long moment.

Frannie finally said, "Hell, accidents happen. Anyone who works on the water knows that. People get lost. A lot of us want to get lost when we come up here—that's why we don't take an office job in Spokane. But having three vessels go missing that close together is no accident."

"No," Carwyn said. "It's not. Have any of you seen the redheaded vampire named Zasha? Not as good-looking as me, sadly. Fire vampire. Tall, very noticeable. They don't try to keep a low profile."

All of them shook their heads.

"Rumors and whispers," Frannie said. "Humans up here try not to pay attention to most of that stuff. It's a quiet place. The whole coast is laid-back. Nobody goes there to cause trouble."

"Katya can lay the hammer down when she needs to," Brick said. "No one wants that to happen. The Russians, the Chinese. Everyone stays cool."

"Zasha didn't though," the greenhorn said. "I know who you're talking about. Christy said he…" The young man cocked his head. "They?"

"They," Carwyn and Ben said together.

"Yeah, well, I never met them, but Christy said this vampire visited the Dolphin one night at the end of the summer. Made her real nervous. She said his—their vibe was real jumpy. Gave her the creeps and made Paulson—her boss—she said he seemed kinda serious. I mean, he's from Sweden or something, so he's not mister jokey or anything, but he's usually real relaxed."

Paulson.

Henri Paulson. Something was tickling the back of Carwyn's brain. It was a familiar name, but he couldn't picture a face. But there were many Scandinavian water vampires who lived on boats. It was one of the more common places to find them.

"How close was this visit to when the Dolphin went missing?" Ben asked.

The greenhorn shook his head. "Maybe three, four weeks?"

Ben and Carwyn exchanged a look. Was Zasha visiting marks before they attacked, or was there another explanation for the visit to Paulson? Could the Scandinavian vampire be one of Zasha's allies?

"What kind of boat was the Dolphin?" Carwyn asked.

"Beautiful, mate." Brick pulled out his phone. "I have a picture of it. The boss wanted a word with Paulson last summer, and Jeb and us took her to where he was anchored, up around Admiralty Island." He pointed the phone at Ben, then at Carwyn.

The yacht on the screen was a beautifully equipped ship painted gleaming white and navy blue. It had modern electronic equipment and stunning woodwork on the deck.

"Got there in the middle of the day, so we got to hang out with the crew all day and enjoy the boat until sundown." Brick smiled a little. "That was a fun day. Hate to think of anything happening to that lot."

"Was Paulson one of Katya's people?"

"Don't know," Frannie said. "But he was a regular in the area. I've heard his name for a lot of years. Mostly he hired from her people."

"So that's the Dolphin missing first? Then the two fishing boats?"

Frannie looked at Brick, and he nodded.

"Yeah," the man said. "That sounds right."

Carwyn's mind kept circling back to his original question: Was Paulson a victim of Zasha or an ally? He needed to speak to someone who knew Paulson, but that probably wouldn't happen until they reached Ketchikan.

"Thanks," Carwyn said, glancing at the greenhorn at the end of the table. "What was your name, son?"

The young man sat up straight. "Jack. John, but everyone calls me Jack."

"My friend and I" —he nodded at Ben— "we're going to do everything to get you some answers. If we can't find Christy, we'll at least find out what happened to her. And if anyone hurt your girlfriend, you know our type doesn't wait for a judge and a jury."

Carwyn left it at that; Jack could fill in the blanks.

"Yeah," the young man said. "Thanks." He shrugged one shoulder. "Her family would appreciate it."