He was reaching for another rock, his only available weapon, when the first guy grabbed his arm—his right arm; they’d paid attention to which arm was his strongest. Richard changed direction, tried to leverage himself free—didn’t work. The second guy grabbed his left arm and pulled the other direction. They stretched him out between them, forced him to his knees. He made a token struggle but he had nothing to fight against from this position. When he tried to swing a kick at one of the guy’s naked, unprotected genitals, the man swerved out of the way. Their muscles were taut, straining—at least they had to work to keep hold of him.
The third guy hadn’t joined in, not even when Richard did damage to his companions. He stood before them, leaning on his spear, regarding Richard with a clear sense of victory. He was the leader of the gang—and he had an agenda, a reason for all this. He was studying Richard. Sizing him up.
“Think he’ll do, then?” one of the henchmen said in the thickest brogue Richard had heard since arriving in Ireland. The man might have grown up not speaking English at all. “He can surely fight.” He sounded impressed, but the compliment only annoyed Richard. If they’d wanted a fight they could have asked for one.
The leader, Richard assumed—the one who’d kept his hands clean—said in an equally thick brogue, “What are you, then? Not so big as all that, not so tough. And I’d heard you were a big, bad man.” Richard grinned back in an attempt to piss the guy off but the man ignored him. “There’s some that think we can use you—a strong man with the sea in his veins, even if it’s just a little of it. A warrior with skills that none of us have, that might be useful in our battles. There’s some that think that blood calls to blood and if I called, you’d answer.”
Richard’s mind raced to keep up with the words and the tangle of meanings. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Show me your hand,” the leader said. Richard didn’t move, because he couldn’t.
Clamping his arm against his side to keep him still, the goon on the right forced Richard’s hand up, squeezing his palm to straighten and spread his fingers.
“Webbed,” the leader observed. “You know the stories?”
Richard struggled, mostly on principle, and the two guards gripped him even harder. His hands were growing numb. “Yeah.”
“Tell me the story.”
His mother met a handsome stranger under circumstances she never talked about. He’d always lived by the sea, and his mother would always look out at the waves as if she was searching for something. It was just the waves, he thought. How could anyone not look at the waves with a sense of longing? It was just the way things were.
“Tell me the story,” the naked man repeated, stepping forward and lifting his spear to threaten.
Richard was sure the guy wouldn’t actually hurt him. Pretty sure. “The story goes, the child of a selkie and a human will have webbed feet and hands.”
“You believe that? You think it’s real, those stories you’ve heard?” the man asked.
Just a mutation. Richard’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
The man smiled like he’d won something. “Well, then. Why are you here, selkie’s child?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said, suddenly tired. “I don’t even know.” He’d wanted to find something, but he hadn’t known that he’d been looking. He’d wanted an answer, an origin—but this wasn’t quite it.
“I think it’s fate.” The leader nodded, and his two guards let go. Richard’s arms dropped. He wiped blood from his cheek and stared up at this man with salt-crusted hair. “Do you know who you are, selkie’s child?”
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.” Richard chuckled, letting go of good judgment, of trying to make sense of this. He ought to be thinking of escape—he was sure he could swim to shore. But he couldn’t swim faster than seals or mermaids.
“You’re the son of the seal king. And so am I.”
The statement was no more outlandish than the fact of him sitting on these rocks, talking to these men in the first place, all of them slipped out of time and reality. He studied the man standing before him, trying to find any part of himself: eyes, nose, build, or manner. He couldn’t see it.
“How do you know?”
“The sea hears. The sea tells stories. You know it. You’ve listened.”
He’d been watching the sea the whole drive down the coast. He parked because it seemed like a good spot. He’d been looking for something, or following something. He’d been trying to drown.
He spread his hands, felt the membrane of the webbing stretch. A crowd of seals had gathered, staying a respectful distance off, but they watched, looking back and forth between them with an eerie awareness.
The man—who somehow seemed at home on the rocky outcrops, even as he seemed terribly out of place, bare-skinned and primal in a modern world—moved to a spot and reached into a hidden depression. With his free hand he drew out an object, a folded weight of something, thick and wide, almost too large for him to lift. He held it up like a prize. It was gray, sunlight reflected off a rubbery sheen.
Sealskin.
Richard almost reached out to touch it, but stopped himself. His hand was shaking again.
“My father—our father—sent me to find you,” the leader said. “I don’t like it at all—there should only be one Seal Prince. But I see why he did. I see the wisdom of it. We need warriors—”
“Why?” Richard said, laughing outright. “What kind of wars can you possibly have to fight, when all you have are spears and seaweed—”
The Seal Prince’s two guards tensed, and the damp seals around them grumbled and shifted.
The Prince merely smiled. “There are other tribes of our kind. They raid our fishing grounds and we raid theirs. We defend our territory. But you—you don’t understand what it is to have a home, do you, selkie’s child? Would you like to learn? I can give you this.” The sealskin was a limp, still version of the creatures gathered around him.
Richard had a flash of a vision, a lifetime encompassed in a beautiful moment, sunlight streaming through green-gray waters, nudged by a current as he dived along rocks, his body curving and twisting with the shape of the surf, clothed in the smoothness of the skin he’d been given, the second skin he’d longed for all his life without knowing—
But it would be a borrowed skin, an act of charity. He wasn’t born to the water, not like these men were. He was born at the edges, in the surf, half of him in each world. He could swim like a fish and hold his breath for ten minutes. He could fight and kill—and was that all they needed him for? What then, when the war was over?
“He left us. My mother and I—he left us. Why should I think that he, that any of you, care about me now?”
“He’s been listening for you all this time, hasn’t he? We know about the boy you shot, the hostages you didn’t save. The feeling of fear and of failure, and how you haven’t had a good day since.”
He didn’t need to be told. Being told made him angry, and it put him back there. That chaotic moment when your thinking brain didn’t know what the hell was going on but your training knew exactly what to do, and you already had the target in your sights. Enemy shots fired, and when your captain yelled, “Take it, take it!” you were already breathing out and squeezing the trigger. The Somali boy’s head whipped back. A crack shot on rough seas and a rush of triumph. This was the kind of shot they gave medals for. He didn’t really see the kid when he shot him. He saw the gun, he saw the enemy, he’d felt very rational about the whole thing. When it was all over, the water he’d swum in looked just like this. When they arrived at the skiff and examined the aftermath, the rush died. The pirates were dead. So were the three hostages. The pirates had been trapped so they lashed out, taken a stand the only way they could, and if Richard had made the shot two seconds earlier, the aid workers he’d been trying to save would have survived. Nobody’s fault, no reprimands needed. Just the bad odds of a bad situation. Two sides with guns face off, people get
killed. But he should have taken that shot two seconds earlier. And this shouldn’t be a world where fifteen-year-old kids carried AK-47s and killed hostages for a living. That moment your training takes over becomes the moment you play in your memory over and over again, wondering what happened and if you could have done it differently.
“The sea is in our blood, and our blood is your blood. We felt the shock, even so far away,” the Seal Prince said. “We felt you return home, felt you swimming straight out from shore as far as you could, thinking you’d swim so far out you couldn’t get back and so not have to make a decision to keep going at all. You thought maybe one of the white sharks would take you, but they know better than to hunt the son of the Seal King. And now here you are ’cause you’ve nowhere left to go.
“Take it, Richard. Come with us.” He knelt, touched the skin, nudged it forward.
Well, he’d told Doug he might try going freelance.
The water was the only place he felt safe. He was born for the water, webbed hands that worked best when he was swimming. But he wouldn’t be a true seal any more than he was a true human.
A mutant in both worlds.
At least when his teammates called him Fishhead, they did it with love. What would they call him here?
Richard chuckled. “I know this story, too. The soldier home from war, who gets advice not to drink what the dancing princesses offer him. He doesn’t drink, so he stays awake, and he sees where they really go at night.”
The Seal Prince snorted. “Do I look like a princess to you, then? Does this look like poison?”
“No. Are you really my brother?”
“I could say yes or no and you wouldn’t believe me either way.”
He was right. Richard smirked. “I have a place waiting for me back home.” He wasn’t born for land or sea. He wanted to keep a foot in each place. That, he could do. He wanted to go home.
The Seal Prince studied him, and Richard couldn’t read his expression, if he was surprised or disappointed or full of contempt. He had a feeling he could have known this man his whole life and he still wouldn’t be able to read him, to understand him.
“Don’t you even want to meet your father?” the Seal Prince asked.
“If he’d wanted to meet me he would have come himself,” Richard said. His half-brother didn’t deny this.
“Go then, selkie’s child,” the prince said, gathering up the borrowed sealskin. “Go back to your world. We’ll be watching you.”
Richard said, “Tell the Seal King—tell him that my mother died last year. She never stopped looking at the waves.”
The Prince’s smile fell. The two guards, henchmen, whatever they were—they looked to their leader. None of them had expected him to say what he’d said. His news had shocked them. They might have known many secrets, but they hadn’t known this.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the Seal Prince said.
“Thanks.”
The three men, tanned bodies shining, disappeared behind the same outcrop of rocks they’d emerged from. As a mass, a rippling mob of shining mottled skin, the barking seals lifted themselves, scooted on blubber and flippers and heaved into the waves, splashing a wall of water and mist behind them.
And suddenly the world was quiet. The barking and belching ceased, leaving only waves lapping against the rocks. Richard looked back to the mainland. The audience of seals and mermaids were all gone. The stretch of waves between here and where he’d started was unbroken. He sat there, nothing more than a man who’d lost his boat in an ordinary world. He turned his face to the sun and grinned.
He had a long swim ahead of him.
The Arcane Art of Misdirection
THE CARDS HAD RULES, but they could be made to lie.
The rules said that a player with a pile of chips that big was probably cheating. Not definitely—luck, unlike cards, didn’t follow any rules. The guy could just be lucky. But the prickling of the hairs on the back of Julie’s neck made her think otherwise.
He was middle-aged, aggressively nondescript. When he sat down at her table, Julie pegged him as a middle-management type from flyover country—cheap gray suit, unimaginative tie, chubby face, greasy hair clumsily combed over a bald spot. Now that she thought about it, his look was so cliché it might have been a disguise designed to make sure people dismissed him out of hand. Underestimated him.
She’d seen card-counting rings in action—groups of people who prowled the casino, scouted tables, signaled when a deck was hot, and sent in a big bettor to clean up. They could win a ridiculous amount of money in a short amount of time. Security kept tabs on most of the well-known rings and barred them from the casino. This guy was alone. He wasn’t signaling. No one else was lingering nearby.
He could still be counting cards. She’d dealt blackjack for five years now and could usually spot it. Players tapped a finger, or sometimes their lips moved. If they were that obvious, they probably weren’t winning anyway. The good ones knew to cut out before the casino noticed and ejected them. Even the best card counters lost some of the time. Counting cards didn’t beat the system, it was just an attempt to push the odds in your favor. This guy hadn’t lost a single hand of blackjack in forty minutes of play.
For the last ten minutes, the pit boss had been watching over Julie’s shoulder as she dealt. Her table was full, as others had drifted over, maybe hoping some of the guy’s luck would rub off on them. She slipped cards out of the shoe for her players, then herself. Most of them only had a chip or two—minimum bid was twenty-five. Not exactly high rolling, but enough to make Vegas’s Middle-America audience sweat a little.
Two players stood. Three others hit; two of them busted. Dealer drew fifteen, then drew an eight—so she was out. Her chubby winner had a stack of chips on his square. Probably five hundred dollars. He hit on eighteen—and who in their right mind ever hit on eighteen? But he drew a three. Won, just like that. His expression never budged, like he expected to win. He merely glanced at the others when they offered him congratulations.
Julie slid over yet another stack of chips; the guy herded it together with his already impressive haul. Left the previous stack right where it was, and folded his hands to wait for the next deal. He seemed bored.
Blackjack wasn’t supposed to be boring.
She looked at Ryan, her pit boss, a slim man in his fifties who’d worked Vegas casinos his whole life. He’d seen it all, and he was on his radio. Good. Security could review the video and spot whatever this guy was doing. Palming cards, probably—though she couldn’t guess how he was managing it.
She was about to deal the next hand when the man in question looked at her, looked at Ryan, then scooped his chips up, putting stack after stack in his jacket pockets, then walked away from the table, wearing a small, satisfied grin.
He didn’t leave a tip. Even the losers left tips.
“Right. He’s gone, probably heading for the cashiers. Thanks.” Ryan put his radio down.
“Well?” Julie asked.
“They can’t find anything to nail him with, but they’ll keep an eye on him,” Ryan said. He was frowning, and seemed suddenly worn under the casino’s lights.
“He’s got to be doing something, if we could just spot it.”
“Never mind, Julie. Get back to your game.”
He was right. Not her problem.
Cards slipped under her fingers and across the felt like water. The remaining players won and lost at exactly the rate they should, and she collected more chips than she gave out. She could tell when her shift was close to ending by the ache that entered her lower back from standing. Just another half hour and Ryan would close out her table, and she could leave. Run to the store, drag herself home, cobble together a meal that wouldn’t taste quite right because she was eating it at midnight, but that was dinnertime when she worked this shift. Take a shower, watch a half hour of bad TV and finally, finally fall asleep. Wake up late in the morning and do it all again.
That was her
life. As predictable as house odds.
There’s a short film, a test of sorts. The caption at the start asks you to watch the group of people throwing balls to one another, and count the number of times the people wearing white pass the ball. You watch the film and concentrate very hard on the players wearing white. At the end, the film asks, how many times did people wearing white pass the ball? Then it asks, Did you see the gorilla?
Hardly anyone does.
Until they watch the film a second time, people refuse to believe a gorilla ever appeared at all. They completely failed to see the person in the gorilla suit walk slowly into the middle of the frame, among the ball-throwers, shake its fists, and walk back out.
This, Odysseus Grant knows, is a certain kind of magic.
Casinos use the same principles of misdirection. Free drinks keep people at the tables, where they will spend more than they ever would have on rum and Cokes. But they’re happy to get the free drinks, and so they stay and gamble.
They think they can beat the house at blackjack because they have a system. Let them think it. Let them believe in magic, just a little.
But when another variable enters the game—not luck, not chance, not skill, not subterfuge—it sends out ripples, tiny, subtle ripples that most people would never notice because they’re focused on their own world: tracking their cards, drinking free drinks, counting people in white shirts throwing balls. But sometimes, someone—like Odysseus Grant—notices. And he pulls up a chair at the table to watch.
The next night, it was a housewife in a floral print dress, lumpy brown handbag, and overpermed hair. Another excruciating stereotype. Another impossible run of luck. Julie resisted an urge to glance at the cameras in their bubble housings overhead. She hoped they were getting this.
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