“Here you go, kid.”
Hoofed footfalls shuffled toward her through the wood shavings that covered the floor. The animal stood about fifteen hands high, had a milk-white coat, cloven hooves, a tuft of hair under its chin, and a silver spiral horn between its eyes.
Robin spread out the hay, feeding some of it to the creature by hand. She and the unicorn got along well, though at twenty-three she didn’t like to admit her virginity. She’d fallen back on excuses to explain why she’d never seemed to make time for dates, for getting to know the men around her, for simply having fun: too much to do, too much studying, too much work, too much at stake. She’d always thought there’d be time, eventually. But those old patterns died hard. Colleagues and friends paired off around her, and she’d started to feel left out.
All that aside, now she was glad about it. Otherwise, she’d never have had the chance to hold a unicorn’s muzzle in her hands and stroke its silken cheek.
She’d graduated top of her class with a degree in biology and made no secret of her interest in some of the wilder branches of cryptozoology, however unfashionable. She’d gone through the university on an army ROTC scholarship and accepted an active-duty commission because she thought it would give her a chance to travel. Instead, she’d been offered a position in a shadowy military research project—covert, classified, and very intriguing. She’d accepted, transferred to the base in California, where she couldn’t talk to anyone about her work because of how classified it was. Not that anyone would believe her if she did talk.
After visiting with the unicorn for half an hour, Robin continued to the next level down: The Residence.
This level of the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology made Lieutenant Green nervous. It seemed like a prison. Well, it was a prison, though the people incarcerated here weren’t exactly criminals. Colonel Ottoman, PhD, MD, et cetera, liked to say it didn’t matter since they weren’t really human. A lowly research assistant and low-ranking, newly minted officer like Robin, perfectly turned out in her prim uniform with pressed collar and skirt, was not supposed to question such a declaration. Still, she made an effort to treat the inhabitants of the Residence like people.
“Hello? Anyone home?” Colonel Ottoman and Dr. Lerna were supposed to be here, but Robin must have been the first in for the night shift. The day shift had already checked out.
Despite its clandestine military nature, the place was as cluttered as one would expect from any university laboratory. Paper-covered desks and crowded bookshelves lined one wall. Another wall boasted a row of heavy equipment: refrigeration units, incubators, oscillators. Several island worktables held sinks and faucets, microscopes, banks of test tubes and flasks.
One Plexiglas wall revealed a pair of cells. The first cell was completely dark, its inhabitant asleep. Special features of this room included a silver-alloy lining and silver shavings embedded in the walls. The next cell had garlic extract mixed with the paint.
“How are you this evening, Lieutenant?” the occupant of the dimly lit second cell greeted her.
“I’m fine, Rick. Where is everyone?”
“There’s a note on your desk.”
Her desk was the smallest of the group, and the only one without a computer—she was still using a typewriter, although the colonel had promised to get her a computer on the next requisition cycle. She assumed he’d forget. She found a note in Dr. Ottoman’s jagged writing on her desk calendar:
Lt. Green, sorry to leave you alone, special conference came up, Bob and I will be in DC all week. Hold down the fort. No special instructions regarding the new arrival, just leave it alone.
Col. Ottoman
Just like that. Gone, leaving her alone on the night watch for a whole week. That meant she wouldn’t actually have anything to do but feed everyone and keep an eye on the closed-circuit screens.
“Bad news?” Rick said.
“Just inconvenient. Do you know anything about a new arrival?”
“In the aquatics lab.”
She started for the next door.
“Ah, Lieutenant. Chores first?” Rick—short for Ricardo, surname unknown, date of birth unknown, place of birth unknown—slouched nonchalantly against the plastic window at the front of his cell. He didn’t sound desperate—yet.
“Right.”
From the incubator she removed the three pints of blood, “borrowed” from the base hospital, which had been warming since the last shift. She poured them into clean beakers, the only useful glassware at hand, and reached through the small panel in the window to Rick’s cell to set the glasses of blood on a table inside. It wasn’t really any different than feeding raw meat to the griffin.
Rick waited until the panel was closed before moving to the table. He looked composed, classic, like he should have been wearing a silk cravat and dinner jacket instead of jeans and a cotton shirt.
“Cheers.” He drank down the first glass without pause.
She didn’t watch him, not directly. The strange, hypnotic power of his gaze had been proven experimentally. So she watched his slender hands, the shoulder of his white shirt, the movement of his throat as he swallowed.
He lowered the beaker and sighed. “Ah. Four hours old. Fine vintage.” His mouth puckered. A faint blush began to suffuse his face, which had been deathly pale.
Robin continued the last leg of her rounds. The next room contained aquariums, large dolphin tanks with steel catwalks ringing the edges. Bars reaching from the catwalks to the ceiling enclosed the tanks, forming cages around the water.
Robin retrieved a pail of fish—cut-up tuna, whole mackerel, a few abalone mixed with kelp leaves—from the refrigerator at the end of the work space and climbed the stairs to the top edge of the south tank.
“How are you, Marina?”
A woman lounged on an artificial rock that broke the surface of the water in the middle of the tank. Hugging a convenient outcrop of plaster, she played with her bronze-colored hair. Instead of legs she had a tail: long, covered in shimmering, blue-silver scales, ending in a broad fin that flapped the water lazily.
The mermaid covered her mouth with her pale hand and laughed. It was teasing, vicious laughter. Marina seldom spoke.
“Here you are, when you’re hungry.” Robin nudged the pail to where the mermaid could reach it through the bars.
Marina’s laughter doubled. She arched her back, baring her small breasts, and pushed into the water. Diving under, she spun, her muscular tail pumping her in a fast loop around the rock’s chain anchor. On the surface, the rock swayed, causing ripples to spread. Bubbles streamed from her long hair, a silver trail.
Suddenly, she broke the surface and shook her hair, spraying water. Still laughing, her gaze darted across the catwalk to the north tank. Slyly, she looked back at Robin, writhed so she floated on her back, and splashed her tail.
Robin looked at the north tank, which until that night had been empty. A seal, torpedo-shaped, rubbery, its gray skin mottled with black, lay on the artificial rock and stared at her with black, shining eyes. The new arrival. A tag, sealed in a plastic, waterproof cover, hung from the rail by the cage. It read:
On loan from the British Alternative Biologies Laboratory. HOMO PINNIPEDIA. Common names: selkie (Scottish), silke (Irish)
A selkie. It used its sealskin to travel through the water, but it could shed the skin to walk on land as a human. The creature raised itself on its flippers and looked at her with interest. Real, human interest shone in those round black eyes.
“Wow,” Robin murmured. What were they going to do with a selkie?
She leaned on the railing, watching for a time, but the selkie didn’t move. She kept a notebook, a journal for informal observations and such. She could write: “seal, lounging.”
She had to walk rounds every two hours, since many of the subjects didn’t show up on the video monitors. She was supposed to conduct formal interviews with Rick, since he was obviously most active during the night watch. But Ottom
an had collected all the arcane information he could from him—without going so far as staking and dissecting him—months ago, so they usually just chatted. Tonight, though, she found herself leaning in the doorway to the aquatics lab. The lights over the aquariums were dim. The water seemed to glow with its own blue aura.
“It won’t change form while you’re staring at it,” Rick said.
“I’m just curious.”
Now, the seal swam, fluidly circling, peering at her through the thick glass, disappearing regularly as it bobbed to the surface for air.
“‘It.’ Don’t you even know what it is?” Bradley Njalson, the werewolf, had woken up. His deep voice echoed from his bed against the far wall of his cell.
“Yes, oh great biologist,” Rick said. “Have you sexed the specimen?”
She’d tried, but the seal deftly managed to keep that part of its anatomy turned away from her. Not that external genitalia would be visible on a marine mammal.
“The tag didn’t say,” she said. She’d looked for the research files and the reports that had arrived with the selkie, but Ottoman had locked them up before rushing off to his conference.
For all she knew, it was just a seal.
* * *
The next night, she spent most of her shift sitting on the top step of the steel catwalk stairs, watching it.
Splashing in the south tank, Marina pulled herself to the bars and watched Robin watching the other tank.
“Marina, what do you know about selkies?”
The mermaid, who’d been collected in Dingle Bay in Ireland several years before, had been humming a song, an Irish-sounding jig. “A mermaid died to save a silke once.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“Ask ’im.”
Robin turned to where the mermaid nodded, to where a man hung on to the bars of the selkie’s cage, holding himself half out of the water, smiling. Surprised, Robin jumped to her feet.
He was lean, muscular. Slick with water, his pale skin shone. Black hair dripped past his shoulders. His face was solid, unblemished. He didn’t grip the bars like a prisoner; he held them loosely, using them to balance as he treaded water. His smile was playful, like she was inside the cage and he was studying her.
Tentatively, she nodded a greeting. “Hello.”
He pushed himself away from the bars, gliding back through the water. He was naked and totally unself-conscious. His body was as sculptured and handsome as his face. He had the broad shoulders and muscular arms of an Olympic swimmer, powerful legs, every muscle in his torso was defined. She could have used his body for an anatomy lecture.
He swam to the artificial rock, climbed out of the water, and sat back, reclining. He spread his arms, exposing to best advantage his broad chest, toned abdomen and … “genitalia” was too clinical a word for what he displayed. He was posing for her.
Next to him lay a bundle of gray, rubbery skin.
Robin stood at the bars of his cage, looking through them for an unobstructed view. She didn’t remember moving there. She took a deep, reflexive breath. Her heartbeat wouldn’t slow down.
Marina laughed uncontrollably, both hands over her mouth, tail flapping. Her voice was musical, piercing.
Robin fled the room.
Back in the main lab, she stood with her back against the wall, eyes closed, gasping.
“Let me guess. The selkie—male?” Rick’s tone was politely inquisitive.
The flush in Robin’s face became one of embarrassment. So much for the biologist and her professional demeanor. “Yes. Yes, he is.”
“They have a knack for that.”
“A knack for what?”
“Flustering young women out of their wits. I’m sure you know the stories.”
Since her posting to the center, Robin had had to question all the myths and ancient tales. They might be just stories; then again.… She went to the bookshelves to look up “selkie” in Brigg’s Encyclopedia of Fairies.
“How do you do it?” Rick asked, moving to the end of his window.
“Do what?”
“Remain so clinical, when confronted with so many contradictions to your assumptions about the world.”
“I expand my assumptions,” she said.
“What about the magic? Your inability to control your reaction to the selkie. You are so careful, Lieutenant, not to look into my eyes.”
The impulse was, of course, to look at him. The voice hinted at rewards she would find when she did. Mystery. Power. She resisted, taking the book to her desk, passing Rick’s cell on the way. She looked at the collar of his shirt. “Why are you all so damn seductive?”
“It’s in the blood.” He grinned. The allure disappeared. He could turn it on and off like a light switch.
Brad laughed, a sound like a growl.
Robin almost wished for the seal back. It had been much less distracting. For the rest of the night, the skin remained folded on the rock, and the man watched her. She turned her back on him to check off her rounds on the charts, and when she looked again he was right there, pressed against the bars. Sometimes, their faces were only inches apart. Sometimes, she didn’t shy away, and she could feel his warm breath. He never said a word.
She was attracted to the selkie. That was a statement, an observation, something empirical with explanations having to do with the fact that she was a young woman and he was a young man. A very handsome young man. Hormones were identifiable. Controllable.
So why couldn’t she seem to control the way her body flushed every time she entered the aquatics lab? Rick had mentioned magic. But the center was here precisely because magic didn’t exist, only biology that had not yet been explained.
Biology. She needed a cold shower.
* * *
Wednesday night.
She turned around after setting down Marina’s supper and tripped on the catwalk. No, she didn’t trip—Marina had reached through the bars, grabbed her ankle, and tipped her over. The mermaid was stronger than she looked. Robin sprawled across the catwalk between the tanks, too surprised to move, lying with the meat of her palms digging into the steel treads.
The selkie was by the bars, right beside her, reaching through. He touched her hand. Even though his hand was damp and cool, Robin thought her skin would catch fire. He took her hand, brought it through the bars, and kissed it, touching each knuckle with his lips.
When she didn’t pull away, he grew bold, turning her hand, kissing the inside of her wrist, tracing her thumb with his tongue, sucking on the tip of a finger. She hadn’t imagined she could feel like this, all her nerves focused on what he was doing to her. She closed her eyes. Nothing existed in the world but her hand and his mouth.
She was on duty. This was not allowed. She should stand up and leave. Write a report about the cooperative behavior of the selkie and the mermaid. Marina was laughing, quietly now, from behind her rock.
Gradually, Robin slid forward so that her face was at the bars. She shouldn’t be doing this. The security cameras recorded everything. The selkie kissed her. His lips moved slowly, carefully tasting every part of her mouth, letting her taste him. His hands cupped her face. If it hadn’t been for the bars, she would have let him pull her into the water.
He drew away first. The bars kept her from reaching after him. He swam a few feet away, holding her gaze until he reached the door of the cage, where he lingered, waiting. The message: If she wanted to continue, she’d have to open the door.
Well then, that was it. She lay on the catwalk, her hand still thrust through the bars, dangling in the cool water.
She used the bars to pull herself to her feet. She trembled a little, her heart racing. Nerves, that was all. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She could still feel his lips.
She planned to go straight to the next room. The control box to deactivate the electronic locks on the cages was at the top of the stairs. A single move. That’s all it would take. Marina made a sound, part sympathetic, part mocking.
/> She walked past the control box, into the next room. Her lips pursed, her blood rushed.
“Lieutenant?” Rick said.
Ignoring him, she continued to the side room that held the bank of a dozen TV monitors, showing the view from cameras focused on every enclosure in the center. Jones the dog was gnawing on a rawhide bone. The griffin was scratching the steel wall of its cell. The unicorn stood with a foot cocked, nose to the floor, sleeping. In the aquatics lab, Marina was basking on her rock, brushing her hair with her fingers, probably singing as well. The selkie, still in human form, swam back and forth in front of the door, like he was pacing. Like he was waiting.
She shut off the cameras, rewound the tapes, and erased the evening’s footage. All the monitors went to static. She left a note for the day shift complaining that the security system was on the fritz, that she’d tried to fix it and failed.
On her way back to the aquatics lab, Rick called, his voice harsh. “Lieutenant Green, this isn’t you. This is the magic. Selkie magic. Stop and think what you’re doing.”
She paused at the door. She was sure she knew what she was doing. But she’d read the stories, and Rick was right. Male selkies had a predilection for seducing women. This wasn’t her, it was the magic.
And she wanted it.
The hand that pressed the button for the lock to the north tank was not hers. Not really.
The door to the selkie’s cage opened with a small noise. She kept her back to it, her breath short, her eyes closed with the realization of what she was doing. She’d worked so hard, stayed in control her whole life, and now she did nothing but wait. She gripped the railing by the stairs.
She heard dripping, water rushing off a body climbing onto the catwalk. Still, the touch on her shoulders came as a shock and made her flinch. He must have sensed her anxiety, because he brushed her arm gently, stroking lightly with fingertips until she relaxed. Letting her grow accustomed to him, as if he were taming a wild animal. Then both his hands touched her, moved along her arms to her shoulders. Her shirt grew damp with his touch.