“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:
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.
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 Ottoman 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.
