Kitty’s Greatest Hits (16 page)

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. 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.

L
OOKING
A
FTER
F
AMILY

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?”

Cormac set the towel on the counter. “Yes, sir.”

Ben stood, jostling the table. “I’ll help, too.”

“No, Ben, you stay and do your homework,” his father said.

“But—”

“It’s cold, and I don’t want you out in it.”

He disappeared through the door. Cormac followed, pausing a moment to look back at Ben, who sat and ducked his gaze, blushing, not wanting to get caught staring. His father didn’t have to tell him off like a little kid in front of Cormac. But Ben supposed he’d asked for it. He’d known what his father would say.

The numbers on his algebra worksheet seemed to fade and jumble together.

A moment later his mother stood beside him, drying her hands.

“He’s right, Ben. It’s too cold out. You know he really wants you to stay in and study hard.”

“Yeah. I know.” He didn’t care about the cold. He wasn’t sick anymore.

“You’re going to be the first one in the family to go to college. It means the world to him. And me, too.” She squeezed his shoulder and went back to the counter to put dishes away.

He knew, but college was such a long way off, and it wouldn’t get him the respect of someone like Cormac.

Ben told his mother he was reading for school, but he turned the light out, sat up by the window in his bedroom, and stared over the nighttime ranch. The moon was almost full and made the patches of snow scattered across the prairie glow silver. The posts and rails of the corral fences were shadows, streaks of dark in the moonlight.

The pickup, its bed empty of hay now, drove around the corner and parked by the barn on the other side of the corrals. His father and Cormac jumped out of the cab and came toward the house. They looked good together. Right. The burly rancher and the tall kid walking beside him. They weren’t even related by blood and they looked more like father and son than David and Ben did. Ben was scrawny, not strong enough for ranch work. Not that he’d had a chance to prove himself or grow into the work. Better suited for books, they’d all decided.

He turned on the light, sat on his bed leaning against a pillow, held his book, and tried to look like he’d been that way for the last couple hours. When Cormac came to live with them, they’d squeezed a spare bed into the room. Ben had lost his only private place on the ranch.

Cormac opened the door.

Ben glanced up, he hoped casually. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Cormac said.

Ben couldn’t think of anything to say after that.
So, how are the cows? What’s it like being an orphan?
He just watched his cousin over the edge of his book. Cormac pulled off a sweatshirt, unbuttoned the flannel shirt underneath, slung them over the back of a chair. Peeled out of his white T-shirt, dropped it, turned back the covers of his bed, unzipped and shoved down his jeans. Crawled into bed wearing only his briefs. Rolled over with his back facing Ben, who’d lost his chance to say anything.

He couldn’t remember what they’d talked about when they were kids. Movies and TV, probably. They’d seen each other every spring—Cormac’s family had always come to help with branding the calves—and at Thanksgiving. They were about the same age and hung out with each other then. Ben could remember playing king of the hill, riding ponies, and taking family trips to Grand Lake. But those times were a while ago, and the person sleeping in the next bed seemed like someone different.

He put down his book and turned out the light. Moonlight bled into the room around the edges of the curtain.

*   *   *

Cormac went through the motions. Wake up, wash and dress, function for the day. Sleep at night. The rest was numb. If he didn’t think, he didn’t have to react.

His aunt and her family were good to take him in, house him and feed him and all. He paid them back by doing chores. It was how he’d been taught. You got more out of life being polite than not. He couldn’t forget what he’d been taught. Especially now.

Full-moon night, he went hunting, like he’d been taught. Full moon was when they came out, and there was no one left to do it but Cormac.

The cops told him he shouldn’t handle guns anymore, even though he’d been hunting for years, helping with Dad’s outfitting business. Too many questions about him and guns. They wanted him to keep his nose clean, they said.

Cormac didn’t care.

Uncle David, a little more practical and a lot more knowledgeable about how they led their lives, had let him keep his rifle. For keeping coyotes off the property, he said. Didn’t matter, as long as Cormac had access to it. He had the bullets, too. His dad’s bullets. The cops hadn’t known about those.

Aunt Ellen and Uncle David hadn’t asked him about the man he shot. They must have known what it was he’d shot, even if none of them could tell the cops about it. They’d understand about him going out now.

He wrapped up a slice of beef from the fridge and carried it with him in a paper bag.

With all the sense of righteousness in the world, he quietly made his way to the mudroom and loaded the silver bullets into his rifle.

“Hey.”

Cormac looked up, too distracted to be startled by Ben’s appearance. He stood there, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, a stripe of moonlight from the window slicing across him, his thin frame, shaggy hair.