The Selkie

A couple notes from the author:

Category choice was/is debatable. There are strong supernatural and horror elements and it skews plot and exposition vice sex, but it's erotica about lesbian desire at its core.

None of the literary references or historical factoids that litter this story are necessary to the plot, like who Ayn Rand and Edmund Dantes are. If you do get every reference however, I'd like to strongly encourage you to go outside and talk to people more.

And now, on with the story.

*****

Chapter One

Aud gazed out at the dark greenish waves of the Southern California beach at nightfall with eyes that more closely matched the fathomless blue of the Arctic Ocean; unceasing, unbroken, and unyielding. With longing in her pale ruddy face and the wind in her paler long hair, she could be Helga the Fair awaiting Gunnlaugr Serpent-Tongue's return, or Ophelia debating her final dive, or Iduna thinking of crossing the rainbow bridge. Her broad forehead, high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and proud jaw proved her ancient Scandinavian heritage, but her pleasing lips and the slightest touch of facial lushness softened those traditionally harsh Nordic features.

What was she? Most casual observers seeing her longboard, bikini top, and short shorts would assume she was a just a tall neo-Hippie surf rat. As Aud's observer, however, I was far from casual.

After an uninspiring evening surf, I carried my board back up the trail to the beach house and stowed it in the garage. I showered off the ocean grime and put on my PJs before crawling into bed with my benefactress, a rather Rubenesque woman who was already snoring lightly.

Calling her a girlfriend wouldn't be accurate, though we had developed a mutual fondness. Maybe Sugar Mama is the right term? She feels so guilty about not actually loving me that she's bought me a car and paid for me to go "back to college." I'm halfway to a marine biology degree that I've no intention staying in town to complete.

For my part, I've been a thief, a killer, a liar, and a hooker. Golddigger doesn't seem all that bad by contrast.

"Welcome back," she greeted me drowsily and flopped a heavy arm around my svelte body, drawing me in across purple satin sheets for a close spooning, "Didn't decide to camp out?" She thinks I go camping at the beach for a few days when the mood takes me.

"I wanted to be in bed with you," I answered honestly and burrowed back into her, feeling comfy and cared for. We drifted off.

I woke before her, per usual. Rolling toward her while still under her arm, I nuzzled and kissed her awake until she took her arm off me and shifted onto her back.

"Good Morning, Shelly." She thinks my name is Michelle. It's as good a name as any.

"Morning," I murmur back without lifting my head from her smooth skin.

I nibbled the underside of her chin, avoiding any mouth to mouth with morning breath and working my practiced way down the familiar territory of her plumpish body instead. With easy warm kisses, I blanketed her shoulders and chest in devotion.

I licked under the straps of her nightie while running my fingertips up and down the insides of her sensitive forearms from elbows to wrists until her hands stroked my white-blonde hair approvingly and pressed my head further down.

She pulled her heavy bosoms out of her nightie and played with them as I pushed the front of her nightie up to kiss and lick her ample stomach. I stopped to tongue out her deep and deeply sensitive navel, dipping and swirling my agile tongue. Her sleepy smile and half-lidded eyes told me she'd want more. I scooted down the bed.

Her legs spread open unconsciously as my hands caressed her sides and upper thighs. I knelt inside her knees. Leaning forward on my elbows, I parted her folds for a long, end to end lick of her increasingly moist pussy. Then I pulled back to nibble and lick her inner thighs to the sounds of her twitters and moans. Soon one of her hands left her own nipples to rest on the crown of my head, coaxing me back to her needful pussy.

I lapped up the gathered liquid, drawing much more. Her breathing sped and her moans rose in urgency. I pressed one, two, and finally three fingers into her, pumping in and out of her steadily. Adding a rhythm with the flat of my tongue and some quick flicks to her protruding clit had her flirting with the edge quickly.

"Ahhhh," she sang out loudly through her muscular contractions as I brought her to a gentle morning orgasm.

We cuddled until she left for work, never to be seen by me again. I didn't love her, but do hope the rest of her life is pleasant.

I drove to class in the sporty little car she bought me.

I prefer to be gainfully employed and have turned my hand to everything from midwifery to parasailing instruction, with dozens or more occupations between. In the past decade, however, networked documentation of identity has made fabricating an effective past history difficult and dangerous. Courtesan may be the safest job left for me.

Entering the amphitheater-style classroom, I froze amongst the other students for what I hoped was an imperceptible fraction of a second.

I felt the gaze of a vampire.

Careful not to look around or show any interest, I took a seat near the front and tried to appear - perhaps implausibly - vastly interested in my calc book until the professor began his lecture. The gaze frequently shifted momentarily from me throughout the 90 minute class, but immediately homed back in unnervingly on the base of my spine after every respite. Only the full measure of discipline I'd developed over millennia kept me from bolting or turning to see the thing that stared at me.

If you ever believe yourself to be in the presence of a vampire, don't let on that you've noticed. Looking down calmly and leaving nonchalantly ASAP has kept me from being drained or worse countless times.

If you're not prey already, you'll garner its attention by obviously recognizing it. If you are prey, showing an awareness will precipitate an attack. Nothing is more certain to make you dinner than running away shrieking or staring in wide-eyed terror.

I waited composedly until class ended, walked directly to my car, locked the doors behind me, and turned on the engine.

Aud left quickly among her fellow students. Like Viola playing Cesario, she imitated those around her successfully enough to fool the impersonated, but not the fool. She manifestly felt me watching her - the downy hairs on her nape rose in primal warning of my predatory nature - and that alone confirmed that the beautiful mimic was clearly non-human. To so pointedly ignore my gaze and to attempt to hide and escape amongst humans was a doppelgänger trick, not behavior befitting of a fellow predator.

So why did the cloistered Aud's heady blood smell so enticingly of werebeast? "O mistress mine, where are you roaming?/O, stay and hear! Your true love's coming"

Clearly I drew its interest, but did it understand why? If I tantalized a hungry vampire more than any of its other available targets, simply maneuvering away until it found equally appealing and less dodgy prey would save me. Sucks for the human(s) drained in my place, but they would die of a vampire bite and therefore had less to lose.

I, on the other hand, am a renewable food source for vampires. Discovering one in the area meant I'd be pulling up stakes or risking becoming a captive blood donor in perpetuity.

More than my need to leave town before someone realized that I never aged or that I morphed into a ringed seal at least once a month, (I'm a selkie, or wereseal as you like, but I'll get more into that later) vampire encounters had caused me to flee one life for another. Especially in the past century, vampirism seems to have spread like a plague in the Americas.

I blame oceanliners and transatlantic flights for the modern globe-trotting blood-sucker. Committing to a month on a 19th century sailing vessel was much harder for vampires. They'd be forced to either find the privacy required to drain and dump a body weekly or look like a walking corpse on a confined vessel of suspicious sailors.

Restrictions on global travel are different for me, because my primary goal is always to swim under the radar. Both as a ringed seal and as a woman of obvious Nordic heritage, I have to stay in the northern hemisphere to not stick out like a sore thumb.

Even still, I've learned the hard way to never stay long anywhere. And the monster that sent me quietly fleeing from the classroom is why.

I glanced up unfocused to see my fear. Crossing the parking lot with inhuman fluidity was a female vampire, flushed from having recently fed and gliding into a nondescript blue sedan to leave. To randomly attend a single session of calculus class in daylight and with no need to feed, it had to be hunting something specific. Smart money was on me.

It's difficult to tell by sight, but the exotic vampire looked to be of Eastern European decent and so could be very old - for a vampire. The turning process weeds out any that aren't in top physical condition and halts aging, so all vampires appear to be in the prime of life. Vampirism started on the edge of the Black Sea though - spreading primarily with the Slav ethnogenesis - so the very oldest are likely to appear Slavic.

I pulled out of the parking lot quickly, vainly hoping that it'd lose me in the mess of departing students. But sure enough, the blue sedan followed three cars behind me and turned left when I turned left. Then turned right when I turned right.

After the blue sedan followed me irrationally around the same block twice, the vampire gave up any pretense of cloaking its intentions and drove directly behind me as I took the northbound exit for the freeway.

The vampire caught my eye in my rearview. Flashing a killer smile, it stuck its long prehensile tongue out at me cockily. The thing was objectively stunningly gorgeous, but that wasn't the reason for its smugness. Or at least not the only reason.

It had me, and we both knew it. Eventually, I'd have to stop and seek privacy, even if for something as banal as a bathroom break. Once I became isolated, I'd be lost. I needed to get rid of the bitch and fast.

Were it male, I'd strongly consider luring it somewhere and killing it. Vampires are certainly destructible.

Staking or silver won't do it. They have uncanny melatonin issues and will sunburn badly if they haven't fed, but don't burst into flame in normal daylight. No shapes, words, or herbs seem to bother them. Essentially, you have to somehow stop the blood supply to its brain until it dies.

Sounds simple enough, but vampires have a level of rational self-interest that makes Ayn Rand seem like a simpering liberal. You can crush them with a heavy weight, blow them up, or draw them into the path of a predator large enough to tear off their heads, but each requires executing a dangerous plan. They'll starve if you can trap them in stone, ice, or the ocean depths, but that generally means acting as bait. Beheading via a blade is the most obvious answer, but their speed and strength makes them grave melee fighters and it's hard to catch them unawares. (I've gone in for a close up kill, but not before at least taking out an eye and both lungs with crossbow bolts.)

My preferred method (after running and hiding, I'm no hunter) used to be fire. Now it's a shotgun blast to the head.

None of these would be very practical with a female vampire though, as much as I'd like the conceited bitch behind me to be dead. Male vampires tend to be solitary and leave no mourners at their deaths. Females generally live in groups, and - whether it's a hivemind thing, revenge, or self-preservation - they'll hunt en masse anything that kills one of their own. That's how I escaped the first vampire who imprisoned me...

I fled from Southern Germany during the Carolingian Dynasty when vampires began turning up sporadically. The ones I met there simply drained me and left me for dead but - although healing was inconvenient and dangerous - I was more frightened of being caught up in the increasingly popular witch hunts for the miserable creatures.

Northwest and away from the danger, I secured a position in the scriptorium of a Benedictine convent in the coastal Netherlands (Holy Roman Empire, at the time), owing to my knowledge of Latin and mixing inks. Scribing may not seem exciting - and it wasn't - but white-collar work was rare in the Middle Ages. I'd safe access to books and women, so the quiet nunnery suited me admirably through generations of lovers.

Johanna was the last of them. The best of them too, though maybe only because our parting led me to romanticize her. Either way, she and our last day together are etched in my memory.

She'd flaxen hair which was always in a mess, brown doe eyes so open to any knowledge, and an easy, simple smile. A delicate girl, she was given to consumption and had the bright, brilliantly flaming beauty of consumptives bent on life. Due to her delicacy, she worked in the scriptorium with me, out of the severe Swiss weather.

We snuck off to bed early in the uneven light of the large brick fireplace, her smiling and leading me to a straw mattress on a wooden platform. Sharing a bed at the time was entirely common. What we did in that bed was not.

After quickly undressing and laying our clothes neatly away, we wriggled under warm blankets and laid face-to-face.

We kissed. We were dawdling, loving, and tender with no hurry in the ignorance provided by the present. My tongue pulled into her mouth and sucked gently. Her hand on my shoulder, and on my breast. A caress of my nipple, a massage of the sensitive skin. My fingers trailing lower, through her curls, over her mons, pass her puffy labia, into her dewy cunny.

My knee pressed between her legs. Her thigh mashed against my wetness as I kneed my fingers into her. Her free hand grasped my shoulder and stayed as an anchor point.

I butterfly-kicked my two fingers inside her, light taps of her walls teasing her and catching her attention before her moans for more brought me to a greater level of decisive action.

I thrust into her solidly, steadily. I excited her with hard, even, earnest strokes. Then her breathing changed. The quickening of her shallow breath as clear a sign as the melting snows that her heat was ready to bring the spring floods.

My thumb circled and flicked her pounding clit as my fingers curved in her, the pliable tissue inside making an easy, regular target for the pads of my fingers as my knuckles bent and unbent. Bent and unbent. Each second applied pressure in her moistness. Each second brought her pulse faster.

Johanna's head went back, eyes closed. Her face - impassioned - was so beautiful, so serene and animated at once. An angel uninhibited by anything in life and there with me in our own little world of open pleasure.

Her inflamed groans filled my open mouth as I searched out hers once more. Our lips met, noses rubbed. She moaned my Netherlands name. It was the last time I heard it.

"Sanne. Sanne, Sanne, SANNE!"

Her dam broke and unleashed a torrent onto my waiting hand. My fingers still in her were clenched and unclenched by her trembling, twitching muscles and her moans softened into a long sigh of air leaving her relaxed body.

I went back to kissing her as she wound down, then watched in amusement while the sweet girl licked herself off my fingers. Our legs stayed entwined and we fell asleep like that. Another lovely day ended with lovely Johanna.

The other nuns' screams woke us deep in the night. The end was quick for her. A look of shock on her angelic face at the dirk driving into her vulnerable body, but no time for the pain to register.

The vampire who killed her had glutted itself already, but kept killing for sport with its blade. Like the vampiric equivalent of the killing of a buffalo herd and taking of only the tongues, but even more despicable on the moral scale.

I am very old. With age through ages, strong emotions like hate have to be reserved. There are many things I don't like, but - a millennium later - I still hate that fede skide pikfjæs stodder luder.

Brutality in that time was as common as opportunity, so the cruelty didn't make me hate it. The sheer stupidity of it killing the golden goose when it could have picked off nuns one at a time for months and fed comfortably didn't make me hate it. It recognized what I was and kept me as a captive blood source for years, but I've been a slave before and after, so I didn't hate it for that either.

I hated it for robbing her. As a consumptive in the 800s, she likely wouldn't have lived to see 25. But that made the few years she had so much the more precious and it took them with less than a whim. It killed her reflexively, destroying something so precious and evanescent without even a full thought.

I wanted every day to kill it while it held me prisoner, but never got a chance. I spent my days and nights bound and so depleted of blood that I lacked awareness most of the time.

It stashed me in a locked shack deep in the woods, where the bastard would talk at me frequently. It seemed to maintain the psychological need for socialization without the capability of relating to others that's required to formulate anything but antagonistic interactions. Of course, I may be prejudiced by the fact that - as I mentioned - I hated it.

It bragged once of killing a female vampire, then it didn't come back for a few days. I'd time to replenish when a group of female vampires chased it back into its lair, killed it, drained me, and left me for dead. Apparently they didn't learn what I was before they tore my captor limb from limb...

If the female vampire hunting me now knew to hunt me specifically, its nest could know too. No way could I handle a group of vampires. I'd grown so careless in my current soft life that I wasn't prepared to handle even one. A quick and prudent escape to the ocean was my best bet.

The blue sedan switched lanes and drew abreast of me, the vampire inside motioning me to pull over. Up close, it was so hypnotically beautiful that I nearly lost control of the vehicle. More frighteningly, I found myself wanting to appease it. Steeling myself, I stared straight ahead and sped up until it dropped behind me and leered into my mirror again. No way would I willingly engage the thing.

Still - not for the first time - I wished I was a more imposing animal in my alternate form than a ringed seal. Sure, I can use bodies of water for concealment and travel. I can also dig very quickly and hold my breath for long periods of time, a useful skill when I'm buried alive. (My foreflipper claws are designed to get me through 6 feet of solid ice.)

Those claws are harmless on land though, where I slog myself on my belly with my foreflippers and some waddling. At 120 pounds, even other seals can hunt me. A potential nasty bite to the leg aside, most humans just think I'm all cute and cuddly. I kinda am all cute and cuddly.

If I were even just an elephant seal, I might be able to convince vampires that I was more trouble than I was worth. C'est la vie...

In lieu of scaring it physically, involving the police seemed the best way to shake the thing off, at least pro tem. Being in custody for any substantial length time is a death sentence for a vampire, so they'll avoid cops like the plague.

In that way, the police are my friends. If cops arrive while I'm breaking and entering, I just morph. (One of the few advantages of being a cute and cuddly ringed seal is that I'm seldom suspected of nefarious schemes.) I bark piteously as though abandoned and confused until the sympathetic - if equally confused - cops call animal control to release me into the nearest ocean. I considered doing that now, but any location isolated enough for morphing would also serve an attacking vampire. A cop could still work though.