The Selkie

On the other side of a set of overpasses and exits where two east/west thoroughfares crossed the northbound freeway, as expected, a highway patrolman waited for speeders going north.

I shifted into neutral briefly as I passed him and swerved convincingly as though I'd slipped a gear. His lights came on as I stopped on the shoulder. The blue sedan had no choice but to keep driving.

"I'm sorry, officer," I forestalled, "My girlfriend loaned me her car and I'm not really good with a stick. I think it jumped or something." I'm pretty cute and cuddly in my human form too. Between that and the girlfriend comment, he was willing to talk to me in a harmlessly lecherous way.

"Aw. That's alright, sweetheart." He proceeded to give me very good instruction on standard transmissions and a series of less good double entendres as I flirted and flattered.

The sedan passed me each way twice in ten minutes. Then ten more minutes passed with no sign. It was probably waiting at the next exit.

That, in fact, was the lynchpin of my plan. I'd lose the vampire for sure by taking one of the two highways crossing the freeway and thereby giving it five initial options to guess between if it did eventually double back to find me. I could be traveling back south or either way on either one of the east/west thoroughfares.

"Thank you so much, sir. I feel a lot better about driving this beast now. But I'm still afraid the engine might slip again. Do you mind if I turn around at that divide up there and just go home to my girlfriend?"

He nodded, said something in agreement, adjusted himself, and returned to protecting and serving. I pulled a U-turn on the freeway and took the second exit west toward the coastal highway. I wasn't going back to my "girlfriend" ever.

I did feel bad about leaving her so suddenly. Not that I'd ever again stay long enough to watch the depressing and inevitable descent into infirmity and death, but normally I'd be kinder in my departure. She'd be left with evidence of a romantic death or a noble calling to give her optimistic closure. I drafted a text about an ocean swim and hoped that she'd assume a riptide got me when the abandoned car was found and my phone was checked.

Not saying goodbye wasn't a cruelly dismissive forsaking of a woman who'd taken me in. The vampire would almost certainly backtrack to her town when it lost me. Leading it straight to her house didn't seem more merciful than abandoning the woman without resolution.

Turning off the highway, I parked by the cliffs and left the car wearing only a loosely tied string bikini and five-finger shoes. I dove into the warm ocean at a run and swam a half mile north along the cliffs to a rarely spelunked underwater littoral cave.

Aud ran to the water, a marble sculpture of Daphne come to life. She charmed me. Happily, I needn't harm her as werebeasts are seized for the Menagerie. But what manner of werebeast was she that she'd try to evade rather than attack? Werebeasts commonly draw a pursuer to an ambush site, but she'd have escaped entirely had I not taken the precaution of affixing the GPS tracker. Such odd behaviour precluded classification. Her bewitching Northman features suggested polar bear, siberian tiger, and tundra wolf to me. Not knowing which made the mysterious blonde a potential deathtrap.

Her pleasing human form swam into a cave as the first tendrils of sunset snaked into the sky. I waited atop the cliff to see in what form Aud would emerge.

I swam until the saltwater became too shallow and my hands and knees bumped the smooth stone floor of the ancient cave. Blind in the deep reach of the dark cave in my human form, I had to feel along the rock wall to walk. Closing my eyes and concentrating, I heard nothing but the sounds of the surf and water droplets dripping off the stalactites.

Near the top of the cave, I reached into a crevasse above the high tide line etched in the stone and retrieved a waterproof fanny pack. It's not the sexiest of baggage, but it's easily and safely hidden over years and it's not like I can bring a trunk with me.

Showing up on a beach as a naked woman with no money or ID requires more reliance on the kindness of strangers than is wise, (though it's still less awkward than morphing into a human in a colony of seals on ice) so I build and maintain a re-starter kit. The precaution has been habitual since the winter of 1216, although back then I only kept a purse of gold, a hunting knife, and some whaleskins in a small cave north of Oslo. My stash is more thorough nowadays.

A quick inventory by touch revealed that none of my ill-gotten supplies were missing. I had ten grand in recently printed U.S. currency; an expertly forged Utah license and U.S. passport proclaiming me to be 22 year old Ashley Rodgers of Provo, UT; a dry bikini, tank top, mesh shorts, and flip flops; and a B&E pouch, two sheathed obsidian sleeve knives, and a Heizer DoubleTap with six spare .45 rounds.

I switched out the flip flops for the slightly damp five-finger shoes, stripped out of my current bikini, strapped on the fanny pack like a bandolier, and tied strategically placed stretchy bands to the strap around my soon-to-be smoother body to hold against the current. I hugged the wall walking back toward the mouth of the cave until I felt water lap at my bare feet.

Then came the hard part. Morphing is very quick and grows quicker with time, seconds for me at this point. It's a natural process and there's no lasting damage or lingering discomfort. During however, I cannot express the agony of your body reshaping itself. It's - mentally at least - even worse when the morph is intentional, because you are choosing to experience that level of severe pain.

I laid on my belly on the wet rock and focused into and through the pain. My bones reformed, my torso extended, my limbs shrank, and my organs fired. The worst is my head. My eyes, sinuses, and ears burst in my mutating skull while my brain was squeezed and streamlined as a seal's.

I retain my memories, motivations, and beliefs, but my thinking is swifter and shallower, more dominated by instinct than logic, emotion, or experience. I can still reason, but it's not my initial reaction.

I clambered forward to the mouth of the cave. Methodically, I expelled all the oxygen I could from my lungs before sliding into the water and back to the ocean.

For just a few moments, the current streamed around my newly aerodynamic body and I felt the playful blast of energy that always accompanies my first swim.

The loud splash of something heavy and high-speed behind me dashed my exuberance mid-barrel roll.

In human form, I'd give in to the temptation to see what it was. As a seal, instinct told me that anything big enough or fast enough to displace that much water was bad news for me. My pelvic girdle pedaled my speed up to 30mph even before instinct became thought.

Attempting to escape a creature that has to breathe less often than I do and that swims faster than me over distance may seem futile. It was. If I could have outpaced it to the shelf drop off, my odds would have increased with every fathom of pressure. But I flagged after only minutes at my top speed.

It didn't.

The vampire seized my left rear flipper in a bone-crunching grip. Not hyperbole. My flipper folded up like a paper fan excruciatingly as it turned me onto my back. I yelped and tried frantically to twist myself free of its grasp.

The thing raked its claws across my slippery body, trying to get a hold with its other hand. It only succeeded in tearing my fanny pack off, but left four deeply-gashed furrows in my side that released billows of bright red blood in their wake.

I swear the vampire grimaced at the sight of the blood it drew. Up to that point, I just tried fruitlessly to free myself from the steely clinch with brute effort like a bear in a trap. But vampires are just another type of animal at their core and not steel traps. It had to be switched from fight to flight, to be forced to desert me to the open ocean. I couldn't let it draw me from the water.

With the desperate instincts of a doomed animal, I bent my spine to bring my foreflippers to its head and dug into the thing's exquisite face. My inch-thick claws shredded its flesh in instants, with some ribbons coming loose entirely and floating away in the current.

It screeched out the breath it'd been holding and released my flipper to bring its hands to its damaged face, holding the fanny pack to itself as though to stop the blood seeping into the painfully salty water. Blinded and bleeding profusely, it disregarded me in its own desperation and rocketed toward the surface and shore.

Who's all cute and cuddly now, bitch?

Not that I had any illusions of victory. I have a healthy respect for oceanic predators, but no fear, so I was relatively safe. With beheading as one of its few fears, a blinded vampire leaking blood from its face in shark-infested coastal waters experienced too great a risk to stay in the ocean.

As for me? Although broken, bloodied, and without any earthly possessions, - for the moment at least - I was still free.

*****

P.S. Author's Note: The depiction of male vampires as irredeemably psychopathic loners is only a cheap literary device to logically explain the absence of male vampires in any sex scene in this story universe. While inherently sexist, it's not meant to be offensive to the male gender.