Sacrificed to the Sea - Cari Silverwood Page 0,1

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,