She abandoned the pizza to chill on the desk and petrify into tomato-pepperoni shoe-leather. She couldn't eat. She stared out into the darkness and the rain, hoping he'd see her against the light, come up here to beat the living shit out of her for being such a fool. Hoping he was alive.
But you shot at him. No way he'd know you aren't waiting up here to kill him. No way he'd know you threw the gun away.
She stripped off her sweatshirt, her pants, her underwear. Pulled off the bandanna and curlers, her hair already dried from the rain. If he came in and saw her naked, he'd know she didn't have a gun. Maybe he'd decide to screw her before he killed her, give her at least a moment to say she was sorry.
That was another thing she'd done, another thing she'd shown him, damn few Johns had ever seen her stripped. She'd always kept some clothing on, just pulled her pants down and lifted her sweater or shirt. Always kept someplace to hide the gun or blade.
She'd felt safe with him, safe enough to be naked. She'd let him do things she'd never done with a John, gave up control. Trusted him. And he'd made her feel things she'd never felt before.
Damn few people she'd ever trusted in her life, once home blew up around her. Dana had been the first, back at the shelter. First and last, until now. Look where it got her.
Pure luck you stayed clean, used rubbers at the right times, never shot up with shared needles. Pure luck — she'd never cared whether she gave a John AIDS or chicken pox or pneumonic plague. The bastards couldn't die fast enough. But Dana had grabbed her by the ear and hauled her to a clinic, and the tests all came back clean.
I am the cat who walks by myself, and all places are the same to me.
She wasn't thinking straight. The light was more likely to scare him away. She switched it off. She shifted her backpack to the floor and lay down on the bed, wool blanket scratchy on her bare skin, buried her face in the pillow that smelled of him, used the pillowcase to mop tears from her eyes.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd cried.
Chapter Eighteen
At least a hundred and fifty yards, Daniel calculated, maybe two hundred, his human brain overruling the seal-thoughts. He floated. He drifted. He waited, just awash, a minimum target. A calculated risk. Some guns had voices, just like that movie character said. You could tell them by the sound. That had been an AK-47 firing, full auto, the other time he'd floated in the waves below the Pratt gazebo. And the AK wasn't a paragon of accuracy. Couple that with a downhill shot . . .
Water splashed, between him and the cliff. Sharp cracks echoed off the rock, high-velocity rifle, the AK again. He stood on his nose and headed deep. The water welcomed him.
Yes, someone still hid in the Pratt caves.
Daniel played for a bit, enjoying the water and his body. He'd earned it. He dove. He swam. He dove and swam again. The bottom rose under him, and he followed the taste of familiar land, felt familiar shapes in the sounds of the sea turned to touch through his sensitive whiskers and the pressure of slow regular waves humping up and crashing against stone. He smelled seals in the water, smelled the oil of torn herring that washed from well-fed teeth.
Shallower and shallower and into the rockweed and he let a surge wash him up onto a ledge smoothed by centuries of seal bodies and seal fur into a hollow trough only slightly modified by human hands. Morgan hands. He squirmed up the stone beyond the reach of the waves and into afternoon sunshine, and lay there panting gently and basked while unmeasured time passed.
The other seals ignored him. Generations of seals had ignored generations of Morgans on this island, something different about them and yet not threatening. Just different.
Daniel scratched his right ear with his flipper, an itch from drying salt or sand fleas or just peeling skin. Herring scales dotted his snout and whiskers, and he rubbed them loose and sent them flying with a sneeze. The sun warmed his coat and the granite ledge under him, tempting him to drowse. Sun and clean cold water and fish in the sea — what did a seal care about security systems and corpses with their hearts cut out?
For that matter, what did a seal care about missing sons? A seal never even knew his sons. Daniel had been spending too much time in his other body. That mistake had captured more than one Morgan through the generations. He shook himself, sending drops of seawater flying, and hunched along over ledge and rumbling cobbles until shade touched his back and the heavy pungency of spruce surrounded him and he was hidden from any prying eyes.
His bones burned with liquid fire as they flowed inside his body, he grunted a squeal of pain that turned into a groan as his mouth and throat changed shape, and he was human again. Human, with sweat and tears running down his face and with the need of human clothing against the chill breeze off the water. As always, turning into a man felt like a loss to him.
Something he'd often wondered — had Morgans been seals before they became humans? What would science make of his DNA? Morgan blood was human enough to allow transfusion. Morgan sperm and ova had proven quite compatible with Homo sapiens, down through the centuries. Was a selkie human? Did "normal" humans have the capacity to change? And if so, why had some ancestral Morgan learned and the rest of the human race missed out?
He heaved his body upright and picked his way naked over shattered urchin shells and spruce twigs, wincing at their
