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

  “Bashtud,” she managed past the gag, and tried to fasten her teeth onto his fingers but her mouth couldn’t open much more.

  He pushed back on his knee and withdrew his hand, then chuckled and returned to push his fingers into her mouth and press them onto her tongue. There was a big hole in the metal rod, she realized as she choked and spluttered.

  “Such a fun day ahead of us.”

  Then he dragged her further into the building to where there were shiny steel tables and walls lined with tanks of fish. He turned on many lights above that blinded her.

  Then, while she was recovering from that, still straining to open her eyes, he hooked something into her, near where her tail muscle ended and the fin began.

  Searing pain erupted.

  The fire.

  Rippling fire.

  She gasped, held it in, tensing.

  And he began to pull on a chain. It clanked as it ran through an anchor point far above, and her tail began to be hauled upward.

  Her weight fell on where she was hooked.

  She screamed full-throated and writhing, as he hoisted her upward.

  When he was done and she was off the floor, he left her there, swinging slightly, with her long, wet hair dragging the floor. Panting, she waited for the pain to subside a little, for the screeching feel of it running from tail to spine to her pounding head, to settle to something bearable.

  Less pain, less pain…

  Unscrunching her face from the grimace of agony, she heard the scrape of his boots and stared up at him. A curved knife hung point-down from one hand.

  He raised it to waist-level and pursed his lips, then remained in place, stiff, uncompromising, apart from the turn of the knife as he shifted his fingers.

  She couldn’t help flinching. Dying by a knife, with this maniac intent on hurting her, it was going to be terrifying.

  As bad as what she had inflicted on others?

  Worse. At least her lovers had suffered ecstasy as well as death. Her bites had been nothing compared to steel slicing into her flesh.

  She imagined the first cut of that slim weapon, her guts spilling, and pinched her teeth onto the gag. When he took a step toward her, she whimpered.

  His boots crunched again, twisting in a small arc on the spot, then Wolfgang lowered himself, crouching until they were level with each other, face to face.

  The knife was in his hand, glinting as he turned his wrist. The man had the eyes of the Devil, she decided. Dark, unmoving in focus, as deadly and cold as one of the great ocean predators that lurked and hunted the bigger prey. The spectacles had gone.

  She whimpered again as he came even closer, until his breath met hers, then he lifted his gaze and looked up the length of her.

  Blood was trickling and dripping down her, she could feel it meandering over her belly.

  His mouth tightened. “Why?” The word was distorted almost beyond recognition, as if the syllables were spiked and he’d torn his throat uttering it.

  Raffaela could only shake her head, minutely, not wanting to attract his attention again, fearing the knife, not sure if he wanted an answer.

  “Why!” His scream was as loud as hers had been, and she shook, for it ripped into her ears. It filled the room and accused her of a multitude of things, all in that one burst of sound. Things she could never deny. The loose end of the chain above jangled at her movement.

  “Why?” he said, quietly, closing his eyes, jamming them shut. The skin around his eyes furrowed. “I loved him.” The sentence broke as he said it, pieces of it falling to the air as his throat again failed in its purpose.

  Her shaking intensified. The chain kept rattling, signaling her fear to him. What did that matter?

  This was her doing.

  Even so, hate had been planted. How could it not? He hated her, and she may have detested what she had done but… the way he’d trapped her, his murderous intent, and the stench of his betrayal mingled with her fears. If she could rip out his throat, she would. Her jaw clenched, and she gnawed the rod, teeth clinging stickily to the metal.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wolfgang stood, inhaling wetly through his nose, snorting, swallowing the evidence. That was from the tears he refused to shed. His eyes would be shining with them. Roughly he dragged his arm across his face, pressing, dabbing, then he glared down at her.

  Blood on her. Blood, knives, a hook through her, and that scream of hers that fair stuck a nail in his heart, ground in his worthlessness, woke him up to truth.

  What was he doing?

  Merrick would’ve laughed at Wolfgang. If he knew. If a dead man could know.

  Torturing a fucking mermaid? His intent had failed at the first hurdle. This was not him.

  He staggered back a small way, remembering the day Merrick was taken, and every night and day since then when he’d imagined Merrick rotting, eyeless, rolling in the waves and the currents, being picked clean by sharp-toothed fish. Fish like her. Like this hooked creature. By now, he’d be limbless and gutted.

  A flesh-tattered skeleton.

  All her doing. He raked her with his scrutiny again. Vengeance should have been sweet.

  “What are you?”

  And he wasn’t sure what he was truly asking with that.

  Was she human? Couldn’t be.

  Was she human enough to value her life as he would a human’s?

  He rubbed his shut eyes with splayed finger and thumb.

  If she was not… what was he doing anyway? Would he torture a dolphin?

  How did he prove it? Did it fucking matter? He pressed his fingers harder onto his eyeballs.

  After all, when had he ever thought it moral to dissect a living animal? Never. His colleagues had laughed at him when they visited a restaurant with live lobsters in tanks. He’d walked out when they threw one, still brandishing its limbs, in a pot of boiling water.

  One of his weirdnesses.

  Wolfgang dropped his hands, feeling the looseness in his arms and that roiling nausea as if he might throw up. His jaw muscles knotted.

  He’d stuck that gag on her to keep her from biting him with those shark teeth, maybe killing him if she reached his neck, but it also meant she couldn’t talk back. What was he going to do with this lithe, beautiful, piece of death?

  He kneeled again. Letting her go made him feel sick too.

  Not an animal then. Too smart. A monster? So many human monsters in this world. His brain ticked over, offering up a gem of a thought for the first time in ages.

  “Why do we not have fossil evidence of you, of your… people?” He jerked his wrist, pointing the knife at her, and his upside-down mermaid zeroed in on that with those big green eyes.

  He wondered if she knew how pretty those were – how exquisite the liquid color.

  Before her last visits, he’d dropped a submersible drone into the bay and had seen her coming.

  She moved like a piece of wet silk through the water. Trails of the sea bubbled by in flickers that clung to her body, shreds of gemlike luminescence. Glimpses of breast and the swirling fan of dark red hair on her naked back. The undulations of her body made a liquified burlesque.

  Startling. Sensual. A personification of lust.

  His eyes had been open, fixed on the small cellphone screen. Absorbed, he’d almost missed looking up when she surfaced below him.

  Nothing had recorded – he’d seen it, but it wasn’t there. No video. No images. Nothing left on his cellphone except empty ocean. And he’d still wanted to kill her for what had been done to Merrick. Desire did not cancel hate.

  He came back to the present. Grimaced at his reaction below. Down, dick. I command you, not the other way around.

  “Why don’t we see skeletons? Dead mer… folk or whatever you are? Is it magic?”

  She shook her head and silver-hued tears slipped from the corners of her eyes.

  Unhappy? Join the club. She probably didn’t know the answer.

  Wolfgang shook his head.

 
Did they turn into seaweed when dead? Convenient, if he were the sort who could kill her. He’d kept her asleep all day, waiting to see if that wacky folk tale were true, and had spent half those hours looking at her curled up in his sheets.

  As a mermaid, underwater, she was art nouveau in motion, skin and gleaming scales and flowing hair swathed in moonlight and sea.

  As a woman in his tousled sheets, she was kissable, bitable curves, her breasts tipped by soft peach-pink areolae. He’d lusted after sticking clamps on those to hear her squeals. With her legs bent high as they were, when he’d inched away the sheet, the slit of her pretty cunt showed below. Slightly swollen and with wetness glistening on the lips from their lovemaking. Tempting enough to make him stare.

  Nubile, he would’ve thought her, as he slid his dick inside her, if she were a normal female bedmate.

  And if she wasn’t hundreds of years old.

  Fuck this remembering her being sexy. She was here, swinging. Hooked.

  Naked.

  Together, he and Merrick had shared girls, upside down, tied up, doing things to them—

  He squashed the painful memory, squeezed his eyes, shut, open. Not the same torturing a mermaid though, was it?

  “Can you prove you were once a human or did you lie to me? Are you just a monster?” he rasped. Could I prove it with tests? “Crap,” he muttered. This was his research field, and here was a perfectly fine new species. But he couldn’t show her to anyone else, could he?

  Not because of any moralistic fanciness. And not to spare her the scrutiny.

  No. It was because he didn’t want to.

  Because if anyone else knew she existed it would limit what he could do to her. His cock hardened just thinking of the possibilities. He eyed the hook, the length of her and began to wonder all sorts of things…

  He’d simply meant to torture her, sick man that he was. Revenge. Imagining things didn’t always equal reality.

  Could not. Do it. Sorry, Merrick.

  Would he begrudge me thinking what I am thinking? Probably not. The man was, had been, a lecher of huge proportions. Wolfgang sighed then rested his chin on the hand bearing the knife.

  This would be apt. She sang to men, then sucked them to their deaths. Sucked them off, to their deaths, even, maybe. He leaned in and stretched out his arm, inserted his fingers in the hole in the gag though she grimaced and tried to duck away.

  Maybe he couldn’t torture her to death but fucking her was not out. Studying her. While he fucked her.

  “Lick. Or else this.” He waved the knife. A little terror, Merrick? Just a little for revenge. She’d done bad things, so some repayment was in order.

  When she tentatively began to lick at his fingers, he stared some more, feeling his cock grow harder, lengthen, push at his pants. He slid the knife across the floor to the side then put his unoccupied hand to her throat, grasped her there while she licked, her eyes fastened on him.

  “Are you getting a stir of something? What if I give you cock instead of knife?”

  Her tongue stilled, and she curved her neck. He would swear her eyes had widened.

  Mermaids loved fucking men, though normally they did it for bad reasons, from what this Raffaela had said. What if… All in the name of research, he let his throat-hand run over her neck skin then up to her breasts, curved it around one and held her there, watching her as he began to play gently with her petal-soft nipple.

  Her reactions, the subtle wriggles and gasps, amused him.

  “Keep going,” he said, guttural, thick. This was pretty depraved, but he was past wondering what he was doing. Not torturing her, that was surely a plus?

  What she’d told him at the beach could be lies. Facts were better. Human hybrid, or animal, or monster, he was still wondering which she was as he shifted and craned forward, to place his mouth over the center of her other plump breast.

  His tongue followed her skin, circling, feeling the pop of her nipple erecting, and hearing a soft moan break from her mouth.

  Mermaids had a thing for men, according to legend. A weakness for them.

  He swirled his tongue over her now button-hard nipple then sucked, repeatedly, listening to her, feeling her body sway and arch, just a little.

  The two of them were doing the most erotic of acts while she hung head-down, hooked by the tail. That had to hurt. This was damn crazy. Hand going up past her hip, he felt for her ass, only to remember she did not currently possess one. Not a human one.

  Except, he felt a strangeness, a shifting, a change of whatever one might call mermaid flesh, and ass was under his hand. A fat handful of gorgeous ass on a moaning girl. He left this newly found ass, slid hand over her hip to her mound, to slide and search between her thighs, to slip along her cleft, and to stick a finger into that recently nonexistent cunt.

  In… Deep…

  And a miracle just when he needed one.

  Sopping wet. What else on a mermaid? Her weight slewed, lopsided. She half fell, shrieking, but he caught her as he stood.

  Amazed, he looked past the curve of hips and heaving taut belly, to legs. Of course there were legs. Two of, and the hook was now piercing through at her ankle.

  Between the Achilles and bone, he told himself. The sight of that. He sucked on his bottom lip, wincing. Ouch, but she could take it.

  She’d transformed, like any self-respecting mermaid would when prey was near and about to be fucked and killed by her. Wolfgang couldn’t help the mild curve of his mouth. This was a bizarre, macabre event.

  Man, if only he could record what he intended to do next. Still supporting her body, he unzipped and pulled out his rather magnificent erection. Much harder than the night before. That had been a chore. This was far more… fun.

  Revenge fucking. If she tried to bite off his dick, she’d find it impossible.

  “Keep that mouth open,” he grated out. As if anything else was doable.

  He could feel the rise and fall of her chest, see the puckering of her nipples, and the flush of pinkness spreading over her skin at chest and stomach – was the flush a sexual sign? He’d never seen anything that obvious on a girl. When his fingers traced up her thighs, he felt hints of where scales had been. Bluish imprints shimmered under the artificial lights.

  He straightened fully, one arm around her, pulling her body up a little higher, taking the weight off the ankle hook while he grabbed his dick and searched for and found her mouth. He slid the head into the hole in the gag and found flesh, warm, yielding tongue and flesh. The saliva she’d made while sucking his finger was handy, lubricating her orifice nicely, and he wrapped his arm about her waist and hung on as he smoothly thrust in and out of her mouth.

  Those teeth were locked away, though they must be human ones by now?

  Nothing stopped him going deep, and he swore, grunted, and after twenty or so shoves into her, he stuck it in and remained there, fully engulfed. His eyes rolled up, as he felt her embrace the head of his dick with her pulsating throat.

  That was not quite human.

  God.

  So immoral. So dirty. So fucking good.

  Wolfgang stared down but couldn’t see where he was in her, because his body was molded to hers. His mouth was close to pussy level.

  Mermaids had clit, it seemed. There it was, a blatant pink-red, swollen bump where her slit began. A nodule that gleamed with wetness. He pushed his mouth over her and began to do his own sucking, a featherlight licking, nudging, pulling gently, making her stiffen and her thighs clench.

  She arched into his mouth and burbled noises past his cock, bursting into a series of groans that sounded close to climax-level in joy.

  He grinned, listening to her, feeling her buck at the touch of his tongue while she sucked on him. He began to do these soul-wrenching, dick-pulling small thrusts that barely left that wet hot cave of mouth. He peered up along her legs, at that hook.

  A monster wasn’t human.

  A human didn’t transform.

  And was a mo
nster a man who throat-fucked a girl with her hooked and hanging? That was a very big yes.

  Blood trickled from her ankle wound where the hook went through.

  Should he let her down? Then something odd happened below. It was as if his cock had expanded hugely, to occupy her mouth and throat in every crevice, every fold, ready to burst with come.

  Enormous. The metal hole dug into him, surrounding it, squeezing him.

  Throbbing, beating with his heart-blood.

  He groaned terribly, unsure if it would fit out through the hole in the gag if he yanked himself from her. He might tear it off and was so fucking ready to explode in her mouth.

  She sucked on him, a vacuum he had to fill, pulling him deeper, making him bigger.

  She arched then shuddered, moaned onto his dick, and her throat closed in harder, tighter.

  So big. So tight a space.

  He shunted his cock into her and forgot where his tongue and lips were as his balls cramped and ejected his come, rocketing it into this mermaid’s welcoming orifice. She was orgasming also, bucking at his mouth, pushing him back and forth then straining forward and shuddering into a rocking motion.

  The chain tinkled.

  He managed to extricate his cock, feeling as if he barely wrangled it out through the hole, scraping. Clenching his groin, he grunted, mind floating away. Climax totally worth it. Then he took her weight in his arms and unhooked her foot, let her down, before he staggered backward to collapse onto his butt.

  Wolfgang leaned back onto his palms. The girl, the mermaid, the bleeding woman gasped at him, catching her breath, from where she lay on the floor with her arms tied at her back. Her mouth moved.

  As he watched, she wriggled from her lips the crushed gag – then spat it far enough so it dangled from the leather strap, diagonally across her cheek.

  The thing was mangled. His eyes surely bulged.

  What. The. Fuck.

  Poor quality metal.

  His cock could’ve been in there. He glared at her.

  She smiled, beatifically.

  Doing anything was put on hold while he sat panting, recovering from what he had done to her and from what she had wreaked on him.