Kitty's Greatest Hits

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 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