She logged into the security computer and erased the evening’s footage. Then she disabled the program. 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 about 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 was 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.
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 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. She couldn’t get away. She didn’t want to. Skilfully, more deftly than she could have thought from someone who lived in water and didn’t wear clothes, he opened the zipper of her trousers, and slipped his hands into her panties. One hand caressed her backside, the other - played. Oh . . . She struggled to kick off her shoes, and get her pants 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. He paid attention to nothing but her, and she was overwhelmed. Locking her against him, he pulled 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.
And 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 with a simple reboot, 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 recording program again, and removed fuses from half the monitors as well, blinding them.
“Lieutenant,” Rick called 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 his 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. And 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 towards 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 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 voicemail 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 waist. 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 seal skin 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 stood, clutching 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 slacks and shirt of her uniform. All expressions 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 cloth
es 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 seal skin and 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 goodbye. 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. “Goodbye,” 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 back seat 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. She stopped long enough to get to an ATM and 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 seal skin 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, she was smarter than those women in the stories, she hid the seal skin - not in the house, but buried 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.
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 there and then. 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. He 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 in her eyes. She only saw ocean there. She thought about the seal skin, buried in the sand a mile inland, and wondered - was he still a prisoner? Did he still see steel bars locking him in?
Holding his face in her hands, she kissed him. 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.
Seal skin 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 any more?
He never looked back, but dived 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 grey seal breaking the surface, diving again, appearing further 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 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. 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 so
on 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.
“When are you due?” Rick asked softly.
He startled her back to reality, 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 any more. 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. She didn’t know the first thing about raising a child. She didn’t know how she was going to teach this one to swim.
She touched her face, which was wet with tears. When she tried to answer Rick, she choked. He put his arms around her and held her while she cried on his shoulder.
Author Biographies
Carrie Vaughn
New York Times bestselhng author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged.
carnevaughn.com
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters 162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009
“The Temptation of Robin Green” © by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. First publication, original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.
The right of Trisha Telep to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library