Sacrificed to the Sea: mermaids .. monsters .. men Read online

  mermaids .. monsters .. men

  CARI SILVERWOOD

  Sign up to the newsletter to get new book alerts, sales (and a FREE welcome book) http://www.carisilverwood.net/

  Need more dark romances in your life?

  THE DARK MONSTER FANTASY BOOKS: PREY, STEEL, BLADE

  Or for something much, much darker

  DARK HEARTS BOXSET

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  About Cari Silverwood

  Acknowledgements & Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  As they dropped her to the deck, lightning cracked, flashing on the maddened faces of the two men tasked with killing her. They’d flung the hatchway wide and hauled her, kicking and writhing, into a hurricane.

  The sky was wilder than she’d ever seen it, and already the power and fury of the storm drenched and chilled her. Frigid water charged across the deck, dashing at her face, tugging at her dress, as if to take her prematurely.

  She screamed, her throat tearing with nonsense babbles. The men turned their eyes from hers.

  Swiftly, they silenced her pleas with a cloth gag.

  Bound as she was, at ankles, wrists, and arms, she could do nothing as they carried her across the clipper’s deck.

  Beneath the roar of the wind, she was carried, beneath the towering waves trying to smash them from the rolling deck of the ship – muted, terrified, and abandoned by every other human on the vessel. She cursed them in her mind even as she feared for her life. Above, the rigging and masts lurched beneath a swirling chaos.

  The rain thudded at her skin. The cloth in her mouth tasted of oil. They’d silenced her. Ashamed of what they did, perhaps. Even Guffrey, the ship’s carpenter and the man she had last bedded, had turned away as she was accosted.

  This storm threatened to take the ship, and she was a woman and bad luck – no matter that she’d been welcome to whore her way across to Ireland until this storm found them.

  If they sacrificed her, they might be spared.

  She cursed them again then sobbed and laughed all at once. Her tears were a paltry contribution considering what the sky and the sea were doing. Water washed across the timber deck as if the sea had already claimed the ship.

  Grim-faced, the two men took her closer to the rail, lowered her, then steadied themselves, and made the sign of the cross on their chests. This was their last, desperate sacrifice to save a doomed ship running before the wind with bare masts and tattered rigging, with the keel likely to give if the winds and waves strengthened.

  They didn’t speak, though the storm would only have torn the sound from their mouths.

  They picked her up between them, by legs and shoulders, and hurled her over the rail.

  A mighty wave curled past and followed her down. She might drown before she reached the sea.

  That would be a mercy.

  There was none.

  She fell – still trying to free herself, as if she could swim to safety, as if the ropes were not knotted tight and cutting her skin, as if she were not already condemned.

  No one lives without hope.

  She tried to free herself and failed.

  The sea did not grant her the final grace of allowing her to slowly sink. It swallowed her in one ravenous gulp, gobbled her into its foaming gullet and drove her fathoms deep. In seconds she was buried under tons of water. Her hands were still bound at her back, her arms to her sides, and her ankles clamped fast and hard together, so that the bones hurt where they pressed at each other.

  Her red dress wrapped her gently like a shroud.

  Silence filled the void as she sank. The storm noise became distant.

  The last bubbles from her lungs were lost to the roiling sea, in the bedlam of a hurricane angry enough to roll the ship a few seconds later, to pour in until its holds were bursting, and then to drive it under.

  Drowning, terrified, and lost, she felt her body begin that effortless plunge. The shadow of the ship followed her down. Beneath lay a mile-deep trench. A place to sleep.

  As her heart beat its last weakened thud-thud, something bit her at neck and back, tore away her clothes, and released her from the ropes.

  But she was gone. Already, Raffaela was a limp, lifeless thing, and the surface was too distant to be reached.

  Her open eyes saw nothing but cold black.

  In the black, something lusted after her, something strange with sharp triangular teeth.

  It feasted on her, plucked at her, thrust into her. It gave her life. A new, if transformed, life.

  When her eyes saw again, the carpenter was falling past her, tumbling to the very bottom. Where he would hopefully rest and rot.

  “Curse you, all of you,” she croaked from her sea-swept, sea-scoured, salt-cured throat.

  Somehow, her words reached her ears.

  Her heart began to beat again and something dire swam away from her, lithely sweeping at the water with a sinuous tail.

  No one came to tell her what had happened or what she had become. She was alone beneath the waves, and although that by itself was clearly a miracle, she was unsure as to what sort of a miracle. Were there bad miracles?

  The sea had become her world. She could breathe and move and swim rapidly. It came to her easily, naturally. What was she?

  By feel, she found she had sharp teeth that were smaller than but similar to those she’d seen on sharks.

  By sight, she found her pretty tail – a long hefty, scaled thing. The scales had a pearlescent shimmer lent to them by the light filtering down to where she swam. The tail propelled her through the water with power and grace, or so she judged it to be.

  There was no one to disagree with her.

  Over the weeks and days she glimpsed others like her, but they kept their distance. She did not understand or know their reasons, but it seemed wise to do the same. She was frightened of what someone like her might do to a new addition to the … species.

  Was she a mermaid? It must be so.

  Or was she something else, something more monstrous?

  An undefined hunger dwelled inside her, and it seemed to be waiting for something.

  Catching and eating fish, seaweed, and various other creatures she tried to not examine as she bit into them, calmed her, but it did not last, and always that deeper hunger waited.

  Eventually the clouding of her mind drove her to swim upward, closer to the surface. Up there her new, shocking hunger might be sated. It raged at her while her body grew numb and her limbs prickled with drifting pains.

  She popped her head above, into the air, and found she could still breathe, though the air lacked the clean taste of the sea. The scents of mankind pulled her to the ships that sailed by. After several days of following the ships then losing them, she ceased to deny herself. She was weaker and hungrier, yet also more able to smell them, their flesh, their lusts and their urges, Closer to land, where hills rimmed the horizon ahead of her, the ships often slowed. Some of them kept together like schools of fish.

  Fishing boats. The men called to each other as they cast their nets.

  She swam closer to a boat swaying back and forth in the waves, and there she found her first prey. A young man, merry of face, concentrating on his net while he hauled on ropes.

  He saw her and frowned.

/>   With a hold on the boat’s side, she lifted herself and her breasts, above the water.

  The man froze.

  Then she opened her mouth and sang to him in a voice that pricked him with desire and kept him staring at her fixedly as he approached. With the slightest of tugs, she pulled him closer. When he fell over the side, she slowly lured him deeper, downward, pulling off his pants and wrapping him in legs that had newly formed just for this purpose. To spread them, to fuck a man while he drowned, to kiss him as he thrust, to take him into her world. Finally he was spent. His mouth gaped, his wide-open eyes glazed over, his chest stilled. His limbs washed to and fro like pale seaweed.

  Though she had tasted his blood at his neck, it was his death she sought.

  Then… his life rushed into her, a fresh and glorious sun to heat her, strengthen her heart, and give her the force to go on.

  She watched as he sank.

  Many hours passed before guilt assailed her. She curled into a ball, hugging her tail, unsure when it had reformed but not caring. She’d killed. A man. So she could live. It was a terrible, sinful, wrong thing she had done.

  A life for a life, though, her desires told her. It wasn’t so bad.

  Curled up, she stayed huddled on the bottom for a full day. Siren. That is what I must be. Though really, she still wasn’t sure.

  The next morning, when the sun rippled on her skin through the water, she took a deep breath, frowning at herself and surveying her long, pretty tail, and she vowed never to do that again.

  But the hunger was not to be denied. She called it the Ravening.

  Judging time by the moon, she calculated that every few months she had to kill a human to survive. Sometimes it was sooner, sometimes later.

  Exactly one year after she became this strange creature, at sunset, she felt the urge to swim to shore. As she reached the shallows, her legs formed, and she found she could walk and breathe as a human again. Naked, she walked onward, found a village, stole some clothes. When a woman approached her to ask who she was, she pretended she was mute, afraid that opening her mouth would reveal some monstrous part of her.

  Her teeth were not sharp – she felt them with her tongue after the woman moved on.

  It might have been more of a problem if what was happening did not feel so surreal. She could not stay for more than a single day.

  The following day, at dusk, she went back to the sea.

  The years passed, and consuming fish and men became her routine.

  Her one courtesy to her past, she vowed never to forget who she once was or her name: Raffaela.

  She said it to herself many times. She crept under darkened piers and clung to the barnacled posts to listen to people talk, and afterward she repeated the words to herself. When she ventured onto land, once a year, she exchanged a few words with people, if they seemed safe. Over the years the way of words changed. Language changed. Saying the new ones was fun. She must not forget how to be a human.

  Raffaela.

  Sometimes, she swam to a coral reef that poked above the sea at low tide. There, she sat in the air and said her name out loud to the fish that slipped by. Her voice croaked from disuse. The fish flicked their tails at her. The warm sun glittered on her naked skin and on her scales.

  Raffaela.

  When her throat grew raw and her skin dried, she dove back into the water and under the waves.

  Many years passed. Many hundreds of years. She was alone and lonely, of course. How could she ever do anything to remedy that? Once, she’d seen a pack of her own kind, a school of them, whichever was the right word for it, tear apart a trespasser who’d swum too close, until all that was left was a slowly spreading cloud of blood.

  Then one day at dusk, she swam to the top because the Ravening was upon her. Raffaela came upon a becalmed sailing vessel with a man sitting on the gunwale edge. He was talking and laughing. It was the laughing that fascinated her. With her head above water she heard him clearly. He threw his head back and the last of the sun haloed through his thick hair.

  He was beautiful, the most beautiful man she had seen for all her hundreds of years, though the laugh helped too – it was so full-throated and brimming with soul.

  She needed him and only him. And so she swam to him singing quietly, and he turned and found her with his eyes, though the light in the shadow of the hull was dim.

  She called to him and he leaned over and slipped into the water with her. He let her drag him down many fathoms in seconds, for she used her powerful tail.

  Above, someone had cried out his name, “Merrick, come back! Merrick!”

  By the time her legs had formed and wrapped him to her, he was probing at her with his manhood, pushing, straining to open her, to penetrate her fully. He shoved in, lubricated by her response. This was such a thick and hard cock that she groaned and mimicked his recent movement – she flung back her head and arched, as he drove himself into her.

  She saw his face in between biting at his neck. He suffered her small wounds, enthralled by their sex, pumping at her, pulling her to him with his large hands on her hips.

  They fucked gloriously as she bled him, nipped him, consumed his mouth with her mouth. As he consumed her. The kiss was as addictive as the sex and their eyes stayed on each other. She could see the moment when reality dawned on him. When he knew what she did to him.

  This terrible and bloody intercourse had already lasted far longer than was normal.

  Somehow, she was keeping him alive, breathing her breaths into his mouth while they kissed and fucked. And then, to her dismay, she felt him lose the battle with life.

  His life passed to her, and he died.

  She wept as she saw the dullness come over his beautiful eyes. She cried tears of silver that floated away as she released him to the depths. The ocean swallowed him, and he drifted lower beneath her feet. With her throat locked by grief, she wept some more.

  What had she done?

  He was different. He could have been hers. If only she knew what to do to bring him back.

  She dived with him then and tried to breath the life back into him, but to no avail.

  Again, she released him and turned away, and she swam for hours, for miles. She found herself in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go, no future, with nothing at all of worth to make her want to exist.

  In the morning, still overcome, she returned to find his body, to do with it… well, she knew not what she intended but…

  Something.

  She could not find his corpse. This had been her hunting ground for the past half century, and she knew every cranny, every underwater cavern, yet she could not find his body.

  Some predator had taken it.

  Which only reinforced her uselessness.

  Never before had remorse knifed into her and consumed her so mercilessly. It was as merciless as she had been to the humans she killed. That night, to consider her path from here on, she went to her coral reef and thought, while the moonlight silvered the waves.

  She closed her eyes and spoke aloud to the moon and the sea. This vow she did not want to renege upon, not like the last time when she’d just begun and was a novice at killing.

  “Never again will I take another human life. Never.” Raffaela bit her lip with her sharp teeth. She would let herself die. It was for the best.

  How to die though? Merely letting herself weaken and expire from lack of food seemed awful. It should be quick yet not too quick. She deserved some pain.

  For close to a month she dithered about, staying in her hunting area. Her time to walk upon the shore was coming. So was the Ravening but she dearly wished to walk on the land again. Could she hold off the hunger for long enough? She must choose a way to end herself. A shark would be repulsive. What else, though?

  A peninsula lay beside her reef. She swam closer to the shore. There were hills here and among them she might find an unclimbable chasm. When her day of being human ended, she would surely dehydrate and die if she could not
find the sea. That seemed fitting – to die near where Merrick had died, plus she would take her last breaths as a woman should, in the human world.

  Except, when she swam to the beach, at the dead of night, there was a man sitting on the sand near the jetty where boats were moored. That alone would have meant little.

  He saw her. He watched her swim by and followed every deviation of her course.

  Something covered his face and eyes – a hunk of metal and glass such as the human divers wore. It made him resemble a monster. He saw her every move, even though the moon had not yet risen, and the night was as black as her sins.

  Curious, she swam closer and into the shallows. She had no urge to kill. Yet.

  She meant to die anyway, so what harm could this do, to speak to a man? He held no harpoon or weapon.

  “Who are you?” She wrapped her arms about the anchor rope of a dinghy and stared across the sand. “Can you see me?”

  He nodded. “I can see you.”

  “Oh.”

  This gave rise to a dilemma. She was curious about him, but the Ravening was also strengthening. He was new and different.

  “I’ve been studying your kind. You’re a siren?”

  The moon was rising at his back, lighting up the sand with subtle tones.

  Those few words of his had ignited her interest to heights unknown for centuries. Who was he? She must know more. And when she saw the chain that led from his leg to a vehicle parked higher up the beach… her fate was sealed. She must know more. The centuries of monotony had worn on her – of death and hunger, of an ocean full of creatures that she could not talk to.

  She hungered for words.

  “Perhaps I am a siren. I don’t really know. But what are you?”

  He dragged off the mask and his gaze wandered over her appreciatively, she thought, dwelling on her breasts. She knew how much men loved those.

  “Just a man doing some research on your kind and you… A beautiful woman.”

  Not siren – woman.

  She smiled at him, tentatively, trying not to show her teeth.