Sacrificed to the Sea - Cari Silverwood Page 0,2

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