by Lysa Daley
Continuing on, she neared the bluff’s dead-end. Where was she going? I tried to scurry forward. And then I saw it. A small rocky arch, that previously hadn’t been visible, opened up. She was headed to that cave.
I had to get closer before she vanished inside. I flapped my wings and lifted my bird body far enough off the ground to lightly skim a few inches above the sand. A small flock of seagulls clustered on the sand eyed me suspiciously as I passed. They could clearly tell something wasn’t quite right with me.
I landed on a rocky perch above the cave. Serena walked with purpose toward the mouth—obviously not her first time here—and vanished from sight.
Cautiously, I fluttered down to the sand near the entrance. Taking small bird steps, I slipped into the dark. The sand gave way to slick, wet rocks and the echo of waves lapped on rocks. My bird eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. Because of the cove’s low ceiling, I was too big to fly in here. I knew that my bird feet were made for swimming, but the water made me nervous.
Who was I kidding? The water terrified me.
After I caught my breath, I downsized into a smaller sandpiper bird with nimble feet and agile wings. An added and unexpected benefit was that my eyesight also improved in the low light. I took flight deeper into the cave and landed on a small cold rock that jutted up out of the water. From where I sat, I spotted Serena swimming, fully clothed, toward the narrow outlet to the sea.
She was awkward in the water, with her human legs clumsily kicking. Why was a siren swimming as a human? But then after a moment, her legs fused together and her clothes seemingly fell away as glowing iridescent scales appeared on her body.
She didn’t look like a mermaid with a full fishtail. Instead, she kept her human features but became more streamlined and flowing. Her head remained above water as she started to sing, her angelic voice echoing off the sides of the cave. Did she have an audience I didn’t see? Was I the audience? Or did she just like singing?
If I had that voice, I would singing constantly.
Then she abruptly stopped and flipped herself up in the water, diving in head first. Her feet momentarily flashed in the air, then sliced like a knife into the water and disappeared from sight.
After thirty seconds, she hadn’t resurfaced. That probably meant the cave had an unseen underwater exit.
If that was true, then Serena was gone, and I was stuck in this cave.
There was only one thing I could do. I launched myself into the air, taking flight and zooming back the way I’d come, exploding out of the cave into the fresh air. Then I angled around over the coastline and the water. Gliding overhead, I searched the waters below, trying to find her. Finally, my wings tiring, I landed on the edge of the bluff that gave me a good vantage point. Scanning the surface, I didn’t see anything and my heart dropped. Where had she gone?
I kicked myself for not transforming into some type of fish or something like an aquatic turtle.
But I couldn’t do it.
The embarrassing truth was I was too afraid of the water. Even the calmest, shallowest pond made me nervous. And I couldn’t swim. Not to mention that there were sharks, including great white, all along the Southern California Coast. I could never plunge my whole self into the cold and deep water. My heart would burst before I made it out.
Finally, twenty yards away, the top of her head popped out of the water. Looking north, for maybe two, three miles, the coastline was nothing but jagged rocks with a rough surf beating on them. Gone were the long stretches of golden California sand and the easy beach access. Humans would’ve had a very hard time navigating this part of the coastline.
Maybe that was exactly why she was here.
Flying along the coast, I could see her iridescent body gliding north in the water. It was amazing how fast she could swim. From above, I could almost feel her sense of freedom and speed and, for a moment, I felt envious.
I really needed to work on overcoming my fear of the water.
Half a mile up the coast, she veered into a crescent moon-shaped rocky cove, where a dozen large sea lions sprawled on the rocks and soaked up the last rays of the winter sun. As I landed on a perch not far above the sea lions, only one turned his doglike, whiskered face toward me, but then decided I wasn’t very interesting and looked back at the siren.
There was no sandy beach here. It was just jagged rocks meeting the crashing surf.
The siren swam directly up to a large rock that jutted out from the sea and hoisted herself up between two male sea lions.
I expected the wild sea lions to slip away into the sea, but they just barked at her. I realized all of the sea lions were male. I wasn’t sure if that was unusual or not. Maybe males gathered together.
She reached out and touched the larger of the sea lions on the nose. As soon as her hand made contact, the animal turned into a human. Then she did the same to the second sea lion. He also transformed into a human.
Selkies! The sea lions were actually selkies.
Chapter Nineteen
The two men sitting on the rock looked like brothers, with their slicked-back black hair and slightly wide indigenous facial features. I’d seen these guys before. They were the Eskimo motorcycle club from the bar.
Other sea lions on the beach slipped into the water and approached Serena. Each one she touched turned into a dark-haired man. Their transformation looked like a wave or a rolling effect from head to toe, as if they were shedding invisible skin and revealing their human form. This was different than the way I transformed. For me, it was more like morphing all at once.
Selkies were pretty rare. Not many existed anymore. This made a gathering of so many all the more unusual. I knew there was some pretty specific folklore regarding selkies that had to do with tragic love affairs. A human woman could cry seven tears into the sea to summon a selkie. Legend stated that if you could steal their seal skin, then you had control over them until they could retrieve their skin. I had no idea if any of this was true.
But Serena had turned each of them into a human via her touch. She was in control of them as they eagerly swam around her, like a dog with its master.
Why did this siren have a selkie harem waiting for her? A siren wasn’t more powerful than a selkie?
Two sea lions remained on the beach. Instead of clustering around Serena like the others, they dove into the water and submerged. A moment later, the pair of sea lions reappeared, towing the man wearing a blue work shirt and blue jeans from the depths. The man’s beard was long and his hair was scraggly like he hadn’t been to the barber in a while.
The man looked more dead than alive, but I couldn’t tell for sure because only a sliver of sun remained on the horizon. Even though I was in the form of a harmless little sandpiper, I was nervous to try to get closer.
The sea lions towed the body over to Serena. For a moment, I was almost certain that I saw the man’s arm twitch. Then both arms moved. But a cold knot of dread formed in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t see him well enough to identify him. Was he one of the missing men? I needed to move in order to get a good look at his face.
Gingerly, I took flight, winging out and away from the siren and the selkies, then flapped higher and doubled back on the other side. From my aerial vantage point, I had a clear view straight down.
The man was alive but barely conscious. I could sense no magical energy radiating from him at all. He was human. I couldn’t be sure, but the man resembled the photograph I’d seen of this missing Jason Saperstein. That meant he couldn’t breathe underwater. So where had he been? They’d clearly been keeping him underwater. Whatever they were doing, they had some way of allowing him to breathe beneath the waves.
How many other humans might’ve been down there as well? Was this where the missing men had vanished to?
The selkies offered the man to Serena. With one hand, she pulled him up from the water and laid him across her legs. Her strength was amazing, like that of a vampire or were-beast.
For a mome
nt, it almost looked like she was going to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But instead, she began to sing in her mesmerizing voice as she gazed with heavy eyes out over the horizon, watching the last seconds of light before the sun disappeared.
The man’s eyes fluttered weakly open and his face glowed with ecstasy. He was enchanted. I also found myself giving in to her magical song as she continued to sing, a happy feeling washing over me.
Perhaps I’d been wrong. Perhaps Serena had come here to rescue these men. Maybe she was actually a kind-hearted, beautiful soul, and we were really on the same side.
But then, the instant the sun set, extinguishing the remaining light, something changed. Her face hardened and her song became harsher, more intense.
Fear snapped me out of the spell I was getting pulled into. She was waiting for the sun to set. This was ritual magic. Some of the darkest, worst magic could only happen as the light of day gave way to the dark of night.
The selkie-men circled her in a watery frenzy. Her right hand shot up into the air. The mesmerizing song stopped as she slammed her bare hand down. I could only see the man’s face. His eyes went wide with shock, and his whole body convulsed for a long painful moment. Finally, he went limp. A second later, she again raised her right hand — this time clutching the man’s still-beating heart.
Horrified, I suddenly went numb inside. No, we were definitely not on the same side. I’d just watched a man die. I felt sick. Could I have done something to stop it? Now all I could do was sit helplessly and watch.
The selkies cheered, swimming wild circles around her rock throne and growing more frantic as they looped and splashed around her.
With her free hand, she carelessly pushed the dead body off her lap. The man in blue tumbled down, his dead body slamming against the rocks, then plunging into the turning water below.
Sickened by what I’d just witnessed, I flew farther away, landing on a rocky shelf built into the bluff. I fluttered my sandpiper wings to stabilize myself. I didn’t want to know what would happen next, but I knew I had to watch.
Sure enough, she raised the heart to the dusky sky, like an offering to a god, then pulled it down and took a bite out of it.
I looked away, unable to watch. This was dark magic at its worst. What was the point of this black magic?
She must have been luring these men out onto the beach with her song then she would somehow capture them — probably with the aid of her selkies — and waited until she needed to feed again.
Did this mean Morty and his brother had already fallen victim to this evil creature, or were they still somehow alive and being kept underwater?
It didn’t take long for her to consume almost all of the heart. What was left, she threw like scraps for dogs out into the water. The selkies went wild trying to get a morsel. Serena stood up on the rock, on human legs, brushing her long hair away from her face and looking sated.
My stomach turned.
Then she gracefully swan-dove into the waters below. She came up once, flipping over so I could again see her fishtail before disappearing into the depths. The selkies, returning to their seal form as easily as putting on a coat, barked madly and followed her out to sea.
They left me, just a lone little bird, sitting above a cold ocean cove.
When I was certain they were gone, I took flight, skimming the shoreline and looping back in, trying to see if I could find the heartless body. The strong surf was tugging it out to sea, but I saw it briefly emerge from the waves then get sucked back down. I didn’t have much time before it was pushed out to sea.
I returned to the beach, gliding down to the ground.
After I came back to my human form, I stood on a narrow rocky shelf only a few feet above the water. There was no solid ground anywhere in this cove. If I wasn’t careful, I could’ve easily slipped and fall into the freezing water.
The man in blue’s body bobbed face down just out of my reach. I glanced around and spotted a long, thick piece of driftwood wedged into the rocks. With the driftwood, I was able to hook it under the dead man’s shirt and tow him onto a flat rocky space. It took a couple tries, but I was finally able to reach under both of his arms to pull him out of the water.
Turning his body over on the rocks, I got my first good look at his face. I felt a small rush of relief. He was not supernatural. Now at least I could confirm with certainty that it wasn’t Morty or his brother.
I still wasn’t 100% certain, but he resembled the photos I’d seen of Jason Saperstein, the father from Calabasas whose wife thought he’d run off with another woman to gamble. Would it bring her comfort to know the truth? To know that he’d been lured away and murdered in the most vicious way? Or would she prefer to go on believing that he was alive and out there still?
As I looked at this broken body wondering what I should do, I heard a shuffling behind me. I instantly felt like someone, or something, was watching me.
I stood but didn’t see anything.
Then movement in the other direction caught my eye. A head came up, followed by the rest of the body, and I felt a shiver of revulsion. I recognized the sickly gray skin with bone and tendons peeking through.
I hated ghouls.
A second one appeared behind the first. The smell of death had attracted them. To my left, two more ghouls moved toward me from the opposite side of the cove. They’d been hiding behind rocks in the dark shadows, waiting for darkness to fall.
I really, really disliked ghouls. They made my skin crawl.
They were your basic flesh-eating monsters. Unlike zombies, who were the walking undead and only ate brains, supposedly ghouls were smarter. And that made them dangerous. Ghouls didn’t discriminate when it came to their culinary desires. They’d eat any flesh — dead or alive.
Including my flesh, if they caught me.
But there shouldn't have been any ghouls in Malibu. Way too much sunshine and happiness. Ghouls mostly terrorized industrial areas, garbage dumps, cemeteries, or any place where there might’ve been a lot of death or decay.
An upscale, populated beach community certainly wasn’t one of those places. It was teeming with life of every sort. This vibrant life force should’ve acted like a repellent to the ghouls.
But they wanted this dead body, and I wasn’t going to be able to protect it from them.
As they closed in on me, I realized that I needed to bring something back with me to prove that this either was or wasn’t Jason Saperstein. I quickly scanned his body. No wedding ring (I wouldn’t mention that to his angry wife). A glint of light from a very expensive waterproof diver’s watch caught my eye. A lot of surfers also wore them. I reached down to unhook the complicated latch.
Above me, the ghouls swarmed. One was drooling. My stomach turned as I tried to unhook the watch band. Another ghoul stumbled and fell head first onto the jagged shallow rocks below. I heard a sickening crack when his head hit the ground. None of his ghoul friends paid any attention or tried to help him.
I continued to fumble with the watch, desperate to get it off the wrist. The ghouls were only a few feet away. I tried to focus and not completely freak out. I considered abandoning this attempt. But then, finally, the stubborn latch snapped open. I pulled the watch off the dead man’s wrist and took off running down the beach, hoping the ghouls would ignore me and just head for the dead body.
I slipped the watch on my wrist. If it was attached to me, and I transformed into an animal, then the watch would stay with me. If I was just holding it loosely in my hand, then I might unintentionally drop it during the change and lose it.
Unfortunately, the ghouls didn’t head for the body. Of course they didn’t. The brainless morons chased after me instead. Revulsion and panic seized me. I’d heard that living flesh tasted better than dead flesh. Because I really didn’t want to be their dinner, I picked up the pace.
Maybe this was why none of the bodies had been found. Ghouls were an excellent way to clean up any evidence. Why else would they have
been here? Sunny beaches were not their habitat.
I stopped and turned. I’d put some of distance between me and the ghouls, but I still didn’t have a lot of time. I wasn’t sure if I‘d recovered enough energy to transform again. And I had to be calm enough to concentrate, or it wouldn’t work.
As the ghouls continued their relentless approach, I forced myself to concentrate on becoming the sandpiper again. I felt my chest tighten and a pain shot through my head. It wasn’t going to work. Birds took a lot of energy. I still didn’t have the focused mind or the reserves to transform again.
The ghouls were getting closer and closer.
I turned to the ocean. The water was rough and waves were strong. There had to be another way. Then I remembered my elevator encounter with a vampire not long ago. Because of limited space, I’d transformed into a ladybug.
Could I do that again? Something small might work.
Maybe something slightly sturdier and more accustomed to the environment than a ladybug? As I closed my eyes, I swore I could almost feel the breath of the ghouls on my face. Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate.
In a flash, I shrank down to the sand as a tiny rock crab.
The ghouls stopped, confused. While they may have been smarter than zombies, they weren’t that much more intelligent.
Not one of them even thought to look down.
Instead, after a confused beat, they stumbled off toward the dead body.
I’d been saved. But poor Mr. Saperstein, or whoever he was, was about to become dinner for ghouls. And there wasn’t going to be anything left when they were done.
I got back in my car and sped away as fast as possible. I headed over the canyon toward the valley.
I wasn’t sure what I should do. Should I call Mrs. Saperstein to see if she could confirm that the diver’s watch belonged to her husband? Or should I let Mr. Stroud know so that he could handle it?
After mulling it over, I finally came to the conclusion that if I was Mrs. Saperstein, I would want to know that my husband was dead. And she knew me already. She’d told me all about her missing husband. It would probably have been much easier for her to hear the terrible news from me instead of a complete stranger. Besides, I was pretty sure no one ever volunteered for the job of telling someone that a member of their family was dead.
