Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters. They are owned by Tanya Huff, Lifetime, and Insight, and hopefully I have returned them unharmed.
Lamentations of a Hand-me-Down
Part 2
Tadhg Dougherty was, like most Irishmen on the coast, a fisherman. Poor. Forever smelling like fishguts and seawater. Forever dreaming that life could be better, and should be, for a hard worker like himself. Hauling nets had made him strong, too many days on the craggy rock-strewn shores had made him hard.
Tadhg attended church like any good man and then returned to his cottage to pay heed to the local gods. Christ or no, you did not toy with spirits.
He wandered the shores under sunny skies that only God himself could design and beheld, on a shoal in the distance, a sight as rare as a banshee's lullaby. A family of selkies hopped and waddled from the waters to stretch themselves in the sun. Of all the sídhe, they are the least to be feared, for they are neither tricksome nor wise and have no use for the sons nor souls of man. They are children of the sea, who play in the waters, eat their fill, and make love as the will desires, troubling man only with the dreams inspired by their devastating beauty.
As Tadhg watched, the selkies drew themselves up the rocky shore until they reached the edge of the soft grass. And then they slipped from their pelts like shedding a thick winter coat. Men and woman with perfect white skin and supple, strong limbs emerged from their seal-selves like butterflies. Tadhg had nowhere to hide on the open coastline so that he might watch their play. But he recalled, once, having heard of a man in Cork who caught himself a selkie by swimming in from the sea. The fools never think that man will come from anywhere but dry land.
So Tadhg left all that was valuable to him in a dry spot that he could find again easily enough and walked into the icy Irish waters, minding that he didn't splash. He swam out a safe distance, where he would be lost among the waves, and then made his way down the rocky shore, just out to sea from where the selkies dropped their pelts. The water swallowed his strength whole, leaving him cold and numb and slow. But he let the waves carry him in as the sídhe creatures sprawled themselves lazily on the grass.
It was no great cunning that got Tadhg Dougherty his selkie pelt, just luck. As the water pushed him in to the shore, he started to churn his legs to revive the feeling. And as soon as he touched the solid sea floor, he was off, moving up the beach of stone as quickly as his limbs would allow.
The selkies heard his crashing on the gravel, though, and let out screams of terror. They ran for their skins with a lightness and ease no human could match. All but one. She had gone further ashore to pick flowers on a whim. So as the other selkies put on their seal-selves and made for the water, snapping at Tadhg with their sharp teeth, that one was only just then coming to the grassy ridge. Her pelt was the only one left. And she stared naked and shaking in terror as a human hand closed around her precious skin.
That was how she came to be an Irish fisherman's wife.
That was how he told the tale for miles around to anyone who would listen.
Tadhg was a gentle husband at first. He called his new wife Maebhe and tried as best he could to please her and make her smile. He brought home flowers when he had the time. He sang her songs that his mother had taught him. And he spoke with a soft voice when he told her how beautiful she was, how she brightened his life and made him feel whole. But always, her eyes found the sea, and any true affection she had was cast upon the waves.
"Maebhe," Tadhg said one evening in early winter.
She looked up from the pot boiling on the stove and wiped her slight hands on her apron.
"I've tried ta do right by ya, ya know." His voice was quiet and sad. Dark hair fell across his forehead.
She said nothing. She just stared at him with her deep eyes that swirled purple and green with reflected light.
"Yer not happy. I know that. But yer me wife, won fair. And I think. . . what I mean ta say is-" He got up from his chair and paced over to the peat fire to toss in a brick.
"How about o' deal b'tween you und I?"
She quirked her head to the side. "What kind o' deal?" Her violin voice filled the small house like sunshine. It warmed him more than the fire at his feet ever could.
Tadhg smiled to himself, and the light in the fireplace made his young blue eyes look green. Selkies, as they say, are the children of the sea. Innocent. Tadhg felt the devil whisper in his ear, telling him how to get the prize he most desired.
"A child. For yer freedom." He looked at her and held her gaze.
"For my freedom," she whispered.
The mere thought of it filled her eyes with tears as salty as the sea. She rushed to Tadhg and gripped him on the arms. It was the first time she'd ever sought his touch.
"My pelt?" She looked up with innocent hope.
"For a son." He lifted one calloused hand and wiped a tear of joy from her soft cheek.
She melted into him as she had never done. Maebhe wrapped her arms around him tightly and buried her face in his chest. Her touches were fire, and she bent his head to hers for a kiss to melt stone.
Tadhg's need came as a storm, beckoned by her willingness. His Maebhe. His wife.
He held her body close and rocked against her, learning every curve and tasting every cry. And she swallowed him, drew him in with every trick she knew from her ages spent in play. She drove him mad with caresses, mad with a kiss, and to shuddering incoherence as he came.
In the dark, they lay together, sweaty and spent. She had thought to give him what he wanted. To celebrate the birth of hope within her own breast. It didn't occur to her that her husband had already gotten what he wanted. And she could not read on his face what lay within his heart.
She had been perfect-his every want made real. And he could not imagine breathing without it, without her, yielding.
The selkie called Maebhe screamed like a human woman during her labor. She thrashed on the bed as the midwife stroked her head. She breathed and huffed as the contractions knotted her insides. Then she wheezed at the urge to push.
The midwife had a sharp, angular face and strong hands. If she noticed the birthing mother's strange, opalescent eyes, she made no sign. She just pressed a damp cloth to the woman's head and fetched clean sheets when needed. Already gasping and spent, Maebhe sobbed in her arms.
"Push now," the midwife said.
"I can't!"
"Ya can. We all can."
Maebhe's head rolled on the pillows, her long hair clinging like a web to her skin. Pain cracked her pelvis and back, radiating outward into a howl.
The midwife took her shaky hand and held it between her palms. "Love, ya have ta try. Right now fer me. Jus' once. Then it'll be over."
Maebhe's head shook involuntarily as she sobbed at this madness.
"Jus' once," the woman urged.
The pain built again, but there was no hiding. And so she had to believe. She pushed. And she screamed.
Again.
And a third.
It was always just once more, until the baby came and the bed was red with blood.
The relief was a drenching waterfall. Maebhe laughed and reached out her thin white arms for the bundle of baby, her savior, who would be loved all the more for the gift he would give.
"It's a boy." The midwife smiled as she passed him over.
It's freedom, the selkie wanted to say. But she just stared down at the tiny red face in fascination. She touched his little nose with the tip of her finger and smiled with more joy than she could ever remember.
There was a creak at the door. The selkie glanced up from her son to see Tadhg, framed by the orange setting sun. The world blazed around him.
"We thank ya, Brenna," he said to the midwife.
She smiled back, wiping her hands and gathering all the soiled linens.
"What will ya call him?" she asked.
Tadhg knelt beside the bed and brushed a coarse finger over his son's small face. His eyes flicked to Maebhe and locked on the curve of her lip.
"William," he said.
Brenna nodded, and on her way home, she spread the happy news.
At first, Tadhg said, the baby needed his mother. But after he was weaned, she would be free.
And then Tadhg said it was fishing season and someone had to stay home to keep the baby out of trouble.
And then came the day Maebhe had been fearing, the day her simple mind refused to accept for so long, though the gathering clouds had forecast well before.
She stirred a pot of stew on the stove and waited for her husband to return from cutting peat. William laughed as he set up a row of small blocks and toppled them over. His laughter was a foreign sound. And compared to the waves of the sea and the songs of whales was small and insignificant.
Cool salty air blew in the open windows and ruffled the scant curtains. Maebhe turned to it like a sunflower and breathed. The sounds of William's playing faded to a grey drone that passed below her notice. And the breeze blew out her soul like a whipping flag.
An age could have passed as she stood there, transfixed by the sensations that reminded her of home. She longed for sharp teeth and fresh fish. She could remember dancing through the water with her brothers and sisters. She had been the best at hunting blind, with only her sensitive whiskers to tell her when fish flitted by. The salty breeze aroused the memory of water flowing over her soft skin, and she was lost.
The sudden stamp of feet on the wooden floor made her jump, splashing thin stew on her apron. She turned to see Tadhg just closing the door.
"I want my pelt," she said in a strong, determined voice.
He looked at her with his hard blue eyes. "No."
"What do ya mean, 'no'?" You said you'd make me a deal. And I kept my bargain!" She stalked toward him, finding a wooden spoon in her hand beating through the air as she hollered.
He was unmoved. He might have been a statue except for the lust in his eyes at the color of her cheeks and the heaving of her breast.
"I said no." He smirked.
The smirk sent her wild. It was the first time she had ever truly felt fury and the unseelie desire to taste blood. The selkie called Maebhe flew at her human husband from across their small home, wielding the spoon like a sword. He was a betrayer. His smile said it all. Suddenly their years of pleasant living and wild love became false, coated in a slime of deception worthy of a solitary sídhe. Every kind moment twisted and tarnished in her memory. She had treasured some of those memories, even as she had wanted to return home. In the wake of that violation, she raged and darted with uncanny speed, weapon held high.
Tadhg's eyes flashed. He stepped, swung his strong arm, and slapped her to the floor in a single blow. Her head careened into the wall with a loud thud as she fell.
For a moment, she lay sprawled in a pool of dress and long hair, too stunned to move. And then her wits gathered, and she turned, scrambling against the wall at her back. Blood rose on her lip, and she stared upward with wide eyes full of shock and fear. He stepped closer, and she cowered instinctively.
Tadhg Dougherty had learned something new. He leaned over his selkie wife and watched her shrink back, turning away her trembling lip. Power shot through his veins. It was the exaltation of mastery. He smiled and experimentally jerked his arm back with an open palm.
Maebhe flinched.
And his smile grew wicked.
She shook at the feel of his hot breath, hovering, pressing.
"Do ya know what I'm goin' ta do instead?" Tadhg nuzzled up to her ear with horrid gentleness.
She shook her head.
"I'm goin' ta take ya to America, maybe Canada, where you'll never see tha' blasted coast again." Then, he thought, she might have eyes for him.
The selkie pressed her dark eyes shut. And eventually she felt the heat of her husband's body move away. He picked up William from the middle of the floor, and only when she heard another door close did she hold her head in her hands and start to weep.
Tadhg kept his promise. Within two months, they were stowed away on an ocean liner like many Irish families before them, heading for the cheap ports of Canada. The fare was the lowest he'd been able to find.
Somewhere, amid all their belongings, her pelt was folded and locked away-somewhere in the hold that was inaccessible while at sea. And still Tadhg watched her. Always.
When they arrived on solid ground again, he swore off the sea and took a job as a green grocer instead. On the side, he learned to build houses as it was done in the New World. And eventually he built his own new house by hand.
Maebhe learned to speak to no one. If he knew, it made him angry. She might tell her story or beg for help. And no power in the world was going to take his lovely wife away. So she faded into a ghost who walked the sidewalk in a grey coat and turned her eyes from every smiling face. The music in her voice died. When she spoke to her husband, if she spoke at all, it was a small, strained sound that quivered like it might simply break.
In the eyes of all their neighbors, Tadhg read recrimination. Every day he was sure she had been out, talking to strangers. He was sure they all knew the secret of his pretty little wife and plotted amongst themselves behind drawn curtains. And so Tadhg became quiet too, because they could not understand what it took to protect a thing you loved so dearly. And they would not understand how deeply her sullen eyes cut into his soul.
On the day the new house was finished, Maebhe learned why no one had been asked to help in the construction. He led her and William over the polished wood floors of the hallway into the basement. Only it wasn't. She had expected a root cellar. What she saw was a room, fully furnished, with no windows and a single door. Her hand closed tightly on her son's, and she turned.
Tadhg smiled. "It's fer yer own good. Did ya think I wouldn't find out? Ya been talkin'. I know ya have. An' now I know ya won't be." He sounded tender and calm.
She gave a stuttering, horrified look around the small dark space. Her stomach quailed, and she drew a breath to speak, but her husband went on.
"Now, give me William." He stuck out his hand and looked pointedly at the toddler who held his mother's fingers.
"Tadhg. Ya can't. Please. I didn't-"
"Don't!" He roared and lunged, just enough to make her flinch back and drop the boy's hand.
William's mumbling came to a stop, and he stared up at his father. The sight of him softened the man's monstrous expression.
"I'm sorry, love. Ya break my heart. I've loved ya, and ya break my heart." He lifted William in his arms and left, closing the door at the bottom of the stairs as his wife threw her small body against it. Through the solid wood, she could hear the top door close as well. She stared into the grain near her face and sank to the floor. Her small hand traced where the door knob should be. But there was only a keyhole. And only one key.
Slowly, over the weeks, her young husband with fine hair like coal and sapphire eyes faded away. He became a shade, a shadow that darkened her cellar door. She asked about his day, about William. He muttered replies in a dull voice and leered. If she fought him, he held her down with heavy hands that left bruises. Sometimes he used both hands on her neck just to see her eyes widen with primal fear. She would not die, no, but the pain got her attention. And in that he could revel.
"Your clothes are dirty," he said one day. Or one night. She could not say.
Her hand went to her blouse. It hadn't been cleaned since he'd locked her away.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. She wasn't. It had been a secret hope that the stench and ugliness would drive him off. That perhaps she wouldn't have to endure another lathering with his tongue if her skin tasted like grime.
Tadhg sneered at her. "Give them to me."
"Tadhg."
Anger flowed easily through him, and he snatched a fistful of her shirt in his hand, wrenching her close so she stumbled. His face was a mask of rage.
"No wife o' mine," he snarled and jerked until the fabric tore. "Is goin' ta wear rags!"
He used both hands and ripped the blouse from her shoulders while she shrieked. As easily as Tadhg angered, the selkie cried, letting tears streaming down her face and drop from her chin. Tadhg ran his hands over her trembling bared skin and cupped each breast as she shook, just to see if she'd try to stop him. Her lips moved, but that was all. So he slid thick fingers under the waist of her skirt and then knelt to get the full strength of his arms. The skirt too tore into strips. And then there were only the undergarments left guarding what was his by right.
Maebhe's stomach turned, and she jumped, screams catching in her throat, when his rough hands laid her bare. She gripped her hands into fists at her sides and fought against giving him what he wanted. She bit her lower lip when he pressed full against her.
"I built this house fer you. Crossed the ocean fer you," he growled into her ear and nuzzled his face against hers, feeling the wetness of her tears on his cheek. "Yer so beautiful. I need to see it."
Her eyes rolled open in silent pleading as his lips found her neck, and then she squeezed them shut again.
"Tell me ya love me," he muttered.
Maebhe trembled and threaded her thin fingers into his hair.
"Tell me!" he said more harshly, lifting her like a sack over to the small bed.
He dropped her on the mattress, and she bounced once. Instinctively, her knees drew up as she curled away. Hot calloused hands forced them down and apart, even as she strained. He leaned in close, waiting.
She mouthed the words at him, her throat too dry to speak.
"So I can hear you," he said softly.
"I love you, Tadhg."
There was only the light from the lamps in the corners to illuminate her room. She had a radio, a vanity, a bed, and a corner bathroom with a sink. The cold, varnished concrete floor was mottled with throw rugs. Everything smelled like her, a vague mixture of skin and sweat. She stood before the vanity mirror, watching the bruises on her reflected face fade from purple to yellow-green and finally vanish. It might have taken a day. A minute. The sídhe count time by the slow march of the stars. She had no stars. A day was the time between visits. A day was how long it took for her husband to remember he loved the feel of her fair flesh. And to forget it rendered him weak.
The radio played on, Count Basie's band splashing loud and happy noise around her cell. She stared, unmoved by it. Unmoved by anything. She watched her cheek heal with unnatural ease. Her broken arm mended as though it had never known violence. The ache of her crushed throat waned and she wheezed less as time rolled on. Hair as still and straight as the Cliffs of Moher hung to the backs of her knees.
Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .
The music blared. Sterile light made her skin glow.
She could not even remember the smell of the sea.
Maebhe twitched.
Her eyes refocused, and in the mirror she saw something new. Not herself. She saw the mirror and its sharp glass. Selkies are slow and gentle by nature. Innocent in their desires, faithful in their loves until the love has passed. She had never loved her husband. But she had never dreamed of his death either. Not until then. Not until the humiliations made her hate her own body, its unacceptable weakness, its capacity for endless pain. It's immortality.
He did not even bring food anymore. Her knees and elbows bulged under her skin. Her cheeks were sunken. He did not seem to notice. And though the hunger ached her bones, it would do no more than that. Just more pain.
Her fingers curled into fists, and she smashed them against the mirror with a sharp cry. It cracked into scimitar shards in its frame, and she laughed with a mad glee. She broke the frame enough to pull out a piece as big as a knife. She held it reverently, and the edges sliced her palms without pain. Red pools gathered in the creases of her hands, and a smile crossed her pale face. She dipped her delicate head to her cupped hands and licked off the blood with a satisfied shiver.
It tasted like the sea.
As a weapon, the bare glass would not quite do. The selkie peered around her cell, and her eyes alighted on the bed. It was a place she no longer slept. But it had linens that would make a fine wrapping.
She moved swiftly to turn off the radio so she could hear footsteps as she worked. The pillowcase had the thickest cloth. She sliced it into long strips that she then braided and wound around the shard. It was crude, at best, but it only had to last one use. She ran her fingers over the braids lightly, whispering prayers to a god that did not look out for her people. They were the only prayers she knew. And she thought it fitting that the human god take responsibility for his own wretched creations. She wondered who he was and if the oldest selkie might know. She wished to have words.
Tadhg Dougherty's wife pressed her naked body against the wall of her chamber and waited. She could wait forever. There was nothing for her but time. In the silence she could imagine the glass sliding into his chest or his stomach. The look of shock on his face made her want to laugh. In her mind's eye, he fell before her as weak and useless as a doll. She could strip him bare and leave his corpse to rot. The selkie looked down at the knife and pictured it covered with his blood. She smiled.
When his footsteps fell on the stairs, her breath stopped. The knife quivered in her hand as she heard him stop at the door. He was reaching down with the key around his neck. Her whole body burned with golden energy as the key turned and he gave the door a push.
In the scant second between the door moving and her attack, Tadhg saw the shattered mirror on the vanity. It made him pause. He never paused. He always shouldered through the door like a pissed bull. That pause brought her lunge up short.
She howled her fury and swung the knife as she flew around the corner. Pale light glinted off its glassy edge. She expected to bring the shard straight into his heart as he plowed forward. Instead, she found him motionless. His arms came up automatically for protection, and the glass slashed into the meat of his forearm, spattering blood on the both of them.
He cried out and stumbled back, glimpsing through his arms the thing he had married, a bright red knife raised high in her hands. She had ruined it, ruined everything! A rage blasted from his body to his hands, and Tadhg did not wait for a second strike. He dove at the selkie like a bear, catching her wrist in one hand.
They scrabbled for control of the knife. She screamed and clawed, twining her hands around his, over his, gasping and roaring and crying in desperation. She pulled on her wrist and the knife until he squeezed so hard that her fingers ceased to work. Tadhg took the knife and kicked her away, with nothing more than disgust on his red face.
She clutched her stomach and scrambled up. Her small frame vibrated in anger. He wasn't even afraid. He turned his back to her to leave, so she launched herself at him.
Tadhg turned, shard in hand.
And the selkie sank herself onto the knife with a stunned gasp. She fell without screaming. He watched with hateful eyes as she gulped in air. The motion of breathing cut her innards on the blade, sending fresh pain that only made her gasp again. Tadhg's lip curled into a slight sneer as he crushed his shirt into a bandage over the wound on his arm. And then he left.
Because the sídhe do not die, or do not do so easily, she lay with the shard in her belly for as a long as it took for her to pull it out herself. Her fingers always slipped on the slick glass and blood. She cut her hands gripping the edges. And when it finally fell to the floor with a crisp clink, she lay in a small pool of her own blood as the wound healed. The blood dried around her as she wept. Sometimes, when her fantasies told her how she might have won, she cried an ocean.
While she still lay weeping, her husband returned. He'd brought chains.
That was the day she lost her name.
He became simply master; she, simply slave.
When William was two, the selkie found herself burdened again with child. She had long since lost any hope for herself, but a child! A child deserved better. Better than her master. And more, the very thought of giving him anything made her spit bile. He would always have to take.
The chains kept her mostly in the middle of the room. If he cared to use the bed, he moved it. There wasn't much available to her, but she made do. She wrapped herself in the chains until they bit, squeezing her abdomen with all her strength. Eventually, despite Tadhg's interruptions, she succeeded in a miscarriage. The master was furious. And that made her heart glow.
Every time, she killed them. Every time one of the master's rapes became a child, she found a way. For awhile, she contrived to be willful just to be beaten. Even as she would writhe from the pain, inside, she would laugh.
But eventually, the options vanished. The chains became too short to twist. And he learned when she was using defiance to goad him. Time enough, and it was bound to happen.
Tadhg moved her to the attic when the contractions started. He called in a woman whose silence could be bought and stood in the doorway to watch.
Between screams, the selkie stared out the window in fascination. The sky was painfully beautiful. And bluer than the master's eyes. She watched the sky, wanting to embrace its free vastness, and felt the light of the sun arc through the window onto her pale white arm. It filled her up, called her out of herself, and made the world fall away. The sky, the sky, the sky.
The child, at some point, came. But her soul floated beyond the window and made her dream at how life had been. The sky made her think of the sea and sunsets over the water. She remembered crashing waves on cold rocks and the smell of salt and fish.
The midwife shoved a child into her arms, and she looked startled to see the woman and the child, both. It forced her back into the room, back to the master's daughter, the master's face, the master's house, and her own despair. She peered down at the small face, born of pain and violence, and felt only sadness and terror. A girl. What would the master do with a girl?
She grimaced and flushed with hatred.
Oblivious, the midwife turned and smiled to the master, babbling idiocy and kind things. For a moment, he looked away to show her out. And that was all it took to toss the window open. That was all it took to set her daughter free. Dearbhail. The name rose in her breast like a memory. Little Dearbhail who knew no pain.
Something snapped in the master when he returned and saw her leaning out the open window, laughing. It wasn't a mad laugh from someone in bedlam. It was joy, like she had climbed a mountain and wished for God to know.
He didn't even rage. He didn't strike her or slam her into furniture. When she turned at last from reveling in the sky and gazed at him, he backed away in gibbering horror.
"What have ya done?"
She looked out the window, then back. A breeze swept her hair out like a sail.
"What kind o' monster does that," he muttered in a small voice as he stared at her.
She smiled.
Things changed.
XXX
The master, the current one, had crueler eyes than Tadhg. They were twisted and dead with madness, possessed of a lighter, more haunting blue. His fingers dug into her cheeks as he forced her to look at him. She felt the stairs looming at her side, and her arm throbbed from where it whacked into the banister. Despite herself, she mewled as her cheeks cut against her teeth.
"Edward Ellis is dead. It's all over the news. The Hazelton was a huge affair, and now it's a scandal. That you caused!" He bared his teeth as he spoke.
She stared blankly back, shaking under his fury. Tears burned at her eyes, but she held them in. That much she had learned.
"You didn't think I'd find out. Well I did." He pressed his face right up to hers and then moved like a snake, striking the side of her head. He slammed her skull into the banister with each word. "I. Did. Find. Out." And then he let her fall into a heap. "Eddie was a good client, paid our bills! Did you think you were going to run away?" He laughed a high, incredulous laugh and then bent to grab a fistful of hair to haul her up.
Lights sprang and danced in her vision, and she panted, trying not to sob. Her hands curled over his, and she tried to lift herself up to stop her scalp from ripping off.
"No," the master said. "No . . . you know better." He gave her a calculating look and then shrugged. "Doesn't matter."
Then he turned, still holding the selkie by the hair, and dragged her to the cellar door. He opened the top door with his key, then the bottom one. And with a swing of his arm and swift kick, he sent her tumbling back inside where she belonged.
She knew the punishment for disobedience. The last master had discovered it many years before.
XXX
When William was five, he was brought to see the selkie on his birthday. It was a secret, his father said. And if he was very good, he could see her again next year. But he had to be very good, and he couldn't tell a soul.
The selkie looked down at her son's little face, and he pouted, telling her she looked sad.
When he was twelve, he sat awkwardly on the old bed, gawking in embarrassed silence. She was still as young and beautiful as he remembered. The sight of her round breasts and smooth stomach made him burn in ways he had never known. He thought he might save her, unlock her chains. And she would run away with him. He could touch her; she could love him. It was an innocently painted dream.
At fifteen, he tried to steal a kiss.
At sixteen, he learned to take one.
He had spent every moment since the year before thinking about the magic woman. Her dark eyes taunted him. In dreams, she held him willingly and whispered his name. She made him shudder. He thought the dreams were a prophecy. Maybe they were dreams she sent to him with her magic.
When she balked at his kiss and smashed those dreams to bits, he lashed out. He shoved hard at her shoulders, pinned her down, and crushed his mouth against hers anyway. Her struggle made him feel strong. And he understood why his father had kept her all those years. It had been a promise between father and son.
The last thing Tadhg Dougherty did before he died was tell his son the location of the selkie's pelt. And the first thing William did after the funeral was find it, locked in a box in an attic built above the bathroom closet. As a boy, he thought his father was telling stories about the sídhe creature from the old country. But she had never aged, and she never died. And her wounds did heal so perfectly. Running his hands over the soft pelt of mottled grey and brown, he finally had proof as to why.
He let himself through the first door to the cellar, still holding the enchanted skin on one arm and stroking it with his fingers. His feet thudded on the stairs as he went down and opened the second door. A sound he had never heard filtered through the gap.
The selkie moaned in pleasure, rolling herself on the floor as her chains would allow.
William stood frozen, staring. She stopped. And then her eyes fixed on the seal skin on his arm.
"My skin," she whispered in awe. And then she flung herself to the ends of her bonds like a hound, straining against his leash.
William flinched back and crushed the pelt against his side.
The selkie's face shattered. She crumpled like she'd been shot and held her stomach as though she kept her guts from spilling. Her mouth gaped wide in a gasp.
The man stared, and as he did so, his arm relaxed. The selkie responded in kind, coming to lie lax on the floor. She sucked in air and shook, eyeing her pelt from where she lay. William's eyes followed hers, and a smile spread across his face.
"Hurts, doesn't it," he said.
The fire of life in the selkie's dark eyes died.
"But not always," he mused. And then he stroked her skin again.
To her own horror, she felt the touch run up her back in a wave of pleasure, and she arched into it. A warm glow spread down her limbs. All unwanted. Tadhg had thrust upon her hurt after hurt and invasions that tore the tenderest places. He had never made violation feel good. William's discovery was all the more horrific for the way he could make her sigh. The pleasure was real. And only in the moments between ecstasies could her mind gather enough to be sickened.
The master was smirking in a way that made her want to tear her own flesh. When he stopped, she crawled back from him and gathered her limbs together into a ball, hiding her face in her knees. She heard him go. And when the door shut soundly, she rocked herself back and forth and let herself cry.
