He kissed the back of her neck at her hairline, below the twist she kept her hair up in. His breath was hot on her skin. Her body melted, slumping into his touch. He pulled her back, away from the stairs, slipped his body in front of hers, and pressed her against the cage. She was limp, unseeing. She let him guide her.
He nuzzled her neck. Her nerves tingled with every touch. Overwhelmed, she moaned softly. His hands moved to the buttons of her dress shirt. He had them open before she realized it, and his hands were inside, cupping her breasts, fingers slipping under her bra.
Instead of putting her hands on his shoulders to push him away, like she should have done, Robin clutched at him, her fingers slipping on his slick skin. She dug her nails in for a better grip.
“Hmm,” he murmured and pinned her against the bars. It was the first sound she’d ever heard him make.
He pulled her arms away just long enough to take her shirt off. His hand slid easily over her skin, and her bra fell away. His kisses moved from her neck, down to her breasts. She wrapped her arms around his head, holding him close.
She bent, unconsciously trying to pull away from so much sensation, so much of him, but the bars kept her close to him. She couldn’t get away. She didn’t want to. Skillfully, more deftly than she could have thought from someone who lived in water and didn’t wear clothes, he opened the zipper of her skirt, slipped his hands into her panties. One hand caressed her backside, the other—played. Oh—she struggled to kick her shoes off, to get her skirt and pantyhose off, to give him better access. He helped.
Her clothes gone, they were naked together. Skin pressed against skin. His erection was hard against her thigh, insistent. He paid attention to nothing but her, and she was overwhelmed. Locking her against him, he eased her down to the catwalk.
They were going to do it, right here on the catwalk, her clothes awkwardly spread out to protect her from the steel. Marina softly sang something in Irish that was no doubt very bawdy.
Robin felt like she had saved herself just for this moment.
* * *
The next evening, she brought hay to the unicorn’s cell.
“Here you go. Come on.”
The unicorn stayed at the far end of the room, its head down, its ears laid back, its nostrils flaring angrily.
Robin stood, arms limp at her sides. Of course. She left the hay, closed the door, and continued her rounds.
She found a note in the lab from the day shift explaining that the problem with the security system had been fixed by simply changing out the fuses, and if it happened again she should try it. The officer in charge sounded testy that they’d lost a whole evening’s worth of surveillance. Not that anything around here ever changed.
Except that it had, everything had changed, and Robin didn’t want anyone to know it. She shut down the cameras again, and removed fuses from half the monitors as well, blinding them.
“Lieutenant,” Rick said to her as she removed his pints from the incubator and prepared his supper. “Look at yourself. This isn’t like you. He has enchanted you.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she murmured, sliding his beakers of blood through the slot in the window.
Rick didn’t look at them; instead, he pressed himself to the window, palms flat against the plastic, imploring. “He’s using you. He doesn’t care about you, he’s only manipulating you.”
She looked at him. Not his eyes, but his cheekbones, his ear, the dark fringe of hair. Anything but his eyes. “Just like you would do, if I opened your door and let you seduce me?”
Which wasn’t fair, because Rick had never tried to seduce her, never tried to take advantage of her. Not that she’d ever given him the opportunity. But he’d always spoken so kindly to her. He’d spoken to her. Until now, she had never thought of Rick as anything but the elegant man who was supposed to be a vampire, locked in a prison cell.
“I’d never hurt you, Robin.”
Now when he looked at her, she flushed. Quickly, she turned toward the aquatics lab.
“Robin, stop,” he implored. “Don’t go in there. Don’t let him use you like this.”
She gripped the doorway so hard her fingers trembled. “I’ve never felt like this before,” she murmured.
She hadn’t meant for him to hear, but he was a vampire, with a vampire’s hearing. He replied, “It’s not real. Let it go.”
“It feels … I can’t,” she said. Because she had never felt like this before, she had never felt so good, so much before, it was like a drug that filled her up and pushed every other worry aside. A part of her knew Rick was right, that if this feeling was a drug, then she’d become an addict in a day and she should stop this.
The rest of her didn’t care.
When she reached the aquatics lab, the selkie hung on to the door of the cage, his dark eyes shining in anticipation. As soon as she’d given Marina her supper, Robin pressed the button for the lock.
* * *
Friday night.
Colonel Ottoman left a message on the answering machine saying he’d be back Saturday. So this was it, for her and the selkie.
She lay in his arms, on the rock in the aquarium. He played with her loose, damp hair, running his fingers through it. She held his other arm around her middle. He was strong, silent. He wrapped her up with himself when they were together.
She couldn’t let it end.
“We’ll go away, you and I.”
He looked away and laughed silently. He kissed her hand and shook his head.
It was a game to him. She couldn’t be sure what he thought; he never spoke. She didn’t know if he couldn’t or wouldn’t.
“Why not?”
He traced his finger along her jaw, down her neck. Then he nestled against the rock and closed his eyes.
She couldn’t hope to understand him. Colonel Ottoman was right, they weren’t even human.
His sealskin lay nearby, on the rock where he had discarded it. She grabbed it, jumped into the water, and swam to the door. He splashed, diving after her, but she climbed onto the catwalk and slammed the door shut before he reached her.
She clutched the skin to her breast. Glaring at her, he gripped the bars of the locked door.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t do this.”
He pressed his lips into a line and rattled the door.
She put the skin out of reach of the cage and pulled on the skirt and shirt of her uniform. All expression of playfulness, of seduction, had left the selkie. His jaw was tight, his brow furrowed.
Skin in hand, she ran to the main lab where she found a knapsack stashed under her desk. She needed clothes for him, maybe an extra lab coat …
“You know how all the selkie stories end, don’t you?” Rick leaned on his window.
“They’re just stories.”
“I’m just a story.”
She smirked. “You’re no Dracula.”
“You’ve never seen me outside this cage, my dear.”
She stopped and looked at him. His eyes were blue.
“Robin, think carefully about what you’re planning. He has enchanted you.” The vampire’s worried expression seemed almost fatherly.
“I—I can’t give him up.”
“Outside this room, you won’t have a choice. You will throw away your career, your life, for that?”
The official acronym for it was AWOL, not to mention stealing from a government installation. Her career, as far as Robin could tell, amounted to studying people in cages. People who defied study, no matter how many cameras and electrodes were trained on them. The selkie had shown her something that couldn’t be put in a cage, a range of emotions that escaped examination. He’d shown her passion, something she’d been missing without even knowing it. She wanted to take him away from the sterility of a filtered aquarium and a steel cage. She wanted to make love with him on a beach, with the sound of ocean waves behind them.
“I have this.” She held up the knapsack in which she had stuffed the sealskin an
d left the lab to stash it in her car and find some clothes.
For all its wonder and secrecy, the center was poorly funded—it didn’t produce the results and military applications that the nearby bionic and psychic research branches did—and inadequately supervised.
She knew the building and video surveillance patterns well enough to be able to smuggle the selkie to her car without leaving evidence. Not that it mattered when Rick would no doubt give Colonel Ottoman a full report. She waited until close to the end of the shift to retrieve the selkie. He came with her docilely, dressed in the spare sweats she gave him.
Marina sat on her rock and sang, her light voice echoing in the lab.
The selkie lingered for a moment until Marina waved good-bye. Robin pulled him to the next room.
“Sir,” Rick, hands pressed to the plastic of his cell, called. The selkie met Rick’s gaze unflinching. “I know your kind. Treat her gently.”
The selkie didn’t react. He seemed to study the vampire, expressionless, and only looked away when Robin squeezed his hand.
Robin lingered a moment. “Good-bye,” she said.
“Take care, Robin.”
Impulse guided her again, and she went to the control box for the lock to Rick’s cell. She pushed the button; the lock clicked open with the sound of a buzzer. The door opened a crack. Rick stared at the path to freedom for a long moment.
Not lingering to see what the vampire would do next, she gripped the selkie’s hand and ran.
She smuggled him in the backseat of her car, making him crouch on the floorboard. Routine did her service now; the shift had ended, and the guard at the gate waved her through.
They’d be looking for her in a matter of hours. She had to get rid of the car, find a place to hide out, wait for the bank to open so she could empty her account. She could leave tracks now, then disappear.
Desperation made her a criminal. She ditched her car, swapping it for a sedan she hotwired. She kept the sealskin under her feet, where the selkie couldn’t get to it.
Two more stolen cars, a thousand miles of highway, and some fast-talking at the border, flashing her military ID and spouting some official nonsense, found her in Mexico, cruising down the coast of Baja.
She knew the stories. She should have driven inland.
They stayed in a fishing village. Robin’s savings would hold out for a couple of months at least, so she rented a shack and they lived as hermits, making love, watching the sea.
Convinced that she was different, that she was smarter than those women in the stories, she hid the sealskin not in the house, but buried it in the sand by a cliff. She wrestled a rock over the spot while the selkie slept.
He was no less passionate than before. He spent hours, though, staring out at the ocean. Sometimes, he wore the same sweats she’d smuggled him out in. Usually, he wore nothing at all.
She joined him one evening, sitting beside him on still-warm sand, curling her legs under her loose peasant skirt. Her shirt was too big, hanging off one shoulder, and she didn’t wear a bra—it seemed useless, just one more piece of clothing they’d have to remove before making love. Nothing of the poised, put-together young army lieutenant remained. That person wouldn’t have recognized her now.
He didn’t turn his eyes from the waves, but moved a hand to her thigh and squeezed. The touch filled her with heat and lust, making her want to straddle him here and now. He never seemed to tire of her, nor she of him. Wasn’t that close enough to love?
She kissed his shoulder and leaned against him. “I don’t even know what your name is,” she said. The selkie smiled, chuckled to himself, and didn’t seem to care that she didn’t have a name for him.
He never spoke. Never said that he loved her, though his passion for her seemed endless. She touched his chin, turned his gaze from the ocean and made him look at her. She only saw ocean there. She thought about the skin, buried in sand a mile inland, and wondered—was he still a prisoner? Did he still see bars locking him in?
Holding his face in her hands, she kissed him, and he wrapped his arms around her, kissing her in return. He tipped her back on the sand, trapped her with his arms, turned all his attention to her and her body, and she forgot her doubts.
* * *
One night, she felt the touch of a kiss by her ear. A soft voice whispered in a brogue, “Ye did well, lass. No hard feelings at all.”
She thought it was a dream, so she didn’t open her eyes. But she reached across the bed and found she was alone. Starting awake, she sat up. The selkie was gone. She ran out of the shack, out to the beach.
Sealskin in hand, he ran for the water, a pale body in the light of a full moon.
“No!” she screamed. How had he found it? How could he leave her? All of it was for nothing. Why had he waited until now to speak, when it didn’t matter anymore?
He never looked back, but dove into the waves, swam past the breakers, and disappeared. She never saw him again. The next shape that appeared was the supple body of a gray seal breaking the surface, diving again, appearing farther out, swimming far, far away.
She sat on the beach and cried, unable to think of anything but the square of sand where she sat, and the patch of shining water where she saw him last. He’d taken her, drained her, she was empty now.
* * *
She stayed in Mexico, learning Spanish and working in the village cleaning fish. She treasured mundane moments these days. Nights, she let the sound of water lull her to sleep.
The army never found her, but someone else did, a few months later.
That night, she sat on the beach, watching moon-silvered waves crash onto the white sand, like her selkie used to. Sitting back, she grunted at the weight of her belly. The selkie hadn’t left her so empty, after all. She stroked the roundness, felt the baby kick.
She didn’t hear footsteps approach and gasped, startled, when a man sat down beside her.
Dark hair, an aristocratic face, permanently wry expression. He was even graceful sitting in the sand. He wore tailored black slacks and a silk shirt in a flattering shade of dark blue, with the cuffs unbuttoned and rolled up—the kind of clothes she always imagined him in. He flashed a smile and looked out at the water.
“Rick! What are you doing here?”
“Besides watching the waves?”
“So you did it. You left.” She was smiling. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.
“Of course. I didn’t want to stay to explain to Colonel Ottoman what you’d done. I brought Mr. Njalson along with me.”
“Brad’s here?”
“He’s hunting back on the mesa. Enjoying stretching all four legs.”
Robin sighed, still smiling. Of course, Rick could have gotten himself out of there—just as soon as he convinced one of the doctors to look in his eyes in an unguarded moment. Now she wished she’d let them all out a long time before she did.
“I was worried about you,” he said, in a tone that made it a prompt, a question rather than a statement.
“I’d have thought you’d have much more interesting and important things to do than look after me.”
“I had the time.”
“How did you find me?”
He shrugged. “I know the stories. I followed the coast. Asked questions. I’m very patient.”
She imagined he would be. He could have left that lab any time he wanted. Maybe he stayed to see what the researchers were up to. To experience something new for a while.
“When are you due?” Rick asked softly.
He startled her back to the moment, and she swallowed the tightness in her throat. “In a month. It’ll have webbed feet and hands. Like in the stories.”
“And how are you?”
She took a breath, held it. She still cried every night. Not just from missing the selkie anymore. She had another burden now, one she’d never considered, never even contemplated. The supernatural world, which she’d tried to treat so clinically, would be with her forever. Sh
e didn’t know the first thing about raising a child. She didn’t know how she was going to teach this one to swim.
LOOKING AFTER FAMILY
The funeral was closed casket. With a body that mangled, the mortician couldn’t do much to make it presentable. Douglas Bennett was forty-eight years old when he died.
His son shot dead the man who killed him. Not that anyone believed a man could do what had been done to Douglas. The police assumed it was an animal—a bear, or maybe even a wolf—so when they saw the second body with a bullet wound through the head and sixteen-year-old Cormac Bennett holding the rifle, they thought they had a delinquent on their hands. Maybe the kid just snapped out of grief and rage at losing his father.
Then the coroner found Douglas Bennett’s blood and skin under the victim’s fingernails and human flesh between his teeth. The kid pleaded self-defense through his court-appointed attorney. The DA dropped the charges.
* * *
Douglas Bennett’s sister, Ellen O’Farrell, took the boy in.
Ellen, her husband David, and their son Ben walked on eggshells around him. He had killed a man, whatever the circumstances might have been, and at his age he could go either way: recover and move on, or spiral down into psychosis. They didn’t talk about Douglas and what had happened; they tried to pretend everything was normal. They kept Cormac busy.
Ben didn’t want to keep quiet. He was crazy to ask his cousin what it had been like, how it had felt, did he want to do it again, and what had really happened? He watched Cormac out of the corner of his eye, hiding behind a light brown flop of bangs. Cormac hadn’t said two sentences together in the month he’d been there.
Ben was doing homework at the chrome and Formica kitchen table after supper. His mother was washing dishes in the kitchen. Cormac helped her, drying plates and stacking them on the counter for her to put away. Tall, lanky, he slouched and had a lazy way of moving. His limbs seemed to hang loosely.
David came in from the mudroom attached to the kitchen, wearing his heavy work coat and putting on his cowboy hat. “Cormac? You want to help me put out hay?”