Mike jarred awake suddenly, torn roughly from a dream in which he was standing watching from the Seawall as Henry Fitzroy in full-blown vampire mode was wreaking death and destruction among the seal hunters assembled on Third Beach in Stanley Park...? The image evaporated as the pounding came again.
His eyes found the red numbers on the clock, 12:26 AM? He threw back the covers and crossed quickly to the door. He was about to look through the viewport when he heard her voice. "Michael? Michael…please, it's Liath. Michael?"
He scrabbled at the locks with suddenly awkward fingers and when he drew the door open he saw her standing drenched and bedraggled and sobbing on his doorstep.
"Michael...?"
He reached out and drew her, icy cold and wet against his bare skin, into his embrace. She was shivering and crying and he tightened his arms around her. "Shhh, shhh, I've got you, I've got you..."
He pulled her in through the door and kicked it closed with one foot. "Liath, what happened, what's wrong?" he asked urgently as he dropped his chin to the top of her head. He could smell the sea and the rain on her body where she shivered and sobbed against him.
He drew her further into the room and when he moved to put her away from him so he could look at her, she wrapped her arms around his waist and laid her cheek against his chest, clinging limpet-like to his warmth.
"Has someone…hurt you Liath?" he asked. A terrible fear had begun to grow in his heart, something dreadful had happened while he was sleeping. He felt her shake her head no against his chest and he pulled her closer to him in his relief.
"We need to get you out of these wet clothes," he said as he heard her teeth chattering. He managed to set her gently away from him. She stood, forlorn and shivering in the middle of the floor. When he had flicked on the bedside light, her eyes were huge and dark in her dripping face.
"Dead," she whispered, "all dead."
"Who's dead?" he said more sharply than he intended as he took her by the shoulders, "Who is dead, Liath?"
"S-six seals, s-six of them shot by fishermen off Bamfield," she stuttered as the shivering started up again. "We couldn't save any of them, not even, not even…"
"Seals," he frowned and he couldn't help continuing, "just seals."
She spun away from his grasp, "No…yes seals, they're only seals," she cried in a voice full of tears. "I should never have come," she whispered as she took a step towards the door.
Mike was behind her in a moment and put his arms around her. The fire had gone out of her at his first touch and she slumped against him in despair.
"I'm sorry Liath, I'm sorry. I thought perhaps there had been an accident and that some of your friends had been hurt or killed," he said as he turned her around.
She stood unresisting as he pushed the coat from her shoulders and let it fall in a wet lump onto the floor. Her clothing was soaked beneath and she stood unresisting as he pulled her sweater up over her head, the wet t-shirt following. He briefly ran his hands up and down her arms, chaffing her chilled skin. He watched a small runnel of water slip down the skin of her chest to disappear beneath the lace of her bra. Celluci, he berated himself, what kind of an asshole are you to be thinking about sex when she is so…. He felt his desire for her stir to life.
"We need to get you warm," he said, stepping slightly away and gently herding her towards the bathroom.
He turned on the water and when the shower was running and the small room began to fill with steam he lifted her chin and looked directly into her haunted face. "Liath, will you be all right to do this yourself?"
She nodded slowly, and finally said, "Yes."
"All right then," he said, "I'll just be on the other side of the door. I'll find you something dry to put on. She nodded, and Mike slipped from the room pulling the door almost closed.
***
Liath leaned her head against the white tiles as the steam rose around her; she knew that Michael didn't understand.
How could he? She asked herself, you've never told him. He is human after all and to him, even though he might care intellectually, they were just seals, just…animals. What was it he had said? 'I thought perhaps that there had been an accident and that some of your friends had been killed.' Well the seals were her 'friends,' and more, they were hers to guard. They had been shot by human fishermen anxious to protect the profit of their catch, as though they couldn't spare a few fish to the seals.
But worse, far worse, Rory had been in seal form in the water, driving the seals from the nets, and the stupid humans had shot him as well. He had dragged himself out onto a rock shelf at the edge of a small island and a homeowner who had heard the rifles had come down to the shore and found three wounded seals hauled out on the rocks.
He had called the Society out to a rescue. When they had arrived, and clambered out onto the rocks in the rain, there was one surviving seal and one selchie in seal form, clinging to life.
Rory, Rory her young kinsman, come from the east as had she herself, as had Orion. Now he laid on the rocks, his chest a bloody ruin and one of his flippers gone completely.
Becky had knelt beside her, but she sent the bleak message with her eyes and her sharply indrawn breath, no hope, Liath there is no hope.
Rory had watched her with his dark brown eyes and she had kept by him, running her hands over the spotted pelt. Rory, her little cousin, redheaded, freckled and gangly, he was no more than twenty-two. His shape never wavered; she knew that he wanted to die in his seal form.
He had watched her as his eyes slowly grew dim and clouded and his blood ran in the wash of the incoming tide. The heavens poured down endless tears as he slowly closed his eyes one last time.
Just a seal...Liath brought her hands up to cover her face and allowed her tears to come.
***
Mike paced up and down in the room; he wanted to do something to help her, something. He clenched his fists impotently. He heard the shower shut off and was across to the door of the bathroom in a few paces.
When the door eventually swung open, Liath emerged into the softer light of the room wrapped in a towel that she clutched above her breasts and her hair a long and tangled curtain. Though her skin was reddened by the heat of the water, Mike recognized the signs of shock and emotional trauma in her face and body language.
He was not quite sure what to say to her, but with head bowed she walked directly to him and into his arms. He held her to him for a moment and then coaxed her into allowing him to wrap her in the spare blanket from the closet. Then he moved her to sit on the floor with her back to his knees where he sat on the edge of rumpled bed.
Using only his fingers, and starting at the ends, he worked his way through her long hair in sections. He carefully eased out the tangles until he could move his fingers smoothly through the damp mass. As he worked he felt her relax by increments until finally her weight lay warm against his legs. He expertly divided the hair into sections and wove the sections into a braid that hung down her back.
All this he did in silence. When his hands finally stilled, she turned to look over her shoulder at him. "And where did a fine young policeman like yourself, learn to plait a woman's hair?" she asked with a ghost of a smile that didn't come close to touching her bottomless brown eyes.
His lips twitched slightly at the memory, "My Nona, my grandmother, used to force me to help her with my young cousins' hair, when we were getting ready for church. If I did a good job, she would give me a dime for each one I did," he said. "I've never forgotten how to do it."
She twisted in between his legs and allowed the blanket to fall from her shoulders. Her eyes were full of sorrow and burning with a fey desire. She looked directly into his worried face and said, "Take me to bed Michael, please. I need to feel love and life this night."
Michael lifted a hand to cup her jaw and pulled her up into his arms. When he pressed his lips to hers she opened her mouth beneath his kiss and she inhaled his own breath from his lungs directly into her body. It fired his blood and he twisted to lay her full length on the bed, his hands moving quickly to strip the damp towel away from her. She held his head between her hands as he took his pleasure of her breasts and in so doing, launched her on the path to forgetfulness.
Her palms slid down his back, dipping and rising against the muscled contours, and she whimpered aloud when her fingertips met the obstruction of the waist of his sweats.
"No," she moaned, reaching out her arms to him as he reared back away from her to divest himself of the garment.
His desire for her was evident in the pulsing hardness that had become the focus of his emotions. Flushed dark, silken and infused with his own life's blood he yearned towards her as she beckoned him, her arms spread wide.
"No, don't leave me for an instant, Michael," she groaned. Her need was so great that she thought only to be joined to that pulsing and vital life.
He crawled up the bed, nudging apart her thighs until he was lying between them and was touching the entrance to her body. He lowered his greater weight onto her and claimed her lips and again as his tongue sought hers, she drew his breath from him in a long inhalation. He felt her chest expand as his own life's breath filled her lungs.
Michael didn't need the message of her hands clawing at his buttocks to tell him what she wanted. He sensed the chilling emptiness of loss and pain within her heart. He knew on an instinctive level that she reached for him to fill that void, to batter way the specter of death with this re-affirmation of life.
No gentle and considerate lovemaking this, he slid his length into her in one long dry and tearing thrust, filling her suddenly and she still bucked downward to him as though she would draw him in further.
He covered her mouth with his and, with his probing tongue, silenced the hissing moan she made.
For a long moment she lay quiescent beneath him, and Michael stilled himself encased in that heated grip. She began to move beneath him, a circular gyration of her hips as she manipulated his length within her, seeking the balm of his touch against her most secret of places.
Her hands pulled him bruisingly towards her and only her sudden wet spasm caused her grip to loosen. He heard a portion of her pain and sorrow slip away in the sigh that escaped her.
As her hands loosed their grip he slipped slowly away from her and then returned, again and again with increasing ease and speed as she began to meet him with her own movements. Their rhythm became more and more urgent as they met together over and over as though they were trying to merge into a single being. He thought nothing of finesse or technique; he thought only to draw her closer and closer still. When his release took him in a maelstrom of sensation and as her cry of completion sounded in his ears, his arms tightened convulsively around her.
*****
The grey light of the dawn was still an hour off, when Mike's cell phone began to ring, buzzing and vibrating across the nightstand. Mike pulled Liath's body closer to his as he reached across her to pick up the phone.
"Michael?" her sleepy voice inquired.
"Shhh, it's just my phone, love," he said in response, groaning as his eyes focused on the small screen of the phone where he read Dave's cell number. Shit, he thought, just what I needed, as his eyes found the clock, 5:26 a.m.
He flipped open the phone and said, "Do you have any idea of what time it is here Dave?"
"Rise and shine partner," he heard Dave's familiar wheeze on the other end of the connection. "There's been another drowning."
Mike threw back the covers and swung his legs to the edge of the bed. He ran his free hand through his hair and then scrubbed at his jaw.
"What, when did it happen, same as the others or…?"
Dave cut him off, "Kate and I just got back from the scene and I'm due in a briefing with Crowley. I am e-mailing the entire file over to you at the Greater Victoria Station…man, it's fuckin eerie, the same thing over and over again. This one is a small time Russian hood found in his bed in Brampton. Oh, and one other thing, one of the names on your POI list turned up dead; beaten and stabbed in a dumpster in an alley off Avenue Road. Ummm…"
Mike could hear the shuffling of paper as Dave rifled through his file for the name. He felt Liath shift on the bed and her hand came up to rest warm against his back. He swiveled his hips to turn his upper body and kiss her lips while he held the phone to his ear, waiting…
"Right, here it is, Caucasian male, twenty four, name Theodore Beaumont, also…listed as missing by his family in Victoria…Rajani has the body now, preliminary cause of death was a stab wound to the heart."
Mike ran his hand over his forehead, "Thanks Dave, look can you give Vicki a call for me and let her know what you have as well? She is working a case that is very close to this one."
"Man, Celluci, if Crowley finds out…Victory always did get results though…alright but you owe me, big time," Dave protested and conceded to his own logic all in the same wheezing exhalation.
"Thanks, partner, I'm on my way in now, how long before the files are transmitted?" Mike asked as he brushed his knuckles softly along Liath's jaw.
"Give me an hour, Mike," Dave said and then hung up.
Mike closed the phone and then rolled back into the bed to face Liath and gather her into his arms. She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder.
"You have to go," she said; it was a statement not a question.
"Uhh huh," Mike murmured against the top of her head. He drew in a breath, he hated this, hated to hurt her when she was so fragile. "Remember when you told me about Maxine Beaumont and how her son was missing after he went to Toronto…" he began.