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The blood shows all. Future and past; life and death and every whisper lost to the ocean. They are made known to him—the King. There are no secrets capable of being hidden when he communes with the spirits tied to this crucible under the surface.
He sacrificed hundreds of witches to harness this power, this sight, and it was well worth it, because of all the dangers in the deep he could watch through this swirling pool of blood, he chose her. From the first moment he saw her, he claimed her. He won’t take his eyes off her now, even if she does pretend to be his enemy.
What a wonderful liar she’s become.
His hands grip the edge of the basin as he leans in closer. He absorbs every soft curve of her face. Her wide eyes and thick white lashes. That delectable pout she makes when she thinks no one is watching. If he leans in close enough, he can pretend he’s really there, watching her lean up against a brick wall Above. How foolish she is to spend her time up there, where she does not belong.
His thumb hastens its movements, worrying a thin braid wrapped around his right hand. The hair is frayed and darker than it once was, aged into a deep mulberry wine—it doesn’t matter, it’s still hers.
It’s the last piece of her he took before sending her away.
Quite a long-suffering lesson this has turned out to be, much to his surprise and discontent. She should have crawled back to him by now, low to the glowing floor of his palace, laments rolling off her tongue straight onto his cock… but she’s damn determined to have her way. So stubborn.
He has no choice but to wait here, holding onto this lock of her hair. Admiring her face at a distance. Pretending her centuries’ worth of dismissal hasn’t been slowly driving him mad. It only makes him want her more.
That stubborn witchling loves to torture him.
A chill surrounds him, prickling the back of his neck, warning him that he’s no longer alone in the divination room. He spins quickly enough to catch a glimpse of the shadow in one corner, as it shifts and thins, shying from his attention.
It’s been happening more and more—wandering spirits stumbling upon him and this sacred room, drawn to the crucible and its power. Drawn to him. This time, though, he isn’t so sure it’s a wandering spirit. There’s something familiar about it. The shadow shifts again, and he recognizes the curves of it, the significance.
He feels her, grazing his arm with invisible icy fingers.
His stomach turns. His blood bubbles. He feels his power being tugged on, pulled out. She wants to reap him. Without hesitation, he flings a net of lightning into the water around him, effectively scattering the spirit. The water brightens and the invisible weight disappears from his veins. She leaves him be, for now.
With a low snarl of warning, he returns to the basin.
The witchling’s visage flickers in the center of the bloody whirlpool, as irresistible as ever. She will come back to him, and when she does, he’ll be more than happy to teach her all the wonders of his love, all the delicious pain and pleasure that comes when she finally submits to him. She’ll realize what she’s been missing and regret this insolence.
But until then, he waits… and grows wary of the deity that would try to undo him.
Hunting a soul on land is twice as thrilling as doing so underwater.
My three hearts hammer in tandem as I lean around the brick corner, my lips pressing together as I spot my target. The male ambles down the cobblestone alley with a woman on his arm, his eyes alight with malevolent humor. She attempts to tug her gloved hand out of his, clutching her skirts in an anxious motion. It’s getting late, and he’s leading her farther from home. I’m out of my element right now, surrounded by air and flower boxes filled with acidic earth.
The fragrance of sourdough drifts across canals and gleaming mosaic squares to saturate every alley in the city, and I have to force my eyes not to drift closed at the scent. If I had more time, I might have sought some for myself. Fresh bread and garlic oil; the temptation is as loud as music to my senses.
Saliva pools under my tongue.
If there’s one thing I envy humans for, it’s their food. What we eat Beneath doesn’t compare; ocean dwellers have no need for taste buds.
It’s unfortunate they can’t change form like I can.
Already, the ocean calls to me, demanding my return, but I endure the soreness in my hearts a little while longer. I’ve come to retrieve what belongs to me.
I don’t remember his name, didn’t care to memorize it.
What I do remember is his reputation Beneath. I’ve been waiting months for him to submit to his true nature. His horrible, predatory instincts. I smile as the memory of our first meeting returns to me—when he scrambled for the surface after I first gave him legs, his eyes bulging in fear, his body vulnerable and foreign to him for the first time in his life. I knew there would be no lasting change for him. Men like him never change. I can shift his tail to legs, his scales to skin, but there’s no power in the world that can fix someone’s heart.
I’ve already tried, and failed, to fix my own.
Bad men deserve to know what it’s like. Life, whether Above or Beneath the tides, isn’t fair to womankind… so I’ve dedicated my life to balancing the scales and I do, even if I can only help one person at a time.
My patron goddess, Mora, encroaches on my shoulder, peering around the corner with me. She’s my eternal, vengeful companion. The Star of the Sea.
I feel her reflect my delight and anticipation for what’s to come.
The only part of hunting I don’t enjoy is the waiting. Waiting for the moment of fear the women must feel, the moment that will allow me to collect what’s due. I sensed when this male made the conscious decision earlier—to hurt his newest human fascination. I won’t let the woman get hurt, of course. That’s why I’m here, on two legs—but I know that fear is the worst part. The unknown. The temporary but seemingly unending terror.
If I had it my way, no woman would ever feel the need to imagine the worst.
The male pulls his unwilling companion closer, his eyes raking over her waist. He yanks her toward the alley wall, his hands grasping at her bodice, ignoring her protests. They’re all the same. Always greedy for what they can’t have, always eager to take what they want as if it’s a game.
He has an opponent now.
I slip out from behind the corner. My bare feet don’t make so much as a whisper against the cobblestone as I close in, as he shoves the woman into the wall and her shoulders make an audible clap against the brick.
Her face twists with pain. And that’s enough.
You mustn’t hurt any woman above the surface, I told him.
I made him swear it upon his soul.
It was a deal I knew he’d lose, despite any and all efforts, despite his most selfish intentions
It didn’t matter to me how he did it. If he had stumbled into a woman at the market and she fell and skinned her knee, I would have come. The fact that he broke the deal like this makes my retribution that much more exquisite.
Little does he realize, there’s unfinished business waiting for him Beneath.
He leans in to steal a kiss from her, but I’m already lifting my hand. Ice spurs in my hearts, the cold of a lightless ocean, of the voids leading to the center of our world. I’ve heard humans say they believe the core is hot, roiling magma… but as someone who’s sunk farther Beneath than most, I know it’s the opposite.
The enchanted wound on my chest, the one torn through bone and sinew to peer in at my clustered hearts, alights with a soft glow. The glow is muted by the slip I borrowed from a clothesline, but the golden rays still seep through enough to snake around him.
They take possession of his soul.
He shrinks and folds, twisting with the metaphysical current, until his body finally molds to my desire: a worm at the woman’s feet.
I pluck him from the ground, smiling savagely as he wriggles between my fingers. My eyes flick up to the woman, and I incline my head in the slightest of bows. She’s not a member of the nobility, judging by her modest dress and worn lace gloves, so I think my respect unsettles her even more than the magic had.
Her dark eyes are wide and shining. She grips the beads around her neck and whispers prayers to a god in the sky.
Ridiculous. I’m the only one listening.
The city knows me. I’ve heard them talk. I’m the spirit that walks along their canals, seducing poor men who wander too close. That’s what they say. If only they knew the truth. This woman can be frightened of me if that is what her heart tells her she must do, she can believe the worst. It doesn’t matter. She’s safe the way I wish I could have been. She will go home to the people she loves and I will relish in even more suffering.
I return down the alley without a word, following the quiet cobblestone streets, crossing bridges until I reach the stairs to the fisher’s bay.
Waves slap the beach and wooden boats sway in the harbor. It’s utterly serene. Once I’ve left behind every trace of the sleepy city and white sand spreads out under my feet, I let my hearts flare with golden light again. My fingernails sharpen into talons, and I pinch the worm in half before tossing it onto the shore.
Another twitch of my fingers, and the quiet is shattered by blood-curdling screams. The merman’s body is in its natural form again, though it’s severed through the stomach.
“Viola.” He screams my name as if it means something, as if it’ll somehow make me stop. But it’s just a name. I’m so many things to so many people. A witch. A hellish spirit. Someone who must be crushed and feared and manipulated. It’s all lies and seaweed, barriers to
wade through but harmless to those built for it. Harmless to me.
The two halves of the mer’s body reach for each other with stringy flying flesh. His legs meld together with burnt orange scales and iridescent fins. He screams louder as his torso reassembles, my abilities saving his life, but bringing him indescribable agony as I allow sand to sift against his organs and settle under his skin.
My magic can’t affect just anyone. There’s rules, as all power exists within one confine or another. This mer belongs to me. His soul has been tied to mine. It’s an extension of my heart now, similar to that of a limb to a body, and so I can do whatever I wish to his form.
How unfortunate for him.
I step forward, allowing my own shape to adjust. The familiar weight of my tentacles sprout around my hips. I keep my human legs to help me travel across the sand easier, but my white tentacles brace the beach and wrap around his neck and shoulders as I descend on him. My lilac-rimmed suctions attach to his skin, sucking to the point of drawing blood. As I kneel, I drive a knee into the scaled pocket concealing his cock, earning me a high-pitched wail.
Goddess Mora’s approval rakes like nails down my back. Yes, child. Good.
An unrestrained smile breaks across my face, my elongated canines pressing into my lower lip as I lower my face toward his. Digging my claws into his face, I force his cheeks to hollow out. I pry his mouth open and draw on his energy, drinking it in.
My hearts illuminates as I drain him, washing his bloodshot eyes in golden light. I pull and pull on his life force, swallowing it into my belly until he eventually slumps against the sand.
I pause before finishing him off.
I don’t want to kill him, and I also don’t want to consume his life essence and risk inheriting any gift he might carry. No reminders. I just need him weak enough to drag back home without a struggle.
Peeling away, I ignore the throb in my core and the lust in my body urging me to continue.
More, more, it screams. Take it all.
It’s not enough. I could feed on a hundred men or mer, and it wouldn’t fill my emptiness. The more I take, the less satisfied I feel. That’s what Triton wanted. The King of the Ocean cursed me with this hunger, this longing for power. This desire to take what does not belong to me. He told me I deserved it, earned it by spurning his advances. He took and took, and when I fought back, he took the rest of me. All the parts he thought I loved the most. He fettered my magic and bound me to the sea because that was the only way to bind me to him. Then he isolated me.
I stopped mourning decades ago. I put myself back together and proved to myself over and over that I don’t need him. That I don’t need anyone. I wouldn’t ever apologize for my cruelty, because this cruel world has never apologized to me.
With measured steps, I drag my new soul-bound into the ocean, my tentacle a solid chain around his neck.
He doesn’t fight it.
I’m tired of dealing with these mer, even if I do get to exercise my wrath upon them. I miss the good I once found in the ocean, when I roamed this sea with my coven. I remember my coven mother, seldom warm
but always kind, who took me in off the slums under Atlantis and gave me a future. I remember the happiness I had with them, however briefly.
This is all I have left: memories of a witch with better intentions; stolen breaths of clean air; relief so brief that if I blink, I miss it.
The memory of their burnt flesh returns to me in that moment too, turning my stomach. I remember, and my life is ripped away all over again.
As the tide reaches my waist, I shift my human legs away and rip the dress from my body with my claws.
Before I can slip the rest of the way under, I hear a song on the wind.
A chasmic, dissonant voice rolls across the ocean. It echoes from nearby, not from the city behind me, but from the intermittent rock lying at the base of the cliff-sides just south of here. The same direction of the human palace.
That voice isn’t human, and yet it holds all the painful urgency of one.
It would be foolish to trust a voice from the sea. The foulest of souls carry the loveliest of lures—a predator can’t hunt without them, after all—but I find myself paralyzed by the depth I hear in this voice. Mortals are superior in the way of feeling. It’s agonizing to watch them, as they live and love and die. Rarely, I come across a mer who is like them, who longs for humanity, who needs that fragility to feel complete and alive. When I meet a mer like that, my hearts demand that I step in, because I wish there was someone out there who could do the same thing for me.
Curiosity rears up inside me, as vicious and unyielding as my hunger.
It’s been a long time since I helped someone who truly deserved it. Decades. It makes me feel better, makes me feel like I’m more than the product of my circumstances, more than the starvation. So despite the whisper in my head encouraging me to return to the deep, I dive under and swim toward the beckoning call of a siren.
My gills sting in the open air.
Rock digs into my palms as I lean back and gaze up at the palace. A few feet of crag rises over my head and gives way to the scaffolding of the tower. A familiar balcony hangs over the cliff, lights and shadows dancing together on it from the room beyond.
Any minute now, she’ll come to me, and I can forget everything else for a little while.
I run a hand through my hair to push it out of my eyes, the red tendrils nearly brown in the dark. My algae-green scales glint in the moonlight as I bounce my tail beneath me. I’m more impatient than usual, but it’s been too long since our last visit, and today has been a nightmare.
A delivery intended for my gallery got intercepted by whales, and half the haul was swallowed. We lost a client because of it.
I’m the one who insisted on immediate recovery despite my business partner’s warnings. She told me the whales were migrating, and I ignored her. We both paid the price.
And if that alone wasn’t enough to soil my entire day, Father finally came to the decision to mate me off.
My right ear rings, soft laughter echoing into it, and I irritably tug on the gossamer tissues rippling off the tip of my helix. Every inch of my skin tightens at the reminder.
I think again of my father’s callous expression this morning when he told me of his plan. Me, mating for life? Playing right into his artful hands is more like it. He said I would have a choice, but in the end, I know he’ll be the one to choose. He’ll lump me with the most unbearable noble maid he can find—one that won’t challenge my decisions or his guidance—and then he’ll expect us to spit out a few tadpoles before he hands me the scepter of power and his prickish personality to perpetuate for generations to come.
My cock shrivels up just thinking about it.
Better me than the others, I suppose. I drop my gaze to the shark tooth strapped to my chest. Removing it from the sheath, I watch moonlight gleam across its hills and valleys. I scrape the tooth over the surface of the boulder beneath me, relishing in the harsh sound it makes, then I settle the blade into a cleft and begin sharpening a dull edge. Not too much. As my only shark blade, I have to be careful. If I wear the ivory down too much or chip the edge somehow, I’ll be forced to replace it. And I really don’t want to do that.
My mind drifts to my family and what will happen to us once I’m crowned.
Instead of being pitted against my siblings, I’ll be forced to pit my children against theirs and my children against each other, as Father did to us. As his father did before him, and his grandfather, and on the cycle goes. My brothers will avoid me more than they already do, and there’s no way I’ll be able to work at the gallery anymore. I’ll be totally fucking miserable. Anchored.
A creak on the balcony pulls me out of my worries, and my entire being narrows in on the light footsteps approaching the railing.
“Aric, are you out there?” Her soprano coats my body like a second skin.
A silhouette appears peeking over the edge, the side of her brown face illuminated by a lantern’s flame. She can’t see me—not even the light from a full moon can cut through the darkness surrounding me; there are too many towering rocks. That doesn’t stop her from seeking me out. Sometimes I come to the palace just to hear her call for me, with no intention of answering.
When I first saw her pacing her balcony several months ago, looking out at the ocean as though she wanted to dive in and explore the darkest tides, I knew she’d be susceptible to my song. My charm works best on humans with a fascination for the sea.
The female sirens, of which there are plenty, never have cause to complain, but it grew monotonous for me to prey on the men who sail from shore to shore. Human women have more fight than their male counterparts.
They’re prettier too.
When I set my gaze on the princess, I wanted to become everything to her simply to prove that I could. And sure, she resisted my song for a while, cowered from the visions I projected into her mind, but she always returned to her little balcony after a time, searching for excitement on that distant horizon. If she truly wanted to be rid of me, she only needed to stop sitting on her balcony at night. She only needed to stop listening. I would have let her. But she didn’t.
I took her continued presence as permission. Or at least, permission enough.
Her shyness was only a mask, a product of her human upbringing. She loved the back and forth, the pursuit and retreat. She loved being seduced by me. And for me, she’s been the perfect distraction.
I smirk even though she can’t see it. “I’m here, Angel Face.”
She melts against the stone railing, resting a cheek on her folded arms as she gazes into the dark. She loves when I call her that. It has to do with that pesky religious devotion she has; to her, it’s a sweet comparison. When she initially explained the idea of unseen winged humanoids serving a god in the sky, I laughed. If I could fly anywhere in the world, the last thing I would do is serve someone hiding in the stars.
If she knew I called her Angel Face with a secretive sneer, she probably wouldn’t think it so sweet.
“Where have you been?” she asks with a pout, her dark hair falling in frizzy curls around her face. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’m here now,” I reply tightly.
She doesn’t care where I’ve been, only that I haven’t been here. She doesn’t want to hear about my life or my troubles. That won’t get her off.
A slow, partially-restrained smile twists her lips. “Are you here to sing for me?”
“That depends.” My voice is dark and distorted, threaded with temptation. “What will you give me if I do?”
Her smile widens as she unclasps a bracelet on her wrist, dangling it like bait on a hook. A thrill rolls up my spine. The gems twinkle in the lantern's glow, the faint refractions as red and lavish as her nightgown. Jewelry. She must be damn desperate tonight.
I’m not ashamed of whoring out my gift for profit.
There’s no one else around to witness it or report back to my father, and these past few months with her have single-handedly carried all the costs of excavation for the gallery—so how could I feel anything but pride? There are worse ways to gain power and respect.
“And the other,” I demand, my tone leaving no room for argument. I know a mermaid or two who’d pay me handsomely for the set.
Her expression falls a fraction, but she unclasps the matching bracelet from her wrist and places them both close to the edge of the railing. She braces her forearms on either side of them and waits.
She can’t look into my eyes right now, but that’s of no consequence.
There are two ways to influence my victims: either through direct eye contact or by touching their senses with my voice. In the dark, this far from her, it has to be my voice, so I start to chant. I don’t know what I’m singing, but it doesn’t matter—the spirits of the ocean always lend me the melody I need. They pass through me, creating the perfect song, one spirit after another after another. I am their vessel, wielding them against the target of my choice.
Purple mist rolls off my tongue as I sing, billowing over the water like mist on a cool morning. It crawls up the rock face, over the salt-washed bricks and through the hewn pillars of the railing. The tendrils slide over her arms, and she gasps in pleasure. I linger there a moment, waiting, caressing her skin with my power and drawing out her need until she lowers her face toward my magic. Permission enough. Her eyes flutter as the mist suddenly turns and careens into her irises, coating her vision in a violet haze.
In her head, I’m no longer singing to her from down below.
I’m on the balcony.
Her emotions assault me as they pass through her mind. Lust and desperation. Sour, earthy selfishness. I wish I could ignore the reach of her emotions the way I can in reality. Here, they’re inescapable. I’m inside her, and so I must feel everything.
She turns to the corner I’ve settled myself in.
The lantern silhouettes her figure, the red material sheer enough to see every curve. I’m one with the shadows. Anything is possible in this little slice of the world I’ve created for us. She can’t see my face or any other distinguishing feature as I peel away from the corner and walk across the terrace. ...
