Chapter 2

-Thief-

Happy Fins Marine Park.

Pet the Stingrays.

See the dolphins.

Learn about our wonderful natural world.

Support your local wildlife rehab.

Bring the family.

Bring your children.

Children. They had an innocence and wonder about them. While their parents mettled on personal affairs and keeping up appearances with their churches and social cliches, the children ooh’d and aaah’d at the menagerie of beasts within the walls of the warden’s garden of misery. Pruned bushes and fresh woodchips laid about their roots only put a thin layer of paint on the cesspool.

Much like in any conflict, one group’s hero was the other’s war criminal. Julie Porter. Researcher, wildlife rehabber, conservationist, advocate for nature, steward of the damned. Her name and likeness found it’s way into many of the walls and fixtures of this place. This whole complex was a monument to her own ego. The benches bore her name. Quotes danced along the walls that were signed by her own crooked hand. Pictures of her exploits in exotic waters and lands adorned the halls. Of course there was a gift shop. Of course the books she’d penned were there. Right next to the plastic orca and squids that will end up in the same garbage pit.

Keeping up facades and covering up your years of lies was busy work. The lady of the manor traveled often, mostly between delusions of her own grandeur. Though this time, she was speaking at a library in Omaha. Some ribbon cutting event, some excuse to have her picture taken. While she picked out her outfit in her posh hotel, the staff would arrive. While she mingled with alcoholic juices for breakfast with the mayor, I would be dumping buckets of feed into the troughs of her personal zoo. While she flirted with businessmen with heavy wallets and conscious’, I’d put a fresh bandage on the wounded jaw of the new resident leatherback turtle, Johny.

Johny had a sad, sad tale. Hit by a boat, found a mess on the shore. Good samaritans found him and spared him. More good people provided the money and machinery to move him from his home of the coast to our humble home in the midwest of North America, exactly where any sea creature shouldn’t find themselves. Johny settled in well, had a hope of rehabilitation and eventual release.

Had.

I’m sorry Johny. I am too useful of a trophy to stroke her ego, and you are too attractive of a lure for sappy, paying patrons for her to allow to leave. I can’t fix what she did to your jaw, but I can try and keep the bandages fresh. I can try and make it look pretty once yet another wound you did not deserve heals. An unfortunate accident while being transported between tanks, they’ll tell any reporter who cares.

Veterinary certificate, animal behaviorist, they were pretty pieces of gold-lettered papers that adorned the walls, both signed with that same brand. I couldn’t read them when I first arrived here, some years ago, but when you’re left captive and bored, figuring out the language of your oppressors is a step closer to discovering the key to your bindings. Learn not only the words, but what they mean beneath the surface, and you might just break free of the cage they placed you in.

Thinking back to the days this dreary tale of woe began, I think back to those human-made signs and words. They were bright, colorful, alluring. I mistook them for good omens, I lost my footing while enchanted by those dazzling lights, and I became intoxicated on her potent cocktail of words. Lies, all of them. Most thought me a simpleton back then, some oversized indigenous concoction of bloodlines and maladies that would eventually go missing in the cold and never be thought of again. However, I saw her, and she saw me. Unfortunately, while she somehow could see me for the beast I truly was, I could have never seen her for the monster that laid beneath those beautiful eyes and that dazzling smile.

What did those signs posted around the tavern say? What did the posters in the ship’s cabin try and warn me of? I’m sure they were all just trying to sell humans more things that humans don’t need, but sometimes I close my eyes and remember those moments. How warm it felt, the taste of the alcohol and her lips. There were words around, on the walls, on her clothing, on the books beside the table…even if they told me to break free of her grasps and run back home, to swim as hard and fast as my seal body could take me, would I have even listened?

Probably not.

Opening my dark eyes, I see the listless Johnny pulling his head out of my webbed hands, off to go sulk in his discomfort in some other corner of the containment pen in the medical bay. Knowing that the warden was closer to returning back to this place with each passing moment, I, too, wanted to go find a dark, quiet corner to sulk in. Unfortunately, some of us have wounds to heal, and others have wounds to brace for. At Least one of us might get some sleep tonight.

X.x.x.x.x.x.x.X

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Fresh, cold snow on my face. I can smell the salt, hear the birds squall, the waves crashing over rocks that will soon bear ice over them. My skin tingles as I think about it, what I’d give to have a fifty fathoms of dark and mysterious water to press through, to taste warm blood in my maw again. It could taste of ash for all I care, it would be welcome. Thunder cracks over stormy skies. A storm is coming.

“Cold shower again, Lagan?” a dreadfully familiar voice asks. It’s after hours, the staff are long gone. There’s only one woman that would have the keys. Her hand reaches in to turn the dial that changes my welcoming icy biome into a deathly temperate sauna. She’s stripping, commenting on my demeanor as her traveling clothes find their place by mine on the locker room bench. The tiled stall is already small for my tall frame, but it would be far from the first time that she made herself well at home within my personal space.

“Got a treat for you Lagan…if you deserve it.” She said as she joined me in the stall. Her beauty had faded over the years, though perhaps that was more from the scales of ignorance and lust being flaked off my eyes, protecting me from the truth like a fish’s scales protect it from – well, life.

Her arms wrap around my sides, surgeon’s hands tracing a line down my abdomen, over my navel, and then lower.

“Only good boys get treats.” She whispered against my back coyly, her talons sinking down further. Why me? Surely one man was just like any other. After the thrill of bedding a nonhuman passed, she’d certainly return to her marital bed by now, right? Well, it was possible that she was a sea wolf, more interested in the thrill of playing with her food and torturing it until dead was a welcome release, than she was in simply having a meal. Having some portions of my anatomy remain trapped in a purgatory between both forms certainly did not help keep her unwelcome hands off of me. Webbed digits were not the only features that had carried over. Neither were my mighty jaw or darkened and speckled skin.

What rested between my legs differed from statues of nude men that adorned their museum. A slit that kept it protected. A sheath to hide it. A bone to keep it sturdy. There was a time when her adoration and praise of my lower body was welcome and appreciated. However, those days had grown as stale as the iron in the cod. The difference being that I’d happily trade these genitals for a bite of that old cod from home once more.

“Gonna be a good boy for momma?” she asked as her fingertip stroked along the edges of the slit. How cruelly fortunate that my captor was a trained medicine woman. It kept prying eyes off of her hoard of guinea pigs and her trophies. The dip was shallow, the sheath barely hidden within. I can’t keep my body from reacting– I can merely protect my mind from dwelling on it.

The water is heating up. Much like the flames of the underworld that lap at my skin when she takes me there. How cruel for what used to be my purest of pleasures be turned into this abomination of touch and affection. The worst part is that at the end of it, I will be whole. I’ll have no wound to gauze and sterilize, no scar to show my ferocity and toughness. Instead, all the remnants will remain trapped within me, where none can see and only I can nurse to health.

“I’m not in the mood, Julie.” a voice that scarcely sounds like my own drums against these cheap tile walls, practically the peel-on type from the shady back corner of the hardware store.

“Don’t be silly. Big, virile boy like you? I know you too well, Lagan. I bet I can get you a little more….cooperative.” she said as her fingertips that were rolling small circles around the port of skin slipped the tips of those digits in and stretched the tissue to make it accommodate the point that was protruding. With that, the sensitive cock stood out of it’s protective orifice, exposed to both the cleansing water of the shower and the damning, filthy paw of the beast.

“There we go, that’s much better. Relax, Lagan. You know I take good care of you.” the warden coaxed as her hand stroked over it, from base to tip, her weathered hands stroking the excess skin along with the movements of her hand. Softly rejecting her advances had worked a few times in the past, long ago. Unfortunately, finding an escape with proving more and more difficult with each encounter. She felt more emboldened. She felt more entitled.

And why wouldn’t she? Nothing had stopped her before, and nothing was going to stop her tonight. I shed for her my strength and my freedom, and in return she has it locked away, an invisible chain used to control me. My handsome, thick coat that took me to the darkest depths and protected me from the bitter cold. My most precious of treasures, and I gave it to a hag. The movement of her hand made my thoughts turn to smoke and waft away, the bleary lights of the lockerroom showers burning my eyes.

“Welcome back, stud.” The warden teased as her hand moved more quickly, the motions keeping me stimulated and firm. She must have noticed my presence in this moment drifting off to my own thoughts. Iit was becoming difficult to not just give in and begin to rut in that hand, to do exactly what she wanted and take hold of her and make her feel lusted over and desired. Porter didn’t care whether or not it was genuine, only that it satisfied that need in the moment, that it itches that scratch that gnawed at the root of her heart.

“Jules, I-” the name falls out of my mouth like bits of a cold meal that have escaped. It would be a surprise if she could hear me over the thunder of the shower at all. I didn’t want to follow through, I did not want to complete this chore. However, experience told me that it was better to cooperate while she was still being nice about it. The warden only asked nicely at first. Then the hierarchy of cruelty began. Next would come insistence, then bribery, then force. If that were to fail, well then the next step is revenge. Unlike the creatures that had their lives forfeited in that final step in the descent to hell, I had something equally as precious to lose, and not nearly as messy to destroy.

My coat. One day I may find a way to steal it back, for good, and use it to carry me farther from her than she could ever hope to reach me. Taking her hand off of the manhood that stood half-heartedly in her grasp, I bring it to my lips and risk the toxins of kissing her weathered human disguise along the knuckles. Holding it firmly, we step out of the shower, and she puts a towel down on the bench that splits the row of staff showers. I will cooperate and be her good boy, in this moment. I will hand over my dignity to buy safety and time for my ticket to freedom. I will make her feel pleasured and desired, so I might feel safety and hope.

The shower still running behind us, threatening to drip cooling water down along the curtain to the cement floor, the trickle began towards the drain that hung in a valley beneath the very bench where I would revisit old, putrid hunting grounds. Long, dark hair stuck to my back and hung around my neck as I was still drenched, enjoying the chill of the open air as a knee stepped over her form to straddle her beneath me. Her spinnerets wrap around my form, my waist and my neck entrapped within them. With a little guidance from her hand, that inhuman cock she seemed so fond of would also be wrapped up by her body as well. She still feels as good as the first time.

How I hate her for it.